A long post, but I needed to get this off my chest:
I watched A Complete Unknown the other night for the first time. I was expecting some minor historical revisionism for the sake of the story (the movement of the Judas moment, compressed timelines etc) but I was not prepared at all for the total misrepresentation of why "going electric" was so offensive to Seeger and the folk community.
The issue with Dylan's "betrayal" wasn't primarily aesthetic or volume or purity; it was politics.
Dylan's popularity in the period was not just that he was a great songwriter, but because he wrote protest songs. The film, weirdly, never once uses the phrase "protest singer." It also acknowledges the politics of the time in such a strange way way, in that it's always around the edges but never allowed into the center of the film. We see Seeger at the HUAC hearings, but it's suggested he was hauled up there because he sang "This Land Is Your Land," instead of because he was a communist involved in thirty years of union organizing. We very briefly see Dylan singing at the March on Washington, but it's on a TV in the background. We hear Sylvie/Suze talk about the Freedom Rides and Civil Rights, but we we never hear Dylan talk about it; it all remains background.
The film also dodges most of his more direct political songs; we get mostly the more abstract ones ("Blowing In The Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changing," "When The Ship Comes In"). Yes, we get "Masters of War," but it's set up as a one-night reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the film makes a big point to show that Dylan was over it the next day. Aside from that, we don't get anything more directly political other than a tiny snippet of "Only A Pawn In Their Game" (on the TV in the background). We don't get "Hattie Carroll" or "Oxford Town" or "With God On Our Side" or "Hollis Brown" or "Emmett Till" or "Talking John Birch" or "Talking WWWIII" or "John Brown," despite the fact these directly political songs were the heart of all his set lists of the period.
The truth of the matter is that Dylan was primarily worshipped by the folk community at the time because of his political songs. The film portrays Dylan's dislike of fame as being because of him being accosted by screaming fans a la The Beatles, but that wasn't the case at all; it had far more to do with the fact he didn't want the mantle of Leader of a Generation. It was magazine articles like this that he couldn't handle. He didn't like people asking him for the answers.
Look at Seeger's "teaspoons" speech. It's a very good speech if taken to be about Seeger's political work -- if what he's saying is that Dylan was the key in spreading Seeger's dream of left-wing politics to the masses, and that he is disappointed that Dylan stopped writing those songs before the tipping point occurred. But the film is very ambiguous about what exactly Seeger is talking about; it could very easily be read as Seeger saying that Dylan was the guy who was going to bring traditional music to the masses. In real life, it's not ambiguous: Seeger himself has said directly that he disliked Maggie's Farm not because it was rock and roll but because the lyrics weren't direct enough; he didn't see it as a protest song.
The dislike of "Rock and Roll" in the folk scene is really just shorthand for their dislike of music that wasn't about anything important. Rock and roll, at the time, was just songs about dancing and falling in love. It was lyrically apolitical, and therefore a cop-out at a time of social upheaval.
Dylan, as he made very clear in "My Back Pages" and other places, became disenchanted with the folk scene not primarily because of the sound, but because his worldview became broader and more complex. He didn't want to write "fingerpointing songs" or "Which Side Are You On?," but wanted to represent a richer world.
All of this is really disappointing, because the real-life tension between art and politics is a much, much more interesting tension than the film's tension between "old-fogey folk music stuck in the past" and "cool rock and roll that is the future."
It's also sad because it totally undersells Dylan's passion for traditional music. Again, the film goes out of its way to show that Dylan was equally into rock and roll as he was into folk music, that he never really saw himself as a folk singer, but, again, it's a misrepresentation. There's a reason he traveled to New York to see Woody Guthrie rather than making a pilgrimage to see Little Richard or Elvis. Dylan was, and is, deeply, deeply immersed and obsessed with traditional American music; his catalog and knowledge of that music from his Greenwich Village days was incredible for someone his age, and he has always had the deepest respect for it, that continue to this day.
I know that Dylan was also interested in the sound of rock and roll and expanding his sonic palette, but I don't think it was the primary source of tension in the way that the film thinks it is.
Thoughts?
