Brief notes:
1.
“A poem is like a naked person,” Haynes said. “Some call me a poet. . . . A song is something that walks by itself.”
Whishaw paused. “O.K., fidget a little,” Haynes said. The director read on. “We just wish to make inquiries,” he intoned. “Are you an illegal alien?”
“No,” the poet replied.
“Are you an enemy combatant?”
“No.”
Let’s not bother with what it all means. No one on set seemed to know for sure; they all pretty much trust Haynes that it means something.
Yes! Let's confine easily explored territory to the realm of "mystery." What could we ask, if we were willing to venture in such a direction? Why does the poet invoke these military-language questions? Why does the poet invoke irrelevant questions? Is there something antagonizing about the poet's presence? What? We're not going to explore that? Fine by me.
2.
Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand.
No, it won't be. You explain it for yourself:
Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive.
That's not hard to understand at all, is it?
It might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating on Haynes’s part, but to make sense in a film about Dylan would make no sense.
Stop that. Unless you're employing this sort of language for ironic effect, you already understand perfectly well what the film is about, even quoting from Haynes' pitch later on --
“I is another.” Then came the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: “If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.”
-- and this sort of backtracking -- this repetition of "I don't get it!" -- only does a disservice to the reader.
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