Legendary american auteur Robert Altman's (M.A.S.H., McCabe and Miller) 1975 epic 'Nashville' is ostensibly a meditation on the country music star making machinery. Strictly on that plane it is a level eyed stare at the ugliness, the moral and physical exhaustion that exists behind the curtain of the Grand Ole Opry and on the fringes of the scene; in the bars filled with horny men looking for T&A and among the star struck, star wannabes trying to get backstage to deliver demo tapes to their favourite singers. But 'Nashville' is no simple musical picture. It is at once an examination of patriotism and advertising(how the two can seamlessly meld in politics and in commerce), the idea of America - the dream, the ideal, and finally the more problematic reality and the corruption and misuse of individuals by the political and showbiz machine. If that is not enough it also deals with the propagation of the mythical America by naive foreign journalists, the concept of celebrity political endorsements and finally the ultimate Altman theme - that of the sheer ugliness of people in modern society.
Remember the babble of voices that fill the soundtrack in M.A.S.H., coming at your from characters both off and on screen in a perfect simulacrum of the crosstalk of everyday life. Similar to the famous overlapping voices technique that Altman was known for, this movie features a cacophony of characters from different professions, classes and functions. Without a fixed focus the camera roves through their lives and rummages through their ambitions, desires and lusts and shows us the compromises they make to achieve them. As the movie plays out very few characters escape the director's critical eye and our condemnation. The great thing is that these two things are separate - no special effort is made to induce our judgement as in traditional films with ominous music or reaction shots of other characters. The ugliness of the characters simply stands out and we recognise these things, partly because of similar characters we may have observed in life or even on the news.
The ensemble cast (another Altman trademark that helps him achieve that babble effect described earlier) makes it difficult to describe the plot and the place in it of the characters, but I will make an effort - with the caveat that my list is far from comprehensive and to get the full effect one has to watch the film. I mention less than 1/10th of the characters that make up the cast. We have a country music elder played by a gloriously mutton chopped Robert Arkin, his shrill wife and good natured son, who comprise a country music first family of sorts. Nurturing gubernatorial ambitions of his own he agrees to the request of a slimy political operative(are there any other types of poitical operatives!) to play a concert for the enigmatic Replacement Party Candidate. This fictional candidate is represented only by a slogan spewing, painted, party van, that over the course of the movie becomes a character in its own right, given a voice alongside the people who inhabit the screen. The megaphone voiced slogans, typical of quasi successful third party candidacies including Ross Perot's, contain a mixture of common sense ideas and complete gobbledygook, like - "Does Christmas smell of oranges to you?". That van represents modern political advertising in all its campy glory.
Then there is the most repulsive and hence most interesting character of the whole cast, a sharply drawn caricature of an obnoxious BBC journalist called Opal, played by a pregnant Geraldine Chaplin, who tries to define America and her people in terms of laughably high flown literary language and what are essentially racist terms. She views people only through symbolic terms and cannot engage with them as human beings and treats everyone around her like dirt. Her only driving aim is her personal ambition. Her character is probably the vilest of the lot and appears to be born of Altman's personal rage against a profession that I am surmising had treated him shoddily.
In one symbolic scene she walks through an empty lot filled with school buses that invoke the busing controversies of the civil rights era. Ten years too late to the scene, she tries to conjure up meaning from the overwhelming yellowness of the whole scene without a single child in sight using pathetic sentences like - "Yellow, the colour of cowardice." or "the yellow menace". Her attitude towards Americans in the South is that they are a bunch of yokels - the joke of course is that they are simple to a certain extent but not in any way that her sententious journalistic sentences can grasp. She can only view blacks and whites through the racial prism gained through reading books and newspapers and refuses to acknowledge the complexity of human and race relations in the south. Altman's own handling of race in the film is a lot more subtle and some might say curious. The only outright racist statement in the whole movie is made by a drunk black man who calls a successful black country singer an Oreo cookie. The only other obviously racist characters in the film is the journalist who talks of blacks in basic noble savage terms and seems to be as much of a unrefined aristocratic classist as she is a racist - In one scene she tells an ingratiating driver/manager that she does not to gossip with servants. In one scene the Robert Arkin country singer elder character offers the black country singer a slice of watermelon at a Nascar event and his wife sho's him away and offers some other package of food. Was that a sign of his latent racism? You have to decide that and the director is not gonna offer any help either way.
