For a truly bizarre Bob Dylan movie, watch Masked and Anonymous

Seen That? Watch This is a semi-regular column from critic Luke Buckmaster, taking a new release and matching it to comparable works. This week, inspired by the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, he revisits the extremely strange 2003 dystopian drama Masked and Anonymous, co-written and starring Dylan himself.
A Complete Unknown
Film history is sprinkled with bizarre curios about, by and featuring Bob Dylan. Seeking them out is like entering an old trinkets store and gazing at the bric-a-brac: dusty, timeworm, once-loved items in the cobwebs of the zeitgeist. Before rattling off some examples for context, I need to preface this by saying that James Mangold’s Oscar-nominated biopic A Complete Unknown—starring Timothée Chalamet as 60s era Dylan—is absolutely not one of them. It’s a decently made Hollywood confection that avoids many of the genre’s pitfalls, without aspriing for anything daring or different.
The previous Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, was much more Dylanesque, in that it’s bizarrely evocative and oddly structured, with several actors—including Cate Blanchett and a young Black child—playing Bob. Then there’s Martin Scorsese’s (sort of) documentary Rolling Thunder Revue, which takes a funhouse mirror approach to truth and truthfulness, riddled with intellectual games and featuring Dylan himself as a key participant. 1978’s Renaldo and Clara is probably the strangest: a near-four hour blizzard of concert footage and sculpted dramatic moments, written and directed by Dylan. That one is probably best for diehard fans only (yes, I have a copy—thank you, mysterious eBay bootlegger).
The film this article’s about—the 2003 dystopian drama Masked and Anonymous—is a curio with major bonafides. It was directed by Seinfeld alumni Larry Charles, who went on to make far more financially successful films, including three starring Sacha Baron Bohen (Borat, Brüno and The Dictator). It has an absolutely stacked Hollywood cast, including—deep breath—Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Val Kilmer, Jessica Lange, Christian Slater, John Goodman, Bruce Dern, Angela Bassett, Mickey Rourke, Luke Wilson, Giovanni Ribisi, and Ed Harris (who appears in blackface—a performance they won’t be including in his In Memoriam segment).
Oh! And the protagonist is played by Dylan. Oh, oh! And the film (which can be hard to find, but is available in its entirety on YouTube) was co-written by Bob and Charles, under the pseudonyms Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine. Sound weird? The party’s just getting started. Dylan’s character is the mumbling troubadour Jack Fate, who, in a woebegone future America, ravaged by crime, war, destitution, and generally bad vibes, has spent many years imprisoned, for reasons revealed late in the runtime. He’s released on the condition that he plays at a benefit concert to alleviate the financial woes of sweaty businessman Uncle Sweetheart (Goodman) and his business partner Nina Veronica (Jessica Lange). Notice the characters’ playful names? Others include Tom Friend (Bridges), Bobby Cupid (Wilson) and Pagan Lace (Cruz).
Fate wanders around, engaging with strangers and absorbing their stories. The film’s structure is disjointed, more interested in fragments than arcs, and broken up with musical performances from Dylan, plus a range of covers (including an awesome version of Like a Rolling Stone, reinvented as Spanish rap). Dialogue-wise it oscillates between repartee and rejoiners—often quite bitter and lacerating—to long ruminative monologues in which characters prattle on to Fate. But really, they’re speaking to nobody, or talking to the audience.
It’s no surprise that audiences generally weren’t engaged by it, and that critics reacted viscerally—like they’d just quaffed a glass of vinegar. But I love those long, windy speeches—not the kind of dialogue one’s accustomed to hearing in movies, and, while they contain noticably Dylanesque flourishes, not the kind we’re accostomed to from his writing either. The speeches are stagey (this film probably should’ve been a play) and evocative, sometimes very sharp and pointy, sometimes almost stream-of-consciousness-esque. What they share is an attempt to come to terms with the madness of existence, an attempt to see over the fences that block our views of society, history, the world around us. Unsurprisingly, nobody gets to the bottom of anything.
The film’s title is dropped during my favourite scene: a characteristically odd moment between Fate and Val Kilmer’s animal wrangler, who, apropos of nothing, goes on a massive rant about the purity of animals versus the corruptibility of humans, ultimately proclaiming: “I look at a crack in the sidewalk and I find it more beautiful than any human being.” To finish this article, I’ve pasted below a transcription of most of this speech, gleaned from a version of the script floating around online then checked against the footage itself, and altered accordingly (there were some minor differences). It’s a monologue of wild, rhymical turbulence, somewhere between a sermon from the mount and the rambles of a street preacher at midnight.
You could skip the speech and just watch the scene on YouTube; I’ve embedded it below. But reading it then watching it allows you to really sink into the language, then appreciate how Kilmer makes it sound naturalistic, in a crazy kind of way. The rantings of the madman who might be right.
Animal Wrangler’s monologue
They (animals) have no time to bother with success or getting rich. They don’t have fantasies of glory. They don’t borrow money to buy things that decrease in value while they own it. You see, they’re beautiful ’cause they just are. They do what they do. A lion don’t try to be a tiger. A rabbit don’t try to do an impression of a monkey. They don’t try to be what they’re not. Unlike us. Us human beings. The cheetah, the tiger, the snake, the monkey, the baboon, the muskrat, the bobcat, the pig that’s fat, the hippo, the rhino, the dodo, the honey badger… Each one, each perfect in their original forms.
Then, man came in. Who created him and for what purpose? It’s still a mystery. Why is he here? It’s a mystery. We know he’s trespassin’. Doesn’t know his own place. Of course he doesn’t know his place, he don’t have one. Man, the bear hunter, the fur trapper, the deer chaser. Then the beer hunter, the deer trapper, the man—the bear hunter, the the fur trapper, the man—the deer chaser, the baby seal clubber, the dolphin snagger, the lowest form in existence. Lowest form of existence. He’s a rabble-rouser, he’s a stirrer-upper, agitator, goes around stickin’ his nose where it don’t belong. The zoo, the aquarium, they are prisons for the animals. These animals cannot learn anything from mankind. Man doesn’t have a thing to teach them.
Man is here to conquer and destroy. And after he’s done with the animals, he’ll turn on himself. You’ll see. I avoid looking at human beings. They disgust me so much with all their atom bombs and automobiles. Two shivering bicycle mechanics, from Dayton, Ohio, inventing a contraption called an airplane. How insane. All the forms and shapes. They build hospitals for diseases they create. Human beings? Alone with their secrets. Masked and anonymous. No one truly knows them. If I go through the day without seeing one, I consider that a good day. My soul has not been contaminated. The only righteous human beings in my book are the children and the elderly. Muslim, Jew, Christian, atheist, secular, humanist. All these religions, ideologies, titles, all the same. Going down toward the same pit. I look at a crack in the sidewalk and I find it more beautiful than any human being….
I’ll tell you something else. In most societies they used to sacrifice animals. Bulls and sheep and things. In place of human beings. But today, we do it the other way around, we sacrifice the human being. Like the Aztecs, like the Incas, like the big corporations.