Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the Runaway American Dream

Jerry Zolten, Kenneth Womack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409404972
• eBook ISBN: 9781317171157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

There is little question about the incredible power of Bruce Springsteen's work as a particularly transformative art, as a lyrical and musical fusion that never shies away from sifting through the rubble of human conflict. As Rolling Stone magazine's Parke Puterbaugh observes, Springsteen 'is a peerless songwriter and consummate artist whose every painstakingly crafted album serves as an impassioned and literate pulse taking of a generation's fortunes. He is the foremost live performer in the history of rock and roll, a self-described prisoner of the music he loves, for whom every show is played as if it might be his last.' In recent decades, Puterbaugh adds, 'Springsteen's music developed a conscience that didn't ignore the darkening of the runaway American Dream as the country greedily blundered its way through the 1980s' and into the sociocultural detritus of a new century paralysed by isolation and uncertainty. Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the Runaway American Dream reflects the significant critical interest in understanding Springsteen's resounding impact upon the ways in which we think and feel about politics, religion, gender, and the pursuit of the American Dream. By assembling a host of essays that engage in interdisciplinary commentary regarding one of Western culture's most enduring artistic and socially radicalizing phenomena, this book offers a cohesive, intellectual, and often entertaining introduction to the many ways in which Springsteen continues to impact our lives by challenging our minds through his lyrics and music.

PART I
“Land of Hope and Dreams”: Springsten’s Working-Class Heroes and the Search for American Identity

Chapter 1
“Darkness on the Edge of Town”: Springsteen, Richard Ford, and the American Dream

David N. Gellman

Introduction

A man makes his way northward on the New Jersey turnpike in his car; it is late at night and the lights of passing traffic blur into a tapestry of hypnotic motion: “Up ahead of me on the turnpike, blue lights flash far and near as I clear the toll plaza and start toward Cataret and the flaming refinery fields and cooling vats of Elizabeth” (Ford, Independence Day 175); the man contemplates relationships, complicated and unfulfilled. Later, on slightly less crowded roads, he finds himself checking into a hotel where a murder has just occurred. Another man, driving a stolen car, makes his way with his daughter and his girlfriend from Montana to Florida. Still another man, out of work, the day before the Fourth of July, contemplates why his wife, a waitress at a bar, has chosen to share his dead-end life; later, the couple wave sparklers in the backyard and dance in the rain. A boy, sixteen, discovers that a gulf between his own life and that of his parents has grown irreparably large—the boy learning that he can no longer count on or define himself according to his own father’s pain. It is the end of childhood, time to think about leaving home, to cast the past aside, though the storyteller is clearly marked by the memory of that moment when independence came not as choice but as a literal and a psychological necessity.

This kaleidoscope of themes, plots, and images are familiar parts of the Springsteen repertoire. Yet, they are drawn not from Springsteen’s work, but instead from a writer who is as accomplished in his field as Springsteen is in popular music. Richard Ford has published eight books of fiction. The most celebrated of these, Independence Day, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has garnered teaching appointments at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Ford, the traveling salesman’s son from Jackson, Mississippi, much like the bus driver’s son from Freehold, New Jersey, has lived out an artist’s version of the American dream (Walker, Richard Ford xi-xiii; Glynda Duncan 3).

Ford, like Springsteen, has created rich fictional worlds, in a variety of idioms, some spare and unsparing, some richly populated with personality and images (Walker, Ford 118). In both men’s work the idiosyncrasies of human frailty and big dreams of mobility are played out across a variety of American landscapes. Springsteen and Ford, each in his own way, subvert and render ironic as much as they affirm the American dream of fame, fortune, and independence, offering a wide array of characters whose lives are lived in the shadow of that dream.

An exploration of what these artists share and what they do not share in terms of imagery, sensibility, and character enhances our understanding of their work, showing how Springsteen is in dialogue with other important contemporary artists working in non-musical genres. The “darkness” that threatens to keep the American Dream permanently veiled from its aspirants has vexed Springsteen’s characters almost from the beginning in ways that seem to affirm, in his famous words from “No Surrender,” that you can learn “more from a three-minute record than [you] ever learned in school.” Ford, with the additional leeway afforded a novelist, explores the possibilities for rendering that darkness through a less time-constrained art form which allows him to expand the imagery and storylines of wanderers and dreamers in the promised land.

