Tremendulent!

I mentioned that we saw Deliver Me from Nowhere, but I didn't have time to get into my thoughts on it, so here are some.

"One of the things that confuses me about this film," D said in his review, "is who it's for, other than cosmolinguist." And I can't help him there, but it definitely is for me. It takes place around the time I'm being born, only a few years before this man would become my favorite musician (I was about three when I could locate and play "Born in the U.S.A." from my dad's record collection, holding the LP carefully and putting the needle down in a way that wouldn't scratch it).

I love that it's about men and masculinity in a way you don't normally see them: I love how the relationship between Springsteen and Landau is portrayed, it's intense and it's emotionally savvy. I don't love the way that women are such secondary characters in this movie that I don't even know Mrs. Landau's name, but I also love the way Jon came home at the end of some of these difficult work days and talked to her about Springsteen's big ugly feelings that were driving the direction his work and life was taking at that point.

I love that the single-mother girlfriend -- who as I suspected was a conglomeration of multiple real-life people -- seemed to confront him with the force of all those real women when he told her he was leaving for California: he's messed up and he's stuck and he seems unwilling to do anything about that. (The road trip and arrival in California shift the dial more toward "unable," but you can't blame this woman for assuming it's "unwilling"; this is clearly not her first experience of young men disappointing her.)

I feel weird because I'm the biggest Springsteen fan any of my friends know with one or two possible exceptions -- more than one person has told me they're relying on me to let them know whether the movie is worth seeing or not -- but compared to the real devotees I am barely a casual fan -- I've only seen him once and not until last year! A lot of my favorite songs are older than me, or close to it, so I have absorbed them in that contextless all-at-once haphazard way that culture is, without time to spread it out or an expert to steer you in it. Born in the U.S.A. rocketed Springsteen from success to superstardom, and my dad was apparently part of that wave because he had that record and no others. I found it on my own, noticed Springsteen's songs on the radio on my own, re-discovered him (after a teenage period of being mortified that I'd ever loved music so uncool as to turn up on classic-rock stations) with "The Ghost of Tom Joad" on my own...

I say all that to say that I'd never realized how entangled Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. are as albums. I liked that the movie portrayed them as so intimately bound up together. We couldn't have had the stadium-filling without the bedroom-recorded demos that were never meant to be heard by anyone else. That really struck me: a lot of my younger years were about me trying to skip the weird confusing maybe-ugly fixations of my brain and heart, I wanted to get right to the likeable if not successful bits. But of course you can't do that. The only way to the cool successful thing might be through the ugly private things.

And you don't have to; the weird confusing ugly stuff might be able to be loved too.

I want to talk about Frankenstein and Breaking the Code too, but this is probably enough for today.