The Unknowable Bob Dylan: Viewing James Mangold’s Biopic “A Complete Unknown” – Deconstructing Crazy Part III

SECOND THOUGHTS

Introduction: “A Complete Unknown”

After my columns on deconstructing crazy from the point of view of popular music, I want to turn to a special case of popular music that like The Beatles cuts across the arts and into the culture at large, even into radical politics. That special case is Bob Dylan. The latest film about him is called, “A Complete Unknown,” based on Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric!,¹ and starring Timothée Chalamet. The director James Mangold also did “I Walk The Line,” a biopic of Johnny Cash, another American institution, who also has a presence in this film since the 2 admired each other as artists and became close friends.

In a tweet on X about the movie on December 4, 2024, Dylan wrote²:

There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.

This highlights the simultaneous credibility of representing the self (“completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”) and its radical fluidity (“some other me”). To drive the point home—even if it is “some other me,” it is still “believable.” Dylan’s identity is, and always was, up for grabs.

Why may this be of interest to a psychiatric audience? Well, identity was at the core of 20th century Western culture, including psychiatry. Think of British psychiatrist psychoanalyst RD Laing’s The Divided Self³ or American social psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self.⁴ Issues of identity may be even more porous and contentious in our fractious postmodern world. Think of identity politics and the pernicious polarization we are living through. And the crisis of identity extends to our field as well.⁵

Constructing an Identity: “Whatever it is they don’t want me to be”

And Bob Dylan poses questions about identity in spades.

In this film, whose script he approved, a stranger on an elevator overhears him complaining about his rising renown:

“200 people in that room, each one wants me to be somebody else. I wish they’d just let me be.”

“Let you be what?” the stranger asks.

Dylan’s defiant reply is, “Whatever it is they don’t want me to be.”

Okay. Dylan as oppositional and defiant. Joan Baez, a well-known folk musician and his girlfriend for a time, during which they were crowned the King and the Queen of the folk music movement, tells him in private, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” She later recounted her love-hate relationship with Dylan in a memoir and a song, “Diamonds and Rust” (1975)⁶:

Well you burst on the scene

Already a legend

The unwashed phenomenon

The original vagabond

Another girlfriend in New York’s Greenwich Village, Suze Rotolo (whose name in the film was changed to “Sylvie Russo” at Dylan’s request), complains she does not know him:

“You came here with nothing but a guitar. You never talk about your family, your past!”

“People make up their past, Sylvie. They remember what they want. They make up the rest.”

Bob Dylan sure did! He presented himself as a “carnie” who had worked in traveling carnivals around the country, he took on an Okie accent like his hero Woody Guthrie who hailed from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl period, and in a hilarious interview at the height of his fame, described himself as a “song and dance man,” implying Vaudeville. That was half-right, anyway.

Pessoa’s Prismatic Dispersion: “Poets don’t have biographies”

Everything is like something. What is this like?

– Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas⁷

If we cannot understand a subject head on, we may examine it indirectly, through comparisons, similes or metaphors, as British philosopher Bryan Magee said in his BBC series, “Men of Ideas.”⁷ Is Bob Dylan like other artists of the 20th century? A few Americans come to mind—JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon—both reclusive writers who actively avoided their public. Pynchon went so far as to send stand-up comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey to pick up his National Book Award, talking in the pseudo-academic double-talk for which he was famous.⁸ As with Dylan, some in the audience were amused, others were baffled.

Yet the ultimate enigma in the world of letters is the Portuguese modernist, Fernando Pessoa (1988-1947). He wrote great poetry in a tetrad of 4 major voices he called heteronyms, going so far as inventing different dates of birth, professions, origins, and above all, poetic styles. Furthermore, he created up to 72 authorial voices, and one he called a “semi-heteronym,” Bernardo Soares, the author of The Book of Disquiet, a masterwork of 20th century literature.⁹ Pessoa’s prismatic dispersion of identity is a hallmark of Western culture. In his essay on Pessoa, the Mexican Nobelist in Literature (1990) Octavio Paz wrote that: “Poets don’t have biographies, their work is their biography.”¹⁰ This captures the complexity and mystery of Fernando Pessoa and applies just as well to Bob Dylan.

True, we give genius a wide berth. We tolerate eccentricity, foibles, and fumbles. We do not judge them by what they achieve but by what they strive for. “Men become myths,” American stateman Henry Kissinger once wrote, “not by what they know, or even by what they achieve, but by the tasks that they set for themselves.”¹¹

In the case of the 2 geniuses on display here—Dylan and Pessoa—both knew much and achieved much. More important is the fact that they set out the tasks, voiced early in their lives, to redefine the nature of their respective domains. Poetry and the notion of a reliable authorial voice will never again be the same after Pessoa, in any language. What music can mean to the public was never the same after Dylan. Above all, Dylan made popular music meaningful, not relevant. The folk movement wanted social relevance: poverty, class, the war in Vietnam. “Bringing it all back home” (to cite the title of 1 of his 3 electric albums that changed rock and roll), Dylan made music intensely personal, existential rather than topical.

