In case you're not familiar with the film, it is a mish-mash of six portraits of different reincarnations of Bob Dylan played by Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, and a black child. Each version showcases different aspects of Bob Dylan's life and music: aspiration, rebellion, fame, self-doubt, family, infidelity, religion, refusing to be defined, etc.
I have to say that the experience of watching the movie was very uneven. At times it seemed to be muddling along and it was hard to see the point of a scene (I fully admit I don't know enough about Bob Dylan's life to pick up on many of the references to real-life events) and at times it was simply brilliant. While several of the acting efforts were very strong, Cate Blanchett is the unequivocal star of the movie. I'd heard much about her performance in the move before seeing it, but I was still blown away.
That reminds me, if you have not seen Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, Cate's performance in it alone makes it worth seeing. She plays herself and her own cousin in one of the ten shorts that make up the movie. The film as a whole is also uneven, but there are some true gems in there. Here are my three other favorites: the one with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, the one with RZA, GZA (from the Wu Tang Clan) and Bill Murray, and the one with Meg and Jack White (from the White Stripes).
Lastly, the idea that we're all complex, multifaceted beings that react and behave very differently depending on where we are, when we are, or who we are with; is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Take the phrase "I'm sorry, I wasn't myself," for example. What does that mean? We're always ourselves, strictly speaking, even if we sometimes seem very different. I know what we mean by it, obviously, but isn't it a strange way of explaining our own behavior?
I've also been thinking about what "me" really means. What is it that makes Mattias be Mattias? I'd like to think that when people think of me they think of a personality rather than just a physical being, but what does that mean if I'm different in different situations? Maybe it just means we never really know anyone fully?
The movie Solaris (I've only seen the newer version by Steven Soderbergh, not the original by Tarkovsky) explored this in an interesting way. The main character (George Clooney) encounters his dead wife seemingly alive on a space station. But, because she's only a manifestation of his mind, she is defined by how he knew her and his memories of her. His real wife committed suicide, and at first he sees her appearing on the space station as a second chance to be happy together, but she is limited by "how he knows her" and she slowly becomes suicidal again. Not the happiest of movies and the last 20 minutes are downright confusing, but it was thought-provoking.
I also want to recommend a book I read in college: The Society of Mind by MIT professor Marvin Minsky. Minsky is an expert in cognitive science and cofounded the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT. The basic idea of the book is that our minds are not singular, but rather a collection of different functions and traits (agents), all simultaneously both working together and competing with each other. Each agent may be simple in itself, but the vast number of them and how they interact is what makes us complex.
It's a bit like the Internet: no single webpage is that special, but the large number of them and how they are connected is what makes it breathtaking. Or Sun Microsystems' old tagline: The Network Is The Computer. Or Metcalfe's Law: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.
Anyway, I leave you with a few lines I wrote some time ago. I already stole the opening in a post title a few weeks ago, but didn't post the rest because it feels like a work in progress, but I don't know if I'll ever get back to it:
I am cacophony, I am harmony
I am cold logic
and inconsistency
with her I am me
with him I am me
without them, me
each the same, but none the same
I am intrinsic, I am context
I am cacophony
and yet still me
Oh, I forgot to mention Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines. An interesting look at the future and artificial intelligence, and some intriguing thought experiments regarding the ability to continue life beyond our bodies by transferring our minds to a computer. But, if we could do that, would I still be "me"? What if we were able to copy me without destroying my original brain - would both of them be "me"?
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