ON SEEING 'NASHVILLE IN NASHVILLE

...An imaginary line surrounds North Nashville, the euphemistic title for Nashville's oldest Black neighborhood...

...It was like the day after the end of the world...

...Opel's journalistic soliloquy for the BBC on the traumas of busing also did not represent the realities of Nashville...

...Urbane viewers of Nashville might snicker at the music represented in the film...

...In fact, at the con-clusion, of the Anthem, a voice hol-lered, "Play ball...

...The burlap walls of the Old Time Picking Parlor and the mural of the da Vinci man astride a guitar at the Exit/ In were authen-tic...

...In this case, Black-white integration has proceeded comparatively well...

...But Nashville at times portrayed a Nashville which was unfamiliar to me...

...Within this line, Country Music City, It's abele to unit Radios in North probably mote frequently taaa they play Cash, Twitty, or Parton...

...The sound truck of the unseen Walker does not just represent the candidate but is the candidate whose manufactured media image has become greater than his real self...

...Sunday church attendance is highly prized and practiced, yet Sunday shopping is rampant and Lord's Day liquor drinks may be purchased...

...Plastic coverings on cameras and recording equipment rustled fitfully in the moisture-filled breeze...

...Thus, country music, middle America and the automobile come together in Nashville, and Altman is quick to reflect this...

...The truth is that for the majority of Blacks country-western music is repulsive since it symbolizes white, red-neck racism...

...It is here that Altman fails...

...The reality which many of these snobbish viewers might fail to perceive is that they are in the minority and the vast majority of white Americans (and even some few Black Americans) are listening to this music and these lyrics because they find in them a genuine expression of their confusion, alienation and rootlessness...

...Two young Nashvillians engage their vehicles in a fender-bender and leap out to pummel each other while in the foreground one of Altman's twenty-four characters tipsily contrives to evade the clutches of her pick-up truck ensconced "hus-band...

...The casual account of the history of the Nashville Parthenon delivered in the final scene was accurate...

...A multi-plication of the volume had miracu-lously occurred as the crowd kept vigil for their messiah with copies of his testament clutched like Sunday morn-ing Bibles in their hands...

...The deaf' children of Altman's Nashville actually communicate and "sing" more effectively than the major characters of the film who possess physical hearing...

...The Main office and publising houses of several major denominations are located in Nashville, yet the amount of adult bookstores, pornographic thesis and massage parlors, most be one of the highest per capita of any major city, in the nation...

...Music City, U.S.A...

...The massive automobile crash oc-curred where massive crashes normally occur in Nashville...

...It is at this point that the automobile and country music cente together...

...At the race track, the music star hopeful resorts to sign language like the deaf children to make her song heard above the roar of the racers...

...Inside the theater, the three filmed advertisements for local goods and services which preceded the main fea-ture enhanced Altaian's commercial-ized credits...

...For a moment I thought they were an intentional part of Alt-aian's masterwork...

...Where in times past people once travelled to religious shrines, they now pilgrim to Nashville to gawk at the Ryman Auditorium where the Opry was born, the new Grand Ole Opry, and the relics in the Country Music Hall of Fame...

...Even the filmed -National Anthem, played by an all-white Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, high school band attired in colonial garb, prepared the audience for the political satirizations of the motion picture...

...Nashville is the city of Andrew Jackson and lames Knox Polk and yet can also boast of the activities of a Cordell Hull, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore...

...There is certainly a practical reason why this combination is so...

...In Nashville, the automobiles are the symbols of the individualism and alienation which Altman sees stalking America and which they ihaye done so much to create...

...One has only to listen to the promotion of a prepackaged tour to Nashville on a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, radio station to understand how far the country music phenomenon and Nashville, its cathedral, have permeated American life...

...Like people in many other cities these days since Vietnam and Watergate, Nashville audiences are not quite so enthusiastic about the National Anthem and this particular audience struggled with hesitancy to their feet...

...The drivers, frequently the sole occupants of their vehicles, are detached from one another and the street sounds with their rolled up windows and radio-filled interiors...

...While Nashville's Catholics have been long since technically integrated, Black Catholics report that the predominantly white parishes frequently experience a cold front when white hands have to thrust themselves into Black hands at the handshake of Peace...

