Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) is simultaneously an intimate film about interpersonal
connection and disconnection and a sprawling meandering portrait of American societal
exhaustion in the wake of Vietnam Watergate and a spate of political assassinations. Despite
its pessimistic satirical viewpoint the film suggests a carefully guarded optimism: 'life may
be a one-way street' but one has no choice but to 'keep a' goin'. Heather Hendershot places
Nashville in the context of the New Hollywood of the 1970s which offered a post-censorship
anti-hero the perennial loser. Embracing the new pessimism Altman's work fits with those of
contemporaries such as Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich but it also stands apart for its
innovative sound design improvisatory drive and loose genre commitments. Through a close
reading of the five days over which the film takes place Hendershot unpacks both its political
dynamics and the characters' interrelationships and motivations. She highlights Nashville 's
criticism of the suffering of its female characters an engagement that springs from Joan
Tewkesbury's screenplay Altman's sensitivity to gendered exploitation (here if not in all of
his pictures) and the role the performers themselves played by improvising and scripting some
of their own material.
