“I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”
- Cocteau
’A Complete Unknown’ works well, if taken just as a film. It rips along, tells its story well. I’ve no idea if early Sixties Greenwich Village was anything like the way its shown, but it feels like a real place captured. From the little I know about the main characters (Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Stand-In Suze), they were pretty much as depicted here.
But of course its not just a film. Its a dramatisation. ’A Complete Unknown’ is completely known to us, that is what attracts us. And therein lies the problem.
Dylan essentially mythologised himself, not only in his music. In interviews and general behaviour, he was a character played by the method actor Robert Zimmerman. Or more accurately, a series of characters. He built an elaborate mythology, but that’s long since condensed down to a single legend - the Judas incident, the Bob-goes-electric saga at Newport. This has become as much What Dylan Is About as any song he ever wrote.
It’s been raked over enough what degree of truth there is in this. (Go here or here if you hadn’t already.) But the point isn’t that what actually happened wasn’t much like its shown here. The point is that this is what people want to believe happened. They believe it the way other people believe Boris Johnson saved us from Covid.
And to be believed myths need to be re-recited. Just like Church-goers can’t only attend once and tick salvation off the to-do list, believers need to be fed more documentaries and dramatisations like this. The first draft of history, that didn’t work out quite the way it should, so now we need a reconstruction to correct.
I’m not a great fan of biopics, and this may be partly why. The advantage of fiction is… well, it's fictional nature. You can devise and arrange incidents and symbols as you choose, to convey what you’re conveying. Your imagination can go free range. Conforming to actual events pens it in. But also, real lives are never so neat as to compress into the required running time. So biopics tend to reach for the myth just because it's more manageable, while at the same time feigning authenticity.
Let’s remember Dylan gave his approval. Someone who never approves of anything much. It’s true that when Baez calls him “kind of an asshole” and “completely full of shit”, the film more-or-less backs her up. Yet his assholeness is considered necessary. You can either please other people or be yourself. Its an either/or choice, like the acoustic and electric guitars which get repeatedly held out for him.
In perhaps the most telling exchange, he contradicts Stand-In Suze about the Bette Davis film they just watched. “She didn’t ‘find herself’, like a lost shoe. She made herself into something different, what she wanted to be in that moment.”
Later, walking away from… well, you know what, an infuriated Lomax yells at him: “Do you even remember folk music, Bob?” He snaps back “no, what’s that?” It’s not just a put-down. It means, I am no longer the person you think you are talking to. I have moved on to my next me. Your call cannot be redirected.
Significantly, he never seems to have his own place. He crashes on Seeger’s couch, he stays in Stand-In Suze’s apartment, bangs on the door of Joan Baez’s hotel room… the nearest we get is his own motel room at Newport. Literally on the move.
So, instead of being examined, the myth is fed. The offered acoustic vs. electric guitar becomes something like the blue and red pill in ’The Matrix’, uncritical conformity versus you becoming you. It’s simultaneously a straight choice and an evolutionary path. Electric trumps acoustic, right? It’s more modern, and anyway its louder and stuff.
Electric Dylan fans tend to believe that when he gave up protest music he actually made better protest music. He went from the particular to the general, not tackling wrongs one-on-one but as a bunch. And by then there were too many wrongs to do things any other way. The film essentially sides with this, though it places most of it in the mouths of his associates. It’s silly stuff, better alluded to than spelt out. It is, to drag up a term from my day, Rockist.
Rockism comes down to the notion that all other music forms are fake, tainted by commercialism, confined by genre rules, while Rock is real - free, unmediated expression. As that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing likely to be brought to you by corporate conglomerates, in place of arguing for it they fetishise aspects of Rock. Chief among which is the electric guitar. In other words, it bestows the same talismanic significance as Folk purists do to the acoustic. (The other signifier he dons are a permanently affixed pair of sunglasses. Which arguably mean something slightly different. While the electric guitar’s an avowal, they’re a deflection of scrutiny.)
And this explains the standard stopping of the story here. Because it conveniently ignores an obvious fact - within the next few years he did the same thing again, this time burning his bridges to his Rock fans, and for pretty much the same reasons.
’I’m Not There’ (2007) was a much less literal take, featuring multiple Dylans all running round at once, with no interest in one another. Which was much more effective because it was explicitly about the Dylan myth, examining rather than regurgitating it. I said at the time, “the film actually feels like a Dylan song rather than some prosaic account of events surrounding its recording. It feels like one of his sprawling mid-Sixties electric numbers, packed with hallucinogenic images and allusions.”
It would be neat to now say this film is like one of the more literal acoustic songs, the ones it claimed got so gazzumped. Perhaps one of the more auto-biographical ones like ’Ballad In Plain D’. But to the degree that’s true, its like one of those songs played by somebody else.
Let’s remember that, when Blues guys went electric, they saw no big deal in it. Some had already played electric at Newport. Others, realising the money came from white folk purists, had by then switched back. (For which I don’t blame them.) Whereas Dylan did see the deal, had the same values as Lomax. They were just arguing about which way up they went. His credo of change prefigured the Beatles and Bowie. Its taken that he didn’t just change into a Rock star, because Rock music is held to embody change.
But 1965, that was a white ago now. How on earth can this still be held to, sixty years down the road? This is the general problem with Rock now, it hasn't done much a-changin' lately. Elements which had once been attached to some purpose are being kept around out of habit. Dylan’s was a time of greater social conformity, a jobs-for-life culture where your future lay between tramlines ahead of you. You deciding on you derailed the tram. Now we live with a volatile jobs marked which involves regularly reinventing yourself just to stay fed and housed. Tom Peters gave the following life coaching:
“Starting today you are a brand. You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favourite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?”
