"Nashville" (1975)

 

Last Saturday, November 7, Joe Biden was declared the winner of the US Presidential Election.  The coronavirus altered the nature of this election, in which millions chose to vote by mail, and in-person voting was complicated by the need for protective face-covering and social distancing, which were unfairly construed by many misguided Americans to be political acts in themselves. 

A divided country chose the winner by more votes than any other president has ever earned.   It seemed appropriate, on this politically historic occasion, to revisit one of American cinema’s most exhilarating and challenging films, Robert Altman’s “Nashville”.

The same day as the election was called for Biden, Americans filled the streets in an unprecedented release of celebration, while the number of reported covid-19 cases was at an all-time high.  The elation over the change in American leadership, simultaneously with the anxiety of a worsening pandemic due to the incumbent’s incompetence, made “Nashville” a meaningful choice for my post-election viewing.   Forty-five years after it was first released, this film remains a prophetic metaphor for America’s collective anxiety, celebration, and confusion.

How to describe “Nashville”?  What is it about?  On the surface, it’s part episodic comedy-drama, part concert film.  It is a chronicle of five days in the country music capital of the world, leading up to a political rally/concert for an enigmatic Replacement Party candidate named Hal Phillip Walker.

Like a series of snapshots of America just before its Bicentennial, “Nashville” chronicles twenty-four characters, whose lives touch, move apart, intersect in interesting ways, and come together in the film’s finale. 

It is during the sequence at the political rally that the film reaches a stunning climax; and then it ends.  We are left in a state of ambiguity, a roller-coaster of horror mixed with hope.

It is more accurate to describe “Nashville” as an epic and multilayered character study.  There are country music stars, hangers-on, and wanna-be singers; politicians and promoters; spouses and children; families struggling through a generational inability to communicate; heroes and impostors, soldiers and rednecks, angels and assassins. 

It is impossible to give enough credit to the actors who embody these characters, many of whom created their own costumes and wrote and performed their own songs.  Worth special note are Henry Gibson and Lily Tomlin in their film debuts (Gibson as the arrogant country star Haven Hamilton; and Tomlin as Linnea, a lonely mother of two deaf children, and the sole white singer in a Black gospel choir); Ned Beatty as Tomlin’s husband, a smarmy attorney; and best of all, songwriter Ronee Blakley in the crucial role of Barbara Jean, a beloved country singer on the brink of collapse.

Also terrific are Keith Carradine (who wrote and performs the Oscar-winning “I’m Easy”) as a talented but womanizing member of a rock trio; Keenan Wynn as the kind uncle of the promiscuous “L.A. Joan” (Shelley Duvall); Geraldine Chaplin as the dubious BBC reporter, who is our wacky surrogate of sorts;  Michael Murphy as Hal Philip Walker’s slick promoter; Robert Doqui as a hard-drinking, cynical black man who resents the success of black country singer Tommy Brown (ex-football-player Timothy Brown); and Gwen Welles as Sueleen and Barbara Harris as Albuquerque, two aspiring singers of questionable talent, who encounter failure and fame in very surprising ways.

These characters move through a world of iconic ideas and images: a world of Black pride and racial tension; of talent and disability (sometimes one and the same); of infidelity and devotion; of traffic jams and race-cars, school buses and auto junkyards, rooming houses and country estates, hospitals and airports; of church services and motel room trysts.

Moving in a cycle from honky-tonks to the Grand Old Opry and back, it’s a world that culminates beneath the columns of Nashville’s Parthenon (a replica of the ancient Greek monument to Democracy) under an enormous American flag, waving to the rhythm of Barbara Jean’s soulful tribute to her Idaho home. 

There are many songs in “Nashville”, patriotic, nostalgic, cornball, seductive, and heartbreaking, that form the movie’s upbeat soundtrack, and which are essential to the film’s fabric, mood, and message. No other movie feels quite like “Nashville”, due in large part to its music.

Running through, like a thread that can’t be pulled lest it all unravel, is Hal Phillip Walker's  campaign truck with loudspeakers, roaming the streets, blaring the candidate’s platform in his own voice, weaving through characters and events.  Although no one pays much attention, Walker’s ideas sound less crazy today than in they did in 1975: fighting oil companies; removing lawyers from congress; taxing churches; changing the National Anthem; and abolishing the electoral college.

The film is like a tapestry of America at a crossroads after Vietnam, Watergate, and political and cultural upheaval of the era, seen in bits and pieces of disparate behaviors and situations, slowly coming together in a panoramic conclusion.  Instead of a clearly defined picture taking shape before us, we get something more ambiguous: a contradictory, poetic sequence that almost defies description in words.  It leaves us with residual, conflicting emotions that are at once both despairing and exultant--just like our fractured country today, fighting a pandemic after an historic election.

