Deliver Me from My WWII Veteran Father and His Traditional America

Bruce Springsteen’s fans often call him a “man of the people.” It is undeniable that there is some genuine right-wing populist sentiment in some of his lyrics. Yet his personal politics have long been on the left, and he is outspokenly vicious in his denunciations of Donald Trump. He has called the sitting U.S. president “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous.” He has also endorsed the impeachment of Trump as well as the “No Kings” movement.

However, the recent biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which expands dramatically on themes Springsteen touched on in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, reveals considerable distance between the singer’s values and populist traditional America.

Deliver Me from Nowhere is fundamentally a film about the singer’s relationship with his father, Douglas “Dutch” Springsteen, who died in 1998. The biographical basics of Dutch Springsteen reveal a man in the mold of bygone American masculinity. He had honest, humble work as a bus driver. He served in World War II. He married his wife, Adele, in 1948 and was still married to her at his death a half-century later. These are accomplishments that instantly place him morally well above many millions of contemporary American men who shirk duty and embrace lives of moral nihilism and personal cowardice. 

Yet the film reveals a young Springsteen fixated on what he sees as the shortcomings of his father. It begins with the singer as an eight-year-old boy being sent by his mother into a bar to fetch his father, who sits dazed in front of a drink. In a later scene, Dutch comes home drunk and wakes his young son to teach him boxing moves, while his mother tells him, “You’re a bully!” Another flashback reveals the son using a baseball bat to defend his mother from his father during an argument. Dutch praises his boy for standing up for his mother. 

The only positive memory he recounts of his father is accompanied by part of the song “Mansion on the Hill.” Here, Dutch takes Springsteen and his sister on a ride to an idyllic corn field, the mansion of the song’s title in the background, and speaks yearningly of what the wealth to afford such a house would bring them, before the children run joyously through the corn.