Pete Seeger is a Perfect Movie Villain

An essay in criticism

The end of M. Night Shyamalan’s movie from 2000, Unbreakable, reveals the twist that Mr. Glass was the villain who orchestrated everything all along. He killed all the people in all those train wrecks in order to find his arch-rival.

The Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is being marketed for Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan. Critics are much more interested in the acting than the movie itself. A conversation on one of The Ringer podcasts even stated that the problem with the film was a lack of conflict.

Ostensibly, the move is a remake of Footloose. Bob Dylan seeking freedom from the constraints of folk music like Kevin Bacon teaching the people of small town, Texas, to dance.

And yet, this is a red herring. The conflict is much more in the open. It is not person vs. society, but person vs. person. The conflict is between Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. The conflict is between the ideology of folk music and the ideology of the musician. The conflict is between music as salvation and music as music.

“Folk music” is not ancient. There was no folk music in the 19th century. Musical genres come from industrial capitalism, not from human creativity. Folk music is not ancient. It claims old songs, but they are not all old. It claims old techniques, but only through ideology.

Folk music presents itself is acoustic, but it is nearly always amplified. It is recorded. Edison comes into the conversation rather quickly. The authenticity of the acoustic masks over the commodification of music in order to offer a purer form of the commodity. It is the No True Scotsman of music, which is just as fallacious as the logical fallacy.

The Newport Folk Festival is presented as this ancient thing but it is only 6 years old when Dylan goes electric. The drive for authenticity in music can’t escape the black hole of folk excavations during the Nazi regime. The Nazis lifted up the German Volk continually, with cultural dress and dance and music offered as the Aryan ideal that everyone should strive for, all in opposition to Jewish modernity.

In the film, folk music is also explicitly anti-semitic, with one of the organizers of the festival mocking Peter Yarrow’s Jewish background, the Peter of Peter, Paul, and Mary. Dylan’s own Jewishness is alluded to in a passing way as a life he is trying to escape, but back to Seeger with some modest spoilers from the movie but not from history.

Seeger helps get Dylan’s career going after their introduction. Seeger functions as John the Baptist, baptizing his messiah and sending him into the world. Seeger tries to craft his Messiah in such a way to save the world. This is where his parable of the teaspoons comes in. Seeger is deluded to the point of thinking music salvific. The teaspoon parable Seeger presents even masks capitalist growth. The people who put in teaspoons of sand are the ones who buy the records and go to the shows and the festivals. Seeger can claim he is above making money for music only because he already has. As we see early on with the juxtaposition between Dylan’s poverty and Seeger’s plenteous household and family and technological innovation masked as ancient practice, like composting toilets.

My own sympathies often lean to Seeger. I rarely think music should be amplified, but this gets back to the ideological nature of folk music. It is a genre that claims to be authentic even while it is recorded, altered, amplified, in hidden and deceptive ways. It is a genre to sell not a movement to inspire.

What music is is never answered. Who Dylan is is never answered, but he is not a messiah for folk music.

Seeger manipulates the people in his life, including his wife, over his ideological of folk music salvation. He is a comic book villain. There are no startling reveals Marvel end-credit clips to prompt a sequel. Seeger is a perfect villain because his villainy needs no melodrama. Everything he does seems reasonable so we don’t notice when he crosses the line from hero to villain. The twist is in the open but still hidden. Bob stops seeing Pete. That is our only clue to the twisting of the relationship. Pete has a guitar for Bob on an evening when he doesn’t want to play. It is for a good cause!

The finale at Newport ups the melodrama where we see Pete Seeger’s villainy come to the foreground, but he and gets the comic book ending when even his wife stands against him.

The final cards of the film, where Seeger is praised for his consistency in folk music and protest movements, don’t change his function in the film. The conflict is between Dylan as a person and Dylan as messiah, promoted by Seeger and others. Instead of being a bildungsroman as it is present, the movie falls into a different genre.

Dylan doesn’t ultimately win. His manager, Albert, is excited for the rock version of Dylan to sell more records and offer more commodities. It seems Dylan is okay with this. The Deux Ex Machina of Johnny Cash continually pushes Bob to spread mud on the carpets, but is the mud which enriches everyone still mud? Bob is the hero for self-expression and self-promotion. This ultimately wins against the Volk-ideology of Seeger. What this leaves us with is the world we live in today, but the world of Seeger was just as wicked.

The conflict of A Complete Unknown is not internal, it is between heroes and villains. Neither wear capes, but that doesn’t change who they are.