‘A Complete Unknown’ Offers a New Myth of Dylan

For some time, since I was an undergraduate at the University of Dallas, I’ve been something of a fan of Bob Dylan. Early on in my time there, I was introduced to his music by friends in the context of singing various folk songs around a bonfire, and we sang Dylan’s version of a classic, “The Moonshiner.” I had a rare introduction to his music for a millennial: I came to him not through listening to my parents’ rock-and-roll music, but as he would have been known early in his career as a part of the American folk revival. The new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, then, was of particular interest to me, but it should also intrigue fellow Catholics interested in thinking about art, tradition, and the peculiarities of the question of development and rupture, which have ramifications for our thinking not only about twentieth-century music but also about the current state of the Church.

When watching any biopic, one is aware that the director and screenwriter will not (and likely cannot in the length of time allotted them) survey the subject’s entire lifetime. Indeed, a focus on a particular action, rather than an attempt at cataloguing one man’s historical biography, has been seen as essential for poetry since Aristotle wrote as much in his Poetics; to understand a biopic, one has to know what action in the subject’s life is being portrayed. This is especially the case for this movie, which mixes fact and fiction into a new myth of Dylan.

A Complete Unknown covers just four years (1961–1965) at the beginning of Bob Dylan’s career as a singer-songwriter, during the time when he was breaking into the folk revival and recording his first six albums, from his self-titled release (1962) to the two albums after he began playing electric guitar (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, 1965). The film portrays his transformation from being “a complete unknown” during his arrival in New York at the age of twenty to being a celebrity who wore dark glasses primarily to avoid being noticed by the fans who seemed to be everywhere. As a newcomer to New York, Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) happens to hit it off with two of the musicians at the center of the revival, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, after he visits Woody in the hospital to play a song he wrote for him. Pete, impressed by his talent, invites him to stay with his family, and shortly after introduces him to the music scene in New York. 

This story should be of interest to any young person about the age of Dylan in the film. Those years tend to be a time of life where one attempts to find the balance between the limitations that friendships naturally bring about and the excess of independence which, while necessary to all of us in varied ways for the fulfillment of our vocations, may be especially necessary to the artist. In our time, however, self-discovery is out and self-creation is in; too many young people tend to think of their identities as not so much a matter of personal experience of their given relationships with God, his Church, their own families and countries, but rather something forged by their own individual creativities, often as an act of iconoclasm against those bonds of belonging. This “expressive individualism,” to use a concept well analyzed by theologian Carl Trueman and by Catholic bioethicist O. Carter Snead, is at the heart of Dylan’s struggle in the film.

Shortly after meeting his girlfriend Sylvie Russo, Dylan takes her to a movie, Now, Voyager, starring Bette Davis. The film itself traces Davis’ character’s journey away from a domineering mother, and although little of the film is shown, its interpretation is pivotal to Dylan and Sylvie’s relationship. Later, Dylan and Sylvie argue about the film: She claims that Davis left home to find herself, but he disagrees, claiming that rather than finding herself, she made herself into something else – “not something better, just something different.” This moment sheds a great deal of insight into how Chalamet’s Dylan thinks about his own move to New York and his budding career. Later in the film, once he’s become much more of a star, after playing a song at a small fundraiser party, a frustrated Dylan emotes to a different girl and a stranger in an elevator (who turns out to be Bob Neuwirth, another musician and a later collaborator) that everyone there has too many expectations about who he will be. When asked what he wants to be, Dylan responds, “Whatever they don’t want me to.” Lacking a positive concept of his artistic purpose, Dylan defines himself apophatically, denying others’ expectations. In a 2004 interview, Dylan himself rejected the image so many had of him in the 1960s as a prophet, describing living in that media climate as “like being in an Edgar Allen Poe story,” claiming that what he realized was that “the press, the media, they’re not the judge – God’s the judge.”

A Complete Unknown shows the freewheeling Bob Dylan freewheelingly creating a myth about his past: the story that he told in one of his first interviews that he had been in the carnival for six years as a child. Sylvie hears his stories with fascination, but singer Joan Baez, with whom he had a long on-and-off relationship, is less credulous. The image is an apt one, however, and recurs later when Sylvie leaves Bob during the 1965 Newport Folk Festival which proves to be the film’s climax, telling him she can’t stand the carnival anymore. At several moments, especially the scene where he plays a song for Baez early in the morning, Chalamet’s Dylan appears like Velázquez’s Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, festivity, and tragedy, which for the Greeks was not only dramatic but also musical. Dionysian music always carried the risk of violence – one remembers that in Euripides’ Bacchae the action occurs when the followers of Dionysus rip a man limb from limb offstage – and the same risk follows for the film’s Dylan. When he plays his electric set at Newport, one senses that the crowd’s dismay – from booing, to throwing objects on-stage, to one fan calling Dylan “Judas” (a real incident that happened at a later concert) – is precisely what the film’s Dylan expected and wanted. The crowd’s protest proves to Dylan that he is pushing the envelope, defying the expectations that the media had set for him.

