[In the following essay, which was reprinted in Movie Plus One, Horizon Press, 1982, Pechter traces Altman's portrayal of America in Nashville.]

Why make a film about—and full of—country music, if you don't like it? I ask this not as any devotee of country music myself, well over nine-tenths of what I've heard of it striking me as a pile of lachrymose slop. But any film crammed with some 25 country-music original numbers ought, statistically, to hit on one that's better than pathetic. Even a nonentity like W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings (whose principal characters are involved with a country-music band) manages to pull one attractive original tune out of its hat for its finale.

Nor do I ask the question rhetorically. There is a reason to make a movie about country music when you don't like it (and don't like the people who create it, and don't like the people who like it), and that reason is exemplified in Robert Altman's Nashville. It's a reason for which even a knowledge of the country-music milieu isn't required: Altman has himself admitted he wasn't familiar with the Nashville scene before he decided to do this job on it (his method of remedying his ignorance consisting of dispatching a hench-person, Joan Tewkesbury, to Nashville to write the script, and then casting almost all the singing roles with non-musicians who were allowed to compose their own songs). For it's not the music that this country-music epic is after; what it's after is the country that's microcosmically revealed in America's (at least, Middle America's) "music capital." ("You get your hair cut! You don't belong in Nashville!" one of Nashville's leading citizens barks at a young musician early on.) The true locale and subject of this film—which begins with a song declaring, "We must be doing something right / To last 200 years," and ends with a crowd singing, "You may say, I ain't free / It don't worry me" following an assassination—clearly isn't Nashville but nothing less than America itself: America as it really is, stripped of myth and idealization, on this eve of its bicentennial celebration.

The subject is one almost all of Altman's previous films can be seen as leading up to, from the anti-militarist, "anti-war" jibes of M∗A∗S∗H through the anti-capitalist ironies of McCabe & Mrs. Miller and that film's debunking of romantic myths (and the similar myth-puncturing of The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us) to the depiction of a rootless society in California Split. And as befits a work of such vast ambition, Altman's new film seems to draw stylistically as well as thematically on elements of all his films before. A sound truck, broadcasting speeches by a Presidential candidate, wends its way through Nashville, and its use as a motif reminds one of the public-address system announcing the showing of war movies in M∗A∗S∗H, while that earlier film's closing announcement of itself as the camp's coming attraction is echoed in this one's clever, self-referential, TV-commercial-style opening credits; a Brewster McCloud's many-stranded plot line and cross-section view of the life of a Southern city now seems to adumbrate the use of such things in Nashville. From The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us comes the busy detailing of the inundation of American life with the debased currency of our popular culture; from a California Split, Nashville's rapid tempo and subtly garish visual style, and the evocation by such means of its characters' lives of transience and anomie.

Nashville, as its publicity loudly proclaims, portrays the lives of no fewer than 24 characters in the course of a five-day period during which they go their various ways and their fortunes occasionally intertwine within the contours of the city's music industry. Much has been made of the virtuoso accomplishment of the juggling of so many story lines, but, though the purely technical feat of keeping them all in motion without much confusion is impressive, their actual substance is something else again. Tom (of the folk-rock trio Bill, Mary, and Tom) is having an affair with Mary, Bill's wife, while at the same time trying to seduce Linnea, the gospel-singer wife of Delbert, a lawyer whose clients include some of Nashville's biggest stars, one of whom, Barbara Jean, only just released from her hospitalization for burns from a "fire baton," seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and is watched adoringly from afar by Glenn, a young soldier whose mother once saved Barbara Jean's life in a fire, and so forth, and so on, as the Nashville world turns.

One can, of course, synopsize almost any plot to the point of banality; but, in Nashville, it's not a case of the transcendence of such banality by the work's imaginative freshness but of a concealment of the banality by the restless and incessant cutting away from one banal plot to another. Zero in on any half-dozen of Nashville's 24 characters' stories, and their impoverishment would be obvious; once again, a bill of goods is being sold on the dubious principle that the losses incurred on each item can be reversed by volume merchandising. And indeed, despite all the ballyhoo about Nashville's audacious originality in featuring 24 leading characters, one could as easily maintain that the film has no leading characters, only 24 actors doing their turns (all doing them well, without in the least extending themselves), much as one might say the same of a film like California Split, whose leading "characters" number two. In any case, what might be truly audacious would be not this Grand Hotel-ish engineering but the kind of freedom in moving from one character to another, following them and then leaving them behind as they enter into the work's development, that one sees in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberté. Nashville may seem refreshingly free of rigid plotting as it's unfolding, but by the time virtually all of its characters have been assembled and their stories converge for the O. Henry-like denouement, one is struck less by the film's freedom of movement than by the ingenuity of its preparation for its payoff.