...Though it is the center of country musk, Nashville found its economic origins as an education center {fifteen campuses currently), railroad center, banking center and light industry center...

...Opel prates to him about her own mobile international sexual adventures which have all become slightly confused for her as separate experiences...

...The southern drawl in Nashville is nuanoed by a slight midwestern twang...

...Ho one made a citizen's arrest...

...Consequently, many Black Catholics, including a family on the same road as St...

...Louis, Louisville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Birmingham, Knoxville and Memphis...

...Henry's Catholic Church, where Haven Hamilton's red-haired public relations secretary worshiped on Nashville's Sunday of separated congregations, had one Black face too many when Joe Broadway appeared there as a worshiper...

...Lack of recognition of Elliott Gould and Julie Christie by music in-dustry leaders is thoroughly possible in a city where films like Walking Tall, Part 2 and Return to Macon County were playing simultaneously at three theaters and Nashville itself was booked at a single house...

...Altman has forgotten to depict the forlorn listeners of country music in the mining towns of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee or the leathery-skinned farmers of the south, mid-west and west who live at the mercy of climate, middle-men, and the federal government...

...At one point, however, Altman threw his sacrament aside and communicated directly with his audience...

...One wonders that in Tennessee and adjacent states the lack of automobile inspection laws and mandatory automobile insurance is a grace to the low-income population who would otherwise be reduced to near-starvation if they could not maneuver their dilapidated vehicles along the roads...

...The ubiquity of the automobile in Nashville conforms to the reality of Nashville, for the automobile dominates the city...

...They could not afford the competence and comforts of Vanderbilt Hospital where Barbara Jean retires to recuperate...

...Airman had deliberately chosen the Independence Day observance exactly two years before the Bicentennial Independence Day to film the climax scene of bis statement that there might be very little to celebrate at the Bicentennial...

...An occasional business trip to New York or Washington had failed to give me a glimpse of what Altaian had wrought on celluloid of Music City, U.S.A...

...Henry's, prefer to drive several miles from all over the Nashville metropolitan area to attend Sunday services at the former segregated Black parish near Fisk University...

...A hot, humid summer afternoon in Nashville realizes this as thousands of air-conditioned automobiles ply the streets...

...I have heard Black Nashvillians tensely request a change of stations if I had accidentally tuned in on a country-western broadcast...

...The superstud folksinger, Tom, cannot even hear the loudly shouted, "I love you," when it is scrawled in lipstick on his bathroom mirror...

...The massive highway crash occurs soon after the first evidence of Barbara Jean's impending psychological crackup...

...Country musk blares from loudspeakers on shoos along lower Broadway while a Public Library FM station presents a rich daily program of classical music and intellectually stimulating information programs...

...Therefore, Altman and the more sophisticated devotees of die cinema should not be shocked when Nashvillians become critical of the veracity and appropriateness of this precedent-setting film...

...In this light, I and fellow Nashvillians would be too harsh to seek a literal presentation of Nashville in the film...

...The automobile is total mobility, flexibility and rootlessness...

...also refers to itself as the Athens of the South and sports a full scale replica of the Athenian Parthenon...

...All he hears is the sound of his tape-recorded singing voice...

...The School Board made no demagogic appeals to cultivate their offices and the people did not engage in ugly confrontations...

...It was a pity and quite shabby that New York had the opportunity to view Nashville first...

...Even one of the major characters makes his liv-ing as a chauffeur to visiting celebrities...

...In the lobby, a Nashville matron commented to her companion, "I really didn't understand the ending...

...The agitation for legislation limiting or eliminating busing has diminished each year...

...The intensity of Black-white social integration depicted in Nashville was unreal for the non-fictitious Nashville...

...In the South, mass transit and interurban passenger service is so poor Snd 'the distances are so great that the automobile has become a necessity...

...The vast majority of those who listen to Barbara Jean frequent the weary Nashville General Hospital...

...A huge American Sag heaved on the side of the Parthenon...

...Every segment of Nashville presents the internal combustion engine in various guises...