This could be seen in his choice of song, as Dylan began the set, in film as in life, with “Maggie’s Farm.” In context, the song was a protest against simply being a part of the movement rather than being his own man, following his own artistic development. But was that development a violation of the folk tradition of which he had been a part? While several characters within the movie, especially Alan Lomax and Seeger, are against Dylan playing his new music at the festival, he is encouraged by Johnny Cash, who not only supports him playing the electric set but lends him his acoustic guitar to return for an encore performance of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The film ends with Dylan visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital one more time; when Dylan attempts to return Guthrie’s harmonica, which his mentor had given him, the older man refuses, pushing it back towards Dylan in a gesture of continued generosity and acceptance.

It may be difficult for younger viewers to understand why Dylan going electric was such a shock to the system of the folk movement, but that feeling can become more visceral if such viewers try and imagine how much of a change it was to the acoustic, singer-songwriter dominated tradition. One has to recall that the 1960s was an age of such changes, from the bulldozing of sections of major cities for the installation of highway systems to a radical falling away from Marian devotions within Catholic communities beset by progressive interpretations of the Second Vatican Council. However, even as Dylan wrote his new electric music, incorporating a whistle – which in the film he finds at the stand of a New York City street vendor – into his new song “Highway 61 Revisited,” his lyrics for that same song begin by situating that highway within the scriptural tradition, starting with Dylan’s version of the dialogue between God and Abraham in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Is it too much to say that while the aesthetic of Dylan’s music changed, the substance of his lyrical connection to the tradition of folk music (and to the deeper tradition of Scripture) remained steady? In a 1965 interview, Dylan claimed that “the words are just as important as the music,” and, pausing, continued to say, “There would be no music without the words.”

The American folk music tradition does not quite have a deposit like the Catholic theological tradition, but the questions of the possibility of rupture from or development of those traditions are similar. St John Henry Newman is perhaps best known today – after his thoughts on liberal learning in The Idea of a University – for his understanding of the development of doctrine, which can only be understood properly, so Matthew Levering argues in his recent book Newman on Doctrinal Corruption, within the context of his concern for doctrinal corruption. For the Church’s proclamation of the true faith to remain itself, it must adequately encounter contemporary challenges, but not by corrupting and contradicting long-held doctrine – such as that abortion is a grave evil or that marriage is a union between a man and a woman for the purpose of offspring and mutual care toward salvation – but by responding to challenges at their root, enriching our understanding of the doctrinal tradition as did St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body catechesis. 

To use Dylan’s songs as a metaphor, the words of the substance of doctrine must remain the same, even as the music of its presentation might change from society to society. For instance, the Eucharistic liturgy has varied in ritual in the different Catholic Churches – between the Roman Church, the Byzantine Church, and the Syro-Malabar Church, to take just three examples of the many Catholic Eucharistic rites. These rites have different music, different prayers, different liturgical calendars; yet the substance of the word at the heart – the consecration rite – has remained constant, and that word spreads outward through the liturgies themselves, calling the faithful together to worship God, to know his transcendent beauty and love for all mankind. The confusion within our time is that, to take one example, the Church in Germany, following its Synodal Way, aims not merely to present differently the perennial truth of the Gospel, but to present a different “truth,” of accommodation to the zeitgeist. Such a change is not development but rupture, corruption of the original deposit.

Is real development possible in music, or art of other kinds – for the new to truly enter into the world through the tradition, not as a rejection or rupture of what has gone before, but reshaping new technologies through the tradition’s knowledge of things carried to the heart? A Complete Unknown does not answer the question, but by raising it suggests that our culture today is searching for wisdom about whether the artist – or really, any one of us – can find hope for something beyond expressive individualism, a place of belonging in a tradition which develops but does not rupture, and respects the uniqueness of our various vocations. Such a question is what the Church should seek to answer today, by continuing to teach the fullness of the life-saving Gospel and worshiping God in the full beauty of her sacred liturgies.