“Nashville” is also a pointed satire about the cult of celebrity, the fleetingness of success, and of the dangerous convergence of politics and celebrity.  It also takes a critical and often hilarious look at advertising and self-promotion in the parallel worlds of country music and politics.  The movie’s opening credit sequence is a wonderful parody of the old K-Tel record commercials on TV, like an advertisement for the film itself even as the narrator says it will be presented “without commercial interruption”.

In the glorious movie renaissance of the early 1970s, audiences became more active participants in a film, willing to bring their own energy and vigilance to watch the entire screen carefully, to listen more acutely, and interpret symbols and images in a more literary way.  Our active attention was often rewarded with an entertaining and artistic experience that lasted far beyond the initial viewing.  It stirred our emotions, challenged our thinking, moved us to action, and stimulated heated conversation about a film’s deeper implications for our lives.

“Nashville” was the culmination of that Hollywood renaissance, which was a creative ferment in reaction to the turmoil of the era. Audiences came to accept characters over plot, downbeat endings, cinematic innovation, grittier technique, violent images in service to a higher purpose, and more realistic subject matter that reflected our world.

I fear that American audiences no longer know how to watch a movie like “Nashville”, which needs a viewer’s active attention to be fully enjoyed and appreciated.  The seemingly haphazard, freewheeling style makes it challenging to keep track of the myriad characters and relationships at first; but director Robert Altman, screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, editor Sidney Levin, and a marvelous cast soon create a familiar world that becomes easier to relax into as the movie goes along.

There is a pattern to what at first seems to be a liberating kind of chaos on the screen: the subtle, red-white-and-blue color scheme; the imperceptible, painterly movement of the camera (especially the zoom lens for emphasis); the carefully layered episodes showcasing the characters in combination with each other; and the experimental use of an 8-track sound recording system, which offers bits of exposition, offhand dialogue, and political commentary, sometimes all at once.  Even a careful viewer might need two or three viewings to take it all in.  By the final hour of this 156-minute masterwork, the movie has taken shape, and we become deeply involved.

The skill with which Robert Altman delivers this classic piece of cinema becomes obvious in the final sequence at the Parthenon, in which almost every character, major or minor, has gathered with the crowd to participate in the political event.  After mere glimpses of these people living their lives and making us laugh and think, we marvel at how well we have come to know them, and how completely Altman has created a world that we have become a part of.  Even late in the movie, some of the characters have a few surprises left to reveal.

That’s why the shocking climactic act, and its aftermath, are so confounding, and its impact so powerful, and even exhilarating.  While nothing is spelled out, and the future of these characters remains open-ended, we have enough material to complete the narrative and draw our own conclusions. The more you can bring to the film, the richer the experience is.

“Nashville” elicits emotions similar to what we might feel after a national tragedy, and/or the emergence of a new leader.  The film ends with the crowd joining in to sing a song.  The refrain, sung repeatedly before the fade-out, “it don’t worry me”, is rich with ambiguity, and speaks convincingly to the conflicting ignorance/resilience of a people in the midst of a crisis.  When children in the crowd are shown singing this refrain even without understanding what has happened, and police are briefly seen moving through the crowd, the implications, while chilling, can be interpreted in different ways.

What makes “Nashville” a great film is its epic scope, its continued relevance, and its capacity to surprise us.  It combines many contradictory ideas and personal stories into something that captures the ever-changing American landscape.  If you immerse yourself in it, give yourself over to its unconventional methods, and watch and listen carefully, you won’t find a more original, unusually entertaining movie as “Nashville”. 

"The Exorcist" (1973)

It is customary around Halloween to watch scary movies.  Before the pandemic, theaters showcased horrific first-run releases and revived old classics.  Still, supernatural stories and creature features of every level of quality, and from every decade, are shown all month on television. 

In this year of horrible political and social strife, along with the worst health crisis in 100 years, people are generally anxious, if not terrified of what awaits just around the corner. Even on cable TV, Turner Classic Movies used an apt tagline to promote its annual Halloween offerings: “2020 feels like a horror movie!”

In the nearly fifty years since its notorious release, “The Exorcist” has been called the scariest movie ever made.  It seemed like the right season, and the right moment in our history, to take another look at this horrendous work of cinematic fiction.   Maybe it would distract me from actual events that have become, to quote “The Exorcist’s” promotional trailer, “almost beyond comprehension”.

Based on the sensational best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty, loosely based on a purported true incident in 1949, “The Exorcist” is an account of the ghastly demonic possession of twelve-year-old Regan McNeill, and her physical and spiritual degradation.  Her mother, Chris McNeill, an actress filming a movie on location in Georgetown, slowly comes to the realization that Regan’s darkening mood, supernatural strength, blasphemous obscenity, violent self-abuse, murderous behavior, and grotesque physical transformation are well beyond the reach of psychiatry.

