More than any other record he made, Nebraska was one that he would later explain with reference to a strangely specific list of inspirations and source materials. Most of it had some connection to the 1950s of his childhood; all of it had characters and settings that carried traces of the same “unforgivingness” he found in Suicide. If Nebraska was a mystery of sorts, the clues given to understand it were these: Charles Laughton’s film The Night of the Hunter, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Robert Frank’s book of photographs The Americans, and, most conspicuously, Terrence Malick’s
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