A Complete Unknown

I’ve just finished watching “A Complete Unknown.” I think it is a brilliant movie. There were so many things going on, so many telling details. I think it needs watching again and again. Which is what we need in movies now: because we no longer see them in theatres, a one-shot thing, but buy them, as we used to buy records, to play over again.

And what is in effect a musical is ideal for this.

The casting for Dylan was incredibly good. Timothée Chalamet really gets Dylan down pat, reminiscent of Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison. Hard to do, with someone so famous and still living. Definitely earned an Oscar. 

Ed Norton as Pete Seeger is also brilliant. A little easier, since Seeger is somewhat less famous. But he really does seem to be Seeger himself.

Joan Baez is not as good. Not Monica Barbaro’s fault. She does a fine job with the role, but nobody could imitate Baez’s unique and uniquely good voice.

And Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash is a fail. Unlike enough that it is distracting, and interferes with the willing suspension of disbelief. Again, the problem is the voice. You needed an actor with a deep baritone. Without it, Holbrook just comes across as a generic greaser, a Fonzie.

Seeger’s “parable of the teaspoon brigade” looks at first like a fail by the scriptwriter. Because it does not work. The obvious way to balance the imaginary seesaw was of course not to fill the leaky bucket of sand with teaspoons, but to take some rocks out of the other one.

Or perhaps this was an intentional parody of Seeger’s political views.

I think the latter. I hear Dylan himself annotated the script. Dylan likes to subtly send people up. He does it to Seeger in his autobiography by lamenting how unjust it is that Seeger was set upon by the government, he being descended from people coming over on the Mayflower and all. 

In other words, Seeger was a poseur who never really risked anything with all his leftist politics, and had no rapport with the actual working class. All a sham. He was really a card-carrying member of the old rich. Went to private school, parents were prominent academics and bureaucrats.

There are other lines and opinions in the movie that I feel certain are Dylan himself speaking: “Picasso is overrated.” 

Yep.

“Bette Davis was not trying to find herself.”

Yep. The task of the artist is not to find himself, but to lose himself. As Keats said, “the poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence.” The “chameleon poet” disappears into the work through “negative capability.” Bobby Zimmerman disappears. Irving Layton referred to his poems as “my dead selves.” 

Baez’s songwriting is lousy.

Yep. It seems obvious to me why their relationship was doomed. Baez was not at Dylan’s intellectual level. But she was too successful and ambitious to live in his shadow. She would have been a millstone around his neck. He would crush her ego.

I’m a dedicated folkie, and also a dedicated rocker. I love them both. But I do find it heartbreaking that Dylan abandoned the folk movement; that pretty much killed it, and it was so beautiful. 

Why did he do it?

The reason the movie suggests and the one Dylan himself suggests, is that everyone was trying to own him. He felt trapped by the expectations of the movement. He needed to break free to be his own man.

But I think that is kind of a cover story. It is not Dylan who felt trapped. Dylan was not real; the self was gone, and there was only the music. It was the voice in his head, the place the songs come from, that felt trapped. It could no longer speak in the folk idiom. 

People imagine authors, poets, and songwriters have command of their material. The best ones don’t.

Someone once asked Stephen King why he only wrote horror.

“Do you think I have a choice?” he answered.

So Dylan could not stay in folk. He had no more folk songs. He would only let them down.

But why did he have to confront the Newport Folk Festival with the fact? Didn’t he owe something to that paying audience? Wasn’t he deliberately insulting their taste? Couldn’t he have sung some of the old songs, just one more time?

I believe the key to that is Suze Rotolo—Sylvie in the film. 

I think Dylan was truly and completely in love with her. She was his first love. And I think she was the one who left him. Probably, as the film suggests, because his brilliance and success crushed her ego. I think she was his muse. For the folk and protest period, he was speaking for her. His voice was trying to please her.

And when she was gone, I suspect it is not just that the folk songs no longer came. It was also that they suddenly became too emotional for him, with too many memories.

I often fear as I read my poetry in public that I might break down. Leonard Cohen needed to get drunk before a performance; when he began, he considered wearing a mask. Dylan went through a period of performing in whiteface.

Dylan’s early folk lyrics are very intimate.

He had to create a new hard-edged persona to protect himself. So, edgy rock. Sunglasses.

And the new songs spoke out of a bitterness. He was badly hurt.

Even today, a Dylan concert is disappointing. Because he won’t play his own songs straight. When he plays his own stuff, he always plays it in a weird bouncy tempo. I’m not sure what it is musically; I think it is 3/3. Happy happy joy joy. The effect, I think, is to take the emotional edge off it, to distance himself from it. Otherwise he may still fear breaking down in public.

Perhaps still for Suze. Perhaps for other heartbreaks since. Everything beautiful comes from pain.

I think there is a similar thing with Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. 

Men do not easily get over their first true love. We are not meant to.