Wild Child

 

by Roman Sympos

 

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Nebraska

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I saw her standin' on her front lawn
Just a twirlin' her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir
And ten innocent people died.

 

From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska,
With a sawed off 410 on my lap,
Through to the badlands of Wyoming,
I killed everything in my path.

 

I can't say that I'm sorry
For the things that we done,
At least for a little while, sir,
Me and her, we had us some fun.

 

Now the jury brought in a guilty verdict
And the judge he sentenced me to death:
Midnight in a prison storeroom
With leather straps across my chest.

 

Sheriff, when the man pulls that switch, sir
And snaps my poor head back,
You make sure my pretty baby
Is sittin' right there on my lap.

 

They declared me unfit to live,
Said into that great void, my soul'd be hurled.
They want to know why I did what I did.
Sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world.

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--Bruce Springsteen

 

 

A few days ago, three months after making its theater debut, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere appeared on Hulu. Based on Warren Zane’s book by the same name [1], it tells the story behind the composition of Nebraska, the singer-songwriter’s most personal, and anomalous, album.

 

Released on September 30, 1982, Nebraska marked a radical departure from Springsteen’s usual style of writing and performance, and a crisis point in his life and career. The album’s ten songs were recorded at home, on a cassette tape deck, with the composer accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. The cassette was meant to be a demo, a working template for the studio version. Despite efforts to make it suitable for performance by his E Street Band, however, Springsteen ended up releasing Nebraska bare and unadorned, its austere, raw-boned sound corresponding to the bleakness of its outlook on the working-class ruins of the American Dream, and on what had, by then, become the ruins of the singer-songwriter’s life.

 

Here’s a recording of the title song:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCpL_ImsiDo

 

After the success of his 1980 album, The River, Springsteen had become dissatisfied with the direction in which his career had taken him—away from, as he put it, “the people that I'd grown up around" (Zanes, p. 83). That included his father, a WW II veteran suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and medicating himself with alcohol. Alternating between bouts of abuse and tenderness, Douglas Springsteen had infused in his son an intense longing for affection from the one source that terrified him most. That longing had driven him almost to the pinnacle of success. Now, on the brink of achieving it, he felt himself blown sideways over the edge of a dark chasm.

 

Needless to say, the film, like the book, has a happy ending, personally and professionally. Springsteen undergoes therapy, is reconciled with his father, and becomes the colossal rock star we all know, love, and admire.

 

I didn’t know any of this when I first heard the album’s title song. I’ve always liked The Boss’s music, but I never became a fan. “Born to Run,” “Hungry Heart,” “Glory Days,” “Born in the USA”—the E Street Band hit parade, with its powerful back beat, gave me all I needed. I can’t even remember the details of my first encounter with “Nebraska.” I was just following my search engine through a maze of folk and blues songs, looking for material for EN 220, an introductory course on poetry. The syllabus included a class on the dramatic monologue.

 

In its purest form, the dramatic monologue reads exactly like what its name implies: a speech by a dramatic character extracted from the scene of a play. What makes it dramatic, first of all, is the poet’s adopting a persona that “masks” their real identity [2], and secondly, the implied presence of another character, an on-stage addressee or interlocutor, whose words or gestures or behavior in response to the speaker are never included verbatim in the poem but only implied by what the speaker says. Even if no responses are forthcoming, the mere presence of an implied addressee can affect how the persona shapes their speech, often revealing depths of character and motivation of which the speaker seems unaware.

 

The presence of a second character who’s directly addressed is also what distinguishes the dramatic monologue from a soliloquy, which is always spoken by a character alone on stage, or speaking sub rosa in the presence of others, or directly addressing the audience. Nearly all lyric poetry is, in this sense, soliloquy. [3]

 

By these criteria, “Nebraska” is clearly a dramatic monologue. It’s spoken in the voice of Charles Starkweather, who, in 1959 and accompanied by his teen-aged girlfriend, Caril Fugate, killed “ten innocent people,” including Fugate’s stepfather, on a spree that extended from Lincoln, Nebraska to Douglas, Wyoming.

