Guest post by Craig S. Simpson.
He is running for President of the United States. His campaign van is a recurring presence in the film, as is his voice, an eloquent southern drawl. Blaring over loudspeakers as the van rolls through Nashville, Tennessee is an audio recording of the homespun wisdom of third-party candidate Hal Phillip Walker. His credentials are never stated (nor is he ever actually seen), but he appears to specialize in folksy aphorisms. “When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that’s politics” is one such maxim. “No wonder we often know how to make a watch, but we don’t know the time of day” is another. What deep thoughts like these truly mean is an open question, but they appear to excite the American electorate. If it is unclear what Walker stands for, we gradually discover what he stands against: oil companies, the Electoral College, the National Anthem, and lawyers in Congress. The nominee of the Replacement Party, Hal Phillip Walker is, in his own words, “for doing some replacing.” His slogan, “New Roots for the Nation,” carries populist appeal for a country on the eve of its bicentennial—a commemoration tempered by a collective desire for change.
In 1975, Robert Altman’s Nashville was released less than a year after the Watergate scandal ended with President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (followed by the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968) remained an open wound. Hollywood responded to the shifting cultural mood with more pessimistic, idiosyncratic stories, and Altman emerged as a major filmmaker following the success of his original screen version of M*A*S*H in 1970. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Altman flew over fifty missions as a bomber pilot during World War II. After the war he directed numerous industrial documentaries before becoming a director-for-hire on episodes of TV shows like Bonanza. A caustic satire of the American military set during the Korean War (and a thinly-veiled critique of the then-ongoing Vietnam War), M*A*S*H introduced moviegoers to his distinctive style, notable for teeming ensembles, overlapping dialogue, innovative sound design, and a restless camera that trained your eye toward the margins of the frame. Altman made great movies before Nashville (notably McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye) and after (3 Women, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park). But Nashville folded the signature elements of his style into a swing-for-the-fences epic.
Nashville is a film without a clear protagonist. After opening with a parody of a televised advertisement for a country music album—“Featuring 24 of Your Greatest Stars!”—the movie devotes more-or-less equal time to an assemblage of country-music icons (played by, among others, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Karen Black, and Ronee Blakley), wannabe celebrities (Barbara Harris, Gwen Welles), eccentric outsiders (Jeff Goldblum, Geraldine Chaplin, Shelley Duvall, Scott Glenn, David Hayward), and a cross-section of the local citizenry (Lily Tomlin, Ned Beatty, Robert DoQui, Keenan Wynn). A member of Hal Phillip Walker’s inner circle (Michael Murphy) is the closest we come to the actual candidate: We eavesdrop on their brief conversation right before the climax at the Nashville Parthenon, where Walker, concealed in the back seat of his limo, is preparing his speech. It is at the Parthenon where all narrative threads converge around a campaign rally and Altman’s endgame is revealed. You could say he too does some replacing, though not in a way you would expect.
Nashville wouldn’t be Altman’s last film with political content. Tanner ’88, his groundbreaking HBO miniseries starring Michael Murphy as an earnest Congressman running for President, had fictional characters cross paths with bona fide candidates during the 1988 campaign. The two projects have more in common than Murphy: both Hal Phillip Walker and Jack Tanner represent Altman’s ideal of a presidential candidate. (Walker was created and voiced by Altman’s friend and frequent collaborator, the Mississippi novelist Thomas Hal Phillips.) Yet Altman’s idealism was accompanied by dark humor and deep pessimism. In Nashville, the fate of Hal Phillip Walker, the 25th character, is given no greater significance than the destinies of the other twenty-four. The attention that Altman devotes to his ensemble—to the “winners” and the “losers,” to the center and the fringe, blurring lines and definitions—is the film’s purest distillation of the democratic spirit.
I went to high school within walking distance of the Parthenon. We were taught that the structure, a replica of the original erected in classical Greece, meant more than signifying that Nashville was “the Athens of the South.” Like the original, it was a symbol of democracy. We didn’t give much thought to this; we took it as a patriotic given. But Altman employs the setting to do what he does best: underline ambiguity and elicit conflicted responses. At once playfully satirical and deeply serious, Nashville belies the trite sloganeering and simplistic solutions of the Hal Phillip Walkers of American politics. It reveals the intricate dynamic between politics and entertainment. It anticipates the rise of the celebrity-politician, from roots that run deeper than we realize.
Nashville will be screened at the IU Cinema on February 24 as part of the 5X Robert Altman: From the Margins to the Center series. Other upcoming films include 3 Women, The Player, and Gosford Park.
Craig S. Simpson is Director of Special Collections & Archives at San José State University. Previously, he was Lilly Library Manuscripts Archivist at Indiana University. He is co-author of Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings (KSU Press, 2016) and contributed a chapter to Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts (IU Press, 2018). He has collaborated with the IU Cinema on several programs, including Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration and Symposium, John Boorman: Conjurer of Cinema, and the current 5X Robert Altman: From the Margins to the Center.