Nashville

When it premiered in 1975, Robert Altman’s film Nashville seemed the culmination of a pattern set in motion with the release in 1970 of Mash and then of Brewster McCloud. All three films offer satiric critiques of American popular culture, contemporary history, values, and ideals. All three are dark and irreverent comedies that celebrate the perverse as well as the normal. One of my favorite scenes in Mash concerns a doctor who is so depressed that he considers suicides. Other doctors and staff at the Mash unit conspire to help him. It’s all fake, of course, a setup, and they help him think he is committing suicide in order to cure his depression. But they’re all entertained at the same time, gleeful at their elaborate joke. There’s something in it for everyone.

Altman’s central interest in these films was America—the state of the union, so to speak. Mash used the Korean War to comment on the Vietnamese conflict. I can’t even remember what Brewster McCloud was about, other than Bud Cort’s desire to fly around the inside of the Houston Astrodome, the angelic Sallie Kellerman’s nude bathing in one of the fountains outside the astrodome, the eccentric old billionaire who yells “Get that bird shit off my car!,” and the kiss between Bud Cort and Shelley Duvall immediately after she has thrown up.

Now Nashville, which remains for me a very pertinent and moving film, looks much more like an artifact of its time. It is deeply marked by a number of historical and cultural issues: the Watergate crisis, the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the cultural divisions it opened up in the United States, the growth of interest in the American South as a popular culture fetish (which included country music), the assassinations of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the rise of feminism, celebrity worship, and a general sense of national anomie—the sickness that Jimmy Carter, in a 1979 speech for which he was much reviled, once suggested had infected the nation.

Nashville is a great American film in the same sense that Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” is a great American poet. It is a film of many voices, many points of view, of conflicting values and judgments. Voices talk against one another in the film, overlapping and canceling one another out, blending in harmony and straining in cacophonous disagreement. It suggests that we have lost our national moorings, that we (at least some of us) have abandoned belief in the founding values of the nation, which consumerism and late capitalism have supplanted. It suggests that we are heading towards self-destruction, that, like Joyce’s Dublin, we eat our own farrow. It also suggests that the time is not too late for recovery, that even for someone like the fatuous and hypocritical Haven Hamilton, the film’s own Bob Hope, there is the final hope of a redemptive act.

Nashville is more important as a symbol in the film than as an actual place.

The city of Nashville is the film’s American microcosm. As the country music capital of the world, Nashville embodies the American dream of talent, success, and wealth. It is also connected, through its history and Tennessee setting and through the country music that insists on this link, to traditional and original American values—family, farming, God, moral and political conservatism. Yet the city in the film seems to be marked by an overweening boosterism and an inability to look honestly at its own reflections. Thus it is a city that, seeking to grow and prosper, exploits the vulnerable and unsuspecting. In this sense, the film is about a city of hucksters and exploitationists. The character Suleen, who works at the airport diner and whose only real friend is the African American counterman Wade Cooley (one of the most complex and endearing characters in the film), is the prime symbol of exploitation. In a scene reminiscent in ways of the “Battle Royale” episode in Ellison’s The Invisible Man, she allows herself to be talked into stripping at a fundraiser for the political character Hal Philip Walker. All the business and political leaders of the town are present to watch her—white men in suits, with cigars and alcohol and leering faces. She doesn’t want to strip, but when she is told that if she does she’ll be allowed to sing on the steps of the Parthenon with Barbara Jean, her idol, she agrees to do so. Bereft of talent or intelligence, Suleen is convinced she has talent. She never stops to question herself or her motives, even when Wade tells her that she has no singing talent and that people are going to eat her alive. The idea here is that the men who watch her also watch all the other characters in the film, that the power and money they embody is what most of the characters are after.

In addition to its role as a symbol of the nation, we have to see the city of Nashville as a symbol of the American South. This is a film about the South, after all, and Nashville is the only glimpse the film affords into the region. The film is made in a period of transition, when the increasing urbanization of the American South, with the attendant growth of commerce and industry, place the modern South in contrast with the more traditional South and with the focus of country music on down-home agrarian values. This implied tension runs throughout the film.

The change occurring in Nashville and the rest of the South is represented early in the film by the focus on the airport, where Barbara Jean is returning back from the clinic where she has been treated for what we are told is burns. The airport is a place of travel, movement, transition. L. A. Joan arrives from California at the airport. Tricycle Man first appears there as well, though it’s doubtful he flew in with his Easy Rider motorcycle. Opal announces at one point that America is a land of car crashes, and there’s some confirmation of this idea in the pile-up that occurs as all the characters at the airport leave at the same time and drive towards the center of the city. We later see a scene in an automobile junkyard, where the rusting car hulks are like vacated American souls (if I follow Opal’s way of thinking). The movie itself is a kind of car crash. What is it that Carlo Marx intones in Kerouac’s On the Road?: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" The airport (and the roadways) are one avenue by which change comes to the city.

