NASHVILLE: A Belated Birthday Appreciation

I spent the summer of 1975 dragging a tacked-together wooden ‘hydroplane’ behind my bike in a small suburb in Western Washington. I was, in those days, obsessed by the coming bicentennial. Like everyone else that summer, I saw Jaws and then shuddered with dread every time I got near the water. We all watched the copters take off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. We sat in front of our TVs in awe as the Apollo and Soyuz rockets hooked up in space. We witnessed two attempts on Gerald Ford’s life: one by a Charles Manson groupie, no less. Watergate was still an incredibly bad taste in everybody’s mouth; even if you were eleven, you still remembered his resignation the previous summer, the way your parents had raged at the TV during the hearings. The 70s were a hell of a thing. Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the 70s: where the battle lines lay in the War Between the Sexes; how close, yet how far away the American Dream for most people in this country; and what the smashing of legal and cultural constraints portended for the Disunited States. Nashville was a success, unlike many of its striving, wannabe characters; but, being an expressive, rather than sensationalist summation of the decade thus far, it failed to register on my radar at all. The only movie released in 1975 that I can clearly remember wanting to see — having to see — was The Hindenburg, which tells you something about my taste level at the time.

Nashville is a series of episodes, observations. Its storylines, its characters, its sequences congeal and then break like an overcooked sauce. No single scene, save perhaps Barbara Jean’s arrival in Nashville and subsequent breakdown onstage at Opryland, determines or drives the plot forward in any meaningful way. The bones are simple: an offbeat anti-establishment presidential candidate is coming to Nashville. If C&W superstar Barbara Jean performs at his rally, she’ll drive the attendance of every other major country star currently in town (excepting Connie White, who nevuh appears on the same stage as Barbara Jean). She’ll also pull along in her wake a mass of hangers-on, upstarts, nobodies and dreamers. How to Book Barbara Jean occupies perhaps ten or fifteen minutes of the movie’s three hour running time. The rest of the show is taken up with musical performances — Nashville is a brilliant musical — and character showcases. Karen Black’s stiff shoulders and even stiffer hair tell you everything you need to know about the kind of ruthless ambition and rigid self containment that have made Connie White a star. Sueleen Gaye’s arc — a diner waitress so deluded, so certain of her talent, so desperate to be seen that she strips naked at a political fundraiser to get a place on stage with Barbara Jean — seems a pathetic, uncomfortable, slightly comical side show, until she pins herself to a column at the (fake) Parthenon in the wake of Barbara Jean’s death, a mute Antigone mourning for her lost opportunity; and you suddenly realize that it wasn’t talent that Sueleen lacked (although she did): it was valor. 

Not that valor is lacking elsewhere: Henry Gibson delivers every possible tint, shade, hue of craven, ambitious self-absorption; the way he nearly piddles himself when Julie Christie shows up at his table is a classic narcissist tick. But then he selflessly throws himself across Barbara Jean, trying to shield her from bullets that have already struck. And Barbara Harris’s Albuquerque — a flea, the pesky little bug Nashville’s movers and shakers keep trying to shrug off, a little striver wannabe, real name Winifred, on the run from her bumptious husband. Trying to be a star, always in the right place at the wrong time — Albuquerque comes through in the clutch, gets a clean shot and takes it, clenches the microphone after Barbara Jean’s fall and belts out the closing number — “It Don’t Worry Me” complete with apocalyptic patter, gospel choir backup and several Big Key Changes.

Nashville is sometimes mistaken for a chatty, gossipy movie about an American subculture catching a glimpse of its own bad side in the mirror. And if every scene were as deliciously catty as the bizarre, banal encounter between Julie Christie (herself), Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson playing Porter Waggoner as The Man In White) and Connie White (Karen Black stealing Lynn Anderson’s AquaNet thunder) then I suppose the argument could hold. But for every vapid celebrity meet-and-greet there is a corresponding examination of the blistering, corrosive misery that hides behind the sequins and fringe. 

Consider “Easy.” A man, a folk-rock star, a game player of the first rank, sings, in very earnest and humble terms, a whiney little ditty about the games women play with his heart. Three different women in his audience, having recently slept with this particularly easy piece of business, believe he is singing it expressly to them. But he is in fact singing it, with barefaced longing and submission, to a plain, conservatively dressed woman hanging on the fringes of the club, in the far back row, outside the bright circle of country music royalty and assorted hangers-on, who barely dare to breath while he sings. The three woman he’s used and thrown away turn to register the object of his desire. They collapse, they sneer; their eyes mist with disappointment, rage — and admiration. She sits passively, absorbing his attention, sealing his doom. Later, when she’s done with him, it’s his turn to suffer the agony of defeat: she disposes of him like a used Kleenex. He’s a one-off, a bit on the side, a break from her saintly routine of deaf children, Sunday church, family picnics. 

