2017 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place: Lucas Neumeyer
NASHVILLE by Lucas Neumeyer, 17
2017 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place
The essence of Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville is the same as the essence of the American spirit, and that is tragedy. Altman hardly ever makes a film about people who are happy, and so Nashville documents the stories of people from different careers, classes, cities, viewpoints, motivations, and experiences. There is no main character (The credits list the actors in alphabetical order), there is no central plot aside from a collection of set pieces, the film acts as a tableau rather than a yarn; The main character is the film itself. This aimless quality highlights how Nashville is not about people, but about culture. The audience is seated in a privileged point of view, as evidenced by the cinematography, which relies on long lenses and sparse editing to convey a voyeuristic feel, but we have to figure out what it is we are spying on. You need only look at the poster to know this film is about America, but what is America?
That’s a complicated question, naturally, but it becomes a bit less complicated when you consider the context. It’s obvious that what “America” differs throughout history, from every disaster to every accomplishment to every administration, America changed. So when we ask, “What is America?”, we should keep in mind what America was when Nashville was made, and the answer is: one of the worst periods to be alive since the great depression. Altman’s film was released a year after Nixon’s resignation, four years before the Iran hostage crisis, before and after two energy crisis, and at the tail end of the longest war in United States history. Opal wasn’t off the mark when she looked for America in a junkyard. For the American people, it was a time of cynicism and doubt, and a perfect jumping off point for Reagan’s promise to “Make America great again (That was his actual campaign slogan). The characters, whether or not they want to admit it, are affected by this pessimism, but more importantly, they are in mourning.
The most important real world event to affect the plot of Nashville is the assassination of John F Kennedy just 12 years earlier. Lady Pearl remembers it in a drunken stupor, “Ruby you sonofabitch. And Oswald. And her. In her little pink suit.” The late Kennedy has been at the center of conspiracy theories in the passing years, but it doesn’t take much digging to see his influence in this film, especially since it ends with a lone gunman at a political rally. Haven Hamilton even calms the crowd saying, “This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville!”
So, yes, this film is sad. It has a wonderful sense of humor and a breezy pace, but they only give way to scenes of sexual humiliation, marital spats, and psychological degeneration. The scene in which aspiring singer Sueleen Gay is coaxed into performing a striptease in place of a song is hard for any decent person to watch. However, these trials and tribulations take on a new meaning when you analyze the central themes that underscore the story.
There are are detractors of Nashville who say it mocks country music and country singers as a whole, but this argument falls apart when you look at the music of the film itself and how it informs the story. There are large passages which are nothing but a series of live performances by the actors themselves, and some of these songs that feel as though they were written for specific characters (“For the sake of the children”; “My Idaho Home”). The soundtrack was quite famously written and performed by the actors themselves rather than professional singer-songwriters. What some people don’t understand is that this method encapsulates the spirit of country music at the time rather than patronizes it. People loved the work of artists like Johnny Cash because they were honest and personal. When listening to Cash’s music, you never got the feeling that he was lying or grandstanding. He had a confident, one-to-one connection with his audience that is preserved in the tones of Nashville. Several actors even have similar names to the characters they portray (Scott Glenn:Glenn Kelly; Timothy Brown: Tommy Brown)
When you understand the importance of the music in Nashville, you notice a pattern, namely that most of the songs on the playlist are about two things: perseverance and ambition. It’s expressed in songs like: “Keep-a-goin’”, “Rolling Stone”, “I never get enough”, and, of course, “It don’t worry me”. With this in mind, almost all the character’s struggles are defined by perseverance through tragedy, be it a music career, a political career, or a failed marriage. This comes in many forms and offers many results, which is only natural when we follow such a variety of characters. We follow two aspiring female singers throughout the film: one works hard and yet fails inches from her goal, another is a drifter who lucked her way to success. Mr Greene is devastated by the loss of his wife while his niece couldn’t give a second glance.
This whole theme of picking yourself up by your bootstraps in the face of tragedy relates back to the state of the country at the time. The American people sank steadily into a state of nihilism and increased crime rates after the death of John Kennedy. Nashville offers, if not a solution, then an observation about the condition of the United States at the time: America is incapable of being discouraged. America, as both a nation and an idea, is too large to be stopped. People from all generations were thrust into a new era whether they wanted to or not. This is what we observe from the ending of this film, one of the greatest of all time. These people are not only not stopped, they’re not even worried. And so, America continued to persevere past its initial 200 years, for better or for worse.