Don’t Look Back (1967)

directed by D.A. Pennebaker

Emma Mackenzie

At age sixteen, I persuaded one of my long-suffering parents—can’t remember which—to let me sign up for a free trial of Love Film. The now defunct DVD rental service was, at the time, the height of innovation. Obviously, I promised repeatedly that I would cancel it before the free trial ended and charges were incurred. Spoiler alert, I forgot, and began a lifelong habit which most recently culminated in me having an Apple TV subscription I can’t really afford or bear to part with. I had managed to persuade them due to the promise that the only film I would borrow would be Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour. Both of them are big Dylan fans―Mum likes Desire best and Dad Blood on the Tracks. These albums were the music that soundtracked my childhood: playing in the car, the kitchen, at their birthday parties. I knew by using this tactic I was on to an absolute winner―they couldn’t say no to Dylan.

My intentions for watching the documentary weren’t simply that I was a big fan like my parents were. Instead, I had an almost obsessive need to impress some skinny art boys, who were so pasty it was as if they had never ventured outside, which has always been my kryptonite. As I saw it, there was no better way to do that than using gems of wisdom from the ultimate pasty art boy himself: Bob Dylan. Sitting in the hallway of my mum's house, where the lone internet connection was located and connected to the computer with a thick, green cable, if you can imagine that, I had scrolled through Livejournal, Blogger and Tumblr―all the greatest hits of teenage boredom―and I’d seen more screengrabs of the documentary than I could count. Dylan’s indefinable aphorisms captioning black and white images of him gazing intensely at someone or something. I wanted in.

You know when you’re young and you say you like something and then every gift you get for the next decade is related to that thing? Well, Bob Dylan was that for me. He had replaced elephants, to which I had previously been incredibly dedicated in my pre-pubescent years. I got books of his quotes, a pop-art style poster my uncle made me, notebooks with his lyrics on the cover, a print from the 1965 tour that Don’t Look Back covers, and, of course, Dylan’s albums themselves. One year, my whole family chipped in and got me an iPod Classic, which was the absolute holy grail at the time. They got “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” engraved on it. That thing was my pride and joy, I still have it now, even though it gave up the ghost many years ago. Needless to say, being a Bob Dylan fan took up a lot of my time and energy, and made up about forty percent of my teenage personality. To say I overly identified with liking the version of Bob Dylan that appears in Don’t Look Back is an understatement. He was iconic and appeared effortlessly cool. He said mysteriously profound things that seemed really smart. When I first watched Don’t Look Back, that meant that I obviously must be all those things too. I got it, or I thought I did, therefore I was different, nevermind that I was several decades too late.

In a way, these pretensions we all develop as teenagers are all we’ve got. We haven’t had time to prove anything yet, except in my case a propensity for after-school detentions and a lack of ability on the lacrosse field. The only self I could claim was one I had imagined. Don’t Look Back Dylan, spiky and refusing definition, eviscerating journalists and captivating crowds with his songs, captured mine more than anything else had before. It helped me dream of all the lives I could live, when all the doors were open before any of them had slammed shut in front of me. They protected me from the reality of being a late bloomer, of not knowing who I was or what my limitations really were. Dreaming kept me safe, until it didn’t.

Pennebaker’s documentary is critically acclaimed for a reason: he is seen as one of the pioneers of the Cinéma Vérité style, and he managed to capture something unguarded and unpolished of a mega star that documentarians of today could mostly only dream of getting on tape. Still, in a way I wish I had never watched Don’t Look Back again, and let it remain untouched, kept as a memory of Dylan’s undeniable brilliance. Roger Ebert wrote in a review at the time that the portrait of Dylan created in the documentary is one of a man who is “immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright.” That’s not an assessment I agree with now, but watching Don’t Look Back as an adult, the outlines of Dylan that made up a genius are certainly more blurred. What once seemed like profundities that I literally scribbled in a notebook beside me, now make me say, out loud, “What does that even mean?” Ebert also noted that he was surprised “Dylan apparently approved of the film.” Knowing this repairs some of the damage done to my teenage daydreams: even if he didn’t always come off well, maybe Dylan knew that that was part of the truth for which he was searching. Pennebaker himself has agreed with this assessment that Dylan was not the genius at 23 I thought he was, saying to Slant Magazine in 2015: “Dylan had a funny street smarts [...] he picked up a kind of attitude or insight that was kind of interesting and intriguing and, I thought, unusual. But there were a lot of times where he was very naive.”

Joan Baez, Dylan’s tourmate and once-upon-a-time romantic interest, also features heavily in the film. I have seen her perform live a few times. Each time I saw, as the years passed, her vocal range became lower but no less beautiful. Baez’s voice has actually become more solid to me. Now, as it fails to reach the dazzlingly high octaves she once could seamlessly achieve, it is something I can let carry my entire weight. Baez, in many ways, has always fascinated me more than Dylan himself. Not that I could admit that to myself when I was sixteen, or to the art boys who had barely heard of her.

In an early scene in Don’t Look Back, the press are photographing her. Baez struggles to pose, and begins to pull faces―deeply relatable. As the press warn her that they will use these silly images, her self-consciousness and discomfort could not be more clear. Eventually someone asks her who she is, and when she gives him her name, he says: “Struth, I didn’t recognise you!” Quickly and quietly she replies, “Good.” She was an afterthought already, it seems, lost somewhere in Dylan’s long shadow. That is, for many, still unfortunately the case: she is an addendum to his musical history, an ex-girlfriend, rather than the exceptional talent for which she deserves to be known and remembered. But these scenes show that the spotlight in which Dylan stood was not made for pure talent alone: persona was required. As an adult, it is Baez who draws me in, who doesn't care to get caught up in the business of creating one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a committed Dylan fan. “Goodbye is too good a word babe, so I’ll just say fare thee well” still hits me in the stomach. When Dylan drawls: “Look out kid,” in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” every muscle in my body contracts. I played “Bound to lose, bound to win”---a demo from the Witmark Tapes—the last time someone hurt my heart, and more importantly my ego. I just don’t think anymore that liking his music, or this documentary, says anything especially interesting about me as a person. In a way, I wish I could watch it again for the first time with my sixteen-year-old eyes, because really youth is the only throughline I can draw between me and the Dylan that appears in the film: youth that allows you to believe there is an ultimate truth that you will one day capture in your hand.

But, don’t look back. The warning is right there in the title. Things won’t ever be as they once were, and we will struggle to remember it accurately anyway however hard we try. Looking back to the sixteen-year-old version of myself is, frankly, humiliating, and might have been better left well alone.

I should note that as I write this, my grandfather is sleeping in a hospital bed nearby: each breath taking him closer to his last. He has lived a long life and achieved mostly everything he wanted. Looking back at a moment like this is both natural and entirely dangerous. There are all the questions I wish I had asked him, and no time left to do so. Instead, I should stare right at him, shrunken and covered in sores, but with eyes when they open as bright blue as ever.

The truth, if there is one at all, is that for all of us there is only the march of nows that propel us forward. Dylan knows this, as he wills himself onto stage for another show. The man, the icon, the musical legend is still touring, refusing to sit still, even as audiences are left unimpressed. It doesn’t matter, though; they’re reliably forgetting not to look back. He can stand on stage and mumble and tickets will still be sold.

Emma Mackenzie is a writer and editor living in London. Her work has appeared in The Independent and The I Newspaper, amongst many others. You can find her @emmamack01 on Twitter.