Nashville is the perfect city in which to create a metaphor linking show business with the business of politics in America. No other city in America is so uniquely connected and defined by a specific genre of artistic expression and in the pre-Rap world of 1975, no other musical genre could be so immediately recognized by the external expression of homogenous aspects of marketing utterly lacking in any individuality. Even after Willie Nelson grew his hair out, one could identify the country music singers at the Grammy Awards from any the representatives of any other pop music genre. Or, to put it plainly: Nashville could most easily become a setting in which the division of America along both musical and political lines could be most starkly established with the least amount of work.
This is an important and essential concept to the construction of the film because if Nashville can be said to be about any one particular thing, it is about the future of politics in America. Made in the midst of the Great American Malaise created by scandals causing the country to question itself like Watergate and the Vietnam War and in the vacuum created by the possibilities raised of what might have been had JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X not all been assassinated in the 1960’s, the one thing that Nashville most certainly cannot be said to be about is politics in 1975.
By that point—a year after Nixon’s resignation and still more than a half a decade away from the country election a former actor as its Chief Executive, the connection between the marketing of entertainment and the marketing of politicians was barely a blip on the radar of public consciousness. The screenwriter and director of Nashville-- Joan Tewkesbury and Robert Altman—apparently saw something going on that nearly everybody else was missing. The most amazing thing about Nashville is how incredibly prescient it was in creating a canvas in 1975 upon which they painted a portrait that looked much close to 2016.
The line between the selling of country music and the selling of a Presidential candidate is actually—incredibly—more blurry in the film than it became in the real life Presidential election of 2016. The empty and simple-minded platitudes of the unseen candidate are indistinguishable from the empty and simple minded lyrics of a country music song.
“…with people all over this country...I'm often confronted with the statement - 'I don't want to get mixed up in politics,' or 'I'm tired of politics,' or 'I'm not interested.' Almost as often, someone said, 'I can't do anything about it anyway.' Let me point out two things. Number One: All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. And Number Two: We can do something about it. When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's politics.”
And:
“I pray my sons won't go to war
But if they must, they must.
I share our country's motto
And in God I place my trust.
We may have had our ups and downs
Our times of trials and fears.
But we must be doin' somethin' right
To last 200 years.”
One can well imagine a candidate stripping the lyrics into a straightened-out prose and delivering it as a stump speech. Likewise, it is not hard to imagine the candidate’s speech above being sliced and diced to serve as lyrics for a tune pouring out of dollars store with a sound system tuned into a local country music station.
It’s not hard to imagine that now, that is. In 1975, it would have been much more difficult, but the world has changed quite a bit since then. And what is more amazing than anything, perhaps, is the America of the 2016 looks more like the 1975 of Nashville than it does the future predicted by 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange or even Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