Country music typically addresses Southern themes and subjects. By choosing country music and musicians as his subject, Altman chooses an easy target. Who will argue back on their behalf and complain of prejudice, bias, stereotyping, anti-regional arrogance? As people who are, after all (according to the logic of the film), hillbilly hicks, crackers, no group will rise to their defense. But Altman is not as vicious as he could be. There is much compassion, empathy, in his portraitures. He finds something to like in most of these characters, even the most despicable among them. Narcissistic Tom Frank, eager and able to bed any women within reach, falls for Linnea, the expressionless mother of two deaf children and wife to the bulbous, soulless Delbert Reese. Tom actually talks with Linnea, playfully, during their tryst, though he had nothing to say to his other partners. Linnea moves him when all the others are merely objects to him, but as soon as he realizes that she is going to leave him he calls up another woman. His vulnerability to Linnea humanizes him, despite his narcissism, his sexist exploitation of women and of his own celebrity.

Linnea’s two children are perhaps at the core of one of the themes in the film, the desire to be heard. In several moving scenes Linnea is seen talking with her children through sign language, and her son struggles to speak. This is the essential theme of communication. Linnea and her husband hardly speak at all or listen to each other in a meaningful way. Delbert can’t understand what his children say at all. When Mary tries to tell Tom that she loves him, he is asleep, or at least pretending to be. Albuquerque—genuinely talented but lacking the connections that would give her an entry into the county music industry—tries to be heard is heard throughout the film. When she is given a chance to sing at a stockcar race, the noise of revving engines drowns her out. The Lady Pearl is trying to express some inchoate idea about her love of the Kennedys and her anguish over their assassinations, but Opal is clueless and confused about what she says. And Barbara Jean tries to say something to the audience at the Opry Belle performance, but she is mired in her own anguish and distress—she can’t finish a sentence, and her handlers don’t allow her to.

The film’s concern with media extends this theme. The opening credits, which present themselves as a television advertisement for the great hits of country music, packages the movie as a media instrument, calling attention to the fact that after all it is a manufactured product, a media vehicle. The opening credits are followed by a scene in which a car with loudspeaker drives through the streets of Nashville blaring out the voice of political candidate Hal Philip Walker. We see scenes of Haven Hamilton and of Linnea and a gospel choir in recording studios. Opal, of course, is a film-maker for BBC, and towards the end of the film Howard K. Smith, an actual news broadcaster for ABC, comments on the Hal Philip Walker campaign. Country music itself is a media-based industry—it communicates with its audience through radio and television shows, through recordings.

Opal, the purported journalist for BBC who is making a documentary “about America,” is constantly perplexed and confused. She misinterprets practically everything she sees and experiences. She’s eager to manufacture meaning—consider her walk through the auto junkyard, and later through the school bus lot. When she watches Linnea singing with an otherwise all black African American choir, all she sees are African jungle natives dressed up. Her essential racism rises to the surface, but rather than criticizing her for this Altman uses it to reflect on her essential ignorance and naiveté. It is no coincidence that the most uncomprehending and clueless person in the film is a documentary film-maker, a journalist.

Still, there are characters here who are little more than one-dimensional surfaces, signs and vehicles for the messages Altman wishes to convey. L. A. Joan is one—overwhelmed with celebrity and self-worship, without any identity or substance other than that she derives from the people she happens to be with at a given moment.

My favorite character in the film is Barbara Jean, who is genuinely talented but who is emotionally ill and unable to cope without the assistance of her husband/manager and of her admirers. As Pauline Kael suggests, Barbara Jean lives solely through her music and her performances. She has no other life, except through her memory, which she occasionally struggles to articulate. Everyone admires her and her talent, and they all seek to associate themselves with her—hoping perhaps that some of her authenticity and her talent will rub off. Trying to decide whether to appear on stage with Barbara Jean or her rival Connie White (they never appear on stage together), Hamilton avers that he will always appear on stage with Barbara Jean. By associating with her and the songs that she sings, perhaps he hopes that the empty and absurd songs he sings will sound slightly less so.

