There is an ongoing debate over what movie audiences really want. On the one hand, there are those who bemoan the upcoming slate of films that are nothing but sequels and prequels. “People want original movies!” they say, and use the spectacular failure of recent comic book movies as proof. But when an original movie like the recent Black Bag doesn’t make a dent at the box office and is quietly shuffled onto streaming, the other side can say, “No they don’t.”

So which is it?

I say, both!

The average viewer likes familiarity. That’s why every night on TV millions of people watch the latest episode of their favorite procedural. Every episode is the same. Has been for years. Doesn’t matter if you’re watching Bones, House M.D., or NCIS, at the end of the day, the story beats are invariably the same. The characters fill the same archetypes. 

Even if you aren’t a student of scriptwriting, you know the flow.

Engaging with a story is sometimes like singing a song. Sometimes you want to sit back and listen to a master perform, but other times you want to join in. And if the tune is simple and familiar, you can learn new words that much more easily. If the melody is complex, with tempo and key changes, it demands attention. That’s when you just sit back and appreciate someone else’s artistry. 

More often than not, we’re drawn to the familiar. 

We go to the movies to be entertained more than we go to be challenged.

But Hollywood seems determined to challenge us. They challenge our ideas of who are familiar are. They challenge our core beliefs about right and wrong. When they do make something that isn’t from a well established intellectual property, they challenge us to accept an unfamiliar actor, who likely isn’t attractive or charming. Why should we want to get to know this person and the character he or she is playing?

We don’t. 

Mass appeal isn’t difficult. Our mainstream entertainment providers are making it difficult, probably in large part because they don’t know or understand what we want. And unless they do, people just like us will move to replace them. 

In the forward to The Revenant and the Cult - Book Two: The Terror in the Wychwood, author Herman P. Hunter mentions that his influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis, and H.P. Lovecraft. While it may seem odd to intersperse deeply religious writers with those antagonistic to the idea of a benevolent God, from a writer’s perspective it makes sense.

For a fantasy writer, particularly one of faith, they are essential.

It’s also worth remembering that all four men were producing their greatest works around the same time on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Theirs was the golden age of worldbuilding, and it’s practically impossible for today’s writer of the fantastic not be influenced by their work, consciously or through osmosis. But to fully appreciate modern genre fiction, it’s to our advantage to drink deeply from their bibliographies.

Because genre fiction doesn’t always mean science fiction and fantasy.

As I noted in my review of The Revenant and the Cult - Book One: The Missing Spy, that story draws heavily from western tropes. Howard, always one to blaze his own trails, also dabbled in Lovecraft’s mythos, but before taking his own life seemed to be moving into writing cowboy stories. He was a Texan, after all. Unlike many authors, he was never satisfied staying in category for too long. 

With his series, Hunter is doing something similar, but different.

Tolkien’s work may be the pinnacle of fantasy writing and the standard to which all fantasy writers are held, as well as the guiding influence of Hunter’s work. But with The Terror in the Wychwood, he again draws heavily from his American brethren. In this story our main trio, Halsedric, Herodiani, and Roe must traverse through a swampy forrest of Lovecraftian horrors, fighting through hoards Frank Frazetta would have been happy to depict.

Two words: Moonlight Hunters.

But while Conan believed in Crom, an absent god who took little interest in the lives men, and Lovecraft only wrote of terrible Ancient Ones who would wipe out humanity like stepping on insignificant ants, Halsedric has a relationship with his Allfather. There is incredible evil in this world, but there is also an all-powerful good, and our hero is His representative. One need not believe in God to appreciate the story, as it’s never preachy, but it’s a fearless attempt to stand alongside all the works that inspired it.

Christian and otherwise, alike.

As the series has gone on, Hunter’s writing has only gotten richer. The books fly by and are pleasant reading, even with the elevated style of the classics. Anyone looking for the pulp violence of Howard, with the weird of Lovecraft, the tenderness of Lewis, and the worldview of Tolkien will feel right at home.

If you know anything about Bob Dylan, it’s that no one knows anything about Bob Dylan. And that’s by his own design. In interviews he deadpan lies (so no, despite what he told 60 Minutes, I don’t believe he sold his soul to the devil). In one era everything thought he was singing protest songs, in the next it was nonsense, later it was Christian and historical songs, with a thousand variations since then.

Even his signature sound was an affectation, as he proved on the divisive Nashville Skyline.

So any movie about him should be called A Complete Unknown, even if it can root itself in known facts. James Mangold (who has trod this territory before with the excellent Walk the Line) introduces us to Bobby (Timothee Chalamet) as he arrives in New York’s Greenwich Village as, well, an unknown quantity. 

There was no building a following from home on TikTok back then.

Young Bobby quickly impresses Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who thinks he sees a kindred spirit. Seeger, of course, was in trouble for being a Communist when that wasn’t very popular in this country. The movie briefly touches on that and quickly moves on. What Mangold wants us to focus on, what is really the crux of the entire film, is that Seeger is passionate about acoustic folk music and Dylan refuses to be put in a box.

Trust me, there’s no group out there more passionate about musical purity than the folkies.

They still exist today.

Writing A Complete Unknown must have been tricky. Dylan needs to drive the narrative without really expressing what he wants, leaving Seeger and Dylan’s two girlfriends, Sylvie Russo and Joan Baez (Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro, respectively), at a loss. They’re so blinded by what they want him to be, they can’t see who he’s going to be. And Dylan, for his part, is so focused on who he needs to be that he rarely notices the conflict.

All of this internal conflict, not handled correctly, wouldn’t have translated to the screen.

But it is handled skillfully. Chalamet gives a nuanced, rather than one-note, performance, that’s at once subdued and driven. We feel for him as he learns the dangers of celebrity, when all he wants is to make music. If staying in a box for too long attracts acolytes, he’ll move boxes. Russo and Baez love him, and we see it in their eyes, and it pains them that they’ll never have him either.

And let’s not forget Pete.

Norton plays Seeger like a musical Mr. Rogers, all warmth and well-wishing. But in the film’s climax, when Bobby betrays him by going electric, Seeger nearly takes up an ax to smash the amps. But as Michael C. Moynihan lays out in his excellent piece for The Free Press, it wasn’t just the new sound that so enraged him. Dylan stopped toeing the line of the leftist agenda and started singing abstract, almost absurdist, songs. 

No musical or ideological purity. Just great art.

Before this, I never really understood why Dylan did two albums of gibberish. Now I do, and I love him all the more for it. In our era of political tribalism, there’s a place for the jester artists who aren’t afraid to say, “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken.” Is that crazy? How would you know? You’ve been living in a hole for so long you haven’t seen the sun. Get a life. Go touch grass.

There’s more to life than ideology.

The movie is, of course, filled with great music and gives you a true sense of the time. As with Walk the Line, the story stops short of the religious awakenings that both Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan had soon after the credits roll. And maybe that’s for the best. Anyone who wants to know what happens next and why will find out, sooner or later.

As for Dylan, he may be an icon, but unlike a statue that remains in once place and is easy to study, he’s still a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.