u/No-Soil1735

1. Romantic rejection - the singer is rejecting a suitor.

2. Autobiographical - Dylan is rejecting the "prophet" image people put on him.

3. Protest - the "babe" is the US government at the beginning of the Vietnam War, or in general any government wanting its people to fight: "Someone to close his eyes for you /Someone to close his heart /Someone who will die for you an’ more" - he doesn't want to close his eyes to atrocities and kill and die.

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What's so clever is 2 and 3 are opposites, it can be read as Dylan telling us he's unable to live up to our projections of him and him being a protest leader.

An early draft for Good Will Hunting had an escape-the-NSA plot, and the writers were told that: "you have two movies in this script, and the movies are fighting each other." So they cut the NSA plot to just Will's job interview.

Have you ever found something similar in your own work? You maybe mixed romance and horror, or character drama and thriller, in a way that didn't quite add up? Did you keep it as both or rewrite a lot to make one side stronger?