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| Actress Barbara Harris as "Albuquerque" in Robert Altman's Nashville. Image courtesy rogererbert.com |
Je Suis Charlie—Blues and the Politics of Insanity
By
Carl L. Hager
This
will probably read as a cross between social commentary and musical analysis
for most readers, but for quite a few it will also read like a film review of
Robert Altman’s 1975 film, Nashville—which it also is. For those who don’t like to predict the end of a
film, yet don’t like to be shocked by it, or who are surprised when Muslim
radicals kill journalists whose provocations offend them, my instinct is to
issue a spoiler alert here. If you don’t mind being utterly confused by what I
have to say, feel free to ignore the commentary in the embedded videos, but you
would be wise to consider each as an integral part of the essay and watch
them. They won’t spoil the impact of what Pauline Kael described at the time as
“the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen.” The film was
made 40 years ago. If you didn’t see it coming, you’ve got to ask yourself the
question Robert Altman poses: why didn’t you listen to the warning?
To say that the radical approach Robert Altman pioneered
early in his career was non-linear doesn’t even begin to describe his
hyperextended naturalism, the disorienting real-time chaos of overlapping
dialog and simultaneous live-action. The camera’s point of view is that of
someone crashing a party, not the traditional one of being formally introduced
to each, one at a time. His
films are such an acquired taste that I, an ardent fan, have to re-acquire the
taste whenever I watch them. But I do, and the two I return to watch most often
are M*A*S*H and Nashville.
M*A*S*H is probably the best known of all of his
films. Not because that many people have seen it, but because of the subsequent
television show that reduced it to Alan Alda doing an endless stream of
smirking frat-boy jokes. M*A*S*H, the movie, bore no resemblance to the swaddled
primetime gauze-and-bandages reality, but was instead one of the harshest, bloodiest,
most unforgiving anti-war films ever made, disguised as a Korean War-era black
comedy—and made in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam war. It was anti-war in
the same sort of apolitical spirit of conscientious objection as Joseph
Heller’s Catch 22. If most sacred cows were tucked into bed by the end of one of
the subsequent TV show’s episodes, the original film left the viewer in a hellish
cloud of slaughter and burning flesh.
As well it should have. No rational human being
loves war. No rational human being loves an indifferent and desensitized bureaucracy
so out of touch with the real world that it values its sprawling playbook of rules
and speeches and political poses over lives.
Neither does any rational human being deny someone
the right to fight back. Dr. Martin Luther King—who spent a lifetime
encouraging non-violence in seeking justice and civil rights, warning against
the perils of using the eye-for-an-eye retribution of the jungle—applied for a
permit to carry a concealed weapon in 1956, after his house was bombed.
The discussion gets a bit tricky at this point. But
all moral outrage and ideological self-righteousness aside, calling a madman or
a terrorist anything but a madman or terrorist doesn’t make it so, even if it
makes you sleep better at night.
You might just get away with inducing a deep, deep
sleep and plunge into a long winter’s nap. But as the thousands of napping
French security forces discovered recently, waking from the coma of denial
comes with a nightmare.
Nashville, the Movie Not the TV Show
In his film Nashville, Altman takes on the American
Dream (which arguably amounts to an amalgamation and distillation of the
Western world’s dreams—where do you think “liberté, égalité, fraternité” comes
from?) Perforce, this includes the American Nightmare (and the West’s). Of
necessity, it means the film is not only about music and musicians, love and
deception, talent and dreams; it’s about lawyers, guns and money. There are so
many stories and so many levels of myth and mythology in Nashville, it would be a daunting task to catalog them all. It
would also be pointless, because the story line is factually comprised of all the stories. But there’s no denying
that the history of the nightmare of the West, whether the discussion is of
western Ukraine, western Paris, or the wild, wild West of America, is the
history of those myths—plus lawyers, guns and money.
It’s a big story, with dozens of narrative threads.
Altman’s approach in Nashville, as
with most of his other films, was to tell many separate, single stories, and
let them all tell the bigger story. This was much like the approach Miles Davis
used in guiding the musicians who played in his various assemblages of
personnel (instead of prescribing a key or specific notes, his single piece of advice
to a recently-hired Chick Corea just hours prior to the pianist’s first gig—no
rehearsal, no sheet music, no nothing—was to “play what you hear”). Altman cast
his film with actors who came with stories ready to tell, in need of a place to
tell them.
