Review

Culture

Music

27 February 2025

6 min read

The biblical undercurrent that the Bob Dylan biopics missed

In the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A colorful mural depicts the eyes of Bob Dylan staring to the side.

Dylan mural, Minneapolis.

Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash.

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown begins with his arrival in New York and concludes with his performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He begins the film as a complete unknown, as he arrives with no backstory to share or, where he does, one that he has invented. He ends it as a complete unknown, because he consistently refuses all the boxes or labels in which others want to imprison him.

This aspect of Dylan’s life and career has also characterised many of the earlier biopics, such as 2007’s I’m Not There which features six different versions of Dylan as poet, born-again Christian, outlaw, actor, folk singer, and electrified troubadour. Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend throughout much of the time covered by A Complete Unknown, described the way in which he absorbed influences at this time like a sponge:

“He had an incredible ability to see and sponge – there was a genius in that. The ability to create out of everything that’s ﬂying around. To synthesize it. To put it in words and music.”

Focusing on this aspect of Dylan’s life and practice can, however, lead to a minimising of his upbringing and also to a misleading sense of brilliant but entirely disconnected phases – essentially a series of rejections – as having characterised his career. There are some important elements of Dylan’s life and ideas that are overlooked, underplayed or simply lost as a result. Many of these involve the particular expression of spirituality that has informed his work from the beginning.

As Rabbi James Rosenberg has explained: “Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. He spent the majority of his childhood, including his high school years, in Hibbing, about 60 miles northwest of Duluth. His father and mother, Abram and Beatie, whose parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, sent both him and his younger brother David to the local synagogue for their Jewish education leading to Bar Mitzvah at age 13.”

As a result, Dylan’s songs have from the beginning of his career been suffused with the phrases and imagery of the Bible; interestingly, not just the Hebrew Bible, but the Christian Bible too. Whether it’s the references to Judas in “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side” or quoting Jesus in ‘the first one now will later be last’ (“The Times They Are A-Changin’”) or the Old Testament stories that feature at the end of “When the Ship Comes In”, wherever you look within Dylan’s lyrics the influence of the Bible is apparent.

Follow that thought with another which notes the prevalence of apocalyptic images (storms, hurricanes etc) and events (‘The hour when the ship comes in’, the moment when “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or the night when the “Chimes of Freedom” ring, for example). Then think from where images of apocalyptic events primarily derive in the Western imagination and you’ll be circling back to the Bible, and the Books of Daniel and Revelation in particular. That is of course what Dylan himself did following his born-again experiences in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but the Bible was always the original seedbed for his images and ideas.

Then, look deeply into one of the most apocalyptic of his early songs – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – and you’ll see a manifesto to which he has held throughout his career and which illuminates his work in every decade and every change of direction within his lengthy career. The central character in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” commits to walking through an apocalyptic world in order to tell and think and speak and breathe and reflect what he sees in order that all souls might see it too. In a much later manifesto song – “Ain’t Talkin’” – he puts it like this:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe …

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

In the last outback, at the world’s end

Throughout Dylan’s career, he writes songs about people travelling through life in the face of apocalyptic storms seeking some form of relief or salvation or entry to heaven. So, what we have in the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century (and then twenty-first century) culture.

It's actually all there right at the beginning in the song that he wrote for and sang to his hero Woody Guthrie:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home

Walkin’ a road other men have gone down

I’m seein’ your world of people and things

Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn

It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

(“Song to Woody”)

Dylan’s songs, from that point onwards, have documented where his pilgrim journey in the eye of the apocalypse has taken him; often with imagery of storms lighting his way. He has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world-weary blues. On his journey he: saw seven breezes blowing around the cabin door where victims despair (“Ballad of Hollis Brown”); lightning flashing for those who are confused, accused and misused (“Chimes of Freedom”); surveyed “Desolation Road”; talked truth with a thief as the wind began to howl (“All Along the Watchtower”); sheltered with an un-named woman from the apocalyptic storm (“Shelter from the Storm”); felt the idiot wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognised himself as an idiot and felt sorry (“Idiot Wind”); found a pathway to the stars and couldn't believe he'd survived (“Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat”); rode the slow train up around the bend (“Slow Train”); was driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief (“I Believe in You”); heard the ancient footsteps join him on his path (“Every Grain of Sand”); felt the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire (“Caribbean Wind”); betrayed his commitment, felt the breath of the storm and went searching for his first love (“Tight Connection to My Heart”); then, at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but he’s walking through the middle of nowhere trying to get to heaven before the door is closed (“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”):

The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies

I've been wading through the high muddy water

With the heat rising in my eyes.

Everyday your memory grows dimmer.

It don't haunt me, like it did before.

I been walking through the middle of nowhere

Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door.

(“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”)

Whatever the crises we face, whether personal or political, there’s a Dylan song that says there’s light at the end of the tunnel if you keep walking toward it and, whatever the song, there’s a depth of insight and compassion for those who are struggling along the way.

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Review

Ambition

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

6 December 2024

6 min read

Why we’re fascinated with power behind closed doors

Conclave captures the powerful chemistry between heaven and earth.

Roger Standing

Roger is a theologian and author with a particular interest in the relationship between faith and culture.

A cardinal glances to the side as he stands amid a gather of clergy,

Cardinal Thomas Lawrence played by Ralph Fiennes.

Film Nation.

