Bob Dylan, Judy Collins

As a teenager I was a dedicated Bob Dylan fan; I loved his early, gently poetic folk, I loved his angry, psychedelic stream-of-consciousness rock period, I loved his temporary country guise, I loved his return to folk with Blood on the Tracks and his exotic Desire. I loved the anger in the Christian albums, and I loved his second phase as a songwriter who spits out Americana gems, from Oh Mercy to Modern Times. But part of me has tended towards the long, slow, wry Leonard Cohen, who, like Bryan Ferry, has adapted his lyrical genius into definite and decadent styles. Perhaps even more than these two masters, though, I have adored the majestic Judy Collins, who encompasses both songwriters while including the disparate genius that emanates from Jacques Brel, Stephen Sondheim, and Kurt Weill, not to mention Joni Mitchell, more open to experimentation than either Dylan or Cohen.

There is something almost unspeakably touching about the string-laden interpretations of great songs that Collins excels at, and in her obvious love for the material she works with. When I was young I considered Collins a very minor musician, perhaps even a singer who didn't "get" Dylan the way I "got" him. I've long since come to recognize this same unpleasant, fundamental, and uneducated approach to Dylan in other Dylan fans -- a prime example would be with Bryan Ferry's recent Dylanesque, a hit-or-miss collection of Dylan songs that have some moments which are spectacular and some of which are blase, which received mostly vitriol from Dylan aficionados. But it's the offhandedness with which Ferry interprets Dylan that is seemingly misinterpreted as being shallow; this is the same feeling I had with Collins when I was young. All I could see was the original, and compared to it, the interpretation seemed merely thin. It took years before I realized that what I considered minor, thin, and pale in comparison to the original was actually much more subtle and gentle -- something so rare and delicate that it could only be misinterpreted.

It's this delicateness that leads to many female singers being marginalized -- k.d. lang and Nanci Griffith may be the two most prominent, two singers working on the level of Billie Holiday. (I would compare them to Dolly Parton if Parton herself wasn't so marginalized.) For women who don't perform with the fervor of Nina Simone or the hard-edged world-weariness of Lucinda Williams, there is little place for recognition. Music criticism is a boy's game, and the boys like women who either act like men or who occupy an extreme version of girliness -- this would explain why middle-aged hipster men can appreciate Astrud Gilberto or Francoise Hardy, but when faced with Collins will turn away.

"no country for old men"

What I found with No Country for Old Men was exceedlingly well-paced and made, and, as with David Fincher's Zodiac, the film with the least amount of stylistic flair in the Coen brothers' career, similar to Fargo in that respect and in terms of the plot points concerning murder, highways, and bags full of money that must go unfulfilled (a cruel joke as well as a rejection of genre rules and a criticism of the act of theft rolled into one).

It is, in artistic terms, perhaps less successful than Zodiac (a film I didn't like) in pushing audiences into new territory, as that film did with its unusual, unjointed narrative style. Like the majority (all?) of the Coens' films, this one comes as a pre-mixed packet: that doesn't mean that the considerable amount of tension it musters is any less thrilling, or even that the film feels hermetically sealed. (And if it does, it's due to the sparse, controlled style of the film.) But you could never accuse the film of being messy -- it has a craftsman's specificity, but not an artist's heart. Expressions of feeling have never been a Coen strong point -- even heightened feeling, even feeling generated from artiface or from the point of view of character. They attempt to make big points by avoiding points at all, letting them suggest themselves by the film's sparseness; it's a movie that works on themes that you're not quite sure you understand. The idea of plot points involving money and violence and queer senses of nobility (even when it concerns fate as random as a coin-toss) seem to me hopelessly quaint, no matter how futuristic the murder weapon.

You're left asking yourself if the Coens (or McCarthy) are honing in old tropes for the prepackaged acclaim such quasi-philosophical notions will give them, or if it's their attempt to comment on genre (here, essentially a Western). No Country for Old Men may be the most thoroughly American film the Coens have made, and it exhalts itself on those big, hard ideas given to us through Westerns. It skimps on the details that matter and instead focus on plot-related visual details, and even when they're funny and important to the story that's being told (as in the the relation to keeping boots free of blood) they don't give us much to cling to outside of their formal elegance.