Roll of the Dice: Hunter of Invisible Game

“I wrote [the title] down years ago, and I don’t remember a lot about it except I said, ‘That’s a nice title.’ I wrote it down and it sat there. Then I did more reading of other things. And I started to get into this sort of post-apocalyptic idea. The idea of these travelers in the wasteland, and what’s the guy trying to do? He’s trying to hold onto their humanness, their humanity in all of this ruin. That was the idea. That’s who this guy is, the guy who is hunting out remnants of what makes the spirit. It was one of those songs that came together a certain way and I didn’t think much about it when I wrote it. I put it away. Now it’s probably one of my favorite things on the record. “

 

— Bruce Springsteen to Sean Sennett, Rolling Stone, March 11, 2014

Only the inclusion of “American Skin (41 Shots)” keeps “Hunter of Invisible Game” from earning best song honors for High Hopes, but it’s still one of Bruce’s best songs of the past twenty years.

It’s definitely his most audacious.

In its finest form, “Hunter of Invisible Game” is a ten-minute-plus opus, with more than five minutes of orchestral introduction and almost five minutes of waltz—all serving as the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic allegory for the decline of Western civilization served up as a short movie filmed at Fort Hancock at the Jersey Shore.

It’s astonishing that it works at all, let alone as brilliantly as it does.

In the film, co-directed by Bruce (his first-ever directorial credit) and Thom Zimny, Bruce plays a reclusive, roaming wanderer haunted by the memories of a family he presumably lost in the unspecified events that led to society’s unraveling.

Bruce may tell his tale in the form of speculative fiction, but it’s clear that Bruce is also spinning an allegory. In this regard, “Hunter of Invisible Game” shares a bond with “Outlaw Pete.” He recorded both songs for Working on a Dream, and their similarity is probably why only one of them made the album. Both songs address an America that has strayed far from its ideals, but whereas “Outlaw Pete” warns that you can’t outrun your past, “Hunter of Invisible Game” offers the promise of reclaiming the future.

At the beginning of the film, our wanderer leafs through an old, decayed prayer book containing photo scraps of his family. The camera makes sure to linger just long enough for us to register the nature of the book, reminding us of the importance of religion in forming and maintaining communal bonds.

He picks up a toy horse–his daughter’s–and is instantly transported by memory to a distant, sunlit past and a simpler, happier life. We intercut between brightly colored memory and the dark present, as he arms himself for the hunt. Remembrance candles provide him his only light and heat, in stark contrast with the bright sun that warms the memory of his family.

Unable to dismiss his ghosts, he visits the ruins of his former home, now cold and empty. Here, the camera ensures we notice his skull-capped cane for the first time.

He tries to wash his memories away in the river, and he sleeps. A young boy comes upon the nomad and rouses him. The boy is lost too, so our wanderer ends his exile–at least for the moment–to return him to his home.

The boy’s small community is relieved for his return and grateful to the nomad for bringing him home. They welcome him into their community, and while he doesn’t stay long, it’s enough nourishment for our wander to return home to himself, to his humanity, and to some semblance of a community.

It restores him, rejuvenates him. But this is the boy’s community, not his own–and so the hunter ultimately takes his leave to continue his quest.

He leaves behind his walking stick with the ornamental skull–a symbolic gesture that conveys both his newly formed communal tie and the shedding of a crutch no longer necessary for him to carry his burden.

It’s at this point that the song begins in earnest, the overture shifting into waltz-time as we notice our nomad still carrying his walking stick. Was his detour a dream, or does the cane represent a burden he can never truly lose? Our nomad becomes our narrator now as he turns to the camera to address us:

I hauled myself up out of the ditch
And built me an ark out of gopher wood and pitch
Sat down by the roadside and waited on the rain
I am the hunter of invisible game

Our narrator is a survivor, one who sees himself as doing God’s work. He imagines himself as a modern-day Noah, building an ark to save and house the essential elements of a society before the worst of it is washed away in the flood. First he has to find them, though, and such ethereal concepts as love, family, and community are not as easy to spot as elephants or giraffes.

Well I woke last night to the heavy clicking and clack
And a scarecrow on fire along the railroad tracks
There were empty cities and burning plains
I am the hunter of invisible game

It can’t be a classic Springsteen song without a train metaphor. Here though, Bruce keeps the train at a distance. Whatever saints and sinners it may carry are far off; only its echoes carry through the deserted cities and arid farmland, as a flaming scarecrow stands in warning to those who might otherwise repeat the mistakes of a failed nation.

As is often the case, Bruce tips his hand in the bridge:

We all come up a little short and we go down hard
These days I spend my time skipping through the dark
Through the empires of dust I chant your name
I am the hunter of invisible game

Civilizations and societies have an arc–they rise and they fall, without exception. In the bridge,  Bruce alludes to what brought his character’s world to the state it’s in: an empire of dust, with citizens who didn’t live up to their ideals. They fiddled, and their world burned.

Now, it’s left to our hunter to seek out the virtuous remnants of his civilization, and he descends into the valley of sin to do so.

Through the boneyard rattle and black smoke we rolled on
Down into the valley where the beast has his throne
There I sing my song and I sharpen my blade
I am the hunter of invisible game

Even in the heart of darkness, there is light to be found. And in the next verse, Bruce tells us where we’ll find it.

Strength is vanity and time is illusion
I feel you breathing, the rest is confusion
Your skin touches mine, what else to explain
I am the hunter of invisible game

This is what he’s hunting: connection. The ties that bind.

Ironically, though, for an artist who can never seem to resist an opportunity for cloaking sex in metaphor, here he does the opposite: he uses skin-to-skin intimacy as a metaphor for the bonds that hold a society together–bonds that eroded and led to his world’s ruin from within, while his countrymen felt impervious from without.

Bruce brings it home in the final verse with stark words of warning.

Now pray for yourself and that you may not fall
When the hour of deliverance comes on us all
When our hope and faith and courage and trust
Can rise or vanish like dust into dust
Now there’s a kingdom of love waiting to be reclaimed
I am the hunter of invisible game

Our moment will come, he cautions, where we’ll be called upon to band together, face adversity together, and hold together. Will we meet the moment, or like the world in which our narrator now wanders, will we fail and cede the stage to new players?

Because, as he tells us before literally walking off into the sunset, there’s always a kingdom of love and goodness out there for those willing to unite and embrace it. Our hunter carries that mission forward, alone, into the dark.

Bonus: Bruce has only played “Hunter of Invisible Game” once ever (although I was lucky enough to hear him soundcheck it before his show in Houston in 2014)–in Adelaide on the High Hopes Tour. It didn’t translate well to a large venue stage, however, and that’s likely why we haven’t seen it since.

Hunter of Invisible Game
Recorded: 2004-2008
Released: High Hopes (2014)
First performed: February 12, 2014 (Adelaide, Australia)
Last performed: February 12, 2014 (Adelaide, Australia)

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