 

Springsteen was moved to write “Nebraska,” the album’s title song, after seeing the movie Badlands, which was based on the Starkweather case. Springsteen told Zanes that he identified with Starkweather because, like him, he’d led an undisciplined life as a young child, when he lived with his grandparents. To hear him tell it, he became something of a feral child. “It destroyed me and it made me,” he told Zanes (p. 132). I think we can also assume that the suppressed rage Springsteen felt toward the man who brutalized and nurtured him by turns from the age of seven must have played a part in his fascination with Starkweather. At one point, the boy attacked his father with a baseball bat.

 

Springsteen’s identification with his song’s protagonist sheds light on why “Nebraska,” which started out as a ballad referring to the eighteen year old serial killer in the third person, was at some point changed to a first-person narrative, a dramatic monologue in which Starkweather became Springsteen’s persona and the singer-songwriter’s voice the killer’s. Starkweather’s interlocutor? The Sheriff, addressed as “Sir,” standing nearby.

 

Once I made it required reading for EN 220, “Nebraska” did what I asked for many years. In fact, more than I asked. The difference between melodic rhythm and the steady beat of meter, for instance, is easier to recognize in a sung performance than in printed lines on a page. The importance of setting, too, is magnified in “Nebraska,” where Starkweather’s monologue is spoken, apparently, on death row.  

 

One thing that almost consistently escaped my students’ notice, however, was the obscene irony of two particular lines: “You make sure my pretty baby/ Is sittin' right there on my lap.” [4] I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of students who got the speaker’s sick joke without a prompt. Most of the others needed to be reminded that, unlike Starkweather, Caril Fugate, his baton-twirling helpmate, got off with a life sentence instead of death in the electric chair. Anyone still in the dark saw the light when I asked, “What would happen to Fugate if she sat in her lover-boy’s lap while 2,500 volts of electricity went coursing through his body?” I’m indebted to one of them for pointing out that another thing Starweather’s holding on his lap, in the second stanza, is a .410 gauge sawed-off shotgun. (The phallic symbolism required no elaboration.)

 

Sitting down to watch the film on Netflix, I was eager to see how Scott Cooper, the director, would handle the composition of the album’s title song, and in particular, if he’d do anything with those two particular lines. However, in the only scene where we see and hear Springsteen singing “Nebraska,” they seemed to be missing.

 

Thus, I was doubly puzzled, and intrigued, by the movie’s penultimate scene, in which, following a performance at the Meadowlands ten months after beginning therapy, Springsteen finds his father sitting on a chair waiting for him in a backstage locker room. Douglas Springsteen, played to perfection by Stephen Graham, asks Springsteen to sit on his lap. And he does. And they embrace.

 

Did this really happen? I wondered. And so soon after Springsteen wrote those two sarcastic lines? What are the odds?

 

Whatever they are, yes, it did happen.

 

But what did it mean? Artistically, that is, and not to Bruce Springsteen, who composed “Nebraska” more than a year before the incident occurred. What did it mean to Scott Cooper?

 

My surprise sent me back to the scene where Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame, sings “Nebraska.” It’s set in the bedroom where he’s recording the song.

 

I noticed then that the lines in question disappear from the sound track just as the camera cuts from White (who, in a cinematic tour de force, sang Springsteen’s material in his own voice) to a flashback of another real-life event, young Bruce accompanying his father to a movie matinee of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, which has had a major impact on his life and work (Zanes, p.107) [5] The film, released in 1955, stars Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, a tent-preaching con artist who marries and murders a widow for her husband’s money and then, after her death, terrorizes his young stepson to reveal its whereabouts. It’s one of Mitchum’s most iconic and disturbing roles.

 

Specifically, the lines “You make sure my pretty baby/ Is sittin' right there on my lap” vanish from Cooper’s musical soundtrack just as Powell holds a switchblade up to his stepson’s face and says, “Speak or I’ll cut your throat like a hog hung up in butchering time!”

