one identity crisis at a time, baby

For the sake of writing something after what feels like ages of Not Writing something, I thought I’d run down my thoughts on A Complete Unknown while they’re still hot off the end credits, even though—per the post title—no one asked me for this.

(No one asks for anything on the internet, least of all other people’s opinions. None of us, I suspect, even want to be here, and yet we just keep on comin’ back, chasing the same thrill we once had when we all accidentally and somehow learned code to personalize our MySpace pages, but anyway…)

Well, for starters, I loved it. Haters move on, or keep reading and maybe you’ll learn something, or maybe you’ll just do the hater thing where you expose yourself to things you know you’re not gonna like, and all so you have something to complain about.

I, too, would love to not have real problems.

(I’m currently vibing entirely off of too much caffeine and not enough sleep, so, no, unfortunately the attitude cannot be checked.)

I liked everything about this movie, but I don’t feel like dissecting performance or historical accuracy or whatever else. I’m just here for the motifs, baby!

So! What I liked best in that vein were the overarching themes of identity, and how that played out through the women’s stories, in both their own right as well as in conjunction with Dylan’s. Your mileage may vary on the following interpretations, but this is my blog so we follow whatever pace I set, and off we go—

Sylvie Russo (based on a real person, but that’s all I’ll say about that because they changed her name to respect her privacy—and for all the good that did, accounting for all the articles and thinkpieces and other inabilities to mind your own business) has her own life and ambitions that exist in the realm of the regular world, which doesn’t have a direct line to the world of celebrity.

Her relationship with Dylan doesn’t work, ultimately, because they both want to go places, but those places don’t share a route. However much Dylan might not relish the aforementioned celebrity (and more on that later), the spotlight’s on and there’s no stepping out of it. And that spotlight is irrelevant to what Russo wants, but she can’t stay on the fringes of it, either. It makes her see too much, and seeing all that in its clear and blinding glory makes her realize she doesn’t want it. Dylan’s never going to be the big cosmic neon lights THE ONE for her. (See: the Realization during a performance of “It Ain’t Me Babe.”)

This speaks to that wider theme of identity, where we fit, and who we fit with, and making the decision to take ourselves out of someone else’s equation when it’s just not adding up. Russo and Dylan could have kept coming back together over and over again, but she has her Moment of Clarity: her happiness can’t hinge on Dylan and his world, because it’s only ever a crushing disappointment. She says herself that she doesn’t really know him. And while she wants what he lets her see, eventually she sees through that to the reality, and it’s not one that works for her.

…I might be talking in circles, or at least I can feel myself spinning out on this one. Well, suffice it to say I’ll be thinking about Sylvie Russo for a good long while, but that’s what I’ve got for now.

Moving on!

Joan Baez holds some major and magnetic space, just like she does in real life. The movie captures the tempestuous relationship between Baez and Dylan almost entirely through the former’s preeeeeetty constant—and rightful!—exasperation with the latter. She calls him out for being ignorant, an asshole, for having a chip on his shoulder even when he’s won.

She doesn’t seem particularly fond of him in real time, when that spotlight’s off and he’s Just Some Guy. Baez and Russo are, in this way, the two sides of Dylan: Who he is as a person versus who he is as a musician. It’s just that they’re both more honest with him about how his inner conflict makes him real fuckin’ annoying to be around.

(And no disrespect to Bob Dylan, but that’s what the movie’s puttin’ down, imho.)

Baez and Dylan’s connection is their music and the message. The only time Baez lights up or even so much as softens around the edges in Dylan’s presence is when he’s singing, because when he’s singing he’s not pissing her off with his bad attitude.

(You could argue that she’s pretty cool with him when they hook up, too, but we don’t see much of that and I’d write it off as the chemical effects of exercise anyway. But! Back to the point—)

This, I think, translates to the whole energy of the film, and to reiterate something I said earlier: It’s not about Bob Dylan the person; it’s about Bob Dylan’s music.

We don’t really see into Dylan the way we usually do in stories about artists. There is no climactic Big Dramatic Monologue wherein the lead waxes raw and honest but nevertheless poetic about what he wants, why he’s doing this, who he is. The closest we get is when Dylan first meets Bobby Neuwirth in the elevator, and I wouldn’t call that a Big Dramatic Monologue—it’s more understated than that.

And I love a Big Dramatic Monologue, but we didn’t need it here. We needed what we got, which is the stripped-down edition of Bob Dylan that focuses on, essentially, what the man himself focuses on: sharing his message through his music.

Dylan’s struggle with a fame he doesn’t want but is necessary, because the art and the artist come as a package deal—that hit me close to home. And maybe that personal resonance is making me read it wrong, but oh well and such is the way that it is, and [gestures vaguely].

Like many musicians of that era, and many of them included in the biopic, Bob Dylan’s work is inherently and obviously political. Surrounded by war and uncertainty and unrest, he had something to say, and the only way anybody’s ever really heard is if enough people have heard of them. You want people to listen to you, you have to Be Someone deemed worth listening to. You don’t get to just drop your two cents and run; you have to let people follow you.

We see Dylan forced to reconcile who he is with who people want him to be, who they demand and expect him to be, and all the while you get the impression that this man just wants to say his piece. But everybody else has a stake in how he says it, and he has to say it the way they tell him to.

Kinda defeats the purpose of it being your piece in the first place, y’know.

I get it. It’s not on the same scale, but… Look, as a romance writer who doesn’t conform to genre standards or trends and who’s not down with the current state of affairs in book culture (iykyk), I’m over the expectations too. That’s why this element got to me so deeply, because I saw my own ~inner turmoil~ in Dylan’s.

I’m not interested in giving people what they want based on what they’ve gotten from like-minded or otherwise “similar” others. I’m interested in saying what I’ve got, and I’d love for you to get on board but I’m still doing this for me and my heart, and to find where I fit in the great grand scheme of things. And that means doing it my way, otherwise why bother? I don’t want to be a vehicle for someone else’s vision; I have my own.

That’s what I see in Bob Dylan’s story, and that’s what I felt from this movie.

The frustration, disillusionment, the stubbornness, the “Fuck everything else that isn’t what I want”—yeah, I do think it comes off as asshole energy, and I think it’s supposed to, and I’m here for it. I say it about myself all the time, like it’s some kind of disclaimer, that “And maybe this makes me an asshole, but oh well.” I think it’s about authenticity more than anything else, and I think that’s always been the unsafe and often unsuccessful way to make your way up in any creative space. (You think it’s all about talent and honesty, but in reality it’s so much more calculated and curated than that, and hence the disillusionment.)

But it worked for Bob Dylan—and excuse however cornball this is—to stay true to his soul. If I’m gonna take anything away from this movie, it’s that.

If you have something to say, say it with your whole chest, and in your own words.

(This post brought to you by stream-of-consciousness, an affinity for more energy drinks than is perhaps medically advisable, and a deep and abiding love for narrative analysis.)