A good man is hard to find (and so is a good woman)
(Note: This is the third post about Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska.” The first post explored the song’s relationship to the case of spree killers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. The second post placed the Starkweather-Fugate story, and thus the song, in the context of the juvenile delinquency scare that gripped America’s popular imagination in the 1950s, seen through the lens of Hollywood.)
Malick’s film was an important anchor for Springsteen because it did this too, moving the gaze away from Hollywood magazines, picturesque diners, bottles of soda pop, pompadours and picket fences (although they are all there in the beginning) and onto the vast expanses of field and prairie cut by interstate highways and the craggy rock formations that define where America’s heartlands become its badlands.
That borderline between heartland and badland is where Springsteen’s song resides and what it explores, with its wailing harmonica and sense of dread and pending void. I played this version of the song in the first and second post, but it’s worth another visit to set the scene yet again:
Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.
Did Springsteen pull this from the depths of his own dark, tormented soul? The answer of course, is yes, (which you know all the better if you’ve read the latest biography or the various articles that came out earlier this summer and discuss his serious battle with depression). But in articulating the dark state of his soul and the American heart/badlands, The Boss also had help from this rather proper and unlikely looking lady:
“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” published in 1953, tells the story of a 1950s family – mom, pop, and two little kids and a baby — living in Georgia and dominated by their not-so-kindly grandmother. On a family road trip to Florida, the grandmother diverts their car onto a lonely back road, ostensibly to find an old plantation she remembers from her girlhood. Confusion, bad tempers, and bumps in the road ensue, causing the family car to have an accident, overturning the car into a ravine.
To their rescue, most unfortunately, comes a car driven by a man whom the grandmother recognizes is an escaped serial killer called The Misfit. Along with his sidekicks, The Misfit quickly and rather quietly (considering) disposes of everyone in the family but the grandmother. The story ends with a tense dialogue between The Misfit and the grandmother, in which she tries to convince him (and herself) that he is a good man, and he assures her – first with words and finally with her own murder — that he is most emphatically not.
photo by Amilton Reis
I guess there’s just a meanness in this world is a phrase Springsteen adapted from The Misfit’s explanation of his motive. “[There’s} nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can,” The Misfit tells the grandmother, “by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.” After he kills her to prove his point, his sidekick comments on their conversation, and the story’s last bit of dialogue and final shocking moment finally take place:
“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
“She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!,” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
And so the story ends. Goodness is just something squeezed out into the world by the cold threat of violence, in a final plea for mercy or a last breath. And whatever pleasure — whatever wild ride — there is to be had in that violence also decays and dissipates, leaving only the meanness. There’s just a meanness in this world. There is no other answer.
You can read the full story here, or listen to Flannery O’Connor read it here:
Coda
In the previous post, I suggested that “Nebraska” is in one sense a bit of a misfit on the album Nebraska, which otherwise chronicles the very specific motives that often drive American men to ruin or murder. But “Nebraska” does have one true soulmate on the album, a song which also features a dialogue between a killer and a man of the law, as well as the same sense of isolation, dread and the futility of begging for mercy or asking why: