The Politics of Springsteen’s Nebraska and the Film About It
This is an excerpt from Greil Marcus’ Substack. We encourage you to read the entire piece.
I found myself irritated and dumbfounded that out of all the fulsome discussion of the film, except for a line at the end of the always incisive Richard Brody’s review in the New Yorker, and, yesterday, Carl Wilson at the end of his Slate review, it was being taken as solely a picture about a personal crisis, when at the time, in 1982, the Nebraska album seemed so plainly a matter of a person addressing himself to a social and political crisis, and trying to paint a picture of a nation whose cords were fraying, or being ripped up and out as a social and political project.
So here, from the moment, is how it looked then. . , how it looked to me:
. . . Nebraska (CBS)—recorded last January in Springsteen’s New Jersey living room with acoustic guitar and harmonica, with a bit of synthesizer and an occasional backing vocal added later—is the most complete and probably the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s USA has yet elicited, from any artist or any politician.
Because Springsteen is an artist and not a politician, his resistance is couched in terms of the bleakest acceptance, his refusal presented as a refusal that does not know itself. There isn’t a trace of rhetoric, not a moment of polemic; politics are buried deep in stories of individuals who make up a nation only when their stories are heard together. . . .
The people we meet on Nebraska—the mass killer Charley Starkweather; a cop who lets his brother escape after a barroom killing; the kid who watches his father patronized by a used-car salesman; the man who loses his job, gets drunk, shoots a night clerk, is given life, and begs for death; the man who discards his beliefs and goes to work for the Mob; the mill workers who’ve grown up in the glow of the mill owner’s mansion—cannot give their lives a public dimension, because they are alone; because in a world in which men and women are mere social and economic functions, every man and woman is separated from every other. . . .
The countless details of craft and compassion that underlie this album portray a world of desperately meaningless killings and state executions, a world in which honest work has been trivialized and honest goals reduced to a bet on the state-run lottery, in which the rich live as a different species, so far above the aspirations of ordinary people as to seem like gods. And it is a world in which blind faith in America, the subject of Springsteen’s brutally sardonic “Reason to Believe,” the last word of Nebraska, has become the cruelest ruse: the belief of a man standing over a dead dog that “if he stood there long enough/That dog’d get up and run.”
The only acts of rebellion presented on Nebraska have to do with murder. They are nihilistic acts committed by men in a world in which social and economic functions have become the measure of all things and have dissolved all other values. In that context, these acts make sense. And that is the burden of Nebraska.