#59 ‘Nashville’
Country, Chaos, and the Long, Slow Smothering of the American Woman’s Voice
Nashville (1975) is Robert Altman’s sprawling, 160-minute fever dream of a nation imploding through its own self-mythology—wrapped in sequins, campaign buttons, and the sickly twang of country music. It’s a satire. It’s a tapestry. It’s a wandering, woozy vision of 24 characters circling each other in a slow collapse of fame, politics, and identity. It’s also a stunning portrait of a culture that asks women to sing, smile, and shut up—until someone decides they’re worth silencing more permanently.
Altman’s genius lies in orchestrating chaos. The camera roves, the dialogue overlaps, the storylines bleed into each other like spilled whiskey. It’s a film that feels both tightly choreographed and completely out of control—an echo of the country it critiques. But let’s not pretend this is a neutral portrait. Nashville is a film that holds a mirror up to America in the mid-70s and says: “Look what you’ve done to your women.”
Take Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the fragile songbird being paraded onstage despite her very public unraveling. She’s a human breakdown wrapped in a rhinestone gown, and everyone—her husband, her fans, her handlers—just wants her to keep singing. Her suffering is framed not as tragedy, but as spectacle. She’s broken, so naturally she must be exploited.
Then there’s Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles), the wide-eyed waitress who’s desperate to be a star despite having no discernible talent. Her “audition” ends in a humiliating striptease for a room full of leering men, and the film lingers there—refusing to comfort, refusing to intervene. Her degradation is not just expected—it’s built in. It’s what happens when female ambition meets a male-dominated industry that only values flesh over voice.
And let's not forget L.A. Joan (Shelley Duvall), the spacey groupie flitting from man to man, framed as comic relief but ultimately just another woman lost in the current, dismissed because she refuses to play by the rules of either sex or seriousness.
The men of Nashville? Oh, they’re everywhere. Charismatic, pitiful, manipulative, oblivious. They sing their songs, they chase their dreams, they dominate the airwaves and the narrative. Even the assassins come with male entitlement. And when the final shot rings out—when a woman’s body collapses to the stage—it is a literal silencing of female voice. A warning. A sacrifice. A finale.
Yes, the film is brilliant. Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” is still a dagger in soft focus. The cinematography is organic and immersive. The editing is nothing short of wizardry. But for all its political posturing and Americana deconstruction, Nashville is most powerful—and most painful—as a meditation on how a nation uses women as symbols, then discards them once they bleed.
4 out of 5 collapsing spotlights
(One for Blakley’s raw vulnerability. One for Altman’s orchestral direction. One for the truth-telling underneath the twang. One for the audacity to end on a lullaby sung by a child while the adults drown in their own rot. The missing star? Left under the stage with Barbara Jean, still waiting for someone to let her sing without breaking.)
