Deliver Me from Nowhere: Oedipal issues can be addressed - but are they ever resolved?

 Deliver Me from Nowhere, Springsteen, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nebraska, Springsteen on Broadway, Oedipal resolution

Bruce Springsteen was a legendary figure in the middle 1980s.  I did not have the wherewithal at that point to spend much money on records or concerts, but many of my friends who did were avid fans.  He was rumored to be the hardest working rock star ever, and the length and energy of his shows was unparalleled.  I did manage to scrape up enough cash to see John Cougar Mellankamp in concert, rumored to be the second-best show at that point, and even in my nosebleed seats, I found that quite enthralling, so when friends would talk about going to Springsteen concerts, I took vicarious pleasure in their experiences.

Ten years ago, I took my son and one of his friends to baseball camp in Florida.  His friend was into Springsteen, so we listened to the Springsteen station on Sirius FM on the way down and back.  I was familiar with most of the songs – and they seemed mostly to be played from recorded concerts – so they were his big hits.  I saw and wrote about his Netflix special Springsteen on Broadway, but that left me with more questions than answers.  So, when the buzz started about this film, I purposely avoided learning much about it – I knew that it starred Jeremy Allen White (whom I enjoyed in The Bear), and that Springsteen himself had had a hand in it. 

I expected that it would be a bio pic in the style of Elvis, A Complete Unknown (about Dylan), Walk the Line (a film about Johnny Cash), Ray (about Ray Charles) or even Maestro (the biopic about Leonard Bernstein), all films I have seen and enjoyed, and each of which follows a familiar arc with a smattering of material about the family of origin, the grind to get from there to the top of the heap and then some material about their fall from grace – interspersed with a good impersonations of the singing and the singer (or conductor) nicely fleshing out the story.  There are variations, but they follow a general outline.

I was unprepared, then, for a film that looked closely at a critical moment in a career – Oh, it included a couple of impersonation moments of the star as a star, but mostly it looked at a crisis – a crisis that occurs after the beginnings of stardom – and one that, instead of derailing the star, propels the second half of his career.  More importantly, I was completely unprepared for my emotional reaction to the film.  I cried like a baby throughout this film (and because it was so emotionally moving), I may not be able to veridically describe it.

To be fair, my family jokes that I cry at Coke commercials.  And I do.  But the quality of this crying was different – I was not just moved by the performance or the story, but both together created a cathartic level experience in me – much like Aristotle’s description of the impact of Greek tragedy on the viewer.  The tragic element here was not; however, in the Greek tradition of something that causes the hero to fail, but this element drives the hero to appear to succeed, when, in fact, he is never quite going to achieve what it is that he is looking for.  The goal for Springsteen, at least as told in Springsteen on Broadway, will always lie just out of reach, so he will keep reaching for it, and this will account for his continuing success.

This movie, then, is about the creation of a weird and off brand album – Nebraska.  I was beginning graduate school when it was released and there was a certain mystique about the album.  It was dark and folksy, and, frankly, to my ear, monotonous.  It was seen by my friends as a break from his more commercial work and a sign that he was a true artist.  Watching the film, I realized that I must have listened to the album at some point because I was familiar with so many of the songs, but I do not remember spending much, if any time, with it.  It was, in a very important sense, forgettable.

This movie presents that album, instead, as pivotal.  On a very surface layer, it was.  Springsteen held hostage the record executives who wanted him to keep playing with the E Street Band and churn out hit after hit.  He insisted that they release this bleak recording made on a cassette tape of his playing an acoustic guitar and singing mournful tunes as a commercial record.  Thanks, in part, to the support of his agent, he was able to make them cave so that he could establish himself as an artist.  Not just by throwing a tantrum and having thus gotten his way, but by having this dreary bit of singing hitting enough of a cord with enough people that even without it being hyped, it became an underground hit.  Point made: I know what I am doing as an “artist”; a concept that seems to be in tension with the persona of the rock and roller from Freehold, New Jersey who plays good, danceable music.

But the pivot it portrays runs much deeper than that.  In Springsteen on Broadway, Springsteen portrays himself as a huckster – someone who is telling other people’s stories that are not really his own.  The title track (the album was recorded in a rental house in New Jersey, not, as I was led to believe, in a motel in Nebraska) is a first person account of the psychopath Charles Starkweather, the heartless murderer played by a young Charlie Sheen in the film Badlands.  This haunting song is about a man who feels no guilt, but it seems to me that that is a wished-for state.  The feel of the song evokes a deep, dark kind of despair – a despair that springs, according to this film, from two sources.

