Information is not knowledge, etc.

in which we all become our own little cancel cultures, or not

My kids’ school has a shrine to Timothée Chalamet. It is the one thing, out of any number of dumb things kids take sides on every day, the entire school has unified around. Although I’ve done no research on the topic, I suspect it’s not the only Timothée Chalamet shrine in America or elsewhere in the world. After all, what’s not to love? He’s played Bob Dylan! And Paul Atreides, twice! And WILLY WONKA! Those are three characters, two fictional and one semi-fictional, I have held a longstanding interest in.

Photo by weston m on Unsplash

I certainly didn’t think Johnny Depp could fill Gene Wilder’s shoes as Willy Wonka, but Timothée Chalamet (like everybody at my kids’ school, I think I’m only capable of referring to him by both names, all the time) managed to so, so beautifully tell the story of Prequel Wonka, teetering on the edge of magic, teetering on the edge of weirdness - is it safe? We don’t know! Probably!

I read all four Dune books in high school and sat through the original David Lynch Dune movie four times when it was playing in theatres, back when you could only see movies in theatres. But it wasn’t Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides that brought me back to the Paramount four times. It was, naturally, Sting. Naturally. Or nearly naturally. It’s much easier to watch Dune in two movies, at home, and take in more of Timothée Chalamet NOT being all ham-fisted and schlocky over Zendaya.

But Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, pulled here and there by his impulses, by the early ‘60s, by Joan and Sylvie and Albert and Pete and, of course Woody - he’s thoroughly enjoyable, irascible, charming and compelling for no reason other than the words in his songs and maybe his hair. The title of the movie, “A Complete Unknown,” pulled from “Like A Rolling Stone,” is itself telling you that if you’re coming into the theater to learn about who Dylan actually was in the early days, you’ve come for the wrong reason. It’s not quite a history, not quite a telling of the Great Bob Dylan Mythology, and certainly not an accurate although a functional portrayal of the roles Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger played in Minnesota Zimmerman’s development into New York Dylan. Timothée Chalamet might have found something to relate to in telling that story; after all, a young man with the goal of becoming a great storyteller has to make a lot of decisions about sacrificing conventional life in the service of believing he has something of more universal import to contribute.

I didn’t listen to any Dylan on purpose growing up; I didn’t have to. There was plenty of Dylan on the radio, like the still-too-long-for-radio AM cut of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Lay Lady Lay,” which I always thought was just gross, even before I understood what “lay across my big brass bed” was implying. But I heard more Dylan than I knew. There was The Byrds’ “My Back Pages” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and Manfred Mann’s “Mighty Quinn,” and my favorite, Leon Russell’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Like a lot of low-information listeners, I didn’t find out until later in life that Dylan’s work was very tightly woven into my childhood consciousness.

Now and then I get in the mood to listen to some Dylan-by-Dylan - after all, he spits out his own lyrics like nobody else can - and the last time my family made one of our regular road trips to Door County, Wisconsin, Marty suggested playing “Blood on the Tracks,” his favorite Dylan album. That resulted in my 11-year-old quickly developing a pretty good impersonation, the rest of us giggling to his “eeeeeeeiiiIIIIIIIIdiot wind” while we were out on highway 57. So when “A Complete Unknown” came out, we took him to see it. He saw the similarities between Wonka and Dylan right away.

Dylan has had no fewer than four major motion pictures made about him, and innumerable books, next to none of which I’ve read. Maybe I’m a little too steadfast about being a low-information listener, but I’ve seen all four movies - this one, and “Don’t Look Back,” and all of Scorsese’s “No Direction Home,” and, um, I may not have made it all the way through the Jim Jarmusch one. Maybe all of this creative output about Dylan is aimed at getting a better understanding of him, but I don’t think I want it. The opening of “A Complete Unknown” is Dylan getting to where Woody is in the hospital and playing him “Song to Woody.” There are verifiable facts in there, but the truth of it is Dylan’s view of Woody as a messenger to the people and a role model for doing the same with his own life. You take what you need and you leave the rest, as Joan Baez once sang - Robbie Robertson’s words, in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Joan Baez’s words in “Diamonds and Rust” were pretty explicitly about Dylan. This whole post began in my head, I confess, while I was making a map of “Diamonds and Rust” for my guitar students. I squandered a lot of time listening to Judas Priest’s version and thinking about how many teenage boys listened to Rob Halford singing it without knowing that it was a folk song about Bob Dylan. What happens to creative output once it gets put out is definitely beyond the control of the creator, unless, I guess, some political candidate you can’t stand tries to use your song and you have a high enough profile to get to tell him to stop because you find him odious. For the rest of us, once it’s out there, what we meant it to say - well, we might be hoping there is some connection to be found. I wondered if any of those Judas Priest fans back in Kankakee found their way back to Joan Baez, the way Leon Russell led me eventually back to Dylan. I mean, how did I not know he wrote that? “A-gonna fall” should have been a dead tip-off.

When I did hear those original Dylan songs, I was a little conflicted. There’s obviously a reason he won the Nobel Prize for literature. There’s a reason I want to hear him say and sing what he has to say. But there’s also a reason he didn’t show up for his own Nobel Prize ceremony. There’s a reason not to tie the art too much to the artist. We all contain multitudes, and I don’t know that it’s ever been helpful to understand everything there is to know about an artist when it comes to connecting with an artistic idea, a piece of music, a sculpture, a story. Some artists’ lives seem to be open to the public, seem to be, and some artists wind up revealing super distasteful things about themselves that get them cancelled. I cancelled Ted Nugent way back in the 1970s when I was forced to hear the entirety of the “Cat Scratch Fever” album. Blech. But you know what, if “Stranglehold” comes on, I’m going to listen. With Dylan, there’s a reason that part of me enjoys his words coming from other people and what other people have to say about him, and I’m not particularly interested in reading his autobiography. I think I’ll just let the mystery be.