A Fear So Real: Film Noir's Fallen Man in Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town and the David Lynch Oeuvre

Bruce Springsteen's film noir-informed innovations on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) betray his effort to confront hard truths about powerlessness in working-class American culture. These are the same dark themes available in filmmaker David Lynch's contemporaneous 1970s output and that which followed in subsequent decades. Beginning with Springsteen's Darkness and Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and continuing with examples from subsequent films and television, we reveal an ongoing dialogue between musician and filmmaker. This dialogue demonstrates Springsteen's prescience on Darkness because Lynch's post-1970s oeuvre continues treading the same terrain as that late 70s Springsteen album. Springsteen and Lynch both invoke film noir's fallen-man formula to critique institutional constraints in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century US, especially those related to the family and capitalist economic forces. Attention to the fallen-man formula reveals Springsteen's and Lynch's similar invocation of film noir as they explore the hard truths and moral consequences of institutional powerlessness on individuals.