Bob Dylan
Shadow Kingdom

Well, yes. Once again, the old bastard has fooled us all. And could I possibly avoid reviewing the old bastard’s new trick?

The last time was two years ago, with the event film exclusively distributed on Netflix Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese: a grand presentation of Scorsese's new Dylan documentary, fourteen years after the historic No Direction Home, with exclusive access to supposedly never-seen materials, an exclusive interview with Dylan, etc., only to discover at the end, upon watching it, that the old bastard, with the complicity of the ingenious director, had concocted a half mockumentary deliberately full of lies, mystifications, and entirely fabricated stories, complete with skillfully doctored archival materials and fictional characters played by actors. All in all, a fine piece of postmodern cinema of the sort Dylan has pursued since the disastrous Renaldo & Clara (a project conceived alongside the Rolling Thunder tour and tied to it, just like Scorsese's film) and that the haphazard Masked & Anonymous could not manage to be.

Now the old bastard has done it again. He has thrust another of his bizarre incursions into the world of cinema upon us, and to cunningly extract the (virtual) ticket price, he passed it off as - hear, hear - a streaming concert. The great live return after the forced interruption of the now decades-long Never Ending Tour due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nothing could be further from the truth. But we hardened Dylan fanatics, impatient to see our octogenarian idol perform on stage again, discovered this latest trick only afterward. Certainly, the trailer could have raised suspicions: a few black-and-white seconds with the old bastard singing Watching the River Flow surrounded by a masked band and an old-time dance assembly. But perhaps it was just a trailer.

And what did the old bastard do? He gathered a brand new band and, with his five new traveling companions (Alex Burke, Janie Cowan, Joshua Crumbly, Shahzad Ismaily, and Buck Meek), selected thirteen songs from his historical repertoire (ranging from 1965’s Bringin' It All Back Home to 1989’s Oh Mercy) and deconstructed and reconstructed them by devising, as is his well-established habit, completely new, often minimal arrangements, without drums, all based on guitars, double bass, accordion, and the classic harmonica. The thirteen reinvented tracks were carefully recorded in the studio, and independent music videos were created for each, shot using the classic music video technique, with the singer and musicians filmed miming the track and then edited with the studio audio. The thirteen videos were edited in sequence to create a fifty-minute film, and that's exactly what we saw. The great live return, my foot.

Yet Shadow Kingdom, as an audiovisual product, is worth it. And it's worth a lot. And it's worth it not just for the music, which is of the highest level as the old bastard has accustomed us to over the years (and the studio recording gives it a clarity and sonic precision that Dylan’s real live performances in recent years could no longer achieve, assuming they ever tried), but especially for the purely visual aspect. Dylan, making use of the talent of Israeli-American director Alma Har'el (known for music videos for bands like Beirut and Sigur Ros), creates thirteen bizarre yet fascinating scenes in an intriguing black and white that - as practically all viewers and critics writing online have noted - seem to directly reference the weird aesthetic of a certain David Lynch.

The comparison is not far-fetched: the contrast between the five composed musicians, always rigorously equipped with cumbersome masks, and the patrons of smoky American peripheral bars who smoke, drink, and dance wildly all around the bewildered performers, often stealing the scene and the focus of the shots, couldn't be more disorienting, just as the frenetic blues-rock execution of I'll Be Your Baby Tonight is madly unsettling, where a fixed close-up shows Bob singing and playing flanked by two voluptuous ladies who keep staring into the camera and occasionally dust the shoulder pads of his jacket with their fingers, while the haunting and minimal version of Tombstone Blues, slowed down excessively and transformed into an even more spectral cousin of Ballad of a Thin Man, with an indecipherable setting of draped walls and a black-and-white checkered floor, seems to come straight out of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. A commendable mention goes to the beautiful and heartfelt version of the classic Forever Young sung with a clear voice - and with a melodic opening Bob seemed incapable of for years - by a solitary Dylan with his acoustic guitar against a black background and the rest of the band blurred in the distant background, as if peering through an opening into the darkness.

Shadow Kingdom, in summary, is a joke on us. But one of those well-executed jokes, the kind that for almost sixty years has made us adore the old bastard. Shadow Kingdom will be available today for the last day on the Veeps platform, at a price that - frankly - isn’t worth the expense. Not for a joke. But the semi-legal and illegal circulation routes of Dylan material are endless: we are, after all, talking about the artist who inspired the invention of bootlegs. Shadow Kingdom can surely be seen and heard again, through alternate routes, somewhere on the web and beyond. For the old bastard, it is worth it.