But for all the noises to be heard about Nashville's Joycean complexities, the extraordinary critical acclaim which has greeted the film has, I think, really very little to do with such things. And the barrage of media hype elicited by Nashville (which may well exceed that for any other film since Last Tango in Paris) is exceptional, even given the semi-hysterical masterpiece-a-month mania with which film reviewing is afflicted. This month, Nashville; last month, Shampoo; the month before, part two of The Godfather. What these widely differing films have in common has nothing to do with a like degree of artistic achievement, or stylistic mastery—but they do have something in common. Nor is it Nashville's artistic superiority which accounts for the extravagant heights to which it has been praised (though I could myself argue a preference for the fleet fluidity and lightness of Nashville's style to Godfather II's monumentality). Rather, Godfather II wears its heart, a bit too earnestly and exposedly, on its sleeve, while in Shampoo one can't entirely shake nagging questions as to whether there's any necessary relation between the personal and the political. But what Altman has constructed in Nashville is an all but perfect vehicle—resembling nothing so much as a work of pornography which sanctimoniously (but sincerely) preaches against pornography—for simultaneously feeling superior to "America" and exploiting the appeal of everything he invites us to join him in feeling superior to.

What in fact Nashville amounts to specifically, with the spectacle of its horde of hayseed characters seen in all their malice, venality, and scrambling opportunism, is the movies' biggest bout of hick-baiting since A Face in the Crowd (a film with which Nashville shares such other features as its crude "satire" of commercials—"Goo-goo Candy Clusters," hawked at the Grand Ole Opry—and the way its loathing for the yokels' stars is exceeded by that for the stars' audience, seen, in Nashville, to turn angrily on Barbara Jean, its erstwhile favorite, when, obviously distressed, she falters in a performance). Strictly as a depiction of corruption in the country-music business, there's nothing in Nashville that wasn't done at least as trenchantly and knowingly (if with less stylistic virtuosity) in Payday of a year or two ago, with its portrayal by Rip Torn of an egomaniacal Country and Western singer. But what distinguishes Nashville from such a genre study is the later film's scope; and lest one imagine that the corruption of Nashville's characters has no larger relevance, a message which issues from the sound truck that weaves through Nashville informs us early on that we're all deeply involved with "politics," whether we know it or not, in whatever we do.

That sound truck broadcasts statements by Hal Phillip Walker, a kind of all-purpose third-party (the Replacement party) candidate for President (the truck emerges from a garage whose door bears the cryptic legend, "Walker-Talker-Sleeper"), at a rally for whom the film's climactic assassination takes place. (The rally is held in front of an actual replica of the Parthenon, originally constructed out of plaster of Paris for Nashville's centennial celebration, which has earned the city its appellation of the "Athens of the South.") Though the assassin, an Arthur Bremer-like loner, is presumably gunning for Walker himself, he settles instead for the troubled Barbara Jean, who is entertaining the crowd in preparation for the candidate's appearance. (Why the assassin chooses this target is left unexplained, though those with lively imaginations may speculate on the possible relation between the killer's domineering mother and the singer's just having finished a paean to "My Mommy and My Daddy and My Idaho Home." Or perhaps since, as the candidate's advance man explains, "The thing with these country people is they've got grass-roots appeal; they're the one's who'll elect the next President," one might as well shoot the entertainers as the candidates.) In any case, no sooner do the shots ring out than Nashville's leading star steps forward to forestall panic with assurances that "This isn't Dallas—this is Nashville!" as indeed it is. Nashville is Dallas plus Memphis plus Los Angeles plus Laurel plus … By now, that is to say, assassinations have become so routinely woven into the fabric of American life that we can immediately close ranks (as the show goes on, a new star is born, and a Patton-like monster flag waves conspicuously) to affirm, "You may say, I ain't free. It don't worry me."

Now whatever my reservations about the version Nashville presents of "America," it's not primarily here that my deepest reservations about the film reside. For just as one can appreciate a work of art whose vision of the world one doesn't share, so, too, can I without difficulty conceive of admiring a film whose view of America is different, even radically different, from my own. (I assume, for the sake of argument, that I hold some stable and statesmanly "view" of America rather than the volatile bundle of violent contraries which my feelings actually comprise.) Indeed, the body of work—Sam Peckinpah's—which I find most interesting in the contemporary American film offers a vision of America a good deal blacker, if also more ambiguous, than anything that's implied by Nashville or in any of the other films of Altman. Insofar as Nashville is engaged in an act of trashing America, I feel no compulsion to defend anything against it. To the extent that America is equitable, as the film would have it, with chauvinistic and pathetic country music, crunched cars, plastic motels, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the movie's targets can fend for themselves; to the extent that it isn't, such derision as Nashville's will hardly undo it.