Liquid Modernity, Liquid Identities

It did not come easy. One of my favorite American films is “The Way We Were” (1973). I was struck by the first line in a short story by the protagonist, Hubbell Gardner, brilliantly underacted by Robert Redford:

In many ways, he was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily for him …

That is not Bob Dylan—things came, but not easily, not comfortably, he was ambitious and evaded fame when he got it. He kept pushing through, never satisfied with what he accomplished, undermining it, rejecting it, refusing the mantle of fame, of idolatry, of being a prophet even though he often wrote like one, going so far as to quote or mimic Biblical verses.

Dylan is a bullshit artist. Let us not feel bad about that. People cut him a lot of slack because of his fame, his achievements, and his intriguing mask. More important, bullshitting is not the same as lying. As American philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out, a liar has a relation to the truth.¹² Bullshit is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. Bullshitters and artists deal with counterfactuals: other possibilities that go against the grain, against the received wisdom of their times.

(Aside: Is there a “Goldwater Rule” for public personalities? For artists? Well, we should not pronounce psychiatric opinions on individuals we have not examined personally, directly as psychiatrists. That does not stop us from making cultural comments and discussing nonpartisan political concerns, especially about policies that affect the health of the populations we work with.)

Some writers are fluent liars, as well as being bullshitters. They routinely use their own lives and the lived experience of those close to them not only as inspiration but as outright models of their works. Graham Greene, whose novels while entertaining and brilliant, are little more than accounts of his extensive travels to political hotspots, is an especially egregious example of that.

And when you come to think of it, how could it be otherwise? Even things that are totally made up have intimate roots, no matter how well hidden. In his investigations into dreams, Freud demonstrated how they displace and condense the anxieties and fears of waking life.

Writers and poets do that, as do the practitioners of all the arts: these are ways of representing the world they perceive in an artistic reconstruction of reality. Just recall the now absurd complaints about Picasso’s cubism or other periods. No one in any art form represents a greater distance from the representational inventions of Renaissance painting. No one, not even The Beatles or Bob Dylan, better represents the 20th century marked by what Australian art critic Robert Hughes (1980) called the “shock of the new.”¹³

Freud also weighed in against autobiography arguing that it is inevitably a distortion and an unreliable reconstruction. Yes, but the way someone reconstructs their life is instructive and revealing, as Freud himself taught us with the psychoanalytic method. This is a fluid, postmodern perspective that was not yet available to him, although he triggered the kinds of doubts that created the conditions for postmodernity. Or as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) brilliantly recasts it, liquid modernity.¹⁴ It is not relativism moral, cultural, or otherwise: we are living in a pluricultural world, a veritable pluriverse, built on ideological quicksand.

In spite of the evidence-based medicine and STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) ideology of the technopoly¹⁵ we are living in, this liquid version of reality may be the only reality that we can count on.

And that is why it does not matter whether Bob Dylan tells the truth about why he changed his name (being inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, the obvious explanation, was too prosaic and predictable, so he offered a succession of others), or his style (“I’m a song and dance man”), or his political commitments, or much else. In the end, he is the least reliable narrator of his own life. As Octavio Paz declared, a poet’s real biography is in his work.

And yet. And yet!

“Was it worthwhile?” Literary critic Gabriel Josipovici asked about Pessoa.¹⁶ Few friends, distant from his family, no life partner, no children. His legacy is his work. Pessoa drank himself into an early grave, dying of cirrhosis of the liver at the youngish age of 47, having published almost nothing in his lifetime. Is that “crazy”? Perhaps, it is precisely an answer to the illusions and pretensions of a rational world that does not correspond to our lived human experience.

"When I think of what is most radical in the literature of the past hundred years,” Josipovici wrote, “of what embodies most clearly the essential spirit of modernism, I think of 5 grey-suited gentlemen: Constantin Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges."¹⁶ Their relationships were all troubled—whether to tradition, country, religion or intimates. Eliot was unhappily married most of his life and Borges married late; the others were notable bachelors. They were all truly lonely individuals who were orphans in their respective cultures and societies, without roots and without offspring.

Despite his shifting relationships, marriages, and children, “Dylan,” that is, the public Dylan we have access to, comes across as the lonesome character in his most famous song, “Like A Rolling Stone” (1965)¹⁷:

How does it feel

To be your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone

These words have taken on a large cultural presence. The latest movie about him is called “A Complete Unknown” and “No Direction Home” was a 2005 documentary by Martin Scorsese.

Is it worth it? These are questions from the outside that we impose on the poet and the artist. As Fernando Pessoa wrote and as Bob Dylan continually implies, they follow other laws.

Austrian Peter Handke, another Nobelist in Literature (2019), who is one of the most brilliant innovators of poetry, theater, and the novel of our time, wrote an early work that captures the conundrums of creativity and reality: The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld.¹⁸ Handke is even more politically controversial (his mother was a Slovene and Handke was perceived as an apologist for Slobodan Milošević and Serbian aggression) than Bob Dylan but it does not matter one iota for his status as an artist and a truth-teller. Whenever I need to renew my faith in the radical possibilities of language, I crack open Handke’s Innerworld¹⁸or his play, Offending the Audience,¹⁹ or his novel, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.²⁰ And if I need the courage to face grief, I reread A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,²¹ about his mother’s suicide. You could read those while looking at Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” (1903-4) and listening to Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” or “Desolation Row” or “Tangled Up in Blue.”

