“Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays out.”
—Bruce Springsteen
The antithesis of social distancing for me was the Bruce Springsteen concert I attended on October 2, 1985 at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It was also the best concert I ever attended.
It was the final night of the Born in the U.S.A. tour and, if I recall correctly. there were around 100.000 people in attendance. It was not only biggest crowd I’ve ever been a part of, but it was the longest one, too.
I think it was a soild 3 1/2 hours. I found the setlist of that night online, and the encore itself was 10 songs. The encore! Apparently Springteen played 33 songs total. And he did a lot of talking between songs.
Yesterday I came across the above quote of Springsteen’s, that I think I pulled from his Broadway show that I saw on Netflix last year. This seems as good as any to point out to reflect on that quote. And to look at the three films from three different places around the globe (Los Angeles, Japan, and Denmark) that I think deal well with “trauma-inducing chaos.”
That includes loss of job, broken relationships, shipwreck, and terminal cancer. Jerry Maguire is such an timeless film that instead of posting the trailer, I’ve included the Springsteen song featured in Jerry Maguire.
Screenwriting from Iowa 