She appeals to a local priest, Father Damien Karras, who is naturally skeptical of her request.  Karras, a Jesuit psychiatrist, whose aging mother is near death, is in the midst of his own crisis of faith.  Regan’s episodes of shocking and disgusting behavior, especially her speaking in tongues, provide Karras with enough proof for the Church to approve the archaic ritual known as exorcism, used to expel demons. To help Karras, The Church sends for the powerfully faithful elder, Father Merrin, as the exorcist.  The film’s mysterious prologue suggests that Merrin has encountered extreme evil before.

This is certainly prime material for the darkest of horror.  The book was long and graphic, with enough character development, and meditation on the nature of good and evil, that the shocks, which took hold of readers and physically sickened some of them, were somewhat justified.

When rumors began that the film would be released late in 1973, helmed by director William Friedkin, who won an Oscar for 1971’s edgy, documentary-style thriller “The French Connection”, public interest grew.  When word came out that the book’s bizarre episodes would be graphically depicted---things that had been banned as obscene even in a new era of permissiveness—the buzz was irresistible. 

I think it is more interesting to consider “The Exorcist” in retrospect, when the stories surrounding its exhibition and its unprecedented audience reaction became legendary. Anticipation about what the film was willing to depict, and what lines of decency would be crossed, created initial long lines of curious people who waited several hours to get into theaters.  The shock value of the film was in large part due to viewers’ hyped, heightened expectations going in.  Audiences were already anxious before the opening credits; those who came totally unprepared must have felt the same primeval, gut response that those who read the book had experienced (especially those with an aversion to the sight of blood, or other bodily fluids).

The word-of-mouth about the movie’s effects-- green vomit spewed on priests, the infamous masturbation with a bloody metal crucifix, the 180-degree head-spin, the levitations and the eerie voices shouting depraved language from the mouth of a once-innocent child—brought mobs of audience members eager to see for themselves. 

Stories about people becoming hysterical, passing out from fright or disgust, or staggering into the lobby physically ill, were the stuff of news headlines for months, and helped make “The Exorcist” one of the biggest moneymakers of all time. 

While some called into question the ethics of involving a minor in this brutal spectacle, even with the use of a body-double in some scenes, it was not a hot-button issue in 1973. Many critics appreciated the technical skill and visceral nature of the movie, which went on to earn 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

I have my own strange affection for the movie, for reasons that have little to do with what’s on the screen.  As an aspiring high-school filmmaker, who was equally fascinated and disturbed by the stories I was reading (it would be months before I actually saw the film), I grabbed my super-8 movie equipment and made my own version, titled “The Exorcism”.  A projector that I had received as a Christmas present, which allowed dubbing of sound and dialog directly through the projector on a magnetic strip applied directly to the film, let me have fun and experiment with visuals and sound effects alike. 

My 14-year-old sister gamely portrayed the possessed girl and her mother; and two classmates agreed to portray the priests.  It was hard work, but we enjoyed every minute, setting up lights, creating effects, and using bad jokes and puns instead of obscene dialog, and humorous effects instead of terrifying ones.  The result was hilarious, and made me a celebrity for the first and only time at school.

Seeing “The Exorcist” today from the comfort of my living room, as the pandemic surges across the globe (without the giddy energy of crowds primed to be scared, or even sickened, by the experience), the film seems less an exercise in carefully mounting horror as it does a masterpiece of physical and psychological audience manipulation.

The movie is an unpleasant experience, frequently ugly, with few lyrical scenes, and little attempt at beauty, or even the comfort of spirituality.  It is meant to shock and leave you shaken, and it is effective; but mostly because it is aggressively loud and intermittently repulsive, not scary in any sustained way.

“The Exorcist” is structured, oddly enough, like some grisly Hollywood musical. We go to musicals to see the song-and-dance numbers; viewers watch “The Exorcist” for the shock sequences.  There are long stretches of exposition, punctuated by brief but potent episodes of shock and horror. Whether it’s a shaking bed, a string of guttural language, or an unspeakable act of evil, each episode is more intense and grotesque than the last one.

That’s how the film maintains a sense of dread, leaving us in fear of what outrage the film will depict next. The moments of shock do not, for the most part, develop the plot (nor do many interludes in Hollywood musicals).  The final exorcism scene, 20 minutes’ worth of darkness and noisy terror, functions like a dream ballet from a Gene Kelly dance sequence, but a foul and demented one.  We aren’t meant to feel sympathy with the girl or her mother. (If anything, the story belongs to Father Karras, who is often overshadowed by supernatural events.) 

We are meant to witness a phantasmagoria, and in that sense the movie delivers; but the material is full of opportunities to provide more depth, to give us more to take away from it, which the movie mostly squanders.

