All roads lead to Nashville
“There ain’t nothing like the loving of a hard-driving cowboy man,” as the country singer Barbara Jean puts it towards the end of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville, and, really, there ain’t nothing like Nashville itself, either. It’s surprising more has not been made of it this year, when the country’s 250th anniversary has got tangled up with the flailing Trump presidency. Though he made the film in 1975, Altman set it a year in the future, amid a fictionalized and chaotic 1976 presidential campaign. He meant to give an account of a country that, on the 200th anniversary of its founding, had descended into unprecedented gaudiness and depravity. When Jimmy Carter wound up winning the White House, Nashville came to seem prophetic. But it is more than that.
