NASHVILLE (1975)

Franz said, ‘Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.’

Sabina said, ‘Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be “beauty by mistake.” Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. “Beauty by mistake”—-the final phase in the history of beauty.’

—Milan Kundera, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’.

The beauty of a rollin’ and tumblin’ Robert Altman party is in the complexity of simplicities, the depth of surfaces, which is the inverse of the “sick-soul-of-Europe” artsy silliness of Fellini, Bergman, and Antonioni. People often go into one of his ensemble panoramas with the wrong expectations, fitting their ideas of “art” or “trash” like a square peg in a round hole, and though Nashville is incomparably entertaining, it’s entertaining on a rather tall order: those who don’t know the first thing about M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), or California Split (1974), might just suffer asthma attacks. To give an idea of what that rapturous shock might feel like, show Citizen Kane (1941) or Weekend (1967) to people who have never seen a film from before the 1980s.

Converging from all walks of life at the titular capital of Country & Western, at the bicentennial birthday of the good old U.S of A., not one of the two dozen in this mad kaleidoscope is complete. We heighten our awareness and eavesdrop from clowns to sharks, to sycophants and twits, and we still can’t steer clear of a double take. Their individual lines are mostly no more than trifles and tittle-tattles, uttered noise besieging you on all fronts; Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and Orson Welles couldn’t be half as cocky. Take the words of critic Harry A. Potamkin—“Dialogue is anti-cinema, ‘speech-as-utterance’ is not”—and try vibing with the atmospheric structure of sounds instead; intuit what this euphoric cacophony leaves you with, and keep the analyst in you at bay. No one character here is at the helm, and no one performer is in the lead. By themselves, these are mere individuals, all of them with ideas of themselves larger than what meets the eye. Yet, taken together, they have the swing of a bebop jam, and amongst all the harmonic progressions a motif gradually reveals itself and interweaves everything together.

As they gather around at a primary rally for populist outsider Hal Philip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips) and his Replacement Party before the Nashville Parthenon, several of them appear onstage in the same frame side by side under an unbelievably serene, majestic Star-Spangled Banner: a tone-deaf pinkie (Gwen Welles) who “can’t sing a lick” wiggling and undulating, following the beats with her hands at the back, wearing a credulous smile; a shabby, stubby runaway blondie (Barbara Harris) lying sideways on the stage like a rebel schoolgirl, clapping jovially, a hole in her sheer tights peering right at you from over yonder; a pouting Black gospel singer whose face is full of displeasure, robed in complete blackness from the neck down; an oblivious, umber-toned officer in an olive uniform and trooper hat, hands joined, legs apart, hibernating behind sunglasses; a vested white cowboy (Keith Carradine), complete with blue jeans and pecan boots, arms folded, sticks out his long neck and shakes his long yellow furs to the side; his barefoot girl right beside him (Cristina Raines, Carradine’s partner at the time), dressed in warmly striped orange, red, and violet, nervously fiddling around with her hands; a stiff and awkward chauffeur (David Arkin) in a poor boy hat and oversized cheap scarlet suit, standing on duck feet, rather woolly; a flatly cute fawn (Dave Peel), beige all over, a little doughy; and a pale matron-mistress (Barbara Baxley), sitting by an umbrella, purple from the waist down until a red pair of peep toes catches the eye, looking rather cheery.

No one looked like they belonged there, yet they belonged together in a sort of wild colour scheme. Not one of them is much to look at on their own, yet it’s a surreal sight, because of the juxtaposition that forms in the space between; they distinguish each other. They’re distinct because of the contrast they form, how different they are from each other, and not of anything innate in themselves. No individual stands out on their own two feet. What does is the composition as a whole, as more than the sum of its parts. If Altman’s sensibility is adjacent to that of a classic satirical naturalist, then his art is that of an American impressionist: everything comes together, by the seat of his pants, blending into an overall effect without losing or diluting the individual identities. The sparkle of an Altman porridge of quirks and postures, wry puns and verbal slapstick, garrulous tremolos and glib vibratos, is in the interactions between individuals. Yet no one here is on the same frequency. When they’re following the same tune, no one comprehends another; when they’re in the same bed, no one bridges the distance. The gaps between are inestimable. People in this Tower of Babel all speak the same language, and they’re all driven by the same thing: wagging its tail, panting its tongue, the star image is rearing its ugly face again. It’s all about fame and alienation in Altman’s America.

