Boomer Mind Control is Alive and Well

Some thoughts on "A Complete Unknown" and the Destruction of Love

Anyone who meets me finds out quick that I’m a Dylan fan. I checked his records out of the library when I was a kid, bought his CDs through the ’90s, and have him marked as a favorite artist now on Spotify. I’m going to see him perform in March.

I’m the guy they thought would enjoy A Complete Unknown, the 2024 biopic about Dylan’s early years.

They were wrong.

I just got around to seeing it.

Didn’t care for it.

The whole thing felt a little like a superhero movie, but here the hero is a scrawny Jewish boy from Minnesota with half a pack of cigarettes and an unshakeable sense of his own greatness. Just like, say, Antman, Dylan here, the great genius of American song, is presented in comic book style: flat, shallow, and petulant. But who knows? Maybe that’s accurate. It’s not like a self-centered twenty-something man is an unheard-of phenomenon.

But that’s not all. As much as he is portrayed as selfish and emotionally stunted, he is also portrayed as an oracle who can barely disguise his disdain for ordinary people: for the fans who hound him, buy his records and finance his stardom. As self-involved, insensitive, and peevish as the Hollywood Dylan is, he’s still too good for us.

Another mediocre Hollywood offering, this film will be forgotten in a few years. But while it’s fresh on my mind, I want to make a point about the way movies shape social reality. This movie, like so many others in past decades, is an example of what I call “the Boomer Frame.” The Boomer Frame is the default template for narrativizing history in movies, something writers resort to without even noticing it. That’s perhaps even more to be expected in a movie about a Boomer icon like Dylan.

Here is how the Boomer Frame works. First, assume that history moves in a straight line from times of restrictive oppression and indifference to times of liberation and joy. We are always moving toward something better in the Boomer Frame. Second, the hinge between the dark times, when people lived under the heavy thumb of tyranny, and the light times, when people are really free to be themselves, is the 1960s generation. It is key to the Boomer Frame that it reiterate endlessly the idea that the Boomers are the most important generation to ever live. Third, no matter how complicated the reality of history and the personalities that inhabit it, they must always be simplified to fit the frame. History must divide into a right side and a wrong side, a powerful force of darkness vs. our hero of liberation. Finally, that hero must, in the end, overthrow the forces of repression by some act of really “being himself.” When our hero finds the strength to “be himself” in the face of an angry and totally unhip status quo, he triumphs.

A Complete Unknown is the story of Bob Dylan smooshed into the Boomer Frame. The hero, of course, is Dylan. His quest here is to overthrow the forces of repressive darkness represented by…..traditional folk music! Yes, here film Dylan alone stands up against the likes of music researcher and documentarian Alan Lomax and longtime champion of Leftist causes Pete Seeger to assert his right to rock. His final moment of victory comes when, in spite of the crowd’s disapproval, he plays “Like a Rolling Stone” on an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 before riding off into the sunset on his motorcycle.

He also rides out of town with impunity never acknowledging the great suffering and turmoil he has brought into the lives of the women who loved him. Both Sylvie Russo and Joan Baez experience miserable interactions with him. He is rude, uncaring, exploitative, and untrustworthy with both. Intense emotional pain, the movie seems to say, is just the price women are expected to pay for the privilege of being close to one of the champions of their liberation. That sentiment somehow makes sense within the Boomer Frame.

My intent here is to do more than complain about the Boomers. I want you to see how consuming hundreds of movies and television shows subtly built around this frame affects us all. The Boomer Frame isn’t just a narrative contrivance; it is a guide to history, a rubric for personal relations, a guide to who does and does not deserve love.

Tragically, almost everyone now (myself included) has unconsciously adopted the Boomer Frame. The average person assumes the past was oppressive and the present less so. He assumes this not because he has thought about it, not because of deep study of history, not because of careful reflection on the relationship between human nature, liberty, and the Good. No, he assumes it because the movies told him so.

When movies give us a simplistic view of history, they also give us a simplistic view of people. When all of history divides cleanly between good people and bad, between holy causes and malevolent ones, then it must also be the case that people are just as simply good or bad. This view is manifest everywhere in our increasingly contentious time. Think of the simplistic arguments one hears daily on Fox News or MSNBC, arguments that depend on the assumption that the other side is made up of irredeemable simpletons.

The Boomer Frame also strikes closer to home. In recent years, we’ve heard no shortage of horror stories of people destroying family and social relationships because they don’t like Uncle Hershel’s politics. Nothing matters more in the Boomer Frame than being the cool guy on the right side of history, not even loving Grandma once she’s popped a Trump sign in the yard.

Such destructiveness is the Boomer Frame in action.

The Boomer Frame is now too deeply embedded in the American mind to excise. The best we can do is resist it where possible. Becoming aware helps us understand why those we’ve loved might suddenly recast us. Where once we were a family member’s fun uncle or a doting aunt, we are now their personal Pete Seeger, a figure representing all the regressive forces of the past who must be cast aside in search of a new moral purity that only the pursuit of heroism, as defined by the Boomer Frame, can bring about.

More importantly, understanding the Boomer Frame helps temper our own temptations to cast others aside. Choosing to view our neighbors through a more nuanced and realistic lens allows us to build and maintain relationships across divisions and to tolerate the kinds of conversations that are the only means for reducing the distance between us.

Becoming conscious of the Boomer Frame is the first step out of it. This is long, slow work, first for ourselves and then to help free our neighbors. But if we desire to tell new, more unifying stories, to reestablish a mythos that might unite us and forestall the horrors that at this moment look inevitable, it is necessary work. It is work for a new generation capable of building something outside what has been handed down, a generation that will, paradoxically, have to produce a whole new breed of cultural rebel, one ready to reject the Boomer Frame and establish a more just and life-giving view, one that makes a way to keep on loving Grandma no matter how she votes.

P.S.
If you are interested in cinematic meditations on Dylan and his cultural significance, both the 2007 film I’m Not There and the Scorsese-directed docuseries No Direction Home do a far better job than the movie discussed above.