Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville opens with an ad for itself. A fast-talking commercial heralds the main actors ("the amazing Lily Tomlin!"), as though they were lots in an auction or artists on a K-Tel compilation. In the background a group of album covers—all fictional, all from the movie—glide by on an endless loop. It’s a slyly disorienting opening sequence, dutifully listing the cast and director while blurring the line between fiction and reality. Only after the film (and the soundtrack) have been advertised does Nashville settle into the city proper, with the voice of fictional politician Hal Phillip Walker taking over for the commercial barker.
"They’d sell albums that way. You’d hear all that pitch. They still do it," Altman explains on Criterion’s new DVD/Blu-Ray edition of Nashville, which many of us have been waiting to see for years now. The rapid-fire introduction is a wink at the film’s subject matter—American popular culture in general, and the country music industry in particular—yet even today there's something jarring in the way it closes the gap between the actors and the musicians they play. If you didn’t know the names Keith Carradine or Ronee Blakely or Timothy Brown, you might assume they were singers.
"Nashville is, above all, a celebration of its own performers," film critic Pauline Kael wrote in her controversial NewYorkerreview. "The actors have been encouraged to work up material for their roles, and not only do they do their own singing but most of them wrote their own songs—and wrote them in character." In films like MASH and The Long Goodbye, Altman toyed with cast, often assigning roles counterintuitively and letting the actors improvise their own dialogue. In 1975, Nashville appeared to take that strategy even further by letting the actors devise their own music. Most journalists and critics repeated Kael’s assertion, creating a memorable myth around the film.
And yet it wasn't quite true, as film scholar Gayle Magee points out in her 2006 essay "Songwriting, Advertising and Mythmaking in the New Hollywood: The Case of Nashville". A few of the actors in Nashville were singers first, and some of them wrote their songs well before Joan Tewkesbury devised the screenplay. Keith Carradine, who won an Oscar for his ballad of sexual gamesmanship, "I’m Easy", played that song and another original, "It Don’t Worry Me", for Altman on the set of his 1974 movie Thieves Like Us. Ronee Blakely penned "Dues" and "Bluebird" not for her emotionally fragile character Barbara Jean, but for her own 1972 self-titled album; her songs "Tapedeck" and "Idaho Home" are included on her follow-up, Welcome, released the same year as Nashville. Even Karen Black, who had appeared in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces and was one of the better-known actor-singers in the cast, had written her two songs, "Memphis" and "Rolling Stone", long before she took on the role of country ingénue Connie White.
In other words, these songs weren’t written for the movie; the movie was written around the songs. While that feat may not sound quite as impressive as a crew of nonprofessionals spontaneously transformed into a troupe of country hitmakers, it actually adds a new dimension to the film, its soundtrack, and Altman’s broader meditation on authenticity and constructed identity. The original vinyl edition of the Nashville soundtrack—which remains a curious artifact of 70s cinema as well as a surprisingly sturdy album in its own right—includes no definitive tracklist on the back cover, so the tracklist remains vague and disarrayed. In addition to thirteen songs from the movie, the album also includes the artist introductions and between-song banter, often going out of its way to suggest that the character, not the actor, is performing the tune. Altman’s conflation of past and present, actor and character, reality and fiction suggests that American pop culture is a mirrorhouse of shifting identities and distorted reflections.
Some of the performances in the film—like Tommy Brown's rendition of the Blakely-penned "Bluebird"—are set at the new Opry, which at the time of filming was less than a year old. The Grand Ole Opry had been housed at the historic Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville since 1941, but in ’74 it moved out to Opryland, a country music theme park. Altman makes good use of the space, contrasting its elaborate stage and flashy lights with the pronounced folksiness of the emcees, who pitch Goo Goo Clusters between musical numbers. The barn façade that serves as a conspicuously old-timey backdrop seems like a fitting metaphor for this glitzy era in Nashville history and for post-JFK pop culture in general: a symbol of performed authenticity, of sophisticated technology conveying downhome sensibilities.
As it skips from Opryland to the Parthenon (another useful symbol of ersatz culture), the music in Nashville skirts the cusp of satire; some of these numbers are deeply, almost purposefully hokey, while others are legitimately good. "200 Years", sung by Gibson as Haven Hamilton at the start of the film, makes a sharp jab at bicentennial sanctimony and unearned gravitas. Two centuries is not very long for a Western country, and the 1970s are not remembered for doing much right: Nixon was only a few years out of the White House, Vietnam was still a lingering foreign policy failure, gas prices were skyrocketing, and most cities—especially New York—were suffering. Especially in contrast to the increasingly ludicrous promises made by the film’s phantom politician (which include changing the national anthem and barring lawyers from holding public office), "200 Years" shouts down—and therefore plays up—the reality of these problems and Nashville’s blindness to them.
On the other hand, "Dues", ostensibly a big hit for the mentally unstable Barbara Jean, is a serious and affecting account of a rocky relationship, which the film makes clear is a commentary on the singer’s relationship with her manager/husband Barnett (played with oily menace by Allen Garfield). The song positions her as a deeply sympathetic character, one of the few in the movie. And yet, Altman shoots her performance of the song at Opryland in a way that makes it obvious that she’s lip-synching—the only time this happens in Nashville. Immediately following the performance, she becomes increasingly deranged, although Barbara Jean never lets her downhome façade slip even as she rambles on about chicken and her grandmother clicking her false teeth to the radio; the character never breaks character. Barbara Jean seems to be based on Loretta Lynn, from her elaborate dresses to her manager/husband to her on-stage meltdowns. Those who dismiss this film as a mean-spirited satire of 1970s country music culture miss Altman’s complex and affecting maneuver of transforming a real person like Lynn, herself hidden behind Nashville’s gingham and glitz, into a character/caricature, only so she can be humanized again.
And finally there's "It Don’t Worry Me", written by Carradine as Tom Frank, one member of a West Coast country trio and love triangle. On its face, it’s a statement of personal freedom not unlike Kris Kristofferson’s "Me and Bobby McGee", but it appears throughout the film in various iterations: a bluegrass number, a gospel tune, a folk-rock anthem, and a patriotic call to arms. Each time, it takes on new significance and meaning. By the film’s end, when a drifter named Albuquerque (played by Barbara Harris) leads a sing-along at the Parthenon, "It Don't Worry Me" becomes a damning indictment not simply of country music but American pop culture at large, which distracts us from the tragedies and injustices that happen every day, assuaging our fears and numbing our outrage. The ending is at once cathartic and intensely cynical: a bicentennial bringdown that still resonates so many years and hit singles later.