Senhsucht. "How we were” (The Way We Were, 1973) by Sidney pollack it's a'work done in capturing the sense of nostalgia and the return of the lost time in people's lives. To success contributes the Redford-Streisand couple, which conveys a feeling melancholy towards a irrecoverable world: more stable, more coherent, more integral. In its presence the present appare disconnected.
It's not just memory: it's perdita, an sweet pain that the German word Sehnsucht expresses with rare precision. The film not only represents the Sehnsucht of the protagonists, but also arouses it in the viewer.
The story of Katie and Hubbell – she idealistic, he disenchanted – invites us to reflect on how the past would not be never finished, but rumbles in the present as persistent echo di regret e perdita.
Another film, totally different, to equally give back the sense deep of the Sehnsucht, is "Once Upon a Time in Americaa” (1984) by Sergio Leone, where for Noodles the past is redemption e condemnation.
Ten years earlier, in 1974, Ettore Scola had explored similar themes in “We were so loved", with a cast of exception: Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Stefano Satta Flores, Stefania Sandrelli.
But if in “The Way We Were” the past is a sweet and poignant memory, in “Springsteen – Free Me From Nothing"The past è wound: weight, anger, pain to cross. It is challenge that terrifies and frees it.
The film breaks completely from the canons of the traditional biopic and shows how genuinely creative moments blossom from an honest and radical confrontation with one's own experiences.
"Free Me from Nothingness" engages and invites reflection on this inescapable need to open ourselves to the new, to grow, and, why not?, to free ourselves. Even from nothingness, because the past, in effect, no longer exists.
The title
The first thing that struck me about “Deliver Me from Nowhere” was the title itself: so elusive that it forced me to turn around every time, invariably followed by an “Ahhh, that one?”
Even the original title, with a more redeeming nuance, remains difficult to remember, as if director Scott Cooper and the production wanted to distance themselves from the Hollywood biopic and maintain a strong link with the book.
The film is in fact based on the book Deliver Me from Nothingness. Bruce Springsteen and "Nebraska" by Warren Zanes, an author who knows Springsteen the man and artist very well, having shared the stage with him as guitarist of Del Fuegos.
This title, so uncinematic, similar to that of Terrence Mallick's films, reconstructs a precise segment of Bruce Springsteen's life: the genesis of Nebraska, a decisive artistic and existential experience.
The film finds its strength in the two main actors: Jeremy Allen White (Bruce), already a neurotic chef in “The Bear”, and Stephen Graham in the role of the father Doug, already in that role in the miniseries “Adolescence”..
The hole in the floor
When does work begin on Nebraska (1982), Springsteen has already achieved success with The River and, in an ideal continuity, it should lead to Born in the USA. Instead comes an album of dark, chilling, intimate, desperate ballads.
In reality, the artist feels disconnected, empty, separated. Fame doesn't fill the void left by unhealed wounds, by unspoken words. He should have "said so many things, so many more," but he hasn't had a voice, not even a whisper.
“I write to fill a void,” says Bruce. That void is the unresolved: his relationship with his father, Doug, which crushes him and leaves him speechless, incapable of moving forward and loving. “I know who you are,” says the car salesman. “Lucky you know,” replies Bruce.
The film features black-and-white inserts, almost out of context, showing Springsteen as a child next to his father: a man hardened by work, unfulfilled, at times violent, incapable of expressing affection or receiving it.
Bruce fears he looks like him. It will be the work on Nebraska to lead him back to his father: improvised recordings in the bedroom, voice and guitar, notes in spiral notebooks, stories of desperate people and losers.
“When Bruce was little, there was a hole in his bedroom floor… What he does with this album is fix that hole, a hole inside him,” says Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer and mentor, in the film’s trailer.
Through Nebraska Bruce reconnects with his family history and rediscovers a love he'd never been able to give or receive. Music becomes a bridge to a distant father, finally recognized in his vulnerability.
He defends the album from the record companies with determination and even ferocity: the sound must remain that of the cassettes he recorded, without intervention, without promotion, without touring, without press. Only his music will have a voice.
At this point it can really be born Born in the USAThe hole has filled with new content: progressive, propulsive, constructive. It's possible to move forward, in life and in music.
Nostalgia or regrets?
There is a poorly concealed nostalgia in the air today for how we wereA cohesive and recognizable community, families with defined roles, and a stable workforce. Social mobility, of course, but also permanent jobs, factories, and clear identities.
Bruce's family largely reflected this model: they lived in Freehold Borough, a small white working-class community in New Jersey, made up of workers, employees, and Catholic families of European origin.
The Springsteens were also Catholic, of Italian-Irish descent. Bruce attended religious schools, his father had blue-collar jobs, his mother worked in an insurance company, and he raised two sisters.
A traditional family, in many ways—and perhaps the term "patriarchal" isn't out of place here. The imposing figure dominating the house was, in fact, the father, a towering and looming presence.
Yet, as someone has acutely observed, all this apparent solidity did not prevent the young Bruce from slipping into neurosis, anger, silent desperation that Nebraska he would later report it.
Going back to "the way we were" isn't a panacea. Perhaps it's just a sweet illusion that reassures, softens, and numbs. But it's also understandable that this narrative finds space in our time, so desperate for direction.
Doug, my father
The figure of Doug Springsteen complicates this narrative scenario and almost becomes the precursor to the identity crisis of the white-collar worker: unstable or non-existent job, addictions, social alienation, a sense of uprootedness.
From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, throughout Bruce's childhood, Doug held a variety of jobs: truck driver, carpet factory worker in Freehold, and laborer at the nearby Ford plant.
These were jobs nostalgically celebrated as noble and emancipatory, jobs that produced tangible value and that, when he managed to maintain them, allowed him to guarantee his family a modest but real security.
It wasn't prosperity, but something dignified. Yet Doug felt unfulfilled: he became angry, withdrawn, defeated, just like so many men of the same social class today.
An alcoholic and prone to violent outbursts of anger, he led an isolated, friendless life; in one particularly poignant scene, he breaks down in tears in front of his son, confessing that he has no one to talk to.
At home, he spent his evenings at the kitchen table with a six-pack of beer, brooding late into the night. Other times, he would explode in fits of rage, which would unleash on his wife.
Once, Bruce, still a child, hit him on the back with a baseball bat to prevent him from hurting her: a desperate act that would scar them both and keep them apart for years.
Get out of here
In the song Adam Raised a Cain, Bruce remembers those moments:
Dad worked all his life and got nothing but pain from it.
Now he walks through these empty rooms looking for something to blame.
Father and son remained distant for years. Only when Doug agreed to treatment for his mental illness did they reconcile, and the film portrays the moment as a yearning and, finally, with a touching scene.
Bringing families back to how they were, bringing factories back home, halting deindustrialization: will it really save us from national neurosis by restoring dignity to those who have lost it? Who knows? Let's leave it to Bruce to tell us:
Factory
At dawn the siren tears away sleep;
A man gets up and dresses in the darkness.
Through the rooms of fear, through the corridors of pain,
I see my father walking in the rain towards the factory gates.
The factory eats away his hearing, the factory gives him something to breathe.
At the end of their shift, the men leave those gates with death in their eyes.
And believe me, boy:
Someone won't be able to bear the weight tonight.
It's always the same story:
Work that tightens, work that saves.
Run away from here [boy].
It's work, work: just a lifetime of work.
Enjoy! Still in theaters, probably on Sky/Now TV in a few weeks.