The “bantam king” of this shielded-away country, the unctuous singer star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) inaugurates our jamboree in an overripe vibrato: “But we must be doing something right, to last 200 years!” In an ivory “Nudie suit” inlaid with emerald, his sideburns grey down to the rears of his jaw in a wolf-like edge, Gibson’s singing is all impassioned prissiness. Though they’re clearly there, he doesn’t pound home the ironies; he just keeps them afloat, letting you swim in them. Coming down from the first chorus, he glances suspiciously around the studio. Judging? Or afraid he’s being judged? For naive jingoism? Or the laughable lyrics? The outro hasn’t even closed and he’s there asking someone to send an eyesore away. “I’m Opal from the BBC,” actress Geraldine Chaplin intrudes, “I’m doing a documentary on Nashville. Did he hear me?” Oh, he heard, but as these things go, where there is a show of power, there is insecurity underneath to drive it.

But I also wouldn’t have paid her any attention. Waxing bad lyrical that makes country lyrics sound like T. S Eliot, Geraldine Chaplin is so ridiculously dim-witted that you wonder if she’s an impostor. The English critic Dilys Powell fancied, “the BBC doesn’t dispatch eager ignoramuses on that kind of assignment.” Recording her free associations walking through a junkyard, she drivels on in doggerel rhythm:

The dead here have no crosses, nor tombstones, nor wreaths to sing of their past glory, but lie in rotting, decaying, rusty heaps, their innards ripped out by greedy, vulturous hands. … The rust on their bodies is… the color of dried blood. Dried blood. I’m reminded of… of an elephant’s secret burial ground. Yes. Cette aire de mystère. Cette essence de I’irréel. These cars are trying to communicate. O cars, are you trying to tell me something? 

Where the camera, zooming out slowly from herself into the whole view as she went on, exposes the scale of the monstrosity without making much of itself, she merely exposes her own stupidity. “What’s funny about Opal is that her affectations are all wasted,” Pauline Kael notes in her seminal review, “since the hillbillies she’s trying to impress don’t know what she’s talking about.” Certainly not all wasted? If Elliott Gould shows up out of nowhere at the party, she’ll take the next flight out and crash into him like a moth to a flame. To an appeal from a rock band’s driver (Arkin) on the other hand, all that she has to say is simply, “I make a point never to gossip with servants.” But what’s the point of talking nonsense to yourself, knowing that nobody, at least nobody you care about, is around to witness your brilliance? If not to think of yourself in the same terms as you do for the stars you have wet dreams about?

That’s basically the paradox of clout fetish: it really is yourself most of all that you’re trying to impress. At the airport ceremony, Haven gushes: “My son Buddy (Peel), he just graduated from Harvard Law School. We’re trying to give him all the breaks that we never got. Buddy, say hello.” Buddy says, “Hi,” bowing down to reach his dad’s mic, so sunny and callow he might just grow rabbit ears. This greeter-in-chief of Nashville conceives of his son as a kind of mascot to his self-image; it’s obvious that he’s built his son’s life around himself, being his business manager and all, and that he wants him around as a refuge from self-consciousness. He couldn’t go on singing with a straight face “Unpack your bags, and try not to cry. I can’t leave my wife… For the sake of the children, we must say goodbye,” if he’s aware how he’s making himself the butt of his own joke, with his mistress Lady Pearl (Baxley) watching and chattering around with his son in the audience, her neckline plunging down, while his wife is away in France. It’s the fantasy in his music, and in everyone else’s, that protects you from yourself, that keeps you from living up to your perception of yourself. You can see clearly his self-absorption when he sings, and the look of substance withdrawal whenever the fanfare dies down. Music is basically about emotional refuge, and for me, as it must for many, it acts like opium, because that’s the image of our lives we see.

Which is why we’re not the least bit surprised by lyrics like “I’ve lived through two Depressions, and seven Dust Bowl droughts, floods, locusts and tornadoes, but I don’t have any doubt.” After all, pain and suffering are highly valuable in a nation as obsessed with tragedies as with its own identity, and they need great salesmen in order to turn a profit. That has been one of the many roles that Hollywood, the first organised industry to really merge art and mass commerce, played. And Nashville, the Hollywood of Country & Western (Taylor Swift got her start here, so did Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton before her), wouldn’t be Nashville if it was running short of people like Lady Pearl, who suddenly gets all dewy-eyed when someone like Opal makes the mistake of pronouncing the three magic syllables “Ken-ne-dy.” Baxley has a pungent verbal humour to bring out the self-parody in a line without going over the top: “He got four hundred and eighty-one thousand, four hundred and fifty-three votes… and the arsehole got five hundred and fifty-six thousand, and five hundred and seventy-seven votes!” or “All I remember, the next few days was us just looking at that TV set and seeing that great fat-bellied sheriff saying ‘Ruby, you son of a bitch.’ And Oswald. And her in her little pink suit [cries]…” or “And then comes Bobby. … Oh, he was a beautiful man. He was not much like… John, you know. He was more… puny-like.” Opal, usually the one to go sappy, is a step away from rolling her eyes now that mustiness has turned against her.

It gets to the best of us; even the meek old fool Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn) has to have a taste of it, who can’t help introducing his walking skeleton of a niece (Shelley Duvall) to everyone he meets, can’t help adding “She’s from California,” as she’s busy flirting with just about every handsome guy she lays her wide eyes on. “You know, my wife Esther is on the same floor with Barbara Jean” in the hospital, Mr. Green mentions to the young Vietnam veteran Glenn (Scott Glenn) in a church service. He went on: “Esther and I had a son, in the service too. Oh, not, not, not the army, it was navy. And uh, we lost him in the South Pacific, we don’t know how. World War II.” You don’t know if you should pity the geezer or shun him. He’s turned the trauma of his family into his respect and somebody else’s anecdote, even though that’s practically every other American you know. But what is a man like him if not the trauma he sells? There’s nothing of himself to divulge, perhaps because there’s really nothing of himself that he can divulge: he’s built his whole identity and pride on other people in his life. It’s the stuff that gives his empty existence what little meaning there is that can save it from utter mediocrity and dotage. We live off others’ tragedies because we ourselves don’t want to go through with ours.

I was only going through Jar of Flies (1994) and Alice in Chains (1995) recently, and I was amazed by how much the music seems to speak directly to us, that we constantly misunderstood it to be about us. The assassin of John Lennon no doubt identified very deeply with his music. He must’ve thought, as we have for Stevie Nicks, Kurt Cobain, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed, that his life was projected into Lennon’s lyrics, which must’ve been a relief. Yet that relief is built out of an illusion—that someone out there knows what it’s like to feel the things “I” feel—and when that illusion breaks, you wish you never had any belief to begin with.

That is the danger that comes with any art: it heals as much as it kills. But music, maybe the most accessible of all popular arts, is also the most dangerous, because without feeling and its immediacy, it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t just groom your heart of glass. It plays with your fantasies and sense of reality, and it can put your worst fears and sorrows on dynamite. The tragedy of Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the reigning country queen whom just about everyone adores, is thus not in her death, but our loss.

We perceive what goes into the art, and we experience what the unbalance of life and art can do to a person. When she was a child, Barbara Jean memorized the words on a record and earned fifty cents as a prize, and she’s been singing ever since; the artist has developed, but the woman hasn’t. She has driven herself to the point of having no identity except as a performer. She’s in and out of hospitals, and her manager husband (Allen Garfield) treats her as a child, yet she’s a true folk artist; the Nashville audience knows she’s the real thing and responds to the purity of her gift. She expresses the loneliness that is the central emotion in country music. But she isn’t using the emotion, as the other singers do: it pours right out of her—softly. Arriving at the airport, coming home after a stretch of treatment—for bums, we’re told—she’s radiant, yet so breakable that it’s hard to believe she has the strength to perform.

A few days later, when she stands on the stage of the Opry Belle and sings “Dues,” with the words “It hurts so bad, it gets me down,” her fragility is so touching and her swaying movements are so seductively musical that, perhaps for the first time on the screen, one gets the sense of an artist’s being consumed by her gift… She has a long sequence on the stage… when Barbara Jean’s mind starts to wander and, instead of singing, she tells out-of-place, goofy stories about her childhood. They’re the same sort of stories that have gone into her songs, but without the transformation they’re just tatters that she dings to—and they’re all she’s got.

Her “ballads are her only means of expressing her yearnings”, Kael wrote (better than I ever could), “her art comes from her belief in imaginary roots… country music is about a longing for roots that don’t exist.” Everybody has their own fixations on her, and maybe every one of them thinks they are the special one. Glenn, star-struck, goes so far as to keep a silent vigil over her without anyone’s warrant: his mother saved her from a fire once when she was just a little girl, and the naive little boy thinks it’s his preordained duty to be her guardian angel.

But Kenny (David Hayward) is the one who was really and absolutely taken with the music itself. He had no original intention of being there at the rally near the end, no premeditated plan for murder whatsoever. Yet there was a sense of inevitable finality when he made it there: everything made sense when he pulled the trigger, even if you couldn’t explain it. In the course of the film, he abandoned his car on a highway as it broke down and as everyone else looked on; he met a runaway wife (Harris) who wanted to tap her heels three times and turn into a star, and when he wonders what she’ll do if she doesn’t become one, all she could come up with was to become a truck salesman (“But nobody’d buy a truck from a girl!”); later, staying at Mr Green’s, he receives a call from his mother, who’s worried and rambles compulsively on the phone—this is what he ran away from—he can’t just hang up in the presence of Mr Green’s hippie niece, so he moved his finger slowly towards the telephone switch, touched it down, and said: “I love you too, mama… I really do. I’ll see you soon… Bye-bye.”

The day Barbara Jean was out of the hospital, Mr Green lost his wife, only to find that no one seems to care or even notice. As he was still in shock, reacting to the news, he was greeted by the ever laconic and phlegmatic Glenn, who all of a sudden babbles on passionately about how special Barbara Jean is to him. In another twist, the funeral was held at the very same moment as the rally. Dead set on finding his chic niece, who was having the time of her life flirting and showing up at performances, to get her to show up and pay her respects for his dead wife, he got up and left, and Kenny followed. He lost Mr Green in the rallying crowds, then there she is, the virgin-white goddess, brunette hair combed to the back in misty rose pink hair bows. She sang of the idealised, nostalgic family life that was promised, the way of life that seemed to be or have been, the things that some people just dance and sing along to and talk over without thinking too much about what it means: the peril of it taken literally! Of realising the heartbreaking falsehood of it all! The way he looked up, first at her, and then at the big, bright American flag hanging dominantly and buoyantly above, it was not the Look-on-my-Works-ye-Mighty fury that Arthur Bremer had when he shot George Wallace. It was the look of betrayal and disbelief.

Handing his microphone to Albuquerque (Harris) to “sing!” after he was shot along with the country queen, he announces to the panicked crowd: “Y’all take it easy now. This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville. You show ’em what we’re made of. They can’t do this to us here in Nashville.” As if being Nashville means that you’re exceptional from the world outside and its dangers. “You may say, that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me!” Albuquerque warbles. It’s the biggest black joke, and you can’t look on. She brought the crowds back together, rallying ’round the flag. The scene is moving and disturbing in equal measure: we tell ourselves to move on quickly from our collective tragedies, not knowing if it’s for denial or healing. The sarcasm is piercingly uncomfortable. We seek gratification not because we’re soulless and empty on the inside, but to escape. The illusion must persist so we can look ourselves straight in the mirror. The show must go on!

It’s risky writing about a film that moves you in any profound capacity because you always run the risk of drowning it in superlatives or spoiling the pleasure. Nashville should probably be called one among four or five greatest films ever made, then you’d see just why I’d been distressing over this particular review which you’re now reading. You are implored to see one or two Altman films thus mentioned before you embark on your way down the Interstate, and before them the genre films of the 1940s and 1950s that they subvert (1946’s The Big Sleep before 1973’s The Long Goodbye, some John Ford or Anthony Mann before McCabe).

The distance that some people feel in Altman films isn’t the same found in Fassbinder or Godard. It’s unpretentious to the bone. We drift along in the humanities of these little people, the accidental grace of mediocrities, and it’s like a mirror gazing back at us; the distance is with the world around us. For every action there is a reaction. That’s Newton’s Third Law. The main mechanic of the film is to blend any two tints on the palette together and get the most out of a mismatch. Nashville is all mismatches, knitted and unresolved. The tones of interplay chemistry are so all over the place the frictions give off heat, and it absorbs you totally: kept under threshold by the marriage of farce with naturalism, it keeps refreshing itself and never dies off.