Barbara Jean is the authentic talent in the film. She’s also the person whose singing seems to enrage the minor character Kenny, who appears throughout the film, often in tandem with Private Glenn Kelley. The purpose of both these characters remains vague until the end. Kelley has apparently returned recently from Vietnam, and because his mother told him that she has once saved Barbara Jean from a fire, he devotes himself to the singer, following her everywhere, even sleeping one night in a rocking chair in her hospital room. His behavior is the behavior of a stalker. Kenny is also a cipher. He wears clothing that appears to be undersized, so that he seems to bulge out of his shirt and trousers. He carries a guitar case everywhere with him in the film, and we assume it holds a guitar, that he wants to get into the music industry like everyone else. Only at the end do we learn what the case really contains, and only then do we learn what Private Kelley’s narrative purpose is in the film. These characters, like L. A. Joan, the Tricycle Man, and Opal appear throughout the film as unifying elements that draw the disparate elements of the film together, in spite of itself. All of these characters, like virtually all the characters in the film, are in search of something—Opal is looking for a meaning, a hook that will allow her to make the film she claims she is making. L. A. Joan simply wants to associate and hook up with famous people—she doesn’t care who they are, as long as they’re famous. (She changes her name from the prosaic “Martha” to the more trendy “L. A. Joan”—associating herself with another city of trendiness and celebrity). The Tricycle Man is apparently a session guitarist. He’s just a presence in the film who appears here and there. His most substantive bit of action in the film comes in the small magic tricks he performs in the airport diner and at the bar.

Barbara Jean is the film’s heart and center. She’s the standard of comparison against which most of the other characters fail to measure up. Even Connie White, glittery and talented but a clone of sorts, doesn’t measure up. Connie is the most significant threat, however, to Barbara Jean. Unlike her rival, Connie is not emotionally unstable, she doesn’t need the help of advisors to prop her up, and one can imagine her quick rise to first-level stardom should Barbara Jean stumble and disappear. Connie White may want fame and fortune, but she doesn’t need these in the same way that Barbara Jean does—they aren’t (at least not yet) her soul and her identity as they are for Barbara Jean. (This is reading a lot into Connie White’s character). She possesses all the requisite formulaic elements for success.

Barbara Jean is the sort of singer/songwriter who helps account for the charisma of the Nashville name, for the tradition of music and talent associated with it. Clearly in the film, Nashville is in flux, in a state of change. Country Music in the 1970s stood on the verge of obsolescence. Too many white people. Too little variation. The film shows the arrival of different kinds of performers than the country music industry has admitted before this point—African Americans, rock and roll musicians, even in one scene at the racetrack, a singer who appears to be Native American or Hawaiian. Nashville and country music are growing and expanding yet standing in danger of losing their roots and thereby, one might argue, their heart and soul.

(In her hospital room, we see a book that Barbara Jean is presumably reading. It reappears in several scenes, and it’s difficult to make out the title. In one scene the title becomes readable. It’s a paperback copy of the novel Light in August, by William Faulkner. What do we make of this? Was this simply a book someone on the movie set was reading, conveniently seized and placed on the bed as a prop—there’s a significant element of improvisation in Altman’s filmmaking, and it’s possible the book found its way onto Barbara Jean’s bed in that random way. Or is the book there by intention, and if so, what does this suggest about Barbara Jean’s character? Such details are important. We have to pay careful attention to them.)

The final scene in front of Nashville’s Parthenon sums all of this up. Nashville’s Parthenon is, of course, a full replica of the ruined and famous building on the acropolis in Athens, Greece. It was originally constructed for the Nashville bicentennial in the early 1900s, built of plaster and wood. People liked it so much that a more permanent structure was erected following the end of the bicentennial. The Parthenon in Athens, Greece, is a ruin. The Parthenon remained intact for two thousand years until an explosion in 1687 set off by a cannonball ruined much of it. Portions of its marble sculptures (the so-called Elgin Marbles) reside in the London Museum. Other parts have undoubtedly been moved elsewhere. The Parthenon in Greece is a symbol of Western Civilization and thought, associated (whether rightly or not) with the highest ideals and achievements of ancient Greece. The Parthenon in Nashville is a fake, a symbol of all that the film regards as false and artificial and deceptive about the city and what the city embodies.

How ironic then that the final scene takes place on and in front of the Nashville Parthenon, a political rally for the candidate Hal Philip Walker who promises to create “New Roots” for America, and among other things to root out all the lawyers from Congress. It is a scene fundamentally essential to American democracy, and a scene that in the film is invested with every aspect of deceit, deception, hypocrisy, and fakery—with the exception of Barbara Jean, who doesn’t know why she’s there other than the fact that she is there to sing. And she does sing, beautifully, movingly, until the bullet strikes and presumably kills her.

We kill the things we love most. This seems to be one of the messages the film purveys. We kill the things that reveal and betray our own falseness. Why we do so the film does not suggest. At least I cannot tease out the explanation if it is there.

What does Nashville say about democracy? It shows little faith in the ability of the electorate to make intelligent decisions. It shows the electorate caught up in worship of material things, of celebrity, of vacuous meaningless trivia. A talented singer is killed on stage. After a moment of distress and chaos, the crowd is caught up in the chorus of a song, “It don’t worry me.” On to the next thing. Forget the past. A new star is born.

That is to say, this is what the film seemed to say in 1975, which it was current. Today, as I said, it is in addition to everything else it might be an artifact of a particular time and place in 20^th-century American history. I think it’s still relevant.

Pauline Kael rightly described this film as a great comic epic about America. I agree.