Taken together, their work constitutes an ongoing cultural conversation about generational conflict, class, law, and the symbols of American nationhood, in which Springsteen has become a major participant; so doing helps to highlight what is distinctive about Springsteen’s voice in a shared conversation. This essay will focus in particular on Springsteen’s and Ford’s use of Western landscapes and Independence Day metaphors. Each artist frequently accesses these landscapes and metaphors through narratives of father-son conflict.1 Such a comparison rescues Springsteen from the hagiography that critic A.O. Scott has noted marks much of even the most serious writing about him. Thus, we can more readily appreciate how Springsteen’s is a collaborative project in illuminating, through flashes of artistry, the darkness that forms the backdrop for even the most celebratory American imagery. Rather than emphasize Springsteen’s role as the torch-bearer for an “American Tradition” (Cullen; Garman, A Race of Singers), this approach highlights the imaginative projects Springsteen shares with one of his most accomplished literary contemporaries.2

Treating Springsteen as a literary artist is quite appropriate, even though such a move entails a certain amount of historical irony. In a classic 1970s stage monologue delivered in the midst of the song “Growin’ Up,” Bruce Springsteen spoke humorously of his parents’ career aspirations for their son—his father suggested lawyer, his mother author—but Bruce, launching back into the song commented “tonight, you’ll both just have to settle for rock and roll” (Live disc 1, track 7). A quarter of a century later, the notion of Springsteen as lawyer still seems humorously far-fetched, but Springsteen-as-author has gained tremendous currency. Looking at the body of his work, critics and admirers have compared or linked him to many non-guitar-slinging artists, from poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams to fiction-writers John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy (Garman, A Race of Singers; Coles 12-19, 22-28; Cullen 48-49; Sheehy; Crane 339). Springsteen’s own comments encourage this line of inquiry, as when he directs such interviewers as Will Percy and Nicholas Dawidoff to the sources of his own literary inspirations and the way in which he constructs stories. Moreover, in the introductory essays to his published anthology, Songs, Springsteen discusses how he intentionally and self-consciously sought to develop characters (25, 46, 68, 100, 190-91, 274; see also Frith 135). Springsteen placed these characters in a variety of American landscapes to explore intensely personal themes that also speak to the broader American and human condition of their times (Marsh, Glory Days 93-94). Bruce Springsteen is many things—performer, political activist, celebrity—and author.

Springsteen’s influence on other authors—including Ford—as well as filmmakers, is a matter of record (Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive 176-77), but should be treated as more than just so many feathers in the Boss’s cap. Ford has made no secret of his interest in Springsteen. In 1985 he published a thoughtful, largely laudatory appraisal of Bruce during the height of the Boss’s Born in the USA-era popularity. More to the point, Ford himself has indicated that the title and the rudiments of the plot of his masterpiece, Independence Day, derive from the Springsteen song of the same name. As Ford told Elinor Ann Walker in 1997, Springsteen’s “great song, ‘Independence Day,’ this great anthem to leaving home, was probably the first thing that moved me along the path to writing a novel called Independence Day. The title for my book comes as much from his song as all the other sources that name could come from.” (Walker, “Interview” 131-32 and Ford 22, 133, 203).

The question of influence, however, is at best only a departure point. Springsteen may at certain moments have inspired Ford, but he bears a different relationship to Ford’s prose than to Bobbie Ann Mason’s evocative and, from a distance of twenty years, eerily prescient In Country. In Mason’s 1985 novel, Springsteen and the album Born in the USA become virtual characters as the teenage protagonist Samantha explores the echoes of Vietnam, a foreign adventure with daunting domestic consequences. This essay is not about Springsteen as character, but rather about the character of a certain broad swathe of Springsteen’s work, and is thus first and foremost about dialogue. Richard Ford’s America and Bruce Springsteen’s America occupy overlapping actual and interpretive spaces. Both artists investigate the implications for the collective and individual psyche of inhabiting America in the late twentieth century (Guagliardo, “Introduction” xiii and “Marginal” 5, 22). Intentionally or coincidentally, they are in dialogue by virtue of working the same landscape so thoughtfully and reconfiguring the same historical allusions. Psychiatrist-author Robert Coles, scholar Daniel Cavicchi, and Springsteen himself all have expressed the importance of dialogue and communication not only amongst Springsteen fans, but also between performer and audience (see esp. Cavicchi 88-95). In this essay, the dialogue is between authors and their culture, mediated not by fans, but fictional characters. Often those characters travel the open roads of America, hoping to construct new lives or reconstruct old ones—the past, personal and collective alternately informing or obstructing them from reaching their own imperfectly imagined destinations.

