Please, No…A Complete Unknown

Navigating the snake-filled labyrinth that is the American news and media today feels more like a full-time job than simply staying informed. It takes a lot of energy - mentally, physically, and spiritually - to swap one's eyes and mind from near civil war-inducing assassinations of a former President to presidential pick Kamala Harris cackling about coconuts and context to RFK Jr. admitting to burying a six-month-old female bear cub underneath an old bicycle in New York's Central Park with some friends. Even that long list of crazy hurt me to put down.

So, how does one wrap one's chromosomes around this reality that appears to be only getting strangers every day?

I don't know, and anybody who claims they do should double-check that they're not AI. All in all, reprieve is most certainly needed, and seeing I'm on the wrong side of thirty, where any glass of liquid to massage my frontal lobe almost always leaves me in a state of trash, the answer is typically writing, reading, movies, and music, all perfect remedies to drown out the chaos for a few hours.

These reprieves came to me one day as I shamefully ventured onto TikTok to see what was trending or hot. I am a sucker like anybody else for this platform, and I welcome any judgment, battering, etc. So, after a few minutes of content creators trying to sell me Neuro Gum, I came upon the trailer for the upcoming biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold and starring—you guessed it—actor Timothée Chalamet.

Not even a few seconds in and I knew something, no, everything was wrong, but especially when I heard that ever-familiar slow-building, faux-dramatic crescendo of nameless synth in my ear; this forced and imposed gravitas that tells the viewer that something big is about to happen.

No, I remember muttering to myself, not like this…not like this, a subtle nod to the character Switch from The Matrix, who was betrayed by Cypher, once a trusted ally, for the illusion of comfort. Being a Bob Dylan fan from the days of Scorcese's seminal documentary No Direction Home to Todd Haynes's unique take on Dylan's life in I'm Not There, I sensed whatever I was about to watch, whatever shallow, creatively bankrupt "movie" I was about to get a glimpse of was going to damage my already struggling soul on a very, very severe level.

After a big breath in and a big breath out, I clicked play, only to be immediately bombarded with some D-grade Hans Zimmer wannabe music once again pushing the feeling of something “big” happening. I'm not sure what it is about forcing heft for hefts sake but here, it wasn’t earned. And still, it pounded away, dawning on me right then and there just how sinister and capitalistic the scene I was about to witness truly was: a warped, exploitative siphoning of seminal moments—not just from Dylan’s life or an artist’s life, but from a broader projection of Americana—packaged and sold to the highest bidder in desperate need of a nostalgic fix.

Had private equity gotten a hold of this? I wondered. Or was it just the studio making one last-ditch attempt to pilfer and pulverize purity for the few lost Gen Zoomer souls who heard a harmonica and maybe, just maybe, felt something genuine that then could turn a profit from?

In my hazy rage, time seemingly standing still or at least slowed, one of my favorite Dylan quotes came to mind as I may have been shoving a pencil into my ear: "Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?" Sadly, angrily, I felt anything but as I viewed Mr. Chalamet walking nowhere for salaries sake, knowing art did have a price, and even more so when no one asked for it.

We had accepted these terms and conditions from social media platforms long ago, hadn't we? The moment most of us clicked “agree" on their exhaustive list of policies—without ever bothering to read them—our identities became commodities. But why did the sight of Mr. Chalamet, his questionable makeup, and his half-hearted attempt to sing, echoing the whiny tones of every Dylan wannabe I'd known in college, infuriate me so much? Maybe it was because I often yearned for a simpler time when I hadn't been so willing, so complicit in my exploitation. Or perhaps it was because, deep down, I foolishly clung to the belief that some things—like Bob Dylan's legacy—were immune to Hollywood's insatiable need to capitalize on everything. Yet here I was, confronting the harsh truth: in this hyper-commercialized era, nothing was sacred or untouchable anymore.

And isn't this precisely what Warhol prophesied with his subtle, coy sneer; this is what we all signed up for when we made our Facebook and Instagram accounts years ago; this was a wolf in sheep's clothing dressed in "global connection," but instead we all go our microcosm of faux celebrity that only ended distancing us even more. It's no surprise that films like "A Complete Unknown" and other Mangold movies like "Walk the Line" and "Ford v Ferrari" are made and work so well despite the apparent contradiction in their source material: stories of inspired individuals defying societal norms while at the same time, viewers themselves conform via medium and expression.

It felt almost like product placement, like an infomercial, like I was being told that if I wore Ray-Bans and drove a motorcycle, I could be the voice of a generation. The cinematic effort to try and show the viewer all this felt contrived but, worst of all, accessible. Lore is as loose as you make it, and within the first three seconds, they chose the most hallmark, college-room-poster images of Dylan that you could choose. Was this the demographic their ChatGPT analysis told them to cater to for engineering max profit? Given the state of things in Hollywood, it sure felt like it.

