Abstract
This paper provides a close reading and critical unfolding of central themes and motifs in Alexander Payne’s acclaimed 2013 comic ‘road movie’ Nebraska. It focuses on three key issues: (1) the symbolic significance of hawthorn as a threshold between different worlds (Hawthorne, Nebraska being the former hometown to which father and son make a detour); (2) the notion of ‘haunting’ in relation both to ‘importuning’ memories besetting the central characters and to particular sites of remembrance to which they return; and, (3) how the film’s pervasive mood of melancholy is subject to repeated interruption and punctuation by comic utterances and put-downs. In presenting us with a reluctant ‘gathering of ghosts’, a veritable phantasmagoria, the film articulates a particular sense of nostalgia, of a ‘homesickness’ understood here not in the conventional meaning of a longing to return to a forsaken ‘home’, but rather as a weariness and wariness at the prospect of revisiting familiar haunts and reviving old spirits.
Highlights
This paper provides a close reading and critical unfolding of central themes and motifs in Alexander Payne’s acclaimed 2013 comic ‘road movie’ Nebraska
Cut to a side angle of the same figure, clearly identifiable as a rather disheveled old man shambling past railroad sidings and stationary tanker trucks as the traffic incessantly speeds back and forth
Full of the promise of future happiness, it is within and beyond the hawthorn, hawthorn as a ‘soft arcade’, that one may come to lose oneself in the convolutions of time, preserving youthfulness amid the greying, ageing world
Summary
In Irish mythology in particular, it is imagined more as a blessed, a paradisiacal realm from whence death, sickness, and ageing are banished, and from which one may return after many extraordinary adventures and journeys (immrama) in the company of fair and fantastical beings—magical creatures, fairies, gods, and goddesses—to the mundane human world that has grown old in one’s absence, even though one seemed to spend but a few brief moments away Elucidating hawthorn as both manifesting and marking a gateway or portal to another time and space, to an enchanted land, to a dreamworld—this is what is significant for me here. Full of the promise of future happiness, it is within and beyond the hawthorn, hawthorn as a ‘soft arcade’, that one may come to lose oneself in the convolutions of time, preserving youthfulness amid the greying, ageing world
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