Bob Dylan Double Bill at the Mayfair: Bring Your Own Tissue |
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| Written by Frederick Hidell |
| Sunday, 01 June 2008 19:00 |
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It was pouring rain, like God had finally passed a kidney stone and was now unloading a week's worth of festering piss down onto Ottawa. I was drunk, but clearly not drunk enough, because the bitter wet cold was clawing at my bones. I cursed the lord, pulled my jacket up under my chin and hurried my pace. I was moving up Bank Street towards the Mayfair theatre, hoping that the line-up would not stretch out onto the street and force me to wait for tickets in the rain.
In the 1990s, the Mayfair hosted amazing double bills featuring cult classics on a regular basis. You'd have Eraserhead and Lost Highway; Meanstreets and Taxi Driver; Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! and Supervixens; Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, to name but a few. They were wonderful and memorable theatre-going experiences. Unfortunately, those wondrous days of tits and gore and art cinema have largely passed by the wayside. At the turn of the millennium, forced by what one assumes was financial necessity, the Mayfair began screening primarily new releases. The average night now features an odd juxtaposition of films in an attempt to draw diverse audiences, rather than target niche groups of cinephiles. The fact that the theatre was hosting a Bob Dylan double bill was certainly special, and I figured Ottawa audiences would understand what a unique occasion this was and come out in droves. When I reached the theatre, however, I discovered no line-up whatsoever. The girl at the ticket booth was resting her chin in her hand and staring out through the glass with what I immediately recognized as the-thousand-yard-stare-of-retail-boredom plastered across her face. There was an eerie silence to the place. When the Mayfair hosted a Scream I and II double bill, years ago, the noise level was through the ceiling. People were ecstatic, crying out and clutching at one another during the scary moments, laughing when the tension subsided, and then chanting and cheering between movies. Popcorn drifted down from the balcony onto those watching from the floor, like a gentle December evening of light flurries. I whooped it up to such an extent that the mean bastard seated in front of me actually turned around and threatened to smash his juice bottle down my throat if I didn't shut up. His threats were drowned by the noise... Good memories, warm memories on a cold and wet night in 2008, when the theatre echoed not cheers, but silence.
Lord knows what was going on in the bathroom... likely divorced dads and beer league outfielders humming "Mr. Tambourine Man" to cover up the noise of them jerking off into tissues behind the stall doors, while thinking back on their days of youth when they still thought they could be free like Dylan. Of course, the harsh realities of passing decades had not been kind to these men, nor had they been kind to me, for that matter. When Pennebaker first completed Don't Look Back, he was unable to find a distributor and was turned down by every studio in Hollywood, despite the fact that the film would go on to become one of the most highly regarded and influential rock documentaries ever made. It was eventually declared "culturally significant" by the United States National Film Preservation Foundation and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, but in the mid-60s, porno theatres were the only place willing to screen Pennebaker's experimental work. Now, 30 years later, things had apparently come full circle. In Ottawa, not even teaming Don't Look Back up with Haynes's critically acclaimed and Academy Award-nominated I'm Not There could draw audiences out of their houses on a rainy Monday night in April. There were certainly no casual viewers in the theatre that night. These were clearly hardcore Dylan addicts, mainline injectors of his poetry, men who had in the past shared dirty records when desperate for a fix. These poor souls survived year after year at horrible soul-crushing jobs simply by reminding themselves that Dylan's music would be waiting for them when they finally got home. No doubt lifelong friendships would have been forged and bootlegs exchanged had any of them dared to break porno theatre etiquette and actually spoken to one another... but this is Ottawa, and here etiquette reigns supreme. This is not the sort of city that rushes out to see 1960s art house documentaries about politically engaged folk singers. The people of this city have families to raise, after all, and those SUVs don't pay for themselves! Besides, if they want entertainment on a Monday night, the Mayfair Theatre is certainly not going to be the hot spot. Not when CBS has a solid two-hour block of four-camera sitcoms that very same night! No, in Ottawa, they leave the art films and the rock documentaries to filthy Dylan fetishists (many of whom broke the habit once before, only to fall back off the wagon through unfortunate chains of circumstance like the release of Oh Mercy! coinciding with their second divorce hearings), and drunken journalists who watch in rapt ecstasy, touching tissues to their wet eyes while Dylan sings "Only a Pawn in their Game" at a Voters' Registration Rally in 1963, and whisper under their breath, "Where IS everyone?" RELATED ARTICLES: Bob Dylan Goes Digital!
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Who knew how many people were going to be there? This was, after all, a Bob Dylan double bill! D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Todd Haynes’s I'm Not There playing back to back! In addition to the fact that both movies are brilliant celebrations of one of the most culturally significant artists of the latter half of the twentieth century, the event was a rare treat because these Mayfair doubles bills are now few and far between.
I bought my snacks (again, no lineup) and took my seat. I was horrified to see that there were barely a dozen people in the theatre, and virtually all of them were dateless middle-aged men with tired eyes, bald heads and graying goatees. I too was there alone, having been unable to convince a single person to attend with me. It was like sitting in a porno theatre. Each sick Dylan pervert sat alone, trying desperately not to drool, while taking furtive and envious glances towards the few men who had actually been able to convince real, live female dates to accompany them to what was clearly an antisocial and despicable event.
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