...I have yet to see a Black person at the Parlor, and the Exit/In attracts a mere handful of Blacks except when it sponsors a rare Soul, Blues, or Jazz program...

...Nashville is the center upon which all this listening is focused...

...There is, however, a complexity about Nashville which the simplicity of country music camouflages and which no motion picture, including Nashville, could ever> capture...

...he coolly turns around and speeds off in detached security as the shots ring out to cut down Barbara Jean who has progressively become Unattached from , her own reality through the course of the film...

...Perhaps it will be from this minor success that true social integration will come for Nashville...

...The cinema featuring Nashville was located at a suburban shopping mall where just days before several hundred shoppers forsook the lures of Woolco to await the personal appearance of Johnny Cash to autograph his auto-biography, The Man in Black...

...The gauntness and not overly handsome or beautiful faces of many of the country music performers is something their audiences can identify with...

...In Nashville, however, the symbolism of the automobile is greater for Altaian than its practicality for those who live Nashville everyday...

...Outside even the poorest residences several automobiles gather in various stages of automobile transplant...

...Streets and buildings of daily acquaintance repeatedly arrested me...

...But Altman tells us that the Nashville in Nashville is a sacrament for the United States at the time of its Bicentennial...

...It is thoroughly appropriate that Tom's sexual encounters take place in the ultimate byproduct of the automobile's mobility, rootlessness, and impersonality the motel room...

...Everything appeared ready for a celebration of the forthcoming Independence holiday...

...Many of the older' country music stars themselves came from these backgrounds, and I am suspicious that the spangled costumes and makeup are but a coverup for the scars of earlier poverty...

...The new Grand Ole Opry building, located in the northeastern suburbs of the city on the Cumberland River, reinforces the automobile domination of Nashville, since it is accessible only by automobile...

...I was greatly distracted viewing a film set against familiar people and locales...

...Like all sacramental rituals, Altman's Nashville employs vivid visual symbolism to deliver his message...

...The omnipresent sound truck of the candidate rolls silently through Nashville's streets...

...When tie appears later in more formal attire in the Centennial Park cavalcade (or is it a cortege...

...Though Blacks patronize Opryland, like any other commercial recreation-amusement park, they shun the Grand Ole Opry performances as if they would degenerate their health...

...It expresses a longing for times, places and faces of familiar comfort and stability...

...An automobile is, as its same signifies, a vehicle which moves of itself...

...Through it one can automatically cut oneself, off from historical and contemporary communality...

...Southern Protestantism is devoid of the sacjamentalism which Altman himself experienced in his younger years as a Catholic and which carries aver into his films...

...Except for an occasional security guard or technician, the setting was deserted...

...The opening of school in Nashville in this Fall of 1975 was normal and without incident If these are my reactions in viewing Nashville mainly from the perspective of a white person residing in Black Nashville, then the reaction of Nashville's music establishment will undoubtedly be stronger...

...The symbol which dominates all eke in Nashville is that of the automobile...

...Country music is an expression of the alienation and search for roots of a peopl* Its origins are in the poor whites of the Appalachian South who find themselves caught up in the bewilderment of poverty and exploitive forces beyond their control...

...There is a poignancy in the music which can only be understood by being present on a Saturday afternoon at Farmers' Market Warehouse Store in Nashville when the local poor whites come to do their weekly shopping...

...Again, there were just too many Black faces in the Old Tune Picking Parlor and Exit/In scenes...

...This scene had been filmed on the days immediately preceding Independence Day, 1974.1 had stumbled upon the set on the evening of July 2 as I strolled about the Parthenon with some out-of-town visitors who had come for the impending holiday weekend...

...The cavalcade of sleek black limousines bearing the unseen candidate silently glides into Centennial Park...

...His choice of the Parthenon replica for the backdrop of this scene is significant for it represents a state which purported to be a democracy but culminated in a military dictatorship and a debilitating series of military engagements for die sake of preserving the freedoms it had long lost by becoming an imperial power...

...Evel Knievel is one of the ultimate folk heroes of Nashville and a motion picture featuring grueling contests among automobiles with the battered automobile star of the film displayed in the theater lobby is a guaranteed success...

