nashville (1975)
Structurally, Robert Altman's Nashville displays a perpetual convergence that only reaches its collision point in the final frames. It exists in an endless series of convergence and dispersal, the characters somehow all descend on the same location only to retreat back once again to their private worlds. This ebb and flow, its rhythms and cycles, with the rhythms and cycles of popular country music, election cycles, days, weeks, etc. strikes at something indescribable about the late 20th century American experience. Every time the song ends, there’s a brief void of possibility, the void is both exciting for its potential and uncomfortable for the same reason, the crowd holds its breath, the next song begins and in that moment they can truly relax. Any disruption to the pacifying stream is met with increasing disdain, no matter what the reason. With Nashville, Altman achieves that cathartic moment where all life seems to fall into place. With Nashville, through a sprawling canvas made up of seemingly inconsequential moments, Altman finds the duality of all moments, to be entirely irrelevant and to carry deep meaning, depending on their relationship to other moments. Narrative, Altman sees, is pattern recognition in a sea of perspectives. The centers of attention, be they celebrities or politicians, and those who vie to be among them, as one of them or merely in their orbit, the sights and sounds, the faces, the lives. In Nashville we see an ensemble caught in their own personal streams of thought, occasionally becoming entwined with another, never realizing the consequences that each of their actions will have, good or ill, on the people around them. Self-interested in a world of vanity, and those who aren't, live with an honesty that the others promptly parrot and mimic. All the while, the warm sounds of the country music never cease, the only fear our characters truly have in this world is fear of the silence.
Altman captures the Shangri La of the VIP in whose presence the masses sit, watch and applaud. The attention economy is born, personified in Opal, Geraldine Chaplin’s BBC reporter, who never perceives herself as part of the audience she sits in, rather a figure forging ahead on her own journey of discovery. Her disdain for spectators shifts when encountering potential fodder for reportage, a celebrity, a soldier from Vietnam, even an iconic American school bus. In general, she wanders in and out of the film remarking with wildly off-the-mark generalities in an attempt to poetically dramatize the bizarre hodgepodge that she experiences. From all sides, some are down and out, some riding the upward mobility, most are trapped in a state of pause to reflect on the bicentennial with the thought of "now what?". The opening scene of an energetic gospel choir cross cut with the somber march "we must be doing something right to last 200 years" is a nation transfixed by its own place in the world, looking for meaning in the fruits of their labor and finding none. Consumerism had left the populace with little more than Clorox powder and plastic flyswatters with red dots on them. The characters do their best to make sense out of it, but as a collective they are having the same sort of confused mental breakdown in the spotlight that Barbara Jean embodies, singing songs of simple, down-home logic while living none of it in her current reality. The collective downside of rampant exceptionalism comes to a boil as Sueleen Gay performs for an all male crowd of buttoned-up, would-be donors at a political fundraiser. Their instant disgust with her lack of singing talent quickly spirals into a mob of degradation as they regard her only use as entertainment to be performing a striptease. Altman pierces the nature of the coveted spotlight, the one who attains it is instantly objectified for an extreme adulation or disdain, a brief outlet for the crowd’s general dissatisfaction that underscores their daily existence. When Barbara Jean hits the peak of her mental breakdown on stage with a series of unrelated tales of her childhood, the response of the audience is unforgiving, she has become commodity. The music has been given the grand task of, not reflecting a culture, but of crafting the cultural identity for a country that forgot the words. As Hal Phillip Walker’s booming campaign van muses on the national anthem, ‘nobody know the words, nobody can sing it, nobody understands it’.
The characters keep to their circles, and the eruptions occur when the circles overlap. The constant volley that our attempts to carve the life we want will inevitably end our role in another story, Keith Carradine’s enunciation of ‘I’m Easy’ as his character disrupts the lives of most around him, the self-image coming into conflict with the self’s actions. In the end, Altman shows us a nation whose only goal is to separate themselves from the crowd, become heroic figures in their own right, and rise above the role of spectator. Like all performers, they put on the costume and the mask, don the archetype, take the stage and display their routine, rarely pausing to wonder why. As Karen Black’s Connie White reminds the children who come to see her perform, any one of them could be the president. The unrelenting infinite potential and possibility of the space between songs, the ceaseless reminder that in an instant that microphone could be yours, is the underlying structure of the culture et al. How that spotlight which spells the ultimate release for so many can become its own cage as the other side of the mirror is shown constantly in Barbara Jean. There is no more sublime convergence than the finale, as Barbara Harris is finally heard by the crowd she dreamed of, ‘You may say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me’.
10