밥 딜런의 부재와 현존 사이: 토드 헤인즈의 <아임 낫 데어>에 나타난 비선형적 서사의 문제들

This essay deals with the issues of non-linear narrative in Todd Haynes film I’m Not There. As the opening scene indicates, the film is basically “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan.” But in fact, this film is not a documentary about Bob Dylan. Nor is it a direct dramatization of Bob Dylan’s life. Instead, it consists of six different episodes which unfold the stories of six different characters: Arthur Rimbaud the poet (Ben Whishaw), Jack Rollins the prophet (Christian Bale), Billy McCarty the outlaw (Richard Gere), Woody Guthrie the fake (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude Quinn the rock and roll martyr (Cate Blanchett), and Robbie Clark the star of electricity (Heath Ledger). Each episode exists as an independent circuit of the narrative, accompanying various soundtracks, most of which are the songs of Bob Dylan. It switches back and forth from one to another, weaving the whole story on a non-linear narrative structure. This aspect of non-linear narrativity is grounded and developed by a certain “power of the false” which creates a series of virtual images of Bob Dylan by the simultaneous arrangement of incompossible circuits in the whole narrative space and time. Through this non-linear development of the narrative, Bob Dylan is configured as an entity of ambivalence between absence and presence, and its “being-not-there-ness” inscribes other-ness on virtual layers of his music and life.