‘Nashville’ at 50: Robert Altman’s Masterpiece Remains as Timeless, and Prescient, as Ever
Robert Altman’s Nashville has often been described as the best American film ever made. I have never interpreted that superlative literally—as in, it is the best film ever crafted in the United States of America (although one could make that argument, and I have). Instead, I’ve understood it to mean that Nashville best captures “America”—its ethos, myths, contradictions, and the archetypes that populate it.
In 1973, United Artists approached Altman with a screenplay called The Great Southern Amusement Company, which they hoped to turn into a star vehicle for Welsh singer Tom Jones who had recently sprung to prominence with the title track for What’s New Pussycat (Stuart, 39). Far too conventional an idea for Altman, he predictably declined. Still, he found the country music scene a promising backdrop for a feature film, so he offered UA a deal—help fund his next project, Thieves Like Us, and he would follow through on a country music film for the studio. UA agreed, and supplied funding for screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to take several research trips to Nashville, where the seeds of a new screenplay began to take shape.
Tewkesbury’s first trip—which she has referred to as “the Christian trip”—was a chaperoned visit to conventional tourist attractions, which inspired little in the writer. Her second trip proved much more fruitful. She sat in on recording sessions, visited dive bars, and watched travelers crane their necks to spot celebrities at the airport, meticulously detailing her observations in yellow legal pads. To her, Nashville revealed something far less straightforward than anything United Artists might have imagined. It was an epic clash of personalities—ambitious transplants, locals who’d seen it all, the cultural elite and the casual passersby who could only hope to catch a glance of them. She told Interview Magazine, “Back then [Nashville] was like a small town built in a circle. If I saw you in the morning, I’d probably see you at least one more time during the day. So all you had to do was think, ‘If I saw you in the morning, what did you do until four in the afternoon? Who were you fucking that you weren’t supposed to be? Who were you trying to make a deal with?’ You begin to make up these stories for all the characters.”
Sprawling even by Altman’s standards, the film would eventually include 24 characters who weave in and out of each other’s lives over the course of a weekend. Nashville is not a star vehicle in the traditional sense—each of the 24 receive roughly equal attention. What’s startling, given the size of the cast, is how thoroughly and truthfully realized each role is. Altman offers us glimpses of a person at a time, but none are wasteful or frivolous. Each rendering is more deliciously detailed than the next: Tom Frank, the womanizing star played by Keith Carradine, only listens to his own music. Opal, the excitable BBC reporter played by Geraldine Chaplin, fails to recognize the sole Black country star featured in the film as she sits right next to him. Sueleen Gay, an aspiring singer played by Gwen Welles, stuffs socks into her bra as she practices her set in the mirror.
This specificity makes each gathering by a wider ensemble quite rich. One scene which has rightfully earned a reputation as one of the film’s best is the scene at the Exit/In club, where Tom plays “I’m Easy” (penned by Carradine himself, who took home the Best Original Song Oscar). The camera cuts from woman to woman, none of whom know each other particularly well, each gazing at this man, believing he is singing to them. The scene holds weight though because each woman brings her own desires to the moment. LA Joan sees his celebrity before his art. Mary (Cristina Raines) turns her face away from her husband in tears. Linnea (Lily Tomlin) reaches to touch her collarbone in a moment of tenderness. For a woman parenting two deaf children, whose husband pays little attention and treats women cruelly—to be overtly seduced, to be told “I’m Easy,” is a welcome escape.
Undoubtedly, these characters feel so authentically drawn because of the collaborative processes Altman encouraged on his sets. Tewkesbury initially conceptualized her cast of characters by drawing on people she’d met throughout her life: Jeff Goldblum’s Tricycle Man was based on the man who’d taken care of all the old cars on Thieves Like Us; Sueleen Gay was a young woman she’d worked with in nightclubs; Shelley Duvall, who she described as a “study in survival,” inspired Albuquerque, eventually played by Barbara Harris. The characters then took on lives of their own in the hands of their actors, who Altman encouraged to invent, improvise, even costume their characters. Together they found something so universal that 50 years later, we know these characters still. We can easily imagine Sueleen Gay’s delusionally atrocious audition for American Idol, Opal’s podcast (which almost certainly would have a marimba-heavy score), LA Joan tracking down celebrities for a selfie, Haven Hamilton saying “get me to God’s country” after an appearance on SNL. We understand how they strive and dream; how they think they know what they want, only to discover reality less appealing. In Nashville as in life, the promise of America can also be its most heartbreaking deception. For every Haven Hamilton or Connie White who take to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, there are a dozen more Sueleen Gays, who have been sold that dream but who are not equipped to achieve it and who will become manipulated by those in positions of power.
United Artists passed on what would eventually become Nashville; ABC Motion Pictures produced and Paramount distributed. United Artists must have felt some remorse over their decision because Nashville was met with near unanimous critical praise. Kurt Vonnegut claimed it was the best film he’d seen in his life, and asked Altman to adapt his novel Breakfast of Champions (Alan Rudolph, then Altman’s assistant director, eventually made the film in 1999). E.L. Doctorow was said to have cried so hard he lost his contact lens (Hoberman, 206). Pauline Kael’s borderline giddy response has become stuff of legend. “I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness,” she wrote. “It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over; you take it with you.” The country music community didn’t necessarily agree with Kael’s enthusiasm, instead finding Altman’s perspective on the industry insulting and his willingness to allow his actors to write their own songs even worse. Poet and novelist Jim Harrison wrote in The New York Times that the songs were “rip‐offs, parodic blather” and that “Nashville had no more to do with country music than a Styrofoam mango has to do with a real one.”