Land of Hope and Dreams or Darkness on the Edge of Town?

Ford, a native southerner, and Jersey’s Springsteen have both turned to the American West in the quest for evocative landscapes that expand the scope of their work well beyond the narrowly biographical or the narrow confines of regionalism (Walker, Ford 13, 64-68; Walker, “Interview” 133-34; Hobson). Much of Ford’s best work is set in Montana. He presents Montana as a lonely, quiet landscape where violence, theft, and betrayal are not cowboy tales, but rather the combined product of calculation, impulse, and a psychological distance between would-be intimates that is mirrored in the distances between sparsely populated towns on the vast American plains (Walker, Ford 122). The stories collected in Ford’s Rock Springs explore the interior and exterior spaces of Western characters often hovering uncomfortably on the edges of towns like Rock Springs and Great Falls (Folks 143, 154). The narrators grapple with crimes, sometimes against property, sometimes against bodies, and sometimes against hearts and souls. The characters reflect with some detachment on their own lives, yet not without the ability to elicit reader empathy.

Earl, the narrator of Ford’s title story, shares many traits with Springsteen characters in such songs as “Stolen Car,” “Used Cars,” and, to a lesser degree, “Reason to Believe.” Earl has served time in jail for a petty theft, and has also written some bad checks. Loading his girlfriend Edna and young daughter Cheryl in a Mercedes, stolen from the parking lot of a Whitefish, Montana doctor, he makes his way to the outskirts of Rock Springs. He plans to dump the car, which turns out to have engine trouble, at the edge of town and lift another ride. Explaining his thinking in taking the Mercedes, Earl recounts, “I stole it because I thought it would be comfortable over a long haul, because I thought it got good mileage, which it didn’t, and because I’d never had a good car in my life …” (2). Rock Springs, the town on the edges of which the story takes place, contains a large corporate gold mining plant, bordered by a vast mobile home park for the laborers, a makeshift neighborhood that may or may not be rife with prostitution. Neither the riches of the mine nor the seedy vice draws in Earl. Instead, he takes Edna and Cheryl to what he deems to be a respectable Ramada Inn, so they can get food and rest while he plans his next theft. Edna announces her desire to abandon the journey, and the story closes with Earl prowling the parking lot. He asks:

And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? … Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you? (27)

Like the unnamed first-person narrator of Springsteen’s “Used Cars,” Earl is fully conscious of his class position as well as his personal failings. The gold, the Mercedes, let alone a sense of personal security, well-being, and self-esteem, all belong to anonymous others, not to Earl or, in the Springsteen song, the grown man remembering his childhood. The Mercedes is a means to an end—he really does want to drive to Florida—but it also represents an alternative identity and, as such, a measure of alienation as well; even having ditched the Mercedes, which turns out to be just another bad used car, Earl registers at the Ramada as an ophthalmologist, a “mister” even less likely to be riding around in a used car than the “mister” apostrophized in “Used Cars” (Leder, “Men with Women” 116; Garman, A Race of Singers 210).

The parallels between “Rock Springs” and Springsteen’s “Stolen Car” are even more evocative. Like “Rock Springs,” “Stolen Car” is narrated by a man whose romantic life is in tatters; the “little girl” with whom he “settled down / In a little house out on the edge of town” has repudiated their love. The “stolen car” in which each man drives represents a profound sense of fugitive dis-ease, a literal and figurative false front. Yet, ironically, Ford’s car thief and Springsteen’s car thief fear the very thing that makes it possible to get away with the crime—invisibility. Springsteen’s thief doesn’t fear arrest, but rather “That in this darkness I will disappear” (Cullen 171-72), a sharpening of the fear presented in “Fade Away,” the song which precedes “Stolen Car” on The River album. Ford’s character shares the same existential dread (Walker, Ford 132), wondering, ultimately, not so much whether he will get caught, but whether his fellow human beings could see his humanity at all. Ford’s ending is even more ambiguous than those of Springsteen’s “Stolen Car” and “Reason to Believe.” As in the latter song, the desperate situation “seemed funny,” yet it is hard to tell which would be worse for Earl—being perceived as wholly different (a car thief) from “you” or being essentially like “you,” someone who has to soldier on in the midst of personal crisis, in this case for the sake of his child.