But when one populates a work of art with numerous characters toward whom one's salient if not sole attitude is a contemptuous condescension, one is involved, I think, in trashing of a different and more deeply offensive sort. To be sure, there are a few of Nashville's characters in whose depiction one might discern some warmth of feeling: the much abused Barbara Jean ("I don't tell you how to sing—don't you tell me how to run your life!" her manager-husband snaps at her); a talentless, would-be singer whom we see stuffing tissue paper in her bra as she perfects her stage manner in the mirror amid a clutter of religious figurines, and whose fantasies of a career lead her to having to perform a humiliating striptease at a political smoker; a (white) gospel-singing mother of two deaf children (who presumably gets points also for singing not country music but gospel, with a black back-up chorus, though her voice wouldn't pass muster in the most meager storefront-church choir). Here as elsewhere one sees that streak of morbid sentimentality in Altman's work which allows him to extend compassion only to the damaged and doomed, and which seems related to the ritualistic slaughter of an innocent with which so many of his films end. (To be fair, he didn't specify that Nashville end with Barbara Jean's death when he commissioned Joan Tewkesbury's script; he only requested that it end with the death of someone.) The deaf children, in particular, are produced by the film with all the perfunctory piety of Verdoux's family. And as if they didn't in themselves convey pathos enough, they're stuck with a father who, in contrast with their mother, hasn't even bothered to learn the sign language needed to communicate with them.

What was for me the single most affecting moment in Nashville drew, I suppose, on a pathos of such sort: the look on Keenan Wynn's face when he's offhandedly informed by a disinterested nurse that his hospitalized wife has "expired" during the night (though it's hard for me to distinguish how much I was moved by Wynn's portrayal of the character's reaction to the situation and how much by the shock of seeing Keenan Wynn himself looking so genuinely old and frail). Wynn begins to utter a cry of grief, when Altman cuts abruptly—the effect is like a slap in the face—to the supercilious laughter of the cast's two "outsiders": an asinine BBC interviewer, in Nashville to gather material for a documentary, and the clean-cut, buttoned-down advance man for the third-party candidate, rounding up local talent for the rally because "this redneck music is very popular now." These two characters are, if anything, portrayed with even more scorn than Nashville's inhabitants, as if to disarm any criticism that Altman's view is, in fact, indistinguishable from theirs. At one point, Altman stages a multi-vehicle freeway pileup, and has the interviewer exclaim of the collision, "I need something like this for my documentary—I need it! It's America—those cars crashing!" At another, she visits an automobile graveyard, and, later, a school-bus parking lot, so that Altman can milk these things for their symbolic worth while at the same time mocking the interviewer's fatuous commentary on them. (The implicit values and level of sophistication from which the film looks down its nose at the Nashville world are more undisguisedly embodied in the figures of Elliott Gould and Julie Christie, who make guest appearances playing themselves as visiting celebrities, with the natives either fawning on them laughably or, what's worse, not knowing for which film the latter won her Oscar.)

But despite the smoke screen with which Altman habitually surrounds his work—his appealingly modest claims that his films aren't "saying anything," their slightly stoned air of "partying," and his letting the individual participants work out their own contribution for themselves—it clearly is no one else, least of all the BBC interviewer or the advance man, who, to score a cheap irony, shunts aside Wynn's grief-stricken outcry; it is Altman himself. And when you thus trash not just your subject but your own characters and their emotions, you lay yourself open to criticism which goes beyond questions of stylistic virtuosity and artistic finesse. What's revealed in such a moment is a coarseness of sensibility, an ugliness, of a kind one glimpses at moments in a number of Altman's films: in the mob's humiliation of the priggish nurse in M∗A∗S∗H, the intimidation of the transvestite in California Split, the mocking radio adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in Thieves Like Us. At moments such as these, and others like them, questions of artistic finesse tend to recede before purely human considerations. This isn't to say that such things cancel out the considerable talents which Altman's films display; nor would I want categorically to dismiss his films on the basis of such deficiencies in feeling, though to do so would be, I think, a more honest acknowledgment of what his work is about than to gloss over such things in the stampede to praise its artistry. But if one can hardly hope at this late date to head off the stampede, one can still choose, at least, not to join it. To the extent that one sees everything in Nashville as at once cheapened by easy ridicule and rife with a hypocritical exploitation of the "grass-roots appeal" of "these country people" and their "redneck music" for purposes of Altman's own vote-getting campaign, one can choose to turn away and vote, "No."