PAW Goes to the Movies: Sociologist Mitchell Duneier Watches ‘Springsteen’

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska was a stark departure from the raucous sounds that had made him a star. The struggle to make Nebraska forms the center of the new movie, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White and directed by Scott Cooper.

In the latest installment of PAW Goes to the Movies, senior writer Mark F. Bernstein ’83 went to see the film with Mitchell Duneier, the Gerard Andlinger Professor of Sociology and chair of the department. A certified Springsteen buff who has seen The Boss in concert more than 100 times, Duneier teaches the popular course, Sociology from E-Street: Bruce Springsteen’s America, and has written about him in the New York Times and elsewhere.

What did you think of the film?

It was wonderful. It’s officially based on Warren Zanes’ book about the making of Nebraska, but when I read Zanes I thought to myself, “I don’t know how they’re gonna make a movie out of this book.” Zanes gets deep into technical details — he does a great job of explaining how Nebraska was released at the exact moment the industry was pivoting to digital, to compact discs, and how the engineers were obsessed with getting everything perfect for that format while Springsteen was forcing them to release this raw, noisy, non-commercial album that he recorded on a cassette in his bedroom.

So, when I first got to the theater, I was totally blown away when the movie starts with a black and white image of a 7-year-old Bruce in his tiny room in Freehold, New Jersey, anticipating a violent episode with his father. This was nowhere in Zanes’ book. Then they cut to him standing in front of an arena on the last show of his tour for The River.

For readers who may not know Nebraska, what kind of album is it?

Nebraska is incredibly stark — it was recorded on a four-track in Springsteen’s bedroom, basically. Just him and an acoustic guitar. After the huge success of The River, which was a two-record set with the full E Street Band, this was something completely different.

What did you think of Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of The Boss?

All the emphasis on Jeremy Allen White has distracted from the real strength of the film, which is Stephen Graham’s performance as Springsteen’s father, Doug. Those black and white scenes are the heart of the movie, and they come from a different source than Zanes’ book. They’ve used Springsteen’s autobiography as a significant basis for this film, though it’s not credited. They presumably had to get life rights or permission from him. This film is about much more than just the making of Nebraska. It’s about Springsteen’s struggles with depression, his father’s struggles with depression, and what it meant for them each to deal with that (or not) at different moments. Bruce’s relationship with his father has been central to his music and career.

Some have argued that that Nebraska was Springsteen’s response to Ronald Reagan. Do you buy that?

I have never bought that. The title track is based on a 1973 movie about a cold-blooded murder spree that took place in 1958. Springsteen watched the film in the ’80s. I asked my students to do a counterfactual: If Jimmy Carter had been reelected, do you think Bruce Springsteen would not have released this album? Of course he would have.

I see these songs as connected with a longer arc of American history, not simply the Reagan era. You could argue Nebraska captured the mood of the country in 1982, but all of the songs would have made sense in the Carter years. Springsteen wasn’t as political at that stage of his career. There’s a tendency to read his politics back then through the lens of his politics today, which makes such a claim seem even more reasonable now than it did to me at the time.

I wasn’t aware that Springsteen wrote Nebraska at the same time he wrote his next album, Born in the U.S.A., which was much different stylistically and much more commercially successful. Was that accurate?

Until I read the Zanes’ book, I was not aware of the fact that Born in the U.S.A. and Nebraska come out of the same exact period. The story that’s being told by this film is that Springsteen kind of needed to do this. He needed to put out Nebraska before he could move on to the next stage of his career. He needed this for his own psychological, emotional reasons. He was afraid of the next moment, of the superstardom that was to come after The River. Without doing this less commercial album, he could not have moved on to the kinds of songs that were the basis of Born in the U.S.A., even though he had made them at the same time.

How historically accurate was the film, then?

Aside from a few quibbles, it’s extremely accurate — the opposite of the recent film about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, where they took a lot of liberties. There’s only one place where I felt they didn’t keep to the story: Springsteen’s relationship with CBS Records. That scene where the executive first hears Nebraska and says, “Turn it off, I’ve had enough” — I believe that happened. But from Zanes’ book, we learn that the record company was phenomenal. They appreciated what it meant to have Bruce Springsteen on their label and they did everything they could to support the album in the ways that Springsteen wanted.

You’ve been to more than 100 Springsteen concerts. What drew you to his music initially?

When I was in college at Northwestern, I listened to Bruce Springsteen at the same moment I became interested in sociology. I wasn’t drawn to sociology by politics — I was drawn by things like feeling lonely, wanting to figure out what friendship is, wanting to understand what binds people together in groups and communities. I got that in The River. Those were the same things that interested me about sociology.

Interview conducted and condensed by M.F.B.