I’ll be honest, I grew up in Houston, Texas but I
can’t stand country music. And my high school was surrounded by cattle fields
so if there were ever a place to like country music and get away with it it was
where I lived. So watching Nashville was a bit of a challenge in attention
during the songs but I did find the political allegory interesting. I’ve always
been somewhat fascinated by the cultural turbulence of the 60s and 70s from
Kennedy to Watergate. Altman already dealt with the Vietnam War indirectly in
M*A*S*H.
I found the final concert/shooting scene to be very
allegorical to the political turmoil of the time. The assassination of Barbara
Jean symbolizes all the political assassinations of the 1960s (both Kennedys
and Martin Luther King in particular). The one guy even says, amid the
confusion “This isn’t Dallas” where Kennedy was shot. In the aftermath of the
shooting no one knows what’s going on and Chaplin even asks “What’s happened?
Can you please tell me what happened?” which is probably what the whole country
thought in the wake of the assassination. The woman who starts singing
represents the resilience of the American spirit. In a broader sense, this film
and the style of country music can been seen as our nation’s attempt to
reconnect with a simpler time in our history like the stories in country songs.
Apart from all that, I did start to appreciate
Altman’s style of multiple voices at once. It gives the film a kind of
freshness and makes me very interested to see M*A*S*H to see more of his style
in action. And also I’ve heard it’s not too bad of a film.
Pretty weak entry, no readings
ReplyDelete