 

Or they seem to vanish.

 

I noticed, this time around, that the music didn’t disappear, just the lyrics. I listened more carefully and . . . there they were, barely discernible, struggling for breath under the weight of Mitchum’s imperative to speak.

 

Scott Cooper not only directed Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, but also wrote the screenplay, so I can only assume this neat bit of sound engineering was his idea, whether he wrote it into the script or had a sudden inspiration in the remixing room. Whatever the case, it amounts to a critical reflection on Springsteen’s conflicted relationship to his father, drawing a direct connection between the singer’s lap-sitting encounter with Douglas Springsteen at the Meadowlands and Starkweather’s desire to have his teen-aged accomplice die with him, in his embrace.

 

But what is Cooper saying by making this connection? And why does he make it so difficult to detect?

 

Trying to answer these two questions leads to more questions.

 

Is Cooper saying Starkweather represents Bruce’s father? If so, is Bruce “my pretty baby,” a phrase that, as it stands, is ungendered? But what then becomes of Bruce’s identification with Starkweather, wearing his mask, ventriloquizing his voice?

 

Does the punishing stepfather, Harry Powell, represent the violent Douglas Springsteen, who seems to take the place of the loving and caring Douglas, the “real” father, randomly and without warning in the boy’s daily life?  If so, how does the stepfather’s command to “Speak or I’ll cut your throat”—that is, prevent the boy from speaking at all, or ever—fit in?

 

Is Cooper smothering the relevant lines from “Nebraska” to symbolize the adult Springsteen’s suppression of what they might mean to him? As a soto voce directorial commentary on what the boy experienced when he saw this terrifying scene from The Night of the Hunter? As a kind of secret handshake or wink-and-a-nod to Springsteen’s most loyal fans, who’d immediately recognize, without having to hear it clearly, what the sound engineer had suppressed at this salient point in the movie? Is it, in other words, a gesture of fan solidarity?

 

I don’t think we can go to Cooper for the answers. I doubt that he has them, and for that he’s not to blame. Artists are the least reliable expositors of their own work, not because they don’t know what they meant to say, but because their songs, symphonies, poems, plays, movies, novels, paintings, and sculptures mean so much more than what they meant to say. The greatest of them know that, even rely on that.

 

Here’s a start: “The child is father of the man.” William Wordsworth wrote that line in 1802, in a poem called “My Heart Leaps Up.” It sounds paradoxical but makes sense the more you think about it, especially as applied to Springsteen’s life.

 

Follow the logic:

 

The boy I once was made me (“fathered”) the adult I am.

My father made me the boy I was.

I am my father.

 

Charles Starkweather is Bruce Springsteen.

Charles Starkweather is Douglas Springsteen.

Charles Starkweather is the wild child who grew up to be the wild man, the man “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen.

Charles Starkweather is the wild man Douglas Springsteen, whose embrace is fatal.

 

“Speak!” says the wild man, holding his knife to the boy’s throat. Speak now, while you can save yourself. Or I’ll leave you speechless for the rest of your life.

 

I leave it to my readers to take it from there.  

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Notes

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1. All references to Zanes's book come from Warren Zanes, Deliver Me From Nowhere (New York: Crown, 2023), by far the most complete and detailed analysis of Nebraska and of its meaning in Springsteen's life. 

 

2. "Persona" derives from the Latin personare ("to sound through") and originally referred to the masks worn by Roman actors in theatrical performances.

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3. John Stuart Mill, in "What is Poetry?" even went so far as to say that all good poetry was of the nature of soliloquy. All the rest was mere "rhetoric."

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4. The lines are based on a real request from Starkweather: "When I go to the electric chair, I want Caril Fugate sitting right there on my lap" (Zanes, p. 126).

 

5. See also Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016) and Springsteen's interview with Ben Mankiewicz on the Turner Classic Movies, which aired November 2, 2023, discussing the formative movies in his life. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DQXhIqCjaUr/

 

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