Netflix’s Boss born to run on and on
Netflix’s latest butt-numbing slice of Canned Life™ is “Springsteen on Broadway,” a filmed record of Bruce Springsteen’s highly acclaimed oneman show. After receiving two extensions by popular demand, the 2½-hour show is set to end its run in New York on Saturday, Dec. 15; the next day, the special will be made available to millions of Netflix subscribers across the globe. Now, you, too, can hear “Dancing in the Dark” stripped of its cheesy mid-’80s synth and boom.
The special is a neat substitute for those of us too far away or poor to see the Boss rummage through his life and his songs, relating episodes from his “Born to Run” memoir (2016) on a bare-bones Broadway stage. But it arrives to us lukewarm, without the popping, in-person spectacle that made the show a hit. Despite his dynamism, and through no fault of his own, Springsteen recedes into our smartphones to become just a digital record of a great event.
For most of the show, the Boss is in pop-deconstruction
mode, taking a hammer to his own working-class glamour. As he tells us in his George C. Scott rasp, he never had an honest job, never worked 9 to 5, never worked inside a factory a day in his life. Most of his myth was culled from his father; in a gesture that weirdly predicts Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born,” Bruce tells us that he “stole” the voice of the late Douglas Springsteen to amplify his 1980s dirt-and-sweat persona. “I made it all up,” he says. “That’s how good I am.”
He knew his audience would buy this artifice which, nevertheless, was based in familial truths. By weaving a great fiction that blossomed from unglamorous roots (the bars and highways of Freehold, N.J.), Springsteen hoped to find beauty and promise in spite of the place he grew up in: a nowheresville, which worked moms and dads to death, which sat still as its young men were shipped off to butcher and be butchered in Vietnam.
Springsteen’s postmodern shtick is balanced by his humility, his desire to “return to roots” — a desire that’s never cloying. It’s heartwarming to hear the Boss return to his 1973 tongue-twisting mock-Dylan days as he describes the revolutionary fun of Elvis Presley: “joyful, life-affirming, hip-shaking, ass-quaking, guitar-playing, mind’n’-heart changing, race-challenging, soul-lifting ...” The rock star philosophy of “life, sex, truth, power, soul and, above all, rock ’n’ roll”— which, by now, has ossified into cliche — is given an optimistic jolt by Bruce’s voice. From the croaky whispers to the throat-killing hollers of “Backstreets,” his now-69-yearold voice wears the history of his journey proudly.
But rumors that “Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix” “might be the single best thing that Netflix has ever done” are greatly exaggerated. (That honor goes to Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind”). Springsteen’s attempts to conjure up a spell, while they probably worked on the stage, are constantly shattered by Thom Zimny’s cuts and disengaged zooms. This isn’t the respect of ritualized space of other concert-film masterworks like Jonathan Demme’s and Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” (1984) or “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert” (1979 — streaming on Netflix, though let’s see how long that lasts).
It might seem obvious that having the show on Netflix is better than nothing, but is it? What’s wrong with the fiction the Boss leaves us on his records? I can offer neither an immediate solution to the sold-out show and ghastly prices offered by ticket brokers nor a way out of the Netflixization of America in which people retreat from each other and toward a dull blue screen. But I can say that “Springsteen on Broadway” is one more reason to stay inside instead of going out with friends, burning rubber across town, meeting fellow losers and, together, sticking it to the Man (men) — naturally, with the songs from “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978) spilling hot and cold out of burned-out Chevrolets.