VIVIAN ADVANCE

Streaming this weekend...

My Darling Vivian--This documentary portrait of Vivian Liberto, the breathtaking, exotically beautiful, atrociously maligned first wife of Johnny Cash, is told by their four daughters. Rashomon-style, talking heads Roseanne, Kathy, Cindy and Tara each recount, with different perspectives and faintly different tinges of bitterness and perplexity but all with candor and palpable love, the story of their parents' turbulent marriage and its long aftermath.

Though she looked like the sort of woman required to fling herself into a volcano to appease the gods, Vivian was by this account a traditional, private San Antonio Catholic girl. She adored her husband, but never bargained for a life in the public eye, and certainly not for a life raising four daughters mostly by herself, while her pillhead husband disappeared for months on tour; where she was the target of a hate campaign by racist groups because they thought (erroneously, not that it matters) that she was African-American; and where she would later be a barely-acknowledged footnote in the story of her ex-husband's great love affair with June Carter, who was given to publicly claiming Vivian's daughters as if they were her own.

This dramatic, painful story is smoothly and efficiently presented by director Matt Riddlehoover and produced by Cash grandson Dustin Tittle. It's packed with vivid early photos and film footage, and is obviously a must for Cash fanatics. But the central figure remains enigmatic; an extraordinarily vibrant camera subject, yet a somehow recessive personality. Her life was richly documented but her inner thoughts were not; her most heartfelt letter went unmailed, and only at the very end of this film do we get to hear her speak a few words.

A NOBEL CAUSE

Since the startling announcement that Bob Dylan was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, there have been a few dissenting arguments, like this one and this one.

As far as I can tell the case against a Nobel for Dylan is twofold—on the one hand, that there are writers who’ve been laboring in obscurity, sometimes in developing countries, that could use the exposure and the money more, and on the other hand that he’s not a writer, he’s a lyricist, and the power of his writing is inseparable from its musical context.

I can sort of see the former argument, I suppose. But I’m still glad Dylan won, because I’m thinking of all the scoffing and eye-rolling I received in my twenties when I gushed about him as one of the great 20^th-Century American poets. For me, it’s not an acknowledged elder statesman of American pop culture being gratuitously honored, it’s the goofy, wise-assed, frizzy-haired kid with the braying-goat voice from half a century ago being vindicated, along with everybody who could hear something dazzling and beautiful in his haywire words and cadences.

As to the second argument, though—lyricists aren’t writers? Really? W.S. Gilbert wasn’t a writer? George M. Cohan wasn’t a writer? Irving Berlin and Cole Porter? Woody Guthrie? Frank Loesser? Sheldon Harnick? Tom Lehrer? Johnny Cash? Jacques Brel? Smokey Robinson? Leonard Cohen? Neil Diamond? Carole King? Merle Haggard? Bill Withers? Judy Collins? Dolly Parton? Stephen Sondheim? Bob Gaudio? Frank Zappa? Billy Joel? Lyle Lovett? Ice-T?

If Dylan, or anyone else on that list, or any of three hundred others that could be named, don't qualify as writers, than I guess I’d rather not be a writer. I’d rather be whatever it is they are.