...Country music aptly embodies their tired, confusion-ridden, and unhealthy faces...

...Enthusiasm for viewing Nashville itself has been wanting among Black Nashvillians, even though they, might recognize friends, relatives and themselves in several background shots of the film...

...It is the epitome of rugged individualism and that accompanying alienation which it produces...

...A video-taped bulletin of a motorcyclist setting a world record by leaping over twenty-one Vegas at a local race track can be a normal way of beginning a late evening video newscast...

...The evening newspaper carries the final lines of the last stanza, of Americaas part of its masthead white the morning paper features a fullpage interview with the leading local madarae...

...In the vicinity of my residence in North Nashville, decent and reasonable grocery shopping is so remote that the lack of an automobile could make eating a real challenge...

...Images of faculty I teach with and students I have taught flashed on the screen...

...The automobile race track even drowns out the live country music provided for the racing fans...

...It reminded me of Ebbets Field and Gladys Gooding...

...The original lyrics of several of the songs might produce a guffaw, but they are not too distant from such numbers as, "I've got the hungries for love and I'm standing in your welfare line," and "Papa was a preacher and Mama was a go-go girl," which I have heard in recent years...

...There was a bit of difficulty in shifting from the filmed Nashville to the immediate reality of Nashville at the theater door, although New Yorkers have been doing such a shift for several decades of motion pictures...

...In effect these are pilgrimage routes which weekly bear the motorized country music fans to the Friday and Saturday evening performances of the Grand Ole Opry...

...But this is difficult for Nashvillians to avoid for they do live in the Vatican of the Bible Belt and religious fundamentalism...

...There was no applause nor outward signs of approval or disapproval...

...As Haven Hamilton's public relations secretary delivered her boozy critique of Tennessee anti-Catholicism expressed in the John F. Kennedy election of 1960, the audience in which I sat became suddenly subdued and sullen...

...And, yes, Virginia, Goo-Goo Candy actually exists in Nashville, even though some New York cinema savants would at-tribute it to Altman's fertile imagina-tion...

...When the house lights went up, the audience wavered for a moment and then began walking pensively toward the exits...

...Yet, somehow I felt as if I were in a theater after a disastrous opening night...

...True, the Metropolitan School Board did take every legal step to prevent the application of the program, the rate of white student absenteeism did soar for the first few weeks, and a limited few white parents did picket some select schools, but the current bloody agony of Boston and Louisville on the busing issue has been wholly remote from the Nashville scene...

...An erstwhile, rock singer rolls about on his three-wheeled motorcycle on the prowl for female sexual response...

...Car washes, automotive parts dealers, parking lots, and automobile showrooms proliferate the Nashville landscape...

...In Nashville we see too much of the establishment which produces or hopes to produce the music but we see very little of those who listen to it...

...A Black couple, two rows ahead of me, decided to sit the Anthem out and incur a possible misdemeanor recently imposed by the state legislature to enforce democratic patriotism...

...And to this point, they have been...

...Altman had done his homework well...

...A day of repose gave me the opportunity I had waited for Robert Altman could not have chosen a more suitable context for viewing his film...

...What had been designed for a celebration was now to be used for a final commendation...

...In the meantime, the automobile and its extension, the jet plane, shuttle his playmates to his side at the sound of his disembodied voice over the telephone...

...While the rest of Nashville prays, Opel makes a Sunday visit to the automobile graveyard and the school bus lot...

...There was something ironic about the final scene of Nashville as the camera panned' up the gray sky above the tragedy just played before the Parthenon which few viewers will be aware of...

...The south lawn of the Parthenon was set with concession booths wrapped in red, white and blue...

...Nashville is the hub of three major interstate highways which spin off to St...

...Parking at Vanderbilt University is fierce and gives the impression that each student, faculty and administrator uses two automobiles...

...Massive court-ordered, countywide busing has endured in Nashville for four years...

...There was something ominous about the scene., A summer rain had just happened and the dark air was laden with that humid dampness which muffles sounds...

...What Altman is saying through his automobile sacrament is that we have become automobiles ourselves in our coolly detached and rootless mobility...

...Obviously he knew intimately the geographical and physical features of the urban backdrop he had filmed...