The first and most obvious source of Springsteen’s despair is his relationship with his alcohol sodden and cruelly abusive father.  If only he could not feel.  But he does.  He feels, I think, I deeply sorry for his father – deeply sorry that he can’t change the way that his father feels.  I think this is a particular kind of guilt.  Most of the guilt that I feel is a very selfish sort of guilt.  I generally am a very guilty person, but the guilt I feel is for not living up to the version of myself that I should be.  I should have done better, but I didn’t and so you have to suffer.  But your suffering is the side show.  The center of my guilt is perhaps better understood as shame.  I failed to be the person that I expected myself to be.

Now there is a fair amount of shame that I am imagining Springsteen feels about his failure to make his father feel better.  If he were a better son, as it were, his father wouldn’t drink.  But there is another layer to it.  His father’s drinking – his father’s attacks on his mother and on himself – enrage him.  And he wants to kill his father – both to protect his mother, but also to put his father out of his misery – because his father, he suspects – even knows – is miserable.  He feels guilty for his murderous impulse – and wishes that he could have that impulse without the guilt – that he could carry it out as effortlessly as Charles Starkweather kills his victims.

The other part of his guilt, I believe, has to do with his own inability to be better than his father.  He is no more capable of committing to the relationship with Faye, the younger sister of a friend from High School, who is a fan and the mother of a young child from a previous relationship, than his father was able to commit to caring for the young Springsteen and his mother.  In my imagination, like his father, Springsteen desperately wants to do this – or at least to be untroubled by his need to have more than fun with Faye – so he writes with envy about being Starkweather – about being able to not feel anything but fun in his relationships with the important people in his life, and to be unaware that he is ruining their lives by not being able to commit to them.

Springsteen’s confrontation with the ghost of his father and with his own inabilities in the relationship with Faye lead him into a very dark place.  His agent recognizes the soundtrack as a symptom of that darkness, and he realizes that he is in over his head in terms of his ability to help him, so he refers him for psychoanalytic help. 

The film fast forwards from his first meeting with his analyst to ten months later.  Springsteen has just completed a successful set on tour and is meeting with his parents backstage after the show.  There is a tender interchange with his father – and the implication, at least to this viewer, is that the effort that he pours into each performance – the care that he puts into the creation of the impersonations of others – is driven by both a desire to make his Daddy happy and also by a desire to create in the minds of the audience the experience of being with the person he would like to be rather than the person that he fears himself to be; he wants them to imagine him as someone who is reliably there for them.

In Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce acknowledges that the moment portrayed in this film when he enters into treatment with an analyst has extended into a relationship that has continued for at least the next 25 years.  I can’t pretend to know what went on in those conversations.  I can only report on the experience I had watching the film – part of which I have related above.  So, if you want to call this projection, I will not be able to contradict you.  Whether it is accurate is, as it were, up to the boss (I know he hates that nickname, but it seemed to work in the sentence).  But it is also up to you – whether you felt something similar as the events of this moment in his life paraded across the screen.

I think that Springsteen imagined himself to have the power to fix his father.  More centrally, I think he felt guilty for not having been enough – for his presence not being a joy – that it was, instead, a burden.  In addition to feeling guilty – and fearful that this was the case, I imagine that he was furious at not being recognized as the brilliant child – the gift – that he was.  The gift that all children should experience themselves as being.  In the novel The Great Gatsby, which I am currently reading, Gatsby imagines himself, when he is a child, to be a God.  For Gatsby, he is ashamed of his very limited parents.

Certainly, Springsteen would have been ashamed as well – so he hides the aspects of himself that he is ashamed of.  This film is about the beginning of the process of coming to grips with his shame, his anger, his guilt, and his anxiety about the ways in which his relationship with his father pointed out all the ways in which he was not a gift – he was not a God.  To become a rock star is to be treated like a God.  To remain balanced and humble in the midst of the adulations of thousands or even millions demands a reckoning with the parts of oneself that are mortal and fallible. 

Nebraska was, then, not the ego piece of a Diva, but, instead, the acknowledgement of a genuinely troubled soul.  To cut and perform Born in the USA, which he had already written, an upbeat anthem intended to both stir stadium sized crowds, but also to give voice to people who were not him, Springsteen chose to explore who he actually is and who he would like to be, including being ashamed of wanting to be the people that he is and cannot be. 

I think that the lesson that comes out of this movie is that, if we are to surpass our fathers, we need to know that when we do, we are not better than they are – we are made of the same stuff.  And what we need from them is what they needed from their fathers; validation and attunement.  In the dressing room, Springsteen asks to sit on his Daddy’s lap – and his father suggests that he do that just as he did as a little boy.  Springsteen clarifies that he has never befoe had a seat on his father’s lap. 

As angry as we are with our fathers for having wounded us, as guilty as we are for not having healed their wounds, and as anxious as we are about exposing ourselves to being wounded again, we still need that adulation.  Springsteen asks for it from his Daddy, but also from his audience.  He deeply needs to be validated.  Fortunately for us, he recognizes that this validation will come when he performs optimally.  He has come to some sort of peace with his need to surpass and still be connected with the man who bore and disappointed him.

 

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