I wrote about the Bob Dylan movie
don't let people enjoy things
One of the worst things about the modern culture industry is its tendency to turn our aesthetic enthusiasms — selfishly personal, passionate, and awe-inducing encounters with art — into “fandom.” It’s terrible to be treated as a fan: dared to be smugly disappointed or complacently satisfied. Neither is an appropriate response to art, which cannot possibly succeed through flattery, i.e. by showing you something you already know.
I was made to feel like a fan while watching James Mangold’s new Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, but even more so, and more abjectly, while writing about it. Look: I didn’t like the movie very much, and that’s because it’s a silly, lightweight, predictable film about something I love. Less jaded friends and fellow heads have told me to relax: I’m being a bore, pretentious, expecting too much from run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare. Which, yeah. One well-adjusted pal texted me: “it’s exactly what i expected it to be from day 1: a formulaic, soulless, technically proficient biopic directed by a comic book movie guy, starring young wonka.” And he’s right! The thing is though: superhero movies are garbage, plastic waste, the unremarkable ticky-tack detritus of a stuck culture. I can be blasé and good-humored about Marvel movies — to an extent ha ha — because I don’t give a shit about superheroes. It’s not important. But to my unending embarrassment, I do give a shit about Bob Dylan. Very, very much so. And so here we are.
“That’s the problem with a lot of things these days,” Dylan grouses in The Philosophy of Modern Song. “Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.” The old man is right. And the same can be said for movies.
As you’ll see in my review, I didn’t hate the film. I like Timmy, and he was very good (not great, but good) as Bob. It’s just… I think we need to remain vigilant about our standards. (Pathetic, I know.) We need to stop “letting people enjoy things” and continue to treat that treacly exhortation with the contempt it deserves. And we need to keep demanding better from the culture industry — lest everything beautiful and true in America be turned into a Marvel ride. I’ll play the smug gatekeeper if I have to. I’ll even play the disappointed fan, if that’s the only idiom available. I’m tired of all the cheap bullshit.
Note: the excellence of Mangold's "Logan" in my mind wiped clean the stink that was "The Wolverine," so I file a technical dissent from your friend's description of him as a "a comic book movie guy." Mangold is hardly a profound artist, but he's no Zack Snyder, thank goodness.
I think the other reason to object more than to a Marvel movie is that stupid ideas about heroic geniuses who are just better than the rest of us are inherent to superhero stories but they are the opposite of what makes artists, who are great because they are not "Great." Making genius seem inevitable takes the life out of it, which is what fan culture can also do.
I really loved the recent Joan Baez documentary, which was objectively not the greatest movie, because it was so clearly the story she wanted to tell - Bob and MLK were there briefly, but there was her difficult relationship with her sister and her parents, honest looks at her marriage and motherhood, her sorrow about losing some but not all of her vocal range. That wry smile when she says "I know I look good for my age, but there's a limit." Ends with her walking down a path listening to music on headphones, in her own world. The interior life of the artist that is everything and films like this can't ever really do.