August 22, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Altman’s Film

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

AmericanStudies contexts for three of the many compelling characters in Robert Altman’s sweeping masterpiece Nashville (1975):

1)      Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin): As usual with an Altman film, most every character in connected to multiple others as well as distinct layers of the film’s plot and themes, and that’s certainly the case for Linnea: she’s a Gospel singer who is recording tracks with yesterday’s subjects the Fisk Jubilee Singers when the film opens; but she’s also the wife of Ned Beatty’s Delbert Reese, a sleazy, philandering lawyer who is constantly trying to land both other women and political contacts (such as with the never-seen presidential candidate Hal Walker, a fundraising concert for whom provides one of the film’s main throughlines). Since Walker is a Republican candidate, we can assume that Delbert sees himself as a wannabe Republican political operative; and since Linnea is the devoted mother of two deaf children as well as an artistic partner to the Jubilee Singers, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest her politics are different from her husband’s. All part of the social mix in Altman’s depiction of this Southern city.

2)      Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson): One of the figures to whom Delbert makes those frequent political connections is his legal client and another Nashville musical talent, country singer and Grand Ole Opry star Haven Hamilton. The film’s opening cuts back and forth between Linnea’s session with the Jubilee Singers and Haven in a neighboring recording studio, where he’s quite symbolically cutting “200 Years,” a patriotic track for the upcoming Bicentennial (and one of many songs written specifically for Altman’s film, which ultimately features more than an hour of musical performances, nearly all of original songs). A number of prominent country musicians expressed outrage at Altman’s film, and it’s likely due to the character of Haven, the most explicitly country & western of the film’s many musicians and one who does indeed use his music to express a stereotypical (if not at all inaccurate) form of mythic patriotism. But I’d argue that juxtaposing Haven with Linnea in that opening sequence gives us an immediate sense that Haven’s is just one layer within a truly multilayered musical scene (pun intended).

3)      Opal (Geraldine Chaplin): Trying to surreptitiously listen to both of those opening recording sessions is Opal, an English visitor to Nashville who claims to be a journalist for the BBC. Opal does indeed preserve her impressions of the city on a tape recorder throughout the film (as in that hyperlinked scene at what she humorously calls “an American junkyard”), but there are other clues that she is not an actual journalist but rather an obsessed fan. Either way, Opal is definitely portrayed as both a tourist (and thus an outsider to the community) and a stand-in for the audience (and thus our way to gain insider access to all these locals). That she’s an Englishwoman in those roles, in a film that makes such a big deal of the upcoming Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, can be read as another ironic joke in a film full of them. But it’s also a reminder that when it comes to a place as deeply rooted as late 20^th (or early 21^st) century Nashville, all of the rest of are to some significant degree foreigners.

Last Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?