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.