The evolution of this script may or may not have
begun with Altman’s hearing Carradine sing the signature tunes at a party, as
the actor offers, but there’s no question that his subsequent use of them as
the building blocks was an essential aspect of the organic growth that began
with Joan Tewkesbury’s diary and early script. Altman’s ingenuity in letting
the actor/musicians tell the story of Nashville through the music they
performed lay in his faith in the process, just like with Miles’s simple
introduction for Chick on his joining the world’s most acclaimed jazz band.
Letting the music, or anything else, speak for itself, is almost contrary to
what a crafter of movie fiction is all about. Even a documentary film only has
a limited range of interpretation. A Hollywood producer’s instinctive urge to
make a single, easy-to-understand dramatic conflict swirled together with a standard-issue love
interest the central themes, is thwarted by the facts before he even starts. So
he just makes up a story line and hires a screenwriter to cobble it all
together into a commercially viable film.
It is a fairly common practice nowadays to cast
actors who are musicians to play musicians—such films as Beyond the Sea or Ray would
not have stood a chance without Kevin Spacey or Jamie Foxx—and it was Altman’s 1975
film that paved the road ahead for them. But actors as songwriters?
It can’t be overstated that it was the process and
multifold involvements that Altman engaged in the development of Nashville’s script/story line that made
it capable of being much more than a movie about country music. Not only did
Altman create the role of a politician for his film, he had writer Thomas Hal
Phillips create a mythical one, a politician who spoke to Phillips, one who
addressed what he personally would want to hear from a presidential candidate,
and thus be a genuine grassroots candidate who could by extension connect with the
filmgoer. (As an example, though Altman doesn’t speak of it in this video clip, Phillips includes a plank in the Replacement Party—his fictitious presidential
candidate’s—campaign platform that calls for a law disqualifying any lawyer
from holding public office, a populist view if ever there was one). With the
Grand Ole Opry as a backdrop, and an assortment of musical talents more
variegated than the population of the Star Wars cocktail bar, the film
gradually builds into an epic metaphor for the egalitarian ideals of the
American experience.
The script called for a role, as yet uncast when the
filming started, of a celebrated superstar country music singer along the lines
of a Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton. Altman and his team were already on location in
Nashville to begin shooting, when he learned that a singer/songwriter he was
purchasing song rights from, Ronee Blakely, was in town performing. The master
of organic chemistry went to work.
I don’t know precisely what Robert Altman should
have said in response to the Washington
Post reporter. His film was certainly not responsible for Mark David
Chapman murdering John Lennon. What Altman did go on to say about Nashville a generation later, in the
commentary reel for Paramount’s DVD release, was: “The statement here is, these
people are not assassinated because of their ideas or what they do. They're
assassinated to draw attention to the assassin. And in political
assassinations, in their sort of warped minds, they know that they are going to
have a certain amount of people who said 'that son of a bitch [the politician]
should have been shot,' because there's such heat about it. But actually what
they are doing is killing somebody who's in the public eye and is some sort of
an icon. Because this feeling that by, doing that, committing that
assassination they draw the attention to themself, and they make themselves
consequently important. Ah, and it's no surprise to me, the Lennon
assassination, because this is what all that is, and I don't think we have seen
the end of it either."
We
All Come to Look for America
And so the story goes. By the time it all came
together, Nashville wasn’t really a musical in the classic sense of a stitched-together
libretto used to glue a series of musical numbers into a whole. In fact, the
reverse is almost the case, especially in scenes liberally improvised by the
actor/singers. The film, like a few others of Altman’s, defies category. There
were twenty-nine songs included, many of them full performances, and a large
percentage of them were written and/or performed by the actors themselves. Many
in the Nashville music establishment at the time took umbrage—but that they had
missed the point of the movie, that the entire spectrum of humanity represented
in Nashville is indeed what Nashville
is, what the world is, and that Nashville’s microcosm includes a psychopath with a gun in his
guitar case—eventually dawned on most of them. It is an incontrovertible but
very uncomfortable truth that 2 or 3 out of a hundred human beings sharing this
planet with us are stark, staring mad. How could the Queen of Mean, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, have
found humor in such a blood-curdling look at America? I guess you’d have to see
the film.
