THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2024
Why Fox News [HEART] Die Hard: We haven't seen A Complete Unknown, but we can answer a question about the new film.
The question, which is perfectly sensible, appears in this review by Khari Taylor:
[This] brings me to A Complete Unknown’s biggest problem as a dramatic biopic: it's extremely light on conflict and fails to explain the larger stakes for a modern audience, one far removed from Dylan’s youthful era (including my middle-aged self). For instance, why was it so crucial to the American folk movement that Dylan remain a strictly acoustic singer and not “go electric?” What made acoustic folk so sacrosanct that electrically amplified instruments couldn’t be used? Why was it considered so controversial for Dylan to perform as a lead singer in a “rock band” rather than as a solo folk singer?
A Complete Unknown never provides answers to these questions, instead assuming the audience already knows and understands the divide between folk and rock in the 1960s and why it existed. Because of this, I found myself shrugging with indifference during A Complete Unknown’s climax, wondering if what I was watching was truly significant. There’s no question that the 1965 Newport Folk Festival incident was an iconic moment that altered the course of music history, but without being given a full emotional connection to what was at risk—particularly for the folk movement—it felt more like observing a tempest in a teacup.
What explains the era's animus against "going electric?" In part, the answer could perhaps be provided by the contents of the halftime show at yesterday's Ravens-Texans game.
More specifically, the driving force, at that particular time, is suggested by the lyrics which introduce one of the songs on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the gentleman's amazingly early second album.
The album appeared in May 1963. Dylan had turned 22 that very week, but he'd already written (and had now recorded) these remarkable songs:
Blowin' in the Wind
Masters of War
A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
Fifty-three years later, that third song was still astounding when Patti Smith performed it before Swedish royalty at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in 2016.
The song was still astounding. Way back in 1963, a little-known songwriter said he'd seen such things as these when he was still 21:
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw 10,000 talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
Bob Dylan's Blues
Unlike most of the songs nowadays being written up in Tin Pan Alley
That's where most of the folk songs come from nowadays
This, this is a song, this wasn't written up there
This was written somewhere down in the United States
"That's where most of the folk songs come from nowadays?" The cultural context was this:
Sad! The album appeared in May 1963. By that time, much of the energy of 1950s rock-and-roll had been subsumed by the Frankie Avalon-Fabian school of pop, with teen films like Beach Blanket Bingo destined to follow.
That pop culture was, in fact, being "written up in Tin Pan Alley." We recall how amazingly fresh and new it already sounded when Peter Paul and Mary broke (fairly) big with Lemon Tree in 1962.
That trio had itself been assembled in Tin Pan Alley, but they sounded very different. Soon thereafter, along came Dylan, one of their Greenwich Village contemporaries—not to mention Joan Baez—and the rejection of a certain species of manufactured shlock was instant in certain parts of the land.
The insistence on staying acoustic functioned within that context. Even the Beatles were culturally suspect when they arrived on the scene, insisting that they wanted to hold some unnamed person's hand.
As coincidence would have it, A Complete Unknown is a Christmas film this year. We spent a bit of time, in the past few days, spelunking within the bowels of our flailing nation's current "revolt from below."
We did so with reference to a certain affectation on the Fox News Channel concerning Christmas movies. The affectation in question operates like this:
What's your favorite Christmas movie, a panel of Stepfords will ask themselves on one of the channel's programs. The ladies will name some standard titles—and at some point, one of the angry males will defiantly name his own favorite Christmas film:
Die Hard!
In part, so goes the current revolt from below, a revolution which is clearly winning at the present time.
In the past few days, we spent a certain amount of time trying to establish the timeline of the widely revered Frank Capra film, It's A Wonderful Life. Our own unanswered question was this:
How many times was the Jimmy Stewart character forced to renounce his lifelong dream of leaving Bedford Falls?
How many times did circumstance make him abandon his dream? We've finally nailed the confusing timeline down.
(The answer is anywhere from two to four times, depending on how you score a pair of double renunciations—first at the apparent age of 21 or 22, then again four years later. Going to college was abandoned twice. Also abandoned was a trip to Europe, along with a later honeymoon with the person he was lucky enough to marry.)
On the Fox News Channel, the ladies are permitted to cite It's A Wonderful Life as one of their favorite Christmas films. Eventually, one of the fellows will shock the world by stating his preference for the 1988 "gender roles anthem" we've already named.
Triggered by this affectation, we decided to watch Die Hard last night. Frequently, we were struck by what we saw.
Even in that 1988 film, we saw major elements of the current "revolt from below." In particular, the film is bookended by the marital problems of the Bruce Willis character and his estranged wife, who's played by Bonnie Bedelia.
He's a working-class New York City cop. She's a giant-salary corporate executive—one who has even started using her "maiden name!"
How did these two ever get together to start with? That question is never explained. At any rate, by the end of the film, the Bedelia character is once again blurting her married name. Also, she's huddled on and behind her husband's arm in much the way, it must be said, a young couple is posed on the famous cover of Dylan's Freewheelin' album.
In the 1988 film in question, we saw the basic elements of the "revolt from below" which is currently being staged at the Fox News Channel (and pretty much everywhere else).
For better or worse, Die Hard tells a modern "Christmas story." We'll lay it out in a bit more detail tomorrow. We'll also mention this (inevitably) unexplored question about the early Dylan:
What happened to his earlier "sexual politics" as the years went by?
Why did the kinder, gentler earlier Dylan become so sour in his remarks about the people he thought of as women? This may be our species' oldest story—and not just at Christmas time. It's an (almost wholly) unexplored story pretty much all year round!
At any rate, what explains the fight, in the 1960s, against going electric? Very frankly, it goes like this:
The young Dylan had already seen "guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children." Elsewhere, Beach Blanket Bingo was being peddled as Frankie Avalon and Annette moved on to movie careers.
At the time, "electric" was code for Tin Pan Alley! Yesterday, did our failing nation possibly see a Tin Pan halftime show?
Tomorrow: He'd seen 10,000 talkers whose tongues were all broken? At present, for better or worse, our most influential talkers are gaggles of angry male comedians, backed by former professional "wrestlers."
Could it be that their tongues are all broken? That, of course, is a matter of judgment. Also, the Willis character's' "wife-beater" shirt! Plus, that Christmas film's "pin-up" shots!