Ford’s story “Sweethearts” creates a more optimistic effect while working with a similar mix of legal crimes and crimes of the heart as Springsteen’s work. A narrator named Russ describes the day he helps his girlfriend Arlene drive her ex-husband Bobby to the sheriff’s office, so that Bobby can commence a long jail sentence. Bobby, like Earl in “Rock Springs,” had written bad checks—in other words, he had committed the crime of imposture, pretending to be someone with money he didn’t have—but supplemented this crime with the armed robbery of a convenience store. Bobby’s bitterness is palpable but, in the story itself, contained to words. After a failed and relatively feeble attempt to bait his ex-wife into an argument, Bobby snaps, “I don’t know why people came out here. … The West is fucked up. It’s ruined. I wish somebody would take me away from here,” to which Arlene deadpans, “Somebody’s going to, I guess” (56). Bobby’s attempt to place his problems in a big frame doesn’t fly. “The West” had failed to deliver anything but failure to Bobby, but he can’t articulate why it should have been otherwise (Folks 145, 149). The grim awkwardness of an ex-wife, a daughter and a boyfriend taking Bobby to prison proceeds. This event occasions introspection, much of it unspoken, about the frailty of romantic relationships, culminating in Russ’s silent reflection “I knew, then, how you became a criminal in the world and lost it all. Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. … I knew what love was about. It was about not giving trouble or inviting it. It was about not leaving a woman for the thought of another one…. And it was not about being along. Never that. Never that” (Ford, Rock Springs 68).

In marked contrast to Russ, Sims, the protagonist in Ford’s story “Empire,” places himself exactly in the position Russ vows to avoid. The story is set in a train hurtling across the West and is told in the third person. Sims sneaks away from his wife and, after flirtatious rounds of drinks, has sex with another passenger, a female soldier looking for a good time. As he returns to his wife’s sleeping compartment, he reflects, “This can do it … this can finish you, this small thing.” The story ends with a poignant image:

Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around, as if stars held the only light. (148; Walker, Ford 129)

The grip of isolation, the fear of loneliness that Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh identifies as the principal quality and emotional fuel of Springsteen’s Nebraska album is enacted on Ford’s small stages nestled in a big country (Marsh, Glory Days 100; Cullen 1; Grondahl 66; Walker, Ford 100, 119). As Bobby in “Sweethearts” struggles to articulate, the West is not redeeming, but, for so many of Ford’s characters, and some of Springsteen’s, is a token of isolation, a portent of loneliness, experienced or avoided (Folks 143, 154). Although Springsteen’s most searching exploration of the loneliness are found on the Tunnel of Love album, it is Nebraska that first forthrightly confronts the concept that the unlimited space of America’s inland empire might not be quite the same thing as an empire of freedom (Marsh, Glory Days 133-39). In songs such as “Nebraska,” “Johnny 99,” and “Highway Patrolman,” Springsteen explores the problem posed by Ford’s Russ, “how you became a criminal in this world and lost it all.” Springsteen’s characters, like Ford’s, live in an empire where they exercise little power except to perpetrate, or permit, some chilling act of violence (Cullen 21; Walker, Ford 127).

The title song, “Nebraska,” follows the criminal journey across an explicitly Western landscape. The song heads into much darker places than Ford’s stories, recounting, as it does, the killing spree carried out by Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend from Lincoln all the way into the “badlands of Wyoming” and ultimately to the electric chair. “Johnny 99,” with its reference to Mahwah and a public defender, is ostensibly a modern New Jersey tale. Nonetheless, the song has the feel of an old-fashioned frontier drama, replete with the judge with the outsized personality, “Mean John Brown,” and a courtroom brawl. The electric chair imagery at the end substitutes for the noose of old. By contrast, Ford’s Western criminals in “Rock Springs” and “Sweethearts” are not hung at the end of rope or hooked up to a wire. In “Rock Springs,” Edna may cruelly tease car-thief and ex-con Earl about going to the chair, but neither they nor Ford really sees this as a destination for his crimes—even if he were to be seen r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Foreword by Howard Kramer
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “Dream Baby Dream”: Bruce Springsteen’s American Serenade
• PART I “LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS”: SPRINGSTEN’S WORKING-CLASS HEROES AND THE SEARCH FOR AMERICAN IDENTITY
• PART II “THERE’S A SADNESS HIDDEN IN THAT PRETTY FACE”: SPRINGSTEEN AND GENDER IDENTITY
• PART III “LOST IN THE FLOOD”: SPRINGSTEEN AND RELIGION
• PART IV “IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY”: SPRINGSTEEN, ETHICS, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
• Works Cited
• Index