The other notable characters include two wannabe stars - one, a talentless waitress trying to trade in her looks and sensuality for a career and the other, a wife who flits through the movie trying to get her demo heard while evading her angry husband. The waitress, in a depressing and humiliating scene, is coerced at a fund raising party by the machinating political operative to strip for a room full of lecherous men, who, she realises too late, don't care for her flat voice. Altman seems to be suggesting that as nauseating as showbiz might be, with its affectations of sincerity and its rampant commercialism(the harmonising duo reading and singing syrupy adverts for candy in between Opry performances shows us the music - commerce nexus and foreshadows today's clear channel mandated radio monotony) - it is but a slow witted cousin to the corrupt political machine. Given free reign, the political apparatus will simply subsume the entertainment business to its purpose and strip the bit players of what little integrity they possess. Given the flak Altman took for M.A.S.H. - a movie set in the Korean war but made in the spirit of anti war defiance during the Vietnam era one can see the genesis of this angst.
This point is driven home by the story of the returning female star Barbara Jean played by a divine Barbara Baxley. She collapses at the start of the film due to the exhaustion from the grind of the music biz and is hospitalised. In one of the most poignant and simultaneously hilarious scenes in the film she returns to the stage not completely recovered, and becomes silly(I don't know how else to describe the gentle way in which she looses her marbles) in front of the audience, telling them never ending 'aw shucks' stories from her youth that are otherwise typical of the country music circuit. This scene shows Altman's genius for evincing co - mingled emotions from the audience - nothing in life is a straight laugh or cry and his scenes have that same ability to evoke mixed, often contradictory, reactions from us.
We feel sorry for Barbara Jean and are touched by her emotionally naked fragility but also relish the breakdown of her wholesome showbiz personality because of what it reveals to us about the presentation of public figures. Her patter becomes a parody of all the feel good personal stories that entertainers and politicians tell us to ingratiate themselves in our hearts. Imagine if you will, John McCain or Barack Obama going ditsy in a pubic appearance; McCain losing his grip on his prison camp survivor persona and starting to rail emotionally against the forces stacked against him or Obama stopping in the middle of his hope suffocated racial harmonising to tell us that everything is gone to shit and he doesn't have a clue what to do about it. Wouldn't that be something, straight talk for once.
The audience shows the singer no mercy despite her recent hospitalization and calls for blood. In case you were wondering, Altman is giving you the people a big middle finger there, even you cannot escape the 360 degree spread of his withering critique. Her breakdown forces her manager/husband to accept that same Slimy Political Operative's offer of a spot on a pre rally concert the next day . Now the husband wants no part of political sloganeering and insists that the stage be kept bereft of any Replacement Party material. Any guesses as to how badly he is duped? Again, we have reinforced the point that the very nature of the political business extracts messy individualism from the performer and candidate and makes him/her a tool of the candidate's expediencies. Altman's choice to never show us the actual candidate also plays a role in the sense we get of depersonalisation in politics. I ll just throw this fact in here and see if it resounds with the context - James Brown endorsed Nixon in 69. That's right, the godfather, Mr "I am black and I am proud" backed Tricky Dick. What the fuck was he thinking? Considering the extent to which the sorry celebrity endorsement game has devolved to, one can't help but be astonished at Altman's foresight in warning us not to be swayed by some singer's or actor's limp social commitment.
The last scenes of movie are composed of footage of the concert. What follows is a terrifying scene in which Altman both evokes the then still relevant spectre of political assassination - King, X, the Kennedys - and presciently predicts the age of pop culture assassinations - Lennon, Reagan (John Hinckley Jr and the Jodie Foster connection). The bittersweet denouement has the aforementioned runaway wife/wannabe star (Barbara Harris) taking the mic and giving a soulful, frayed rendition of a song called "It don't Worry Me" while backed by a black choir. The whole thing is handled expertly, especially in some crowd shots with a number of children in it. It is shot in a documentary style reminiscent of Woodstock or of D.A. Pennebaker's pioneering roc doc - Monterrey Pop. When these scenes, seemingly transposed from a more hopeful counterculture era, are seen in the context of the political mire of post Watergate, post Vietnam America, the irony is startling. One cannot help but smile and agree when Barbara Harris suddenly says mid song - "We got to be peaceful y'all, otherwise when we die we 'll just have plastic fly swatters with red dots on em in our graves". There you have it, make what you will of it; but you won't forget it. Plastic fly swatters and orange tasting Christmases in a country that wasn't that all that different from the confusion of the present day.
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