An ecclesiastical election, conducted behind closed doors, by a group of old men hardly seems a subject for a riveting thriller. Yet, back in 2016, Berkshire-based novelist Robert Harris thought otherwise. Conclave became an international best-seller.

Now it’s been turned into a movie. And, according to the cognoscenti, a rather good one at that. British Vogue lauded it with great enthusiasm:

“It’s a treat in every sense – visually, sonically, dramaturgically – and, as we hurtle into this bleakest of winters, exactly the kind of galvanising, pulse-racing shot in the arm we all need.”

Really?

Well, following its UK premiere at the London Film Festival in October, the BBC were quick to report a potential flurry of Oscar nominations and even that it was ‘thought to be a strong contender for the best picture award’.

So, what’s going on? How has this dangerously dull and turgid subject turned into a narrative that tames the critics and converts the sceptics?

A late night showing on the day of its release at the end of November beckoned me to find out. So off I went with my wife, after she had finished Gospel Choir practice.

Directed by award winning film-maker Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), it stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini.

The premise is simple. The Pope is dead, and the Cardinals of the Catholic Church convene from around the world to choose his successor. But this, of course, is only the beginning.

Sequestered in the Vatican the prelates are cut off from outside influence as the secret process of electing a new pontiff is enacted. But this does not stop events, past and present, from impacting and shaping their deliberations.

Overseen by Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), the British Dean of the College of Cardinals, the story unfolds as he negotiates these successive revelations and happenings. Along the way he is also wrestling in his own faith for spiritual reality and personal integrity.

As they gather, the not-so-friendly fraternal rivalry of the cardinals and the manoeuvring of the leading contenders sets up a presenting series of tensions for the Conclave:

Cardinal Bellini (Tucci) is the Vatican’s theologically progressive, yet diffident, Secretary of State
Cardinal Tremblay (Lithgow) is a slippery and ambitious, self-promoting Canadian conservative
Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is the forthright and reactionary traditionalist Patriarch of Venice
Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is a theologically conservative and populist Nigerian who offers the possibility of making history as the first Black pope.

Then, at the last minute, into the mix enters a cardinal that no one knew of. Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is a Mexican who arrives claiming the late pope appointed him Archbishop of Kabul in pectore (in secret) prior to his death.

Shuttling between their living quarters in the Domus Sanctae Marthae and the Sistine Chapel, the venue for their voting process, the story unfolds. A complex interplay of ecclesiastical politics, theology and spirituality intermingle with issues of identity, character and choice to make for a heady mix. At stake, or is that on offer, is the power of the Papacy.

Reflecting the church at large the Conclave is a community of conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and progressives, populists and academics, activists and administrators.

Like the world at large, all human life is here. Men with hidden secrets, driven by ignoble motives that often dress themselves in more noble apparel. Ambition, greed, ego and privilege rub shoulders with graciousness, sincerity and self-sacrificial service. Sometimes even in the same person. The human condition is a complicated one. It seems that power retains its age-old allure and ability to corrupt.

And maybe that’s it. For all the secrecy and mystery that surrounds a papal election, right down to the colour of the smoke, it is a human concoction. Human fingerprints are all over it, just like they are all over the church.

The church aspires to be better. To be shaped by a higher ideal. To properly be ‘the body of Christ’ and represent the imago dei in the world. To so inhabit the love and grace of God that through its life and witness God might touch and transform the world for the better. Yet, as one of the Italian cardinals correctly, if too easily, argues, “We are mortal men; we serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.”

Indeed, the great apostle St. Paul had to confess, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect …”, but he is committed to go further, “… [yet] I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” There is an ideal to pursue.

As the cardinals progress through successive rounds of voting the field of candidates narrows and the required two-thirds majority comes within reach. Yet the prospects of the main characters rise and fall through the twists and turns of the plot as it heads to its inevitable climax.

Then one final, unexpected and flabbergasting reveal hits the audience from out of left field. It is a masterful denouement to the tale.

Speaking about how it all came together Harris revealed:

“I approached this not as a Catholic and not as an expert in the Church. So my preparation began by reading the gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking … There's also this question of can you freeze anything at a point nearly 2000 years ago? Haven't the world and humanity evolved?”

As we drove home at gone midnight I found it hard to disagree with Vogue.

The visual spectacle created by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine plays wonderfully with the renaissance setting of the Vatican. It is a beautiful and luscious feast for the eyes.

Volker Bertelmann’s teasing creativity with the score made the drama come alive and heightened what has been an unforgettable experience.

But for me, most of all, it was the drama. The story that was told. The unfolding of events and the interplay with people and their motives, their relationships and their vested interests. It is layered and nuanced and complex, just like real life.

It has left me pondering once again the chemistry between heaven and earth. Between our freewill and agency as individuals and the mystery of the divine presence and the fruit of prayer.

As the cardinals prepare for the final vote a waft of air blows gently through a broken window in the Sistine Chapel and rustles their voting papers. Is Berger tipping his hat to the presence of the Spirit of God, present and active in human affairs?

Perhaps the last word should go to Robert Harris.

“With temporal power, or indeed spiritual power, it is very difficult to avoid factions, scheming, the lesser of two evils—all the compromises that go into running any huge organization and trying to keep, not just hundreds, but thousands of people onside … I have a lot of time for politicians, just as I have a lot of time for these cardinals, because they are grappling with almost insoluble problems. But someone has to do it. Someone has to run a society. And I've tried to write about them with a degree of sympathy.”