Then, amidst weird, every-other-second BOOMS emphasizing earnestness and pathos to keep the viewer from checking their phone, came Edward Norton as Peter Seeger, looking more like an extra in the Coneheads than the folk singer/hero betrayed by Dylan's move into electric. Suffering through Norton's soft-spoken, uninspired monologue side by side a synthetic, slowly building background of bass and algorithmic timing of "Hard Rain" that would make Patti Smith wince, the lines "...we got a feeling we were getting a glimpse of the future" seamlessly met TC turning his head to the camera to reveal the money shot of his jawline.

What did Dylan say? "All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie." It felt like that.

The rest of the trailer had everything you would suspect: the infamous silhouette of Dylan playing against the light of the future; TC walking along a Hollywood set with Cafe WaWa on the wall burdened with an oversized guitar case and conductors cap, no cloud in sight; scenes with the actress Elle Fanning as his girlfriend Suze Rotolo in church pews and apartment stoops in the light of a manufactured moon; shadows of familiar players like a young Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro and others "in the wake" as Mangold put it in a recent Rolling Stone Interview, in Bob Dylan's life.

Sure, it all sounds impressive on paper and plays well on a podcast designed for producers and investors. But isn’t that precisely the problem with movies today? They're too easy, too safe—engineered to pad profit margins. Where’s the courage in repackaging one of the most iconic chapters in the life of a 20th-century legend, masking it with buzzwords like "ensemble” and "miraculous channeling” to fool audiences into thinking it’s something groundbreaking?

It reminds me of the recent clip of Vince Vaughn on the Hot Ones show (where they eat spicy wings and do interview questions) of all things. Vaughn lamented the current state of movies, saying, "You get these rules (when making movies). If you did geometry and said 87 degrees was a right angle, all your answers are messed up. So there became this idea, some concept, they would say something like you have to have an IP (intellectual property). So, for some reason, Battleship, a game we used to play, like a graph, became a vehicle for story-telling. It's so weird."

That's what I sense is happening here with "A Complete Unknown," a kind of manufacturing of truth in time for many that now feels overdone and over-mythologized that it's become a product in and of itself. Ironically, this goes directly against what Dylan was revolting against on the fronts of the media trying to identify him as the "voice of a generation," etc. "I think that was just a term that can create problems for somebody, especially if someone just wants to keep it simple and write songs and play them. Having these colossal accolades and titles - they get in the way." October 12, 2004, on NPR's Morning Edition.

If you need another reminder, Bob Dylan's ​​1965 San Francisco press conference shows how opposed he was/is to committing to any self-based on the belief, in my opinion, that it will always be used as a tool to define, control and monetize, as we see with Hollywood, and sell tickets.

And Hollywood needs to sell tickets. If you have yet to follow the news and metrics around Tinsel Town, one might assume everything over there is going okay, but financials have dried up. FilmLA issued a report recently showing how film production on a 5-year average is down 23.8% (commercials are even worse), overall shoot days in Q2 2024 are down 33.4%, and an overall unemployment of 16.1% is rising. It could be better, so it's not surprising studios are sacrificing artistic integrity for a safe bet with a sure-fire audience when only one studio unit among Hollywood conglomerates posted profit growth in 2023.

Francois Truffaut, one of Bob Dylan's favorite movie directors of that time, once said, "Life has more imagination than we do," which feels fitting given the trailer for "A Complete Unknown." To play devil's advocate, originating from the Latin phrase "advocatus diaboli,” I may be expecting too much. Perhaps I should let the movie be what it needs to be now, echoing sentiments similar to what Dylan said in San Francisco in 1965 when asked to define folk music as a "constitutional re-play of mass production.” However confusing the wordplay might seem at first, it’s clear to me that Dylan was—and still is—fully aware of the embedded capitalism not just in his music, but in all music then, and likely, in all music to come. That’s an undeniable reality, no matter how perplexing or how many double-takes one might give the phrasing. Mass production is deeply embedded in the very core structures and principles of our society, woven into our everyday lives as if part of our fundamental “constitution” and any effort to “break out of it” only leads oneself to another derivative of it.

Either way, the film has Mr. Dylan's support. In the mentioned Rolling Stone Interview , director James Mangold relayed his initial meeting with Dylan, during which he pitched the movie as a story of reinvention and repeated cycles of suffocation and escape, to which Dylan responded positively, "I like that."

But who knows what that means from a figure as elusive and mercurial as someone who says, "I change during the day. I wake and am one person, and I know I'm somebody else when I sleep.”

"A Complete Unknown" will be released December 25, 2024 in the United States and in the UK January 17, 2025.

So You've Decided to Become Isolated & Weird Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.