“WATCH IN WONDER AS BOB DYLAN SLAYS COMMUNISTS!” John Podhoretz Reviews A Complete Unknown:
That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if cowriter and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against “Masters of War”—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown.
The times Dylan informed us that were a-changin’ were the times in which middle-aged men felt the power to order around younger men—and in his case, those middle-aged men weren’t middle managers at IBM but New York leftists ranging from Greenwich Village intelligentsia to wealthier types raising money radical-chic style for “emergency committees” of this or that or the other stripe. A Complete Unknown is a rise-to-fame tale beginning with Dylan’s arrival on a bus in 1961, his almost instant embrace by Seeger and the world Seeger dominated—and which he almost instantly began to find suffocating.
But what was that embrace, really? The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.
It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)
The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic “Which Side Are You On?” nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the “side” in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.
A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.
Read the whole thing.
In his review of A Complete Unknown at Quillette, my former PJ Media colleague Ron Radosh adds:
I met Seeger in the early 1950s and we got to know each other well. I took lessons from him on the five-string banjo, I sang with him at a People’s Artists’ Hootenanny in New York, I sponsored his first concerts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I visited him at his home in Beacon, NY, and I kept in regular touch with him over the years. Our politics would diverge during the 1980s, and we hashed out our differences in public for much of the last decade or two of his life. A year or so before he died, we spoke on the phone, reconciled, and planned to get together in the near future. (Sadly, that reunion never took place.)
Mangold rightly celebrates Seeger’s contributions to the American story, including his strident politics and his opposition to the infamous HUAC hearings, which led to him being blacklisted by the McCarthyites he hated. Unfortunately, Mangold’s determination to portray Seeger as a secular saint means there is no mention of his apologetics for the Soviet Union, which revealed what David A. Graham once called his “disturbingly durable devotion to Communism.” As I noted in an obituary for the Weekly Standard in 2014, “His political vision, his service over the decades to the brutality of Soviet-era Stalinism and to all of the post-Cold War leftist tyrannies, was inseparable from the music he made [and] simply cannot be overlooked.” Paul Berman, whom I quoted in that piece, was even less forgiving, describing Seeger as “a fool and an idiot.”
Not that Seeger was especially fazed by this kind of criticism. “I’m sure,” he told the New York Times in 2007 when he was asked about my work, “there are more constructive things [Radosh] could do with his life.” Nevertheless, after I wrote an article for the New York Sun titled “Time for Pete Seeger to Repent,” he wrote me a letter. “I think you’re right,” it said. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” Instead, upon his return to the US, he had written a tribute to the achievements of the Soviet Union for the English edition of a Soviet magazine. The letter he sent me included a copy of a song he had written criticising Stalin, but he only performed it privately for a few friends. It was, in any case, fifty-odd years too late.
Related: Pete Seeger, America’s Most Successful Communist. Because not just anybody can say they’ve propped up every socialist dictator from Stalin and Hitler to Ho Chi Minh all the way to Saddam Hussein.
