Now’s the time to revisit Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece, Nashville. Not just because it is the great American film of the sound era, or the happenstance that its pre-Bicentennial setting is relevant to how the U.S. anticipates its 250th birthday, but because it spoke truth to American dread.
Altman’s musical-comic-tragic social panorama with 24 characters from different parts of the country who converge on Nashville, Tenn., for a political campaign rally provided a wide-ranging vision of e pluribus unum. Every disparate dramatis personae gathers together at a climactic event where the central character, country-and-western singer known familiarly as Barbara Jean, becomes the focus of their ambitions.
Barbara Jean (played by folk singer Ronee Blakley, a member of Bob Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder” tour, making her movie debut) personified the innocent American’s experience. A C&W queen, she was a pop representative of us all, a show-business version of what a presidential candidate is supposed to represent. The film features an unseen candidate, Hal Phillip Walker, whose platform is heard from a van with a loudspeaker throughout the story, but Barbara Jean galvanizes — whether at public appearances or during a hospital stay where she retreats from exhaustion. We see the fragile humanity that her fans, the naïve, adoring public, don’t imagine.
Barbara Jean’s songs are personal but cross over into pop because they express relatable life events and desires. Through poetic creativity (her songs Dues” and “My Idaho Home”), she rectifies the frustrations and idiosyncrasies that common folk bear, turning the mundane and the tragic and the absurd into art. She personifies the politician’s promise; her façade drops when she cracks up on stage at a rushed concert.
That moment is simply one of the most astonishing, breathtaking scenes in movie history, breaking the fourth wall of our imagination. Altman challenges our supposed sophistication about performance and cultural trust. Our Barbara Jean embodies the optimism, faith, and loyalty usually assigned to politicians so that, in dramatic terms, her fate is a response to Seventies political cynicism.
Barbara Jean’s opposite number is Opal, a British visitor who introduces herself as a reporter for the BBC doing an aural documentary on Nashville’s music scene. As portrayed by Geraldine Chaplin, Opal is Fool to Barbara Jean’s Lear; she gives commentary on the wayward American social habits captured in Altman’s panoply. Opal delivers several brief, comic soliloquies, but her most striking moment, in a display of an English outsider’s superiority, is her attempt to rationalize America’s assassination culture:
I have a theory about political assassinations. You see, I believe people like Madame Pearl — all these people — here, in this country, who carry guns, are the real assassins. Because, you see, they stimulate other people, who, are perhaps innocent, and who eventually are the ones who pull the trigger.
Opal’s theory is the typical hypothesis of the anti-gun lobbyist who demeans yahoos because they “cling to their guns and religion.” Her knee-jerk liberalism doesn’t spoil the film’s ending, since it is among the many nut-job outbursts that make Nashville hilarious and true. (Barbara Harris spouts a few as a showbiz aspirant whose Southern drawl details how the star-making machinery of the record business “has something to do with industrial revolution.”) Opal simply offering an assassination theory is one of those galling eccentricities that make Nashville a head-spinning experience.
Watching Altman’s 24 characters explain life to themselves is part of the movie’s multifaceted look at modern cogitation and self-delusion. It’s what came to mind when witnessing the many media responses to the assassination of Charlie Kirk — mostly shocked, angry, and bewildered — and outside what we get from Millennial movies that merely gaslight us or avoid the political inquiry that Altman’s genius presented as casual observation.
The way Altman’s Nashville deals with the concussive political assassinations in late-20th-century America surpasses the paranoia of Coppola’s The Conversation and Pakula’s The Parallax View. Instead, Altman illustrates how the dread phenomenon attacks optimism, patriotism, and innocence, and he does so accurately — in fact, prophetically, before the killings of John Lennon and Charlie Kirk.
The news of Kirk’s public death is as wounding as Barbara Jean’s. Kirk’s religious faith and his political performance principles were lived out in how he patiently and good-naturedly dismantled the lies spoon-fed to college-age youth. Even when his debating style was aggressive, it was so in the manner of a teacher who cares. That caring was similar to the expression of shared cultural identity in Barbara Jean’s singing, particularly her trenchant vocalization of “In the Garden” among patients visiting a hospital chapel. It was part of Altman’s extraordinary stained-glass “There Shall Be One Flock” montage showing Americans practicing their faith in different settings and denominations. This sequence predates the diabolism of Millennial Democrats that Altman, an old-school liberal, would find unthinkable; instead, he dramatizes a lone gunman to indicate the sociopathy we live with daily. The perception of blended faith and politics deserves to be called Kirkian. In that “There Shall Be One Flock” sequence, Altman shows Americans socially divided yet as spiritually united seekers. Media freak Opal never attends a service, and when the assassination happens, she is clueless about what has occurred. The epic vision of American tragedy and perseverance that Altman created in Nashville, the Old Landmark, prevails.
