25 January 2025
On Sunday, I went to the cinema and saw a film nominated for 8 Oscars, loosely based on Bob Dylan’s early life, ‘A Complete Unknown’ (words taken from Like a Rolling Stone). It’s not biographical but it’s a representation of his early life as a chancer up to when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band.
All the real-life characters are brilliantly cast although Dylan asked that Suze (pronounced ‘Suzie’) Rotolo’s name didn’t appear. She was an established artist and a political activist with her own ambitions and ultimately escaped to Italy to make her own life because she didn’t want to be known as Dylan’s muse. In her memoir ‘The Freewheelin’ Years’ she comes over as a lovely, independent and talented person who deserved, and got, better than Dylan. In the film, she’s sort of represented by a character called Sylvie Russo but ‘Sylvie’ seems feeble and more compliant than Suze.
Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, whom he treated just as badly (listen to Baez’s later song Diamonds and Rust), and Barbaro gives an very good impression of her voice; Edward Norton is sensitively avuncular as the folk purist Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook plays a small role as Johnny Cash, lightly revealing the problems he had with alcohol. Dylan is rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand but references to his use of other drugs are played down.
Even with such strong support, the film belongs to Timothée Chalamet’s as Dylan, performing all the songs himself. He gives a subtle but totally believable interpretation of the Dylan who was becoming famous and moving towards the first of many new directions he was to take in later years, not really caring about other people who had helped him on the way, like Seeger and Baez (who says to Dylan “You’re really kind of an asshole”).
Dylan himself approved the script but didn’t influence the final cut, probably because he doesn’t care what people think about him and was happy to see the legend further confused. There’s a lot of online discussion about whether he suffers from Aspergers and has no way of knowing how other people are feeling, which would be consistent with some of the casual cruelty the Dylan character shows in the film.
Scenes from his life are mixed up and conflated – the cry of “Judas” was actually recorded in Manchester on his British tour but was put into the film’s Newport concert. Although it now grieves me to admit it, I felt similarly betrayed at his London concert on that tour and by hearing for the first time some of the electric songs in the second half, which seemed particularly shocking after the acoustic first half he had just played.
But I got used to them and now accept his broken voice doing little more speaking the words, backed by a piano, a cello and some subdued percussion, and I’m happy to accept a recent song whose title he borrowed from Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes”.
Other news this week included Donald Trump on Monday, with his left hand on a Bible, saying “I do solemnly swear that I will … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.
Within hours, he had forgotten his oath and pardoned 1,500 violent criminals who had been properly convicted for their parts in the 6 January 2021 insurrection that Trump himself had encouraged by telling them to “fight like hell”. In doing this, he described attacks on police officers as “very minor incidents”, even though hundreds of police officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol Building and nine people, including police officers, died as a result of the attack.
Pamela Hemphill, 71, refused to accept the pardon, saying it was an insult to the police officers who she credits with saving her life after she’d been knocked over and trampled on.
Trump then signed various racist (second-generation birthrights given by the Constitution), isolationist (Mexico and WHO), transphobic (only two genders), dangerous (climate crisis denial) and other executive orders that descended to the ridiculous (renaming the Gulf of Mexico and an Alaskan mountain).
Shortly before this, JD Vance, a former Marine who had accused Trump of being a white supremacist and compared him to Hitler but changed his tune when he saw his own future at stake, was sworn in as Vice-President. And Pete Hegseth, who believes government should be subordinate to Old Testament laws, was made Defense Secretary. (I thought the OT was originally Jewish and adopted by Christianity but Hegseth is obviously closer to God than I am.)
I’m also beginning to wonder if Melania has hidden shallows. No normal FLOTUS-to-be would have dressed for a funeral and worn a hat that prevented her husband kissing her at his inauguration.
Trump obviously wasn’t affected by a recent study at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, published in Nature Climate Change, which had measured changes in 200 sites between 1990 and 2020. Too many long words perhaps.
The study showed how Arctic forests, wetlands and tundra are being transformed by the planet’s rapid warming. Since before the last ice-age, these ecosystems have held immeasurable amounts of carbon in the permafrost but, as temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, tundras unfreeze and more CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
Their analysis shows that 30% of these lands are now releasing the carbon they’ve been storing for tens of thousands of years which is, in an understatement by the lead researcher, “a pretty big deal”.
GBNews has quoted the Telegraph’s report that “an Israeli official close to the negotiations” had said that “if Hamas adhered to all the rules set out in the new deal, Israel would leave the strip”. I wonder if they should have said “ … what’s left of the strip” because Gazans returning to the devastation will be left to guess where their house was and where some of their missing relatives probably still are.
Lesser Mutterings 