I should make a bumper sticker: “I survived Bobferatu!” For the dense among us (a club I belong to), “Bob” refers to A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic, and “feratu” refers to Nosferatu: both movies were released today, Christmas Day, and I summoned the can-do spirit of America and self-assembled a double-feature for myself in the cineplex. Kind of thing I haven’t done in a LONG time. Would’ve been no sweat in my 20s! Nowadays? Whoa.

I wouldn’t have written anything about this experience—it was just for fun—but there’s a fascinating line of thought I need to pursue, and this is about the only way to do it. I don’t want to spend hours on it, though…I sometimes daydream about writing about every movie or book I finish, but I just don’t have the juice, let’s face it! Especially today…. So I’m not going to give this one the spit ’n’ polish I normally would. (I’m the kind of writer who agonizes over every fucking syllable. Even the “casual” ones. BUT NOT THIS TIME. I AIN’T GOT TIME FOR THAT! An hour tops, I’ll give it…maybe two?)

What intrigued me, what’s haunting me: both movies were about GAZE. 100%. It was so strange to recognize this! Maybe it’s simply because I’ve been thinking about Gaze lately? (Maybe Gaze is in EVERYTHING, and I just didn’t realize it…oh shit.) I was certainly aware of the fabled “Male Gaze” in pop culture, but I recently learned that it’s derived from a more general notion of Gaze developed by Jacques Lacan. As soon as I heard about Gaze, I realized I’ve been writing about it my entire life without knowing it. Which is why I’ve been very reluctant to look any further into the subject, ha ha! I’m afraid if I learn more about Lacan, it will inflect my writing in some way. Seems silly and superstitious, but I am, sadly, a very silly and superstitious person (not in a GOOD way). Thus, if you know something about Lacan, you’re some kind of expert or even a weekend Lacanian hobbyist, and you find yourself shaking your head disapprovingly at what’s to come—like I don’t know what I’m talking ’bout or sumpin’, which, quite frankly, you’re not wrong—maybe just move on, eh? There’s a lot of Internet out there yet to be explored…you can do it!

Gaze is seeing somebody, obviously. You know that when someone is looking at you, they SEE you. Meanwhile, you KNOW they see you…you know that an image of yourself is appearing in that person’s consciousness. You know that your image, which you thought was YOURS, now belongs to THEM. What the FUCK? It’s out of your control! All they have to do is LOOK at you, and now they POSSESS you! You can’t help it: you’re sitting there wondering what they’re seeing exactly…hoping it measures up…and maybe you start to crave that Gaze, that possession, because it’s the only way to vindicate your actual presence in the Universe. I mean, if no one is looking at you, if no one has laid claim to your value, then do you even exist? You’d have to look in a mirror to verify it, but even then, you’re looking at yourself AS IF you were someone else, from a certain distance. And when you’re not looking in the mirror, you can still see an image of yourself in your mind that you sense is being seen by someone somewhere…someone somewhere COULD be looking at you….

I’m sure Lacan puts it better than that, I’ve got nuttin’ but simplistic gibberish atm, AND I’ve given myself a time limit, so rather than spend another hour fussing over it to make it marginally more intelligible, let’s relate it to the movies I just saw. Both are simple stories [SPOILERS!]:

In Nosferatu, a young girl is ignored, belittled, and demeaned by her flaccid husband, her priggish social clique, and her puritanical society—even to the degree of etherising, corseting, and tying her down to prevent “somnambulism,” a.k.a. personal autonomy—so she conjures up from the wrath of her repressed libido a literal demon to give her what she craves: GAZE. (She just wants SOMEONE to LOOK at HER, to see and esteem her as the Sex Goddess she KNOWS she is writhing around underneath it all.) Indeed, Nosferatu is PURE GAZE, an infinite and lusting Gaze that extends to her all the way from Transylvania, traveling the entire WORLD to SEE and possess her. Every little girl’s dream! She is the Master, he the Servant; he exists ONLY to look at her. And of course, a Gaze can’t consummate its desire—once it finally possesses the object of its obsession, it is destroyed. (Nosferatu literally bleeds from the EYES in his death scene!) In the process of attracting Nosferatu’s Gaze, almost incidentally, the entire city is beset with plague and all her friends die. Oh well! Even SHE dies, sure, but with a smile of contentment, her own pet creature Nosferatu gripped firmly in her carnal embrace. It’s a Triumph of the Feminine Will. (I loved that! I need to watch the original, I’ve never seen it, but now I’m extremely interested! I mean, that was before feminism, wasn’t it? How’d they DO that?)

In A Complete Unknown, a young boy (Bob Dylan), a vagabond magician of sorts, is literally MADE OF GAZE. Everyone looks at him and sees what they want him to be, which is the object of their Gaze, but no one ever sees who he actually is. (So what are they even looking at? Their own desire? Naked, unfulfilled desire projected onto a boyish substrate? A circular Gaze that passes through its object and returns back into the self?) Throughout the film, whenever he plays a song, we witness its effect on the GAZE of the other characters. It’s almost fetishistic… There’s always a Close-Up-Reaction-Shot™ of someone LOOKING at him with sudden desire and being transformed by what they SEE. And that’s ALL HE IS—a papier-mâché doll of all those Gazes layered over each other. The film is structured, essentially, as a litany of the Gazes that bestow themselves ’pon our ’nointed one, starting with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (who’s ALL Gaze since he can’t talk—his eyes just get bigger and buggier, the more he sees), kind of a grudging squint of a Gaze from Dave Van Ronk, then Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, Al Grossman, Johnny Cash, endless fans of course, and who-the-fuck-ever! There is no character in this film who interacts with Bob Dylan in a mundane way. Every single person contributes the reaction shot of their Gaze to constructing this towering figure of legend. And any energy toward revealing the soul that might reside behind this image is always preemptively diverted: Dylan MUST—to preserve the myth—remain an enigma, a Mystery Tramp, you name it.

I don’t have the brainpower to follow this thread any further, and I’m not going to work it over; I just wanted to get the basic idea down before it fades away. Maybe I’ll return to it someday because there were some tangents I could’ve pursued if I had any mental acuity. Or maybe not!