The most astonishing of these is perhaps Tomlin’s Linnea and Carradine’s Tom, one’s the housewife of a lawyer and mother of two deaf children, the other a narcissistic folk star of “Bill, Mary and Tom” (a twist on the popular folk group “Peter, Paul and Mary”). “In repose, Lily Tomlin looks like a wistful pony; when she grins, her equine gums and long, drawn face suggest a friendly, goofy horse”, so said Kael in her review of The Late Show (1977), and that’s precisely the element of her charm. They share the single best scene in the entire film, and I would never wish to spoil it, but let it be said that the moment when Tomlin leaves Carradine, I suddenly felt as if my heart was stung by a bumblebee. It was more painful than anything I’ve seen of Bergman’s marriage stories (much as Altman loves them), and that’s in the span of only three or four scenes.

The funniest, though, should be Walker, who ran on a campaign of kicking all lawyers out of government, never showing up publicly and could just as well be the M*A*S*H-style microphone van that chants “all of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not”, and John (Michael Murphy), the suave, walking-on-eggshells campaign manager he hires, who spends half his time convincing the musicians how non-political their involvement is: you couldn’t find a more lawyerly man in all of Nashville if you tried.

All this is just a tiny iceberg, and here’s another thing why I must constantly wrestle with my soul when I write a review like this: I can’t cover everything. I could write a book. I could go into the ironic contradictions and coincidental similarities between the musical ethos and reality more deeply. I could elaborate why there’s basically no private life for Barbara Jean; it’s not because it’s hidden, but because it’s null; only when she’s performing on stage does she truly shine, does she realise herself as a human being. I could say a thing or two about how needy Del (Ned Beatty) is for his wife Linnea’s love and attention like he’s another child of hers, but she has to keep her eyes on the deaf children, afraid she’ll hurt their feelings turning her eyes away. I could dissect the scene in which Tom sings “I’m Easy,” where all four women offstage who took up his pickup offer think, or wish, that he’s singing to them.

I could go on about: how music isn’t so much politicised as commercialised, as electoral politics puts on the wolf’s clothing they call “entertainment”; how Sueleen Gay (Welles) played strip in front of crude, rabble-rousing men to get to be on the same stage as Barbara Jean: knowing how the dunce admired herself in the mirror, we can barely keep our pity under control; how Opal unknowingly spilled the tea on Tom and Mary as she laughed like a self-aware idiot; how the Grand Ole Opry concert sequence was shot on the same day Nixon resigned for Watergate, as the country drifted ever deeper into stagflation in an ongoing energy crisis (the time is now worse than ever, and as a sign of our current social resignation and bourgeois monopolisation of the popular arts, why hasn’t anyone made anything more inspired than 2024’s Civil War and Megalopolis, one by a naive liberal Brit and the other a living relic of the ’70s?); how Nashville cares so much about music and Christianity that church gatherings are turned into music shows; how specifically Nashville is like a microcosm of America, shielded off from the rest of the country like America is from that of the world; how it has its own little tripolar political order: Hamilton and Barbara Jean vs. Connie White (Karen Black), with the black “whitest n***** in town” Tommy Brown (Timothy Brown) as the neutral, uninvolved party; and how they even have their own names inscribed on the race cars at the races, watched by none other than themselves.

Fortunately for me, plenty has been written wonderfully and incisively on Nashville even before it was set for release, and you’re urged to read them. There was of course Pauline Kael famously jumping the shark months in advance in the The New Yorker, almost single-handedly saving it from a commercial disaster after United Artists had jettisoned from Altman’s back; Altman made back the money for once despite a limited release.

There was also a “critic’s duet” in the Village Voice by Molly Haskell and her husband Andrew Sarris, both nemeses of Kael’s, and both ardently favourable towards the film; Haskell also went on to write more rigorously about it for Criterion. Ray Sawhill of Salon, a protégé of Kael’s, has written insightfully on its 25th anniversary. Also of interest was a “conversation” in Slant between Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard on the sociopolitics of Nashville and its relevance for its 35th anniversary. Manny Farber and Greil Marcus were notable and worthy detractors among many worthless ones (including one by the academic philistine Robin Wood), and to quickly respond to the former’s review for City of San Francisco I have simply this: even Williams, Rodgers, and Pearl are not immune from the inhuman side of business, and to associate an attack on what an artist will do for business with that on their creative or inherent moral merit is more absurd than mistaking the condemnation of a government for that of its subjects.

USA | 1975 | 160 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Robert Altman.
writer: Joan Tewkesbury.
starring: David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blackley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn & Thomas Hal Phillips.