On Monday it was two years to the day since thousands of armed Nazis invaded my town, threatened my family and my neighbors, and killed a young woman named Heather Heyer. I had spent the day in a fog, reflecting on the brave people of Charlottesville, Virginia who had stood their ground against the embodiment of hatred that now seems to spew at us every week – often from the White House itself.
I needed some catharsis. I needed a lift. I needed some rock’n’roll.
That evening I saw the film Blinded by the Light, which is about to debut in the US but opened in Britain on 9 August. It’s the story of a south Asian teenager growing up in a soon-to-be-post-industrial city who discovers that the music of Bruce Springsteen helps inspire him to dream beyond his given environment. Along the way the young man faces social alienation and violent threats from bigots who resent his family’s presence in an economy that turns working-class people against each other.
I shuddered as I watched familiar scenes and heard echoes of dialogue from my own 1980s adolescence. I’m also the son of an immigrant who grew up in an industrial city then confronting the policy-driven disposability of working people. For me, it was Ronald Reagan’s plan to extract money and hope from cities like Buffalo. For the young man in the film, Javed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s war on “society” that helped destroy the fabric of life in Luton.
Javed channels into his writing and relationships Springsteen’s embrace of those crushed by impersonal political forces, sensitivity to the suffering of others, and powerful optimism about the potential for personal and societal change.
Never without his Sony Walkman headphones embracing his thick black hair, Javed programs the soundtrack of his life and spreads the gospel of Bruce, only somewhat successfully. This turn toward the culture of the west angers his traditional father, who moved the family from Karachi before Javed was born. As the only son, Javed should have worked toward a steady, lucrative, and dependable middle-class career in Luton, living with his family as long as they needed his financial support as they paid for two of his sisters’ weddings.
Javed wants none of that. He not only dreams of being a professional writer, he dreams of moving far from Luton, just as Springsteen wrote of running from the working-class town that “rips your bones from your back” in which he was raised.
The youthful immigrant family tensions are familiar. They appear just as starkly in such Asian-centric antecedents as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Mississippi Masala (1991), and Bend it Like Beckham (2002).
British director Gurinder Chadha is responsible for Bend it Like Beckham and Blinded by the Light. The two films have many similarities, including sibling conspiracies to hide dalliances from conservative parents, energetic Bhangra dance scenes, a wedding that gets complicated, and a brilliant use of pop music to drive key scenes.
The film was a collaboration between two life-long British Springsteen fans, Chadha and journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, upon whose book, Greetings from Bury Park, the film is based. Manzoor first wrote of his debt to Springsteen in the Guardian in 2002, and has continued to chronicle his – and our – relationship with the musician ever since.
Springsteen has long made his music relevant to young people striving for something more, struggling to balance the demands and stability of community with values that challenge traditions. That’s what rock’n’roll, born of blues and country music, channeled through charming, southern Christian men like Little Richard and Elvis Presley, has always done for us.
This world desperately needed rock’n’roll in the 1950s as we emerged fully from the brutal compromises of depression and war to imagine abundance, freedom, mobility, and sex. The best rock movies, even set in their own times, explicate those themes and reconnect us with the possibility of something better.
I won’t count Blinded by the Light among the best rock films. It’s a bit sappy at times and many of the characters are predictably flat. It’s among the best south Asian immigrant films, though, three of which have come from the deft directorial hand of Chadha, who has a warm comic sensibility as well as a feel for the narrative power of a good pop song.
Regardless, Blinded by the Light is the film we need in the summer of 2019. As nativist fantasies put the UK on the brink of a no-deal Brexit and the United States is run by and overrun by white nationalists striving to make America whiter, we need inspiration that reminds us that others have stared down Nazi skinheads not so long ago and prevailed.
The National Front and skinheads lurk just off screen throughout Blinded by the Light. They appear in a climactic scene that threatens to sever all the bonds of Javed’s family and community. The film’s depiction of a National Front march through Luton, which I watched on the anniversary of a similar but more deadly Nazi march in my own current town, shows the consequences of abandoning one’s community when it needs you most.
One lesson we can take from Blinded by the Light is that we can strive for justice and better lives within communities that reach beyond our colors, religions, and points of origin. We can and must work to find common cause, to recognize our common fate. We need not run away from our communities to transcend them. We can choose to represent them – and us – better. The film also inspires us to remember that working-class solidarity is possible, if fragile.
And, more importantly at this moment of looming war between India and Pakistan, that south Asian solidarity among Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims is not just possible in the diaspora. It’s necessary.
In the 1980s I had thick black hair, just like Javed. I wore my Walkman headphones just like Javed. If Springsteen was not blasting through them, the Clash were.
That music forged my commitment to describe the world in all its glory and ugliness and perhaps, in small ways, chart a better way forward. I can’t say I became a writer because of Springsteen. But I can say his music has given form and direction to what I have written. And sometimes he has just helped me drive a little bit faster, a little bit farther.
