My Own Version Of You (part 20): If you’re okay, say something

by Jochen Markhorst

XX        If you’re okay, say something

One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Show me your ribs - I’ll stick in the knife
I’m gonna jump start my creation to life

 It is the cinematic dramatisation of the creation story. Of the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, that is. The first film adaptation, James Whale’s Frankenstein from 1931, not only coined the now iconic image of Dr. Frankenstein as a mad scientist and a hunchbacked Igor as his assistant, but also all the fuss with thunderstorms and lightning.

In 1931, the still lifeless body lies on an operating table, in a setting that we would now call steampunk; a lot of gears, Van de Graaff generators, Tesla coils and whatnot. Metal chains with heavy links hang limply from the corners of the table until the doctor activates a mechanism hoisting the entire contraption up through pulleys, towards a recess in the roof.

Outside, a violent storm is raging, and the body and the operating table with all its conductors are now exposed to the elements. We watch along with the doctor, Igor and two visitors, friends of the doctor. From below, we see the table being struck by one lightning bolt after another. The average voltage of a lightning discharge is about 100 million volts, so it’s quite a situation. The horror dripping from the visitors’ faces is completely understandable, but Dr Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is in full mad scientist mode, staring with a burning gaze at the inferno above. Culminating when, a moment later, he bends over the body and sees the monster’s hand move:

Henry:   Look. It’s moving. lt’s alive. It’s alive. lt’s alive. It’s moving! lt is alive! It’s alive! lt’s               alive! It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!!
Victor:   Henry, in the name of God!
Henry:   In the name of God? Now I know what it feels like to BE God!

The scene becomes a template for later film adaptations, parodies and Looney Tunes derivatives; the laboratory usually is a Gothic castle room, preferably on a hill, the assistant a hunchbacked monster, and the moment suprême is heralded by flashes of lightning and claps of thunder.

Thunderbolt and lightning very, very frightening, as Galileo reportedly once said, and he was usually right. It is an upgrade from a visual thinker, the kind of creative mind imagining that Marty McFly in 1955 needs a lightning strike to charge his DeLorean for the return journey Back To The Future or the hundreds of movies using thunder and lightning to heighten the sense of drama. However, in the source, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the surrection scene is a lot less spectacular. The word “electricity” appears only twice in the book, as does “galvanism”, both at a respectful distance from the fateful birth. That apotheosis is treated much more modestly than in the film adaptations and than the spectacle in Dylan’s song:

“With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning ; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when , by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open ; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

So instead of a hellish thunderstorm and cascades of lightning bolts: “infuse a spark”. No demonic “It’s alive” screaming either, for that matter; Shelley’s Frankenstein flees the laboratory and lies down on the bed, tossing and turning. And even falls asleep.

The strike of lightning here in “My Own Version Of You” illustrates – once again – that Dylan is a visual thinker and a film fan, who tends to copy images from film adaptations rather than literary sources for his songs. We saw this more than half a century ago in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (1965), where he sings that “Captain Arab” was stuck on a whale; again an image from the film adaptation, the movie with Gregory Peck – it does not take place in the source, the novel Moby Dick. And we still see it in Dylan’s 2012 Titanic song, “Tempest” (with the Leo took his sketchbook verses, the integration of the film images).

It is, of course, a good choice. “One strike of lightning is all that I need,” the scene with the life-giving electroshock has infinitely more dramatic power with the image of a striking lightning bolt than with the clinical “I infuse a spark of being.” The extrapolation, the next line of verse, “And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed,” sounds great, but we shouldn’t take the content too seriously. Lightning and a blast of electricity is semantically a bit strange already, and “at top speed” is just silly; electricity can at most be accelerated – a little – to the speed of light in a vacuum. Which would be rather fatal for survival chances. Anyway, while this second line of verse may not hold up in the lecture hall, it certainly does on stage – the line sounds like a bell and runs like clockwork. Partly thanks to the Shakespearean elision, the shortening of words for rhythmic reasons, in this case the striking electricity that Dylan shortens to ’lectricity. Which, in all its insignificance, could by now be catalogued as “Dylanesque”, by the way; this is the third ’lectricity in Dylan’s oeuvre, after Stay far from the fence with the ‘lectricity sting in “Walls Of Red Wing” and the well-known The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face from “Visions Of Johanna”.

It is the melodious introduction to the gruesome final lines of this closing verse, to Show me your ribs – I’ll stick in the knife / I’m gonna jump start my creation to life. At first glance fitting in with the bloodlust that we have seen intensify in Dylan’s songs since the twenty-first century and in line with the physical aggression here on Rough And Rowdy Ways at all. “I take a sword, and hack off your arm” in “Black Rider”, for example, or “I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife” in “Crossing The Rubicon” and “fight with a butcher’s hook” in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. The difference is – of course – that the knife stab here is not life-threatening, but rather life-giving, presented as a sinister variant of jumper cables. With stage directions, plot and word choice that, strangely enough, remind us once again of a film classic:

Vincent grabs the magic marker out of Jody’s hand and makes a big red dot on Mia’s body where her heart is.

VINCENT
Okay, what do I do?

LANCE
Well, you’re giving her an injection of adrenaline straight to her heart. But she’s got a breast plate in front of her heart, so you gotta pierce through that. So what you gotta do is bring the needle down in a stabbing motion.

Lance demonstrates a stabbing motion, which looks like “The Shape” killing its victims in “Halloween”.

VINCENT
I gotta stab her?

LANCE
If you want the needle to pierce through to her heart, you gotta stab her hard. Then once you do, push down on the plunger.

VINCENT
What happens after that?

LANCE
I’m curious about that myself.

… the scene from Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) in which John Travolta as Vincent has to save Mia’s life. Mia (Uma Thurman) has accidentally overdosed on heroin – she thought the bag of white powder in Vincent’s coat pocket was cocaine. She is as good as dead, and Vincent is understandably slightly hysterical, as she is the wife of Vincent’s boss, the gangster kingpin Marsellus. But, as we all know, it ends well:

Vincent brings the needle down hard, stabbing Mia in the chest. Mia’s head is jolted from the impact. The syringe plunger is pushed down, pumping the adrenaline out through the needle. Mia’s eyes pop wide open and she lets out a hellish cry of the banshee. She bolts up in a sitting position, needle stuck in her chest [screaming]. Vincent, Lance and Jody, who were in sitting positions in front of Mia, jump back, scared to death.

LANCE
If you’re okay, say something.

Mia, still breathing, not looking up at them, says in a relatively normal voice:

MIA
Something.

Vincent and Lance collapse on their backs, exhausted and shaking from how close to death Mia came.

JODY
Anybody want a beer?

No flashes of lightning or power surges, nor “it’s alive, it’s alive” shrieking, but no less a blood-curdling jump start to life.

——————–

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 21: Here sit I, forming mortals after my image

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
• It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues