Bob Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Going out on a limb here. The best performance by a Nobel prize-winner in an American Western film is — Bob Dylan. He played Alias in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Dylan’s function in the film resonates. The film starts with an intercut between the aged Pat Garrett being shot dead and the beginning of the end of the Pat-Billy relationship. This interweaving of future and past within the narrative raises the film to meta-cinema. This is not just the story of the two men’s relationship but a perspective upon the relationship’s significance.  It’s a perspective upon as well as an exercise in the genres of Western and Male Bonding.

As the two titular heroes operate both within the plot and outside it, as figures in the famous legend, Dylan operates within and outside the narrative. Within, he plays Alias, the top-hatted store clerk who shucks his apron at Billy’s escape from Pat’s jail. Alias then rides with Billy and between the two heroes. 

By the character’s name he has a fluid identity, now a clerk, now an outlaw, at home in town and on the range. He proves a dab hand at knife-throwing, as he skewers a gunsel’s throat from afar. In fact, he embodies the very question of identity. In the minor key, we’re teased to work out who Alias is. 

“Who are you?”

“That’s a good question.” 

That’s a very modern question and answer. Pat’s exchange with Alamosa Bill is a fuller demonstration of how an identity is accrued over time and experience. On the major level the film answers “Who are Garrett and Billy”? We know the names from lore; the film fills in the outline with their humanity, past, closeness and fatality. 

Both figures become existential heroes as they define themselves by the particular motives behind what they respectively do. Billy was a loyal ranch-hand when Pat was an outlaw. Now Pat is the ranchmen’s tool sheriff and Billy is the outlaw. Each man has his own complexity of motives in each key action. 

Dylan’s most interesting scene is in the Chill Wills general store/saloon. Garrett occupies Alias by demanding he read loudly the labels on the shelved canned goods. This is quintessential Dylan; the character embodies the actor. In a prosaic monotone Dylan recites: Beans. Spinach. Peas. Beans. Lima Beans. Beans with spinach. The monologue reflects the prosaic vocabulary Dylan brought into pop music and the prosaic, gravelly voice in which he sang. Here Dylan plays Alias but Alias in script and voice plays and summarizes the Dylan from the outside, from the other art, in our century. 

Like Pat and Billy, Alias lives as a figure in the old fiction but also as a figure in the modern mythology. As the modern persona he balances Peckilnpah’s casting of all the classic Western characters, like R.G. Armstrong, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, etc. So, too, James Coburn gives his Pat Garrett the detachment of the modern anti-hero, carried over from his classic Waterhole 3. Two other modern singers complete the central romantic triangle  — Kris Kristofferson as Billy and Rita Coolidge as his last lover.       
      Dylan also figures outside the narrative. He composed the entire score and sings throughout. His “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” over the Pickens character’s elegiac death is perhaps the film’s emotional peak — and among the genre’s. As Dylan performs within and around the narrative he makes the film not just an exercise in the classic genre and the familiar legend but a revitalizing strike of a modern perspective upon it.  

The Globe Merchant of Venice

Jonathan Munby’s Globe production, as telecast to the cinemas, takes Shylock’s side, preferring to emphasize the emotional force of the tragically wronged Jew over the satire of the trivial Italian merchant class. Several touches direct us toward that point.

The production amplifies Jessica’s significance. In contrast to the frivolity of her eloping with Lorenzo and the stories of her wastrel spending, she has several scenes of powerful pathos. The production stresses the costs of her betrayal of Shylock, the losses suffered in deracination. When she first meets Portia Lorenzo has to coax her in what nicety to speak. Out of Shylock’s world she is out of her element. She shows this again when Lorenzo tries to dance with her, then sweeps Portia off instead, leaving Jessica a self-conscious outsider, watching. To the latter end the production has Jessica and Shylock speaking yiddish in one scene, which sets them apart from the English dialogue — and most of the audience — as also does the added mix of Latin liturgy and Italian songs. 

The production dramatically undercuts the joy and romance of the last scene, which reunites the loving couples. While Antonio reads of the success of his merchant ventures and Bassanio reads about his Portia’s legal foray, Jessica in the left foreground reads of Shylock’s forced conversion. She falls to the floor wailing Oveenu Malkeinu, a hymn to God the Father. The resurgence of her Jewish roots reminds her of her loss and bars her sharing of the Christians’ trivial joy. Instead of the comedy of merchant Antonio we have the tragedy of the Jew Shylock.

The production then shows Shylock converting, the baptismal waters searing his bare head and face like acid.  In the last image the heavy doors of Portia’s mansion slam shut on Jessica, in contrast to her earlier escape from what she felt was her prison in Shylock’s house. The Christians’ ostensible triumph is through Jessica played as a tragedy, Shylock the wronged victim, his Jessica seduced to his ruin by the Venetian gloss.

The play’s separate plot lines are united by the contrast between the Christians’ playing fast, loose and florid with their words and the Jew’s insistence upon fidelity to the word, the Law. The Jews are the people of the Book — which in an early scene Antonio profanes. In contrast, the Christians are shallow creatures of play and betrayals. Antonio's generosity to his beloved friend Bassanio is undermined when Bassanio spurns his doomed mentor's kiss; the friends have a romantic tension. Antonio tries to buy his lover as Bassanio and Lorenzo both court and wed to solve their financial problems.
      Even after the nearly mortal consequence of Antonio’s idle oath, the Christians continue to make promises only to break them. Hence the business with the wives’ rings and their husbands’ betrayals, albeit to their male personae. "By this hand" becomes sinister after Shylock's resolve to claim his sworn "pound of flesh."

The emptiness of their language is also the point of the familiar servant wit of Launcelot Gobbo but also of the scenes of Gratiano’s compulsive verbal virtuosity. Portia’s famous speech about mercy is reduced to that level of shimmering rhetoric -- she will fail her own test of mercy as sorely as Shylock did -- as are her and Bassiano’s rhyming duel over “the ring” and her later lyrical “On such a night.” These are flashy interludes of language without substance or moral compass. 

In contrast stands the nobility of Shylock’s rigid faith in his word, an honour long since lost in the passage from the Biblical desert to corrupt and commercial Venice. As in Othello, Venice stands for modern civilization in all its gloss and moral vacuity, which resents and dooms the noble primitive that has strayed in.

That theme connects the three-casket marriage bond on Portia with the Shylock story. Portia is sworn to obey her father’s commands in marriage, but here she subtly compromises her required disengagement in order to help the handsome but vacuous Bassanio. When he comes in, the song in the background sets up the rhyme that would lead him to the lead casket. She interrupts his movement towards the gold.
     At this point there’s a brilliant touch in the costume design. The three caskets warn us off the allure of a shiny, costly surface, the gold and silver. The winning choice is humble lead. In this scene Portia wears gold and Bassanio silver, emblems of those characters’ — and indeed their whole gentile society’s — false allure and ersatz value. The opening scene, the elopers’ masque, and the later dance scene define the Christians in terms of play, complacent cruelty and triviality, in contrast to the Jew’s dignified difference and the relentless abuse that drives him to revenge and -- by their hatred -- the ultimate loss of his soul.