Nashville
received nine Golden Globe nominations, the most one film has ever received. It
also set the record for the most-ever nominations for a single acting category,
when Ronee Blakely, Lily Tomlin, Barbara Harris and Geraldine Chaplin were all
nominated for Best Supporting Actress Golden Globes. Roger Ebert wrote that “...after
I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt
somehow wiser. It’s that good a movie.” It also received five Academy Award
nominations (including Ronee Blakely and Lily Tomlin, again, for Best Supporting
Actress). But out of all those nominations, the sole winner turned out to be
the music. Keith Carradine won the Academy Award for Best Original Song as well
as the Golden Globe for Best Original Song – Motion Picture, both for his song
“I’m Easy.”
As it should be. And since you have kept reading
this in spite of my earlier spoiler alert, I’ll tell you why. “I’m Easy” was
written, sung and acted by an actor who despised the character he was
portraying—a heartless, gutless, dishonest, serial womanizer, and killer of
souls. The critical scene in which he performs his song takes place in an
intimate nightclub setting. Seated at different tables, and utterly oblivious
to each other, are four different women he is currently sleeping with. Each listens intently as he warmly seduces them with his voice and
guitar, emotionally moved and blissfully unaware that he is, at the same time,
cuckolding each of them and wantonly destroying each of their lives.
Psychopaths come in many guises. The most dangerous
are the ones we fail to see until we find ourselves swept along in their
destructive wake. Politicians. Lawyers. Lovers. Folk singers. Sweet-faced young
jihadists. Even U.S. Army veterans (Nashville’s
disturbing antagonist wears an olive-drab military jacket similar to the one worn
by Travis Bickle, who didn’t appear in Taxi
Driver and our cultural consciousness until a year after Nashville was released. Oddly, Army
surplus stores could barely keep them in stock after that.)
Art
Imitating Life Imitating Art
Due to good luck and nerve, one evening in 1991 I had
the opportunity to hear the story of Altman and crew’s masterful interweaving
of art and artifice from one of Nashville’s
key participants, actress Karen Black. I was having dinner alone at the Lek Café,
a tiny Thai restaurant on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood that, while it lasted, was
a classic hole-in-the-wall place that served spectacular food at modest prices.
I was eating my longstanding favorite, fried garlic shrimp on a bed of lightly
pickled cabbage and the only perfectly-prepared brown rice I’ve ever found—when,
who should I see but a pair of women seated on the other
side of the dining area, one of whom was unmistakably Karen Black.
Who, dear reader, you were just listening to Altman
describe as “...the biggest ‘star’ we had in the movie...” (with recent films
like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby, Portnoy’s Complaint, et al.), and his use of her acting skills in
the role of country star Connie White, as “on-the-nose casting.” I’d vacillated
a bit about whether I wanted to make a star-struck whistle stop by her table as
I exited the place, when she happened to look up from her food and catch me
gazing in her direction.
Then she smiled. Just like in the movies. Karen
Black’s smile was not the usual look-at-my-dental-work, imagine-me-twenty-years-ago
smile. Karen Black smiling was like the sun coming up over the horizon on a
clear summer morning. I immediately crossed the room and did just as I’d
planned, and thanked her for her tremendous body of work. What I had not
planned for is that she would invite me to sit down and join them. I did, of
course, without hesitation, and for the next hour or so we talked about—what
else?—movies. When we got to her work in Nashville,
we talked in greatest detail about the very same experience Altman described earlier
in the video (you’re watching them now, aren’t you?) about casting her.
In the world of Robert Altman’s cinematic maelstrom
of counterweights and balanced forces, “casting” took on additional meaning and
was evolving with the needs of the personalities of the actors, as we witnessed
in his casting of actor/singer/songwriter Carradine against type, and against the
actor’s own wishes. Or in his starting the filming before an actress had been
selected for the pivotal role that was ultimately key to the denouement in the last
reel. Then there was the day the heterodox Altman set attracted the happy happenstance
of Elliott Gould and Julie Christie coming by for a visit and making two
fortuitous cameos, as themselves... in Nashville. But earlier than all of that,
in the film’s beginning stages of development, after Altman had used a pair of
Carradine’s songs to sell the movie project to ABC but before the song
performances had become the structural focus of the film, Karen Black had walked
up to him at their initial meeting with three songs she had written. Through a
combination of intensive script study, ESP, espionage and perceptive vision,
she had decided that she wanted the role and determined how to cut to the
chase. She showed up, rehearsed and ready, and sang her three songs to him. By
the time she had performed the last of the three for the director, she had the
job.