Coda: Why New Views of Identity Matter for Social Psychiatry

With a background in behavior theory and therapy, I have retained critical responses to such complex notions as personality and personality disorders. As a social philosopher, I hold that we have trouble defining a person, let alone personality and its extension to personality disorders.

If we take different starting points that are more contextual and dimensional, we allow for broader, less pathologizing definitions of persons and personality, recognizing greater diversity, from cultural diversity to neurodiversity. Joan Baez called Dylan “an asshole” and many others found him cruel and vengeful. Just listen to the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Positively 4th Street.” Yet, it is also true that they are artful in their invective and tilted popular culture away from the sappy blandishments of Tin Pan Alley (the New York hit factory) and the smug, privileged New England college students who lionized the folk music movement. Pete Seeger, Dylan’s first mentor, wrote “If I Had a Hammer,” but Dylan took a hammer to everything Seeger and the folkies represented by going electric and going mean.

Psychiatry needs to take a hammer to our inadequate notions of person, personality, and personality disorder.⁵ Invoking the received wisdom about them illuminates little about individuals today and just spreads stigma and prejudice against the nonconformists among us.

Social psychiatry needs a more social definition of the self and its articulations in family relationships, networks, and communities. More to come on that which is the goal of another series of “Second Thoughts” columns on terms of the social.

Resources

For an immersion into the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (Winston Churchill’s arresting phrase about the opening of WWII) that is Bob Dylan, I recommend reading his thoughts on the “modern song” and my favorites among his many biographies:

• Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster (2022). Mr. Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016), both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song (2001), and 11 Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award (1991), and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1988).
• Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric! Dylan, Seeger, Newport, and the Night that Split the Sixties. Dey Street/HarperCollins (2015). The basis of the Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown” (2024).
• David Dalton, Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan. Grand Central Publishing; 2016.

For a plunge into the pluralistic world of Fernando Pessoa, I recommend starting with Nobelist in Literature, Octavio Paz’s Introduction followed by the definitive biography by Richard Zenith, a leading Pessoa scholar:

• Octavio Paz, “A Stranger to Himself,” his Introduction to A Centenary Pessoa. Carcanet Press; 1996.
• Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography. Livewright; 2021.

Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal. He is also clinical professor of psychiatry & behavioral health at The George Washington University and president of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). Dr Di Nicola has received numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships. Of note, Dr Di Nicola was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS), given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and is a Fellow-Elect of the American College of Psychiatrists (FACPsych). His work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s publications include: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021).

Acknowledgements

I owe my love of the Portuguese language to Fernando Pessoa whom I encountered on my first trip to Brazil 30 years ago. As I sat with a collection of Pessoa’s poems, my Italian-Brazilian father, and an Italian-Portuguese dictionary, my descent into the Pessoan pluriverse began. Some 20 years later, I was invited to lead a symposium on his life and work at the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon.²²

References

1. Wald E.Dylan Goes Electric!Dylan, Seeger, Newport, and the Night that Split the Sixties. Dey Street/HarperCollins; 2015.
2. Dylan B. Tweet on X. December 4, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2025.
3. Laing RD. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Tavistock; 1960.
4. Gergen KJ. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. Basic Books; 1991.
5. Di Nicola V, Stoyanov DS. Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Science, the Humanities, and Neuroscience. Springer Nature; 2021.
6. Diamonds & Rust (song). Wikipedia. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_%26_Rust_(song)
7. Magee B. Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford University Press; 1982.
8. Thomas Pynchon. Wikipedia. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon
9. Pessoa F. The Book of Disquiet. Zenith R, trans. Allen Lane; 2001.
10. Paz O. Introduction: “A Stranger to Himself.” In: Pessoa F. A Centenary Pessoa. Lisboa E, Taylor LC, eds. Carcanet Press; 1996.
11. Kissinger H. A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22. Houghton Mifflin; 1957.
12. Frankfurt HG. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press; 2005.
13. Hughes R. The Shock of the New. Alfred A. Knopf; 1980.
14. Bauman Z. Liquid Modernity. Polity; 2000.
15. Postman N. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage; 2011.
16. Josipovici G. The Lesson of Modernism, and Other Essays. Macmillan; 1977.
17. Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia. Accessed January 13, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Rolling_Stone
18. Handke P. The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld. A Continuum Book/The Seabury Press; 1974.
19. Handke P. Offending the Audience/Self-accusation. Methuen Publishing; 1971.
20. Handke P. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1972.
21. Handke P. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Pushkin Press; 2001.
22. Di Nicola V, Proença NM, Borja Santos N. Symposium: “Um Estranho em Casa, Uma Casa Estranha: Pessoa e Psiquiatria” [A Stranger in the House, A House So Strange: Pessoa and Psychiatry]. Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon, Portugal. October 31, 2012.