Monday, January 30, 2024
Even before I decided to watch the Bob Dylan biopic yesterday afternoon, one of my first thoughts was, “I wonder if Bob Dylan has seen the film, and if so, what does he think of it.” After seeing the film, I wondered not so much about what Dylan might have thought of how he was portrayed, but of how he assessed the portrayal of Suze Rotolo, with whom he had his first intense love affair in New York City. I would urge anyone who has seen the film and is not familiar with her life to first read her obituary in the New York Times and then to read her own memoir of that period.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/arts/music/01rotolo.html
One of the things that bothered me about the film is how it focused completely on the music in the city, as if somehow that is what made NYC such a magnet for artists back then. As the obituary points out, Suze Rotolo introduced Dylan to other artistic scenes in New York that were being reviewed in the Village Voice. For that matter, where is the Village Voice newspaper in this film? A review that appeared in the New York Times is quoted as Dylan and his manager are in an elevator, but the newspaper that young people were reading in NYC was the Village Voice.
To underline my question of why an issue of VW is not at least seen in the apartment in NYC in 1962, let us remember that the final print issue of the Village Voice (September 20, 2017) used a photograph of Bob Dylan as its cover image. It’s hard to read Chad Byrnes’s review in the on-line successor to the Village Voice without thinking of this overlooked detail in the film, just as the film lacks any genuine sense of NYC’s weather in the early 1960s. The winters were especially brutal back then, though that may not have bothered a young man from the upper regions of Minnesota quite as much.
Review: ‘A Complete Unknown’ Follows Bob Dylan’s 1960s Journey From the Village to Newport
What else would I have liked to have seen in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN? It would have been interesting, I think, to have had a scene in which a look-alike of Frank O’ara and Bob Dylan had walked past each other on the street, neither of them glancing at the other, let alone recognizing the other.
Dylan’s brash disdain for other’s expectations culminates in his confrontation with the folk audience at the Newport Festival in 1965. The context could have used some amplification. The “folk-rock” movement was already well underway The Byrds, a Los Angeles-based band, had recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” in January, 1965, and their version of the song was released to great success in April. By the time Dylan took the stage, what else would the audience have expected? For that matter, what would have worked a lot better in the film would have been the confrontation in the motel before the concert to have had Dylan playing listening to that single being played on the radio. Better still, in fact, why not have the soundtrack be the following: the last 15 seconds of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with a half-second pause followed by the Byrds’s version of “MR. Tambourine Man,” which slowly fades into the background as the argument over Dylan’s choice of material for the Newport concert escalates. The music was changing faster than the times.
If Robert Zimmerman remains a “complete unknown” in this film, it would only surprise those who have not read Jorge Luis Borges’s “Everything and Nothing,” his concise portrait of William Shakespeare, who is capable of imagining the enormous, almost innumerable, permutations that human consciousness can experience, and yet these portrayals can only come into existence because Shakespeare himself was empty: his identity was “nothing,” and therefore could be inhabited by whatever configuration presented itself. Dylan was and is no different. “I don’t believe in Zimmerman,” sang John Lennon. Join the club, John. Neither did Bob Dylan. It is only the words of the songs that deserve to be believed, and relived in our inner dailiness.
Finally, there is one song that Dylan recorded that the film missed a major chance on using to bring the film to a boiling point. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN should have cut to the studio in NYC with the note: “Four days later,” and had Dylan recording “Positively Fourth Street.” It’s possible that Dylan is not thinking of the audience at Newport when he sings the lines:
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say “How are you? Good luck!”
But you don’t mean it
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it
And who could blame Dylan for his sardonic candor? The audience at Newport had obviously not listened to the aphorism in “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” Indeed, the audience at Newport would rather have seen him artistically paralyzed as a folk singer rather than have him develop into a writer whose song lyrics can stand on the page as a poem. Speaking of which, by the way, where is any mention in the film of Bob Dylan’s first appearance in a poetry anthology. Walter Lowenfels included Dylan in POETS OF TODAY, which was published in 1964. It included some of the most important poets of that period, and was unusual for its time in both the number of African-American poets it included as well as poets based on the West Coast. It should be added that it was published by the publishing arm of the U.S.A. Communist Party.
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For an overview of films about Dylan or films in which he plays a character, see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/movies/bob-dylan-movies.html
About Bill Mohr