Another way of saying this is – there are multiple yous, but in none of them do you get to actually be you. Its no longer enough to sell your labour, now you need to sell your self into the bargain. Of course its true that Dylan rebranded himself not to get hired but precisely to get fired, to burn his bridges to one set of fans so that another could be built. But this isn’t the distinction you might think. How will we learn this lesson, us non-geniuses, us regular beings? Thinking “my brand isn’t Pepsi but Bob Dylan” doesn’t help you, it just rephrases the problem.
The film ends with Joan Baez left standing as Dylan motorbikes off. She never abandoned either the Folk world or the notion of music associating itself to movements for social change. Perhaps its time we switched this story round. In a world which has since filled itself with Bob Dylans, be a Joan Baez. She wasn’t such as asshole.
Let’s remember Dylan gave his approval. Someone who never approves of anything much. It’s true that when Baez calls him “kind of an asshole” and “completely full of shit”, the film more-or-less backs her up. Yet his assholeness is considered necessary. You can either please other people or be yourself. Its an either/or choice, like the acoustic and electric guitars which get repeatedly held out for him.
In perhaps the most telling exchange, he contradicts Stand-In Suze about the Bette Davis film they just watched. “She didn’t ‘find herself’, like a lost shoe. She made herself into something different, what she wanted to be in that moment.”
Later, walking away from… well, you know what, an infuriated Lomax yells at him: “Do you even remember folk music, Bob?” He snaps back “no, what’s that?” It’s not just a put-down. It means, I am no longer the person you think you are talking to. I have moved on to my next me. Your call cannot be redirected.
Significantly, he never seems to have his own place. He crashes on Seeger’s couch, he stays in Stand-In Suze’s apartment, bangs on the door of Joan Baez’s hotel room… the nearest we get is his own motel room at Newport. Literally on the move.
So, instead of being examined, the myth is fed. The offered acoustic vs. electric guitar becomes something like the blue and red pill in ’The Matrix’, uncritical conformity versus you becoming you. It’s simultaneously a straight choice and an evolutionary path. Electric trumps acoustic, right? It’s more modern, and anyway its louder and stuff.
Electric Dylan fans tend to believe that when he gave up protest music he actually made better protest music. He went from the particular to the general, not tackling wrongs one-on-one but as a bunch. And by then there were too many wrongs to do things any other way. The film essentially sides with this, though it places most of it in the mouths of his associates. It’s silly stuff, better alluded to than spelt out. It is, to drag up a term from my day, Rockist.
Rockism comes down to the notion that all other music forms are fake, tainted by commercialism, confined by genre rules, while Rock is real - free, unmediated expression. As that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing likely to be brought to you by corporate conglomerates, in place of arguing for it they fetishise aspects of Rock. Chief among which is the electric guitar. In other words, it bestows the same talismanic significance as Folk purists do to the acoustic. (The other signifier he dons are a permanently affixed pair of sunglasses. Which arguably mean something slightly different. While the electric guitar’s an avowal, they’re a deflection of scrutiny.)
And this explains the standard stopping of the story here. Because it conveniently ignores an obvious fact - within the next few years he did the same thing again, this time burning his bridges to his Rock fans, and for pretty much the same reasons.
’I’m Not There’ (2007) was a much less literal take, featuring multiple Dylans all running round at once, with no interest in one another. Which was much more effective because it was explicitly about the Dylan myth, examining rather than regurgitating it. I said at the time, “the film actually feels like a Dylan song rather than some prosaic account of events surrounding its recording. It feels like one of his sprawling mid-Sixties electric numbers, packed with hallucinogenic images and allusions.”
It would be neat to now say this film is like one of the more literal acoustic songs, the ones it claimed got so gazzumped. Perhaps one of the more auto-biographical ones like ’Ballad In Plain D’. But to the degree that’s true, its like one of those songs played by somebody else.
Let’s remember that, when Blues guys went electric, they saw no big deal in it. Some had already played electric at Newport. Others, realising the money came from white folk purists, had by then switched back. (For which I don’t blame them.) Whereas Dylan did see the deal, had the same values as Lomax. They were just arguing about which way up they went. His credo of change prefigured the Beatles and Bowie. Its taken that he didn’t just change into a Rock star, because Rock music is held to embody change.
But 1965, that was a white ago now. How on earth can this still be held to, sixty years down the road? This is the general problem with Rock now, it hasn't done much a-changin' lately. Elements which had once been attached to some purpose are being kept around out of habit. Dylan’s was a time of greater social conformity, a jobs-for-life culture where your future lay between tramlines ahead of you. You deciding on you derailed the tram. Now we live with a volatile jobs marked which involves regularly reinventing yourself just to stay fed and housed. Tom Peters gave the following life coaching:
“Starting today you are a brand. You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favourite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?”
Another way of saying this is – there are multiple yous, but in none of them do you get to actually be you. Its no longer enough to sell your labour, now you need to sell your self into the bargain. Of course its true that Dylan rebranded himself not to get hired but precisely to get fired, to burn his bridges to one set of fans so that another could be built. But this isn’t the distinction you might think. How will we learn this lesson, us non-geniuses, us regular beings? Thinking “my brand isn’t Pepsi but Bob Dylan” doesn’t help you, it just rephrases the problem.
The film ends with Joan Baez left standing as Dylan motorbikes off. She never abandoned either the Folk world or the notion of music associating itself to movements for social change. Perhaps its time we switched this story round. In a world which has since filled itself with Bob Dylans, be a Joan Baez. She wasn’t such as asshole.
No comments:
Post a Comment