In one final act of life imitating art imitating
life before I left the Lek Café, Ms. Black gave me a script she’d stuffed in
her purse, and asked me if I’d engage my fleeting interest in screenwriting and
look at what might be done to fix whatever it was that was wrong with it. I
read it over several times, but never did figure out the script or how to help
her with it. But I had learned a lesson from the great actress—that a real
artistic genius needs to be a provocateur, not an assassin.
Je
suis Charlie?
Je suis.
But it’s pretty obvious that journalists are still
learning the difference between provocation and assassination. Imagine being
asked by a reporter whether you feel responsible for John Lennon’s murder. The
term describing this craven, unethical approach to investigating a story or
idea is the unfortunately apt phrase “loaded question,” for the obvious reason
that responding to it in any way at all could be lethal. The representative of
the Washington Post who asked Altman
the question is one of those 2 to 3 in a hundred human beings who have
determined that their daily survival depends on keeping the other 97—everyone
else in the world—nice and quiet, under control, cowed, heads down and sweating
for fear of thinking a stray thought or disturbing “the peace.”
When those 2 to 3 people in a hundred are in
positions of authority, whether in spheres of government or electronic media or
army surplus chains or arts & entertainment, they like to maintain their
positions by convincing you and me that we need them and can’t live without
them. Without the IRS, how would we ever
manage to pay for all the (fill in the blank) that the U.S. government provides
us? Without an agent taking 20% for directing our affairs, how could we ever
survive the plummeting CD/movie ticket/book/magazine/fine art/photography sales?
Without VA psychiatrists medicating returned veterans on regimens of
Xanax-and-Abilify cocktails like they’re herding cattle, how would the GIs ever
get through another day without being depressed by the world they’ve come home
to? Without the plethora of 24/7 news coverage promoting ideological
prescriptions for correct thinking, how would we ever know how to deal with the
tidal wave of bad news they flood into our living rooms? Without the masters of
war, who would build the big bombs?
Etc.
The
Blues
My brush with stardom and stardust aside, I think
that greater even than the casting coup of getting Karen Black for the role of
country music queen Connie White, was Altman’s casting of Barbara Harris as
Winifred, or “Albuquerque.” Harris was a veteran character actor with great
chops, a Hitchcock favorite, but not so well known to 1970s audiences that
anyone was prepared for her tour de force in the final act of the film.
Because one of the lessons we have learned by the
time the Nashville credits roll, is
that if we are ever to get to the point of dealing with those 2 or 3 out of a
hundred assassins, politicians, jihadists or cuckolds, we are going to have to
lighten up and see the forest for the trees. We are going to have to learn to
tell the difference, and discover that 97 of the hundred people
we know or meet are our friends. Musically, the time-honored way of dealing
with the politicians and jihadists, the bad roads and bad weather, the pain and
the sorrow and the tragedies we inevitably face, is to embrace it all enthusiastically and then
throw it as hard and as far away as possible. Pick it up like Chief Broom wresting
an ECT machine off the floor of an Oregon state hospital, and throw it as far
as you can. You put your arms around it and then sling it. In musical terms,
you sing it. You sing the blues.
Technically—if you are addressing a musicologist (!)—there
is just one type of music that qualifies as The Blues. Some of the better-known
practitioners of the different blues forms have been Billie Holiday, Miles
Davis, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ray Charles. And more
recently, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Cocker, Buddy Guy, Eric
Clapton.
But that’s the narrow view. If you are not
addressing a musicologist, count yourself lucky, because now you can count
every symphony in history, every song that’s ever been sung. It’s all blues. It’s
ALL blues. Blues plus jazz, too. And bluegrass. Opera. Country. Hip-hop. Folk. Rock‘n’roll.
Washtub bass and a comb. It’s all blues. It all serves the purpose.
The more it kicks your ass, the better. The more it
makes you cry, the better. Because the more it makes you cry, the more it will
make you laugh about it all later.
Barbara Harris was cast for the Shakespearean finale
of Nashville for the simple reason that
even though there are musicians who can act when they're called upon, and actors who can sing, well... in some cases you need someone who was born to do both. There’s
a lot of truth in the saying that you can’t tell a book by its cover.
When the situation calls for some soul-deep blues,
you need someone who can sing it.
