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Photo by Cindy Hunter Morgan

Song as Prayer

Joe Roberts could be any number of brothers, and Franky could be too. Joe is the man who stands beside the misanthrope, and though that misanthrope is called Franky in this song, he goes by other names in other songs. He’s Willy in “Pretty Polly,” John Lewis in “Omie Wise.” Quite possibly, he serves a function beyond plot and character. In her essay on “Pretty Polly” in The Rose & The Briar, Rennie Sparks writes, “I believe ‘Pretty Polly’ is a magic spell written to dispel deadness of the heart. Listen to the song. How does it make you feel? ‘Pretty Polly’ is a prayer. It is a cry of pain from a wound so deep one cannot, or will not, acknowledge it.”

“Highway Patrolman” also feels like a prayer – part confession, part meditation, part supplication. It’s a song of penitence. Musically, the sense of prayer is created through that simple, plaintive voice I mentioned earlier – a voice that is almost flat, but not quite. It’s a voice stripped of drama. There’s nothing flamboyant in this song – no Clarence Clemons on a saxophone. This is Bruce Springsteen without the E Street Band. There’s a guitar and a harmonica with the voice, but it’s a spare arrangement. The violence that is mentioned – the kid lyin’ on the floor bleedin’ hard – is shared with little emotion. The voice is blank, impassive. Finish this song and you feel hollowed, emptied – both lighter and heavier, more raw than polished. Years after listening to this album in my bedroom in high school, I’d feel something almost similar in the music of Philip Glass. What is it? The slow sandpaper of minimalism, buffing away the psyche? For me, though, Glass was mood without story – concert hall sound. Nothing matched the kind of mood Nebraska could deliver.

Photo by Cindy Hunter Morgan

Though Springsteen’s song ends with his chorus – that refrain about a man turning his back on his family – the narrative really ends with an image:

Well I chased him through them county roads
till a sign said Canadian border 5 miles from here
I pulled over the side of the highway and
watched his taillights disappear

Springsteen’s voice fades as the taillights fade. It’s an effective pairing of image and sound.

The Good in the Bad

Later in her essay, Sparks mentions Kentucky banjoist Pete Steele, who calls Pretty Polly’s murderer “Pretty Willy.” “They are both beautiful,” writes Sparks, “the killer and the killed.” We feel that way about Franky, too – maybe most particularly and most strongly in Penn’s film adaptation, which adds dimension and complexity to all of the characters in Springsteen’s song, especially Franky (Viggo Mortensen). In one scene, we see one hand with “KILL” tattooed across his fingers. Later, we see the other hand – “FUCK” inked across those fingers.

We see Franky’s tenderness when he kisses his girlfriend Dorothy, and we see his cruelty when he throws peas at her, then spits them at her. It’s effective cinematography. Peas can’t hurt her, but when Franky whips those instead of, say, forks or knives, we intuit menace in a subtler, almost more cunning way. In this same scene, he rebukes Dorothy viciously, claiming, “You don’t know how to see good things in bad things.”

He’s wrong, of course. Dorothy adores him. She sees the good man in the bad man, but his accusation comes from a place of pain. It’s the first scene in which Dorothy seems to rebuff a sexual advance. He’s accustomed to the ease and simplicity of seduction, not its complexity. He’s Lord Arlen in “Matty Groves,” thwarted – without another man to blame. And Dorothy has a bit of Pretty Polly’s unease in this scene. Franky feeds her a mighty fine line (“I got some skeeter bites that need scratching. Why don’t we go fiddle with the hydraulics …), but Dorothy’s hydraulics aren’t sufficiently lubricated. She brushes off the overture, and Frank feels it too deeply. Something shifts. He goes dark, and Dorothy/Polly/Omie Wise says, “Frank, why you lookin’ at me like that? Come on Frank, you’re scaring me.” She could be Polly, singing, “Oh Willie, Little Willie, I’m afraid of your ways.” And when she’s sitting with her parents staring at the television, waiting for the phone to ring, she could be Omie Wise waiting for John Lewis to change his mind, waiting for John Lewis to come back to her.
 

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