Prophets in their Own Land...are seldom believed

 

Last night we spontaneously decided to go see A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, and ended up at a cinema-plex in the Montreal suburb of Cote-St-Luc. The parking lot was empty, the shops in the dimly lit mall already shuttered; fake plants, vibrating recliners and plastic carnival horses on springs had been pushed into the center of the atrium to accommodate the brooms and mops of the late night cleaners.

There’s a particular weirdness about suburban movie theaters, especially when they’re deserted. Our showtime was at 9:30 pm, and there were no ticket-takers or snack vendors in sight; instead we were confronted with an automatic machine saying “buy ticket here” on its digital screen, and no one ever checked the tickets — resembling a grocery store cash register receipt — that it regurgitated.

When we pushed open the doors of the large theater, final credits scrolled on the screen while three grey-haired people wrestled themselves into their heavy winter coats. One woman, gave me a knowing smile as she passed us on her way out. “Why is everyone so old?” we asked each other, and laughed. The enormous, comfortably squishy seats reclined with the push of a blue-lit button to whatever position you wanted.

I couldn’t help wondering what the young Bob Dylan, shown in an early part of the film in a Greenwich Village movie theater with his girlfriend, would have thought of such a place. The Bleeker Street of those days looked pretty familiar, though; I remember it as it was in the 1970s, and how it’s changed since.

The film, which covers Dylan’s early career up to the time he left the pure acoustic folk tradition and went electric, is excellent. I was glad to see it on a big screen: it’s completely immersive, the acting is brilliant, and the film took me right back to my own adolescence. I was only nine or ten when Dylan first came east, hoping to meet his hero Woody Guthrie who was dying in a New Jersey hospital, but I was already conscious of the resurgence of folk music and began trying to play my father’s guitar by the time I was in junior high school. By the mid- to late-60s, he became the poet-prophet of my generation. When Jonathan and I got together, in the late 1970s, we realized that we owned nearly all of Dylan’s records up to that date between the two of us. We’ve only seen him once in concert, here in Montreal about ten years ago, but that was a definite Moment.

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We left the theater at midnight, and came out into a deserted parking lot covered with light snow. Once home, we hurried to get into bed, but after turning the lights out we couldn’t fall asleep. The film had just been too vivid and too personal, somehow, to allow our minds to rest, and when we finally did sleep, it was a fitful night disturbed by mixed-up dreams.

While A Complete Unknown does an masterful job of depicting Dylan’s life as well as those of the other artists and music industry people around him (most notably, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman), and touches on the politics of the time, I felt that it didn’t show how terrible those politics really were. The moves away from the 1950’s revival of traditional folk music, toward contemporary folk ballads with overtly political themes, and then later toward a much harder-edged, angry, electric music, were entirely motivated by hatred of the rightwing government, which had first viciously pursued anyone suspected of being sympathetic to communism, then fought the Civil Rights movement, then pursued the Vietnam War and attacked students protesting the war and the draft on campuses all over America.

I couldn’t sleep last night because reliving those times, in the context of what I’ve learned and observed about human behavior throughout my life, is visceral. Greying people of my age, who listened to Dylan and felt he was speaking for them, will experience that film very differently from people born in later decades. For me, it brought back not only the forces of evil, violence, and oppression we were fighting against, but also the enormous hope we had during the brief years when Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke stirringly of his dream of equality and freedom, when people became outraged by the assassinations, through the time when the Vietnam War was stopped, largely through public outcry led by the young. It seemed like a new era of equality, peace and justice might actually be dawning.

The film focuses on Dylan’s musical and career trajectory, his romantic relationships, and the growing rift between him and folk music purists like Pete Seeger. It vividly depicts the culture of the time, and touches on the overarching political situation, but it doesn’t fully convey the magnitude of Dylan’s motivation or the country’s political reality at the time.

I think that’s both a shame, and a missed opportunity, considering the place we find ourselves right now. People who wonder how the recent election could have happened should look back at American history. The fascists and capitalists have been there all along, waiting for the people to be sufficiently distracted by and addicted to consumerism, glitz and media, or worried enough to be seduced by fear-mongering and lies. I wish that a fine film like this one, which will be seen by so many, had made those connections more clear.

Comments

[Sharyn]

I was there, my mom loved folk music and took us to Newport Folk Festival. I was 14 in 1965. And we would go to Club 47 in Cambridge many times. I was just going through some old photos and had one of Dylan in a car at Newport.