ABSTRACT
In the movie Masked and Anonymous (dir. Larry Charles 2003), Bob Dylan stars as Jack Fate, the son of a dying dictator, sentenced to prison for betraying his father. Fate is released from prison so that he can star in a benefit concert for victims of the revolution, a concert organized by Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman), a snake-oil salesman, and Nina, a harried but hopeful promoter. The dialogue of the movie resembles a Dylan song, with its abundance of allusions, its weighty themes (death, violence, freedom, meaning, truth), its intentional obscurity, and its apocalyptic tone and events. All of this seems to mean a great deal, but again and again, when a character gives a speech that appears to give a meaning to the chaos, Jack Fate dismisses or undermines it in one terse statement. For example, Jack meets the wonderfully weird character called Animal Wrangler (Woody Harrelson), whose devotion to animals and dislike of humans has become a very elaborate conspiracy theory. At the end of Wrangler’s long, rambling speech, Jack turns to walk away with Uncle Sweetheart, who asks him what Wrangler was talking about. Jack shrugs, “Guy’s into animals, I guess.” In the same way, the entire movie seems to be about weighty matters, and the audience feels compelled to come up with a coherent interpretation, only to find that the allusions do not allude to anything, the symbols are not symbols of anything, and whatever meaning we find may easily be replaced by another. Significantly, the audience’s failure to find meaning in the movie reflects-indeed, it is an extension of-the failure to find meaning of the characters in the movie. Whereas a conventional, coherent plot would provide us with meanings and explanations of events, Masked and Anonymous reflects layers and layers of competing meanings, bordering on madness, enticing the audience to enter into the process of meaning-making itself. Postmodern art and philosophy provide many such examples of the attempt to
give a form to openness, to express freedom in a work without thereby limiting the freedom. To this end, postmodernists have utilized a host of techniques that serve to invite interpretation, only to subvert the very possibility of interpretive closure, thereby placing the burden of interpretation on the audience, undermining the traditional relationship of active artist and passive audience.