Still, Altman insisted Nashville wasn’t about country music, per se. He told The New York Times that it was “a metaphor for my personal view of our society…I wanted to do Nashville to study our myths and our heroes and our hypocrisy.” He continued, “The movie is not just a country-music statement. It’s a statement about my stupidity, your stupidity, everybody’s stupidity…There is a decadence in America. I see it all around me.” His outlook was almost certainly informed by the political environment of the mid-1970s. Altman read the first draft of Tewkesbury’s screenplay just as Watergate broke, President Nixon resigned while they were in production, and the film would be released as the nation prepared to celebrate its bicentennial.
Altman captured this cultural dissonance—flag-waving patriotism and the deep cynicism born from collective broken trust in the government—by adding the presidential campaign of Hal Phillip Walker, third party candidate for the fictional Replacement Party, to the film. Walker blasts quasi-populist messages from his wandering van with folksy clarity, satisfyingly simple but also just nonsensical enough to ring authentic to an American third party campaign (“No more lawyers in government!”). His politics hardly matter in the long run; the characters never discuss Phillips beyond what he might contribute to their own professional aims. Most importantly, Walker’s campaign provided an organizational structure for the screenplay, with each character gathering on the final day of the film for a rally. It might be an inconsequential day (just another appearance for Linnea’s gospel choir), or it might be a significant day (Haven Hamilton assessing his political potential), but no matter the individual reason, each would collide on this day to witness an assassination.
Upon first watch, the assassination is surprising. Even for repeat viewers, the clues are minimal to non-existent. For Tewkesbury and Altman though, the lack of clarity was intentional. When violence erupts, motives are not always understood in real time; chaos simply crashes into the context of a person’s daily life. By 1975, the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr, and several more of the country’s most prominent civil rights leaders forced Americans to at the very least consider whether violence had become a feature, not a bug, of American politics. Of course, in Nashville, a political figure is not assassinated, but a popular entertainer. Altman has described how he wanted the violence to affect the “wrong person.” “I thought it shouldn’t be a political figure. It should be Barbara Jean. They never go after a woman. It’s always been these guys, these politicians. And the minute that hit my mind, it exploded. I said, ‘wow, now I’ve got something!’” (Stuart, 66).
Many critics have branded Barbara Jean’s death as prescient, presaging the increased violence toward entertainment rather than political figures (John Lennon would be murdered five years later). I’d argue though that Altman was more prescient about the increasingly blurry line between politics and entertainment. In an interview with the New York Times in 1975, he said “Our political, our elected officials … are also hard to shake once they get up there. And their speeches are no different than the country‐western songs—each new song doesn’t really say anything. And that’s pretty much how the thing started—the idea of making that comparison.”
Consider Barbara Jean’s arrival in Nashville. A line of young women from the Tennessee Twirling Institute march together in time. Those in the bedazzled turquoise leotards, crowns affixed to their heads, peel off to the right and left, while the drill team begins its routine, mechanically step forward, flipping their rifles around and around as the national anthem rings out around them. It’s a welcome ceremony more befitting a politician than a singer, but perhaps that is the point. Barbara Jean receives a politician’s welcome, then suffers a politician’s fate. The most high profile political assassination attempts of the last few decades coincidentally also indicate a blurring of politics and entertainment. Ronald Reagan, actor turned politician, was shot by a man hoping to impress Jodie Foster. A reality television star turned politician, Donald Trump’s instincts skew so heavily toward the aesthetics of entertainment that he had the wherewithal to thrust his fist in the air for a photo op after nearly being shot in the head.
After Barbara Jean is shot and carted off stage, Albuquerque seizes her moment. She had spent the duration of the film migrating from stage to stage, praying for a break, and now, amidst the chaos with Barbara Jean’s unattended microphone and a captive audience, she finally has one. As she rouses the crowd with a rendition of It Don’t Worry Me, the camera pulls back to reveal the American flag looming over the audience. Is this what America is? Are we so quickly and easily sated by spectacle? So desensitized to violence? On my most cynical days (of which there are many recently), I’m inclined to believe so. Still, when interviewed by the New York Times, Altman suggested his vision of America in Nashville was not a totally apocalyptic one, but rather “a total negative and a total positive. You come out and you say, ‘Jesus Christ, four minutes after the girl’s gotten killed, they’re out there singing as if nothing happened.’ But, on the other hand, you say, Wait a minute, aren’t those people fantastic? In the face of this disaster, they’re going to go on.” To Altman, resilience, as much as ambition, is a key facet of the American experience.
No matter your reaction to the film, the parting message Joan Tewkesbury penned for an introduction to the screenplay stands true: “All you need to do is add yourself as the twenty-fifth character and know that whatever you think about the film is right, even if you think the film is wrong.”
Nashville premiered in New York on June 11, 1975 and in Los Angeles on July 2. It is currently available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video
Sources:
Joan Tewkesbury on Screenwriting: An Interview
Author(s): Chuck Sack and Joan Tewkesbury
Source: Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 2-25
The Nashville Chronicles by Jan Stuart
Screenplay introduction by Joan Tewkesbury
Nashville contra Jaws Or “The Imagination of Disaster” Revisited
Chapter in Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan
J. Hoberman
Robert Altman’s Funny, Epic Vision of America
Pauline Kael
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