Mr. Duneier is a professor of sociology at Princeton, where he teaches a course on Bruce Springsteen’s America.
“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which arrived in movie theaters recently, is about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 release “Nebraska,” his most artistically daring and least commercially driven album. The film’s greatest emotional power, however, lies in the scenes, rendered in striking black and white, showing his painful relationship with his father, Doug.
I’ve been thinking about that relationship for years. Lots of my fellow Springsteen fans have; it’s woven through the Boss’s songs and his writing. I’ve also been thinking about it in my work as a sociologist, because of the way Doug Springsteen complicates our understanding of the crisis now afflicting American men.
Politicians, academics, community leaders and others have been sounding the alarm that men are in trouble: high unemployment, alcohol and opioid addiction, social alienation, a pervasive sense of hopelessness and dislocation, suicide. A decade ago, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the painful consequences of these trends among the white working classes. Richard Reeves has since demonstrated that these deaths are increasing at higher rates for men than for women.
These important findings have since been misconstrued, sometimes willfully, to advance the idea that the way to heal American men is to return the nation’s economy, as well as its gender dynamics, to some halcyon midcentury ideal. Doug Springsteen’s life illustrates something different.
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