Paul Rouse: Like Dylan, sport is still tangled up in truth
IT AIN'T ME, BABE: Folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform during a civil rights rally in 1963. Picture: Rowland Scherman/National Archive/Newsmakers
The new film on the life of Bob Dylan – – is brilliant. Timothée Chalamet is magnificent as Dylan and the supporting cast is fantastic.
The whole thing is a triumph for the director, James Mangold, a man whose career in film spans decades and is studded with high-profile successes.
The film was based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book , which explored Bob Dylan’s famous performance at the 1965 Newport folk festival.
sticks fairly faithfully to the book, although there are also inventions as well. There is no problem with that, it’s a feature film not a documentary and has no obligation to factual truth.
Mangold is perfectly entitled to put in what he wishes – in the same way that the ‘Michael Collins’ film took a whole load of liberties with the historical record when it was released in 1996. Again, its writer and director Neil Jordan (a history graduate of UCD) was at liberty to put in whatever he felt would make the film more interesting and entertaining.
There is a difference between artistic licence and complete dismissal of information rooted in facts, however.
In a recent interview, Mangold was asked whether he thought art still had the power to change things. He replied: “Maybe even more so, because information has certainly ceased to be able to move anyone.
You don’t even have to shine that light on it, you can just feel it – and someone can be changed by what they feel.”
People can of course be changed by what they may feel or be induced to feel – but it is wrong and false equivalence to suggest that the choice is between “facts” and “feelings”. Apart from anything else, this approach suggests that facts have no role in influencing feelings.
To just give up on facts and information, and to simply cede the pitch to imagination and emotion and feelings is a profound mistake.
What Mangold had to say is based on a highly dubious premise: that people are more inclined now to ignore facts than in the past, to the point where facts no longer influence anyone.
More than that, the thesis is that what you feel trumps all else – that you can feel what you want and that this simply counts more, even if the facts of something are inconvenient to the essence of the feeling.
Anyone who has ever been in any way connected with sport knows that the swirl of emotions is fundamental to so much of what goes on. It colours how every single situation is considered, from the decision of a referee to the selection of a team.
Basically, the capacity to see what you want to see from any given thing is apparently unlimited. A fine example of this can be found in the arguments which raged after Roy Keane left the Irish squad in the days before the 2002 World Cup.
What ensued was an extraordinary spectacle as the public, politicians and the media convulsed on one side or the other.
Sane and sensible people said and wrote extreme things as they re-cast the dispute as a battle between a ‘new’ Ireland, unready to accept second-best, and an ‘old’ Ireland, happy merely to be asked along at all.
Those who sought to portray the event as some sort of Greek tragedy seemed actually to believe what they were claiming. Or did they? How much was sincerely felt, or how much were people simply revelling in the great absurdity of it all?
In general, it was as if – having already experienced the pleasures of attending two World Cups – we needed now to find a new passion to make the competition worth the bother. In the process, we once more revealed the national talent for hysteria and melodrama.
As an exercise in selective reasoning, it was truly outstanding. Pick the facts that suit you and ignore the ones that don’t and then produce your argument. Instead, argue what you feel.
Again, there is nothing new about people inventing things. In Irish sport, the things that we have made up and that have been ordained as truth are directly related to how people feel about things.
For example, it didn’t suit that Hill 16 was originally known as Hill 60 and was so-called after a battle in the First World War in which loads of Irish soldiers fought in having enlisted in the British army.
So in the 1930s the story was invented that the Hill had been built from the rubble of the Easter Rising and the terrace was renamed Hill 16. Facts didn’t matter.
Similarly, the same principle underpins the claims that the Irish invented chess and that the original Olympic Games organised by the Greeks had been copied directly from the Tailteann Games in Ireland (naturally, our Games were older and more impressive than anything the Greeks could have come up with).
All across history, there are astonishing examples of people making things up and insisting on truths that were self-evidently false. It is a phenomenon that transcends time and place.
Perhaps what is different now though is the belief that this new millennium is different when it comes to facts. And that people actually believe that facts are no longer relevant, precisely because people make so much stuff up and put it on the internet.
And ultimately because so many people seem willing to believe they can have their own set of facts, regardless, the belief can flourish that there is no duty to challenge anyone at all about anything they say. Even when it is nonsense.
Maybe we should do away with the results of matches altogether and let people decide who they feel has won.