Lily Tomlin as middle class femme fatale: inconceivable, but like everything else in Nashville’s universe, undeniably true — and highly entertaining. Nashville is a sparkling entertainment, stuffed full of juicy songs, celebrity cameos, backstage gossip — Barbara Jean’s thrilling, jittering onstage breakdown eerily mirrors Loretta Lynn’s own mental health challenges — but it also lives and breaths on its own terms, which are the terms of its moment in time, the history that it occupies. Its logic is inexorable; nothing about it feels rushed, imposed, made-up. The actors approach their roles with clinical precision; each performance is native, detailed. It takes mere seconds for each of the actors to establish the core of their characters’ being, their inner lives (or lack thereof). Geraldine Chaplin — “Opal! from the BBC!” — has left such an indelible impression on my life that I can’t, to this day, press ‘record’ on my phone without thinking to myself ‘Testaing, testaing, un, deux, trois, quatre….’ Nashville is real in the same way everything we saw on TV in the early seventies was real. These things happened. Donnie & Marie happened. Watergate happened. Saigon happened. And then Barbara Jean was shot. It happened. Try to tell me it didn’t.

For all its apparent randomness, there is abundant formal depth to Nashville. Parallels abound: there are, for example, two black men in the cast. One sits near the top of the country music heap — not Barbara Jean famous, but close and getting closer; the other slings hash in an airport diner. Each knows the truth about Nashville; only one is willing to tell it. Barbara Jean and Connie White circle each other like cage fighters, but never actually clench; did Connie send Barbara Jean the black roses? Well, Barbara Jean would like her to have them back. A trio of players provide connective tissue throughout the movie. Sue Barton, a real Hollywood publicist playing herself, tricked out in custom cut 70s style Holly Hobby housewife weeds, gusts through crowded scenes like a foreign princess, tossing random celebrities like Julie Christie and Elliott Gould out for the yokels to claw at like Mardi Gras beads — a cat bringing home prizes from the hunt as tributes to her own power and reach. Jeff Goldblum performs the same service, bringing the plot’s strivers and grifters — Albuquerque, Opal from the BBC, LA Joan— in and out of the frame. 

Then there’s Opal. Is she really from the BBC? For a reporter, she sure seems clueless. She tartly advises a chatty chauffeur brimming with juicy celebrity dirt that she doesn’t believe in ‘gossiping with servants.’ She drawls long, portentous monologues about school buses and wrecked cars into a tape recorder that she speaks to in French; and, present at the shooting of Barbara Jean, she completely fails to clock it. Whatever she’s doing, wherever she is, she has no idea whats happening. Opal functions as a psychopomp, a guide to the Other Realm. Take her as a sort of crackpot tour narrator in this underworld of fame-hungry shades. She’s a scapegoat besides: she’s booted from the scene, toyed with, disposed of more than once, but she never lets it get her down. She keeps on trucking. Opal is Orpheus, but with blinders on. If Eurydice were following in her footsteps, Opal wouldn’t turn and look back; she’d always be on the hunt for somebody more famous to talk to. Opal is the perfect stand-in for the American public itself: we kid ourselves that we are relevant, consequential, indispensable. In fact, we are bystanders. Extras. NPCs, as the kids say today. Disposable. 

Nashville functions for me like one of Chuck Close’s gridwork paintings. Each moment is its own thing, with its own center, its own texture, gradient, colors, focus. The whole is revealed with the proper perspective. Love blossoms everywhere, in every variety: bumptious and beautiful, false and true, fresh and faded, deluded and cynical, useful and useless. There is murder — a gruesome sensational public assassination on the steps of a concrete copy of the Parthenon; and there is also death — quiet, pointless, cruel and unremarkable, virtually anonymous, the kind one merely averts one’s eyes from. There is endless ambition, and there is meaningless obeisance, the ‘dry husk of loyalty’ hollowed out by habit and casual disgust. One could spend a lifetime cataloging the varieties of ambition that catalyze Nashville. Of disappointment and heartbreak there is every flavor on the shelf.

In 2022, The British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound released its eighth catalog of the world’s best films, according to a global survey of film critics and scholars. Robert Altman’s greatest film, Nashville was bumped from the list’s top 100 films, a fate it shared with The Godfather, Part II, The Grand Illusion and a number of other allegedly less persuasive movies. The test of a truly great work of art is a function of its staying power, which I interpret to mean the rewards it offers on repeat viewing (by that measure, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is undoubtedly the greatest movie ever seen in this household); its openness to interpretation (one reason L’Avventura continues to own a place on the list); and its downstream impact on the art form. The Battleship Potemkin will always place because there is still very little in film that matches the creative thrill of the Odessa Steps sequence. Its perspectives, its motion, its edits:  everything about it is the language of film as we know it. 

Presentism is a curious condition. Films like Get Out and Parasite are undoubtedly good films. But I never want to see them again. Our culture’s taste for garish violence passed me by. And I have sometimes wondered what Barry Jenkins and Celine Schiamma’s films might have looked like shot on film, without the use of LUTs. But it doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t need to see either Moonlight or Portrait of a Lady On Fire again. They are relics of their moment. It is amazing to me that filmmakers like Altman, Michael Powell and Pedro Almodovar were able to create coherent, consistent and effective visual styles using only film stock, light and production design. In fifty, eighty, a hundred years, I am certain that The Godfather Part II, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and The Grand Illusion will have rejoined the mostly brilliant films in the BFI’s top 100. If the Gods are just, Network, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Black Narcissus and Ran will rise with them. And Nashville will sit comfortably near the top, where it naturally belongs.