I Don't Believe You

The Political Undercurrents of A Complete Unknown: The Dylan-esque Mold of the New America

The pivotal moment in the Bob Dylan biopic occurs when he takes the stage at the Newport Folk Festival to perform “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” By this point, Dylan already knows he’s in the wrong place, surrounded by the wrong people, performing for an audience all too eager to be manipulated. He also realizes he’s in love with two women, each of whom will leave him after squabbling over trivial matters that have little to do with his heart. While he doesn’t yet see how he’ll escape this, that uncertainty fuels his performance, allowing him to sing with greater depth, reaching into the audience’s soul.

With exquisite artistic cruelty, the screenwriter has the crowd chant the song’s chorus, oblivious to the irony, while our hero transforms before their eyes, fuelled by the adrenaline of the moment. From here, it becomes clear that the film can be read as a political manifesto against Europe and the Europeans. The hints are there earlier, when Elle Fanning, playing Suze Rotolo, complains that Dylan never talks about his past. Or when Dylan visits Woody Guthrie in the run-down sanatorium where activists have abandoned the white legend of the blues—only to find Pete Seeger there.

For all his greatness, Seeger can't help but play the good guy, trying to win the artistic approval of a broken man who can no longer even wipe himself. Seeger still belongs to an America influenced by Europe. He is married to a Japanese woman and lives between the rhetorical cotton wool of the Enlightenment and the utopian dreams of 19th-century idealists, who ended up either on the scaffold or in exile. Like Dylan, Guthrie is a child of the Wild West, from a brutal, self-sufficient world where few can afford to have a past or an ideology. Dylan’s real name was Zimmerman, and he was the son of German Jews—but the film doesn’t even mention it.

"A Complete Unknown" is the classic American tale of the lone man who moves the world forward by confronting general stupidity. Americans have a sharper instinct for the transformative power of creative destruction than Europeans. That’s why they can make films like "Civil War," where the people tear their own country apart in an attempt to save it. That’s why they can mock the folk movement and expose the miseries of their own equivalents of Lluís Llach, Jaume Sisa, and Maria del Mar Bonet. Dylan knows he must abandon a sinking ship, while his activist friends, paralyzed by doubt and self-congratulation, cling to him like desperate castaways.

The film’s ending hit me hard—perhaps because I saw it on the same day Donald Trump shredded the diplomatic protocol of 18th-century "salonières" and the Europe of the Congress of Vienna at his summit with Zelensky. To fit the story into the screenplay, Dylan breaks the folk festival’s unwritten rules and plays an electric set, including "Like a Rolling Stone." Heard an hour after "The Times They Are A-Changin'," it’s like reliving the last 20 years of European history—the Catalan and the Ukrainian alike. Just consider these lines: "Now you don’t seem so proud / About having to be scrounging your next meal."

The moment the first electric guitar sounds, the audience erupts in outrage. People boo, and someone shouts over the crowd: "Judas!" Dylan turns and delivers that legendary response: "I don’t believe you." It’s as if Trump were replying to Macron in a tweet after brushing off Zelensky for turning up at the White House demanding the moon. If I were French or German, I’d go see "A Complete Unknown" and take a hard look at what’s happening in Catalonia before applauding Brussels’ militarisation plans. An army needs a strong, mature nation behind it, just as any artist needs an audience connected to reality—lest fame consume him.

In Catalonia, we have a president who wouldn’t have been elected without the crackdown on independence and who invokes Zelensky in the name of democracy while ignoring the fact that Trump actually won a mandate at the ballot box. His party, and the bourgeoisie backing him, hope to enrich themselves with minor contracts—the same way they’ve profited from Barcelona’s new garbage trucks. The leading print newspaper has even gone so far as to twist the words of an author persecuted by Franco to justify the government’s new EU-funded economic plans. If this happens in Barcelona, what might happen in Paris, Madrid, or Berlin with the money the arms industry is about to pour in?

Dylan’s biopic champions truth and a knowledge of one’s roots as the foundation of progress and collective intelligence. It reminds us that America is now doing with politics what it did with culture over half a century ago: breaking free from Europe. The U.S. no longer looks so much to its old alliance with France—the one that helped it win independence from Britain—but rather to the 19th century and the conquest of the West. Europe, meanwhile, finds its roots in the Middle Ages, not in the 19th-century world to which the old colonial states huddling together in Brussels want to drag us, offended by the United States.

Catalans know where to look because our patriotism predates the nation-state. We can say that Dylan is the greatest troubadour since the time of Ramon Llull. But much of Europe will struggle to break free from the politicians’ propaganda and say, as Dylan did: "I don’t believe you." And that will be a shame, because the continent’s accelerated militarisation will only encourage reckless gambits and further damage democracy. Just watch the film and pay attention to what’s happening in Catalonia after years of grand speeches and strumming the guitar like Dylan’s old friends. No need to go to Ukraine to get yourself killed.