As unbelievably intense as these scenes are visually, I believe what makes “The Exorcist” such a terrifying experience is its use of sound to manipulate the viewer in a physical sense. There are many scenes of sustained, unpleasant noise, a barrage of sounds we cannot escape (screaming, medical testing, and supernatural voices) which build tremendous tension, which stop with a cut to the next, completely silent shot.  We feel the physical effects of the noise when it suddenly stops: the heart pounds, our blood pressure rises, the anxiety intensifies in the same way as it would from listening to a deafening, broken car horn. 

There are also numerous “boo” effects, like a sudden, loud ringing telephone, an unexpected flareup of a candle in a dark attic, or the scream leading out of an uneventful sequence.  These make us jump, in a fight-or-flight response, before we are confronted with a visual horror that might repulse us.  One cannot block out the experience by averting the eyes, because it takes us too much by surprise, and the sound effects are almost always worse.

If one studies the film closely, we are exposed to all of its cinematic fright techniques during the movie’s 15-minute prologue with Father Merrin in Iraq. All of the manipulations of the movie are here: the sustained noise, the mysterious visuals, the sight of a metalworker’s milky white eye (foreshadowing Regan’s frightful white pupils), his escape from a fatal collision with a fast-moving carriage containing a woman with a demonic visage, and a supernatural appearance of a hellish statue, accompanied by  sounds of dogs growling, slaughtered pigs squealing and bees buzzing menacingly.

These and other subliminal visual and auditory tricks affect the viewer unconsciously, and leave us thinking we have witnessed something utterly terrifying.  The truth is, we have been manipulated into thinking so.

Something else disturbed me in my recent viewing: the film’s assumption that audiences, unconsciously or otherwise, fear Islam.  As the movie’s opening credits begin, sinister music, like a piano wire being scratched, sets up a tone of mystery.  As the film’s title cuts in, blazing red across the screen, we hear on the soundtrack the voice of a man in Islamic prayer. While it establishes the location of the prologue, it also makes an unfortunate connection between Islam and evil, arousing our ingrained, unconscious suspicion of The Other, especially in a film in which Christianity plays a central, heroic role.

Even with the objections the film raises decades after its release, there are a couple ideas within “The Exorcist”—both metaphorical and tangible—that make it a perfect movie for the era of coronavirus and the political circus it created.

The most obvious parallel is the idea that a mysterious “illness” has invaded an innocent child.  The transformation is frightening, just as the sudden onset and deadly symptoms of covid-19 fill most of us with fear.  For believers, the possibility of demonic possession remains remote but nonetheless real; the possibility of contracting this novel virus is also real, but not so remote. Thus far, medicine has not produced a cure, although many of us look to science for hope, if not pray for a miracle.

In a bigger way, Regan’s transformation is a perfect, metaphoric image of our culture’s malaise.  The ugly effects of decades of ignorance decaying our ideals, of insults hurled about with no apparent consequence, the defiance with which people behave with harmful effects to themselves and others, and the hope that someone or something might come along to make things better…all of these feelings are aroused by watching “The Exorcist” today.  Rather than help avoid the problems outside, “The Exorcist” illustrated different ways to feel anxious about them!

One monolog, delivered by Father Merrin as a warning to Karras prior to the ritual, is prophetic, and pertinent to our current state of misinformation about our political and health dilemmas:

“…He is a liar. The demon is a liar.  He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, and powerful. So don’t listen to him! Remember that. Do not listen.”

There has never been another film like “The Exorcist”, even though it has been endlessly imitated, and influenced countless horror movies since.  Like many films of its era, it could never be made in today’s Hollywood.  Whether you appreciate (let alone actually enjoy) it or not, everyone involved gave the best of their talents to create a convincing, technical marvel of shocking impact, if not a lasting work of art. 

Best of all are Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin, whose presence alone lets us breathe a little easier; Jason Miller as the troubled Father Karras; Ellen Burstyn as the volatile, concerned Chris McNeil; Linda Blair, who suffers the torments of the damned, as little Regan; and veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge, whose distinctive husky voice provides the demon’s voice, and the most memorable shocks in the movie.

William Peter Blatty did an admirable job paring down his novel into a workable screenplay, managing to give cinematic life to things that would never have been dreamed possible.  He sparred with director Friedkin about the inclusion of quieter moments of dialogue that lent some meaning to the infernal goings-on.

If “The Exorcist” lacks substance for contemporary viewers, especially non-believers, it rests on Friedkin’s shoulders for eliminating that substance.  (Blatty ultimately prevailed; an “extended cut” released several years ago restored at least one crucial dialog between Merrin and Karras that gave the audience some guidance into what it all meant.)  The final cut was approved by a director who assumed that audiences would be impatient to sit through too much exposition before the horror began.

If you enjoy being scared, or even brutalized, by a horror film, then give yourself over to “The Exorcist”, and let it work its evil magic on your psyche.  On the other hand, I don’t think any movie can capture the terror of this election year as the pandemic rages on.