nashville

it's a robert altman film so you know its going to be frenetic. you know it's gonna be all artsy, that you will be able to tell the actors have been given a certain license to ad lib, to imagine their characters and portray them as they honestly think they would exist, with an outline for a script and probably a few drunken cast dinners to work out major plot lines.

but what is fascinating is to see it for the first time in 2009 after having been a child in the '70s and having been raised by working class people who wouldn't know anything of robert altman. people of only the best hearts, who delved into fundamentalism for a prolonged period of time, people who sold beer and cleaned houses, followed sport, refrained from strong drink, and perceived themselves as wholesome and family-oriented.

not people who went to college or read books, (books not of a biblical nature, that is.) not people who were affected by art much. good people who did not necessarily love travel but who did go to israel all the same. (who needs paris, london or tokyo?)

you watch robert altman's work and you forget ideas like 'who influenced who,' and instead appreciate the idea of a through line in time demonstrated by a class of people who are drawn to art and who live in such a way they rely on art to guide their lives, sensing a depth in their selves. they are the bohemians, the readers, the philosophers, the social, sentient, vibrant pushers of thought through the core of the masses. they are love, collective and incarnate. suddenly altman's peers are picasso and van gogh, beethoven and bach, lennon and bono, godard and von trier.

instead of one vision of, (in this case,) nashville, you get dozens of visions, portrayed by thoughtful actors. altman's genius is in his utter void of ego. he is the contributor, as socialist, communist or democratic as you can imagine. ned beatty brings his vision to his nashville agent and husband of the star country singer. shelly duvall gets to be the ditzy, california, flower child she imagines. lily tomlin probably created her character from whole cloths of lives she encountered one time or another, (the gospel singer slash bored, repressed wife.) tomlin is a revelation in playing tension still.

still, altman wrote what script there must have been. he put the characters in the situations he believed would bring out statements and ideas representative of his world view, (if nothing else.) in this way you can see altman acts as any artist in wanting to affect you. the art is layered but the ultimate object is the complexity of man.

nashville is about nashville. forget the '70s. it's about people as they are in real life, in this case they live in nashville and love country music. (and almost all of them sing.) the country music scene, for its part, can be seen as a sort of simple, stunted lifestyle, but then you see the complexity of individuals kind of break through. you see characters who spend huge segments of life avoiding their own depth, choosing the shallowest waters only to be confronted suddenly by the unavoidable fact that human capacity for conflict and joy and pain is nearly boundless or at least unimaginable.

there are articles about nashville that critique the film in the context of social relevance. they suggest meanings altogether plausible and worth considering. my comments are intended to be abstract. you can see that history is a treasure trove of thinkers as artists and artists as thinkers. in our age i can move from era to era in search of the altman's all to my own edification. in film alone there are several generations of artists and films to explore.

some would argue this era, altman and his contemporaries, is by virtue of nashville somehow the best of any age or better than a given age. that is not likely true. rather nashville is likely the most important or best film of that time depending on how you prefer to think of it. what makes it more is perceiving it from the perspective of one who stands in awe of his own access to the brilliance of my species. i am the common man and yet i benefit from this great art perhaps more than him who is capable of appreciating it more, or appreciating more of it.