"A slayer of Communists"

John Podhoretz is not particularly fond of Bob Dylan but liked A Complete Unknown because of a theme Podhoretz isn't sure the director understood. Who knew that electrified guitars were anti-Communist? From the review of the film:

The hidden story of A Complete Unknown is that Bob Dylan is a slayer of Communists—maybe not because they’re Communists, but I’ll take what I can get.

His rebellion against the elders in the folk movement of the 1960s was a rebellion in part against the static conformity and dreary humorlessness of the far-left politics that had dominated that corner of the music world for a quarter-century.

That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if co-writer 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 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.

John Podhoretz, "REVIEW: ‘A Complete Unknown’," The Washington Free Beacon, Jan. 3, 2025.