Altman’s Americana
Time magazine’s Richard Schikel and Christian Science Monitor’s David Sterritt are among those who have said that filmmaker Robert Altman captures in his films the essence of American life, its uncertainties and its confusion. This accurate interpretation and summary of Robert Altman’s talent as a filmmaker can be exemplified by the realities he has created in THE PLAYER, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, SHORT CUTS and NASHVILLE.
The first of these films, THE PLAYER, is about a Hollywood movie industry executive, Griffen Mill, who murders a screenwriter, because Mill thinks the writer has been sending him anonymous postcards and threatening his life. Mill tracks down the unsuccessful and unproduced writer, buys the man a drink then ends up killing him and covering up the murder by making it look like a robbery.
The “Player,” Mill, escapes murder charges, because an eye-witness identifies the homicide detective, played by Lyle Lovitt, as the murderer. Mill escaped the accusations and moves himself up in the ranks at the studio by becoming the studio boss. What’s even more incredible is that he ends up having an affair with the girlfriend of the man he murdered. Mill impregnates the woman, and the film ends with the implication that he and the woman live happily every after.
At the broadest level, an interpretation of this film’s replication of Americana can be made by equating THE PLAYER’s murderer with the murderers who created American society by massacring Native Americans and living happily ever after in the vastness and richness of the lands colonists stole.
Just as Griffen Mill kills the writer, David Kahane, and impregnates Kahane’s girlfriend, it can be said that the Colonists massacred the natives, impregnated the lands they acquired and have used the ample resources of the frontier, along with their self-designated squatting rights to amass wealth and dominate global markets and global culture.
However, this superficial interpretation of THE PLAYER is not the only reason why Altman is considered a satirical observer of Americana. THE PLAYER’s Griffen Mill is the epitome of the caricature of what is believed to be an American male. Mill is a confident and successful manipulator of corporate deal making. He is able to use the raw resources provided to him by the artists of the culture to make money for his business, further promote his career and acquire more wealth and fame.
In capturing the dynamics of Hollywood through THE PLAYER, Altman is able to capture the soul and birthplace of popular culture. In the 20th and now the 21st centuries, there is no more potent force that shapes American and global culture than the media product created in Hollywood. By showing the soulless, self-absorbed makers of this media content, Altman is showing, in essence, the soul of America, the celebrities who make the products and teach their values and the audiences, who are the mere and passive followers of the values set forth by Hollywood.
The characters in THE PLAYER, much like the corporate leaders of capitalistic America, are so caught up in their work making movies, they often forget the result of their work and the global cultures of vultures -- money-worshipping, violent and hyper-sexual societies -- their movies create. This type of narcissism seems to be at the heart of what it means to be an American as seen by Robert Altman.
A second film that is reflective of American culture is MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. In this film, Altman is taking the mythic genre of the Western, where the lone cowboy hero conquers the frontiers, and he is reinventing the cowboy as no more than an opportunist trying to explore a quick way to earn a buck in the new frontier.
In MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, John McCabe, played by Warren Beatty, comes into a mining town and sets up a card table inside a saloon. He discovers a captive audience of mine workers needing recreation and proceeds to bringing into town several prostitutes. Soon to follow in McCabe’s footsteps is the mysterious Mrs. Miller, a professional madame. Mrs. Miller, played by Julie Christie, railroads McCabe’s half-baked ideas and convinces him into building a legitimate whorehouse.
Why Altman can be interpreted as satirizing Americana in this film is because he is able to capture true opportunistic characters of the men who built the West. Altman shows these gold-diggers, miners and frontiersman as no more than men looking for a quick buck at the expense of others. The cowboys with rock-solid strength of character, a commitment to their dream and a ‘failure-not-an-option’ mantra are nowhere to be found in this film. Instead, there are murders-for-hire, youth who have no regard for each other’s lives let alone the lives of the Chinese they pay to crawl into mines and die digging for minerals and gold.
The anti-hero cowboy we discover in MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER is a fearful and easily spooked conman, a man who is misunderstood and unable to communicate his true emotions and love to the woman he loves, Mrs. Miller. McCabe is not even able to make love to Mrs. Miller until he pays like her other clients.
The dynamic between McCabe and Mrs. Miller, their relationship based on business, the trust they share because of financial gain, and the inability for them to be there for each other when the two needs one another most, is another way Altman seems to parody the alienation and isolation of modern Americana. In the relentless pursuit for success and financial gain, Americans seem to relate to one another only when there is financial gain. Further, love seems to bloom when both parties will benefit from the relationship.
To attempt a relationship in the modernist Western is futile, according to Altman. In MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, the two souls that need one another the most fail each other. While McCabe is being hunted down by the gunmen sent to force him to sell his properties, no one is there to help him. The townspeople are busy saving the façade of a church that they have never attended but gather as a community to save. While McCabe dies in the freezing snow, Mrs. Miller is busy escaping her lonely world through drugs.
Superficial spirituality, greed, violence and drug abuse are all elements in MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER that are straight from the newspapers that chronicle life in the US. Through these parallel and the retelling of the Western story, Robert Altman is again able to hold a mirror at the masses watching his movies, challenging them to look at their reality and ask themselves why their society is not working, why their children are dying of gunshot wounds, why their husbands are out womanizing, why they feel alienated from their neighbors and why their friendships and relationships fail to fulfill their basic human needs.
The loss of friendship, the futility of relationships and examination of basic human interactions are what Altman studies and satirizes in SHORT CUTS, a movie that tells half-a-dozen stories, all intertwined yet separate, much like the lives being led by citizens of a fragmented American society. Dozens of dysfunctional characters seem to populate the modern-day American megapolis of Los Angeles during SHORT CUTS, but none of their lives seem to make sense as lives often played out in more mainstream stories and traditional narratives.
SHORT CUTS is the story of a couple whose child is killed after he is struck by a car. The driver of the car, played by actress Lili Tomlin, is in love with an alcoholic limousine driver, and her daughter is married to an aspiring make-up artist. The make-up artist, played by Robert Downey Jr., is best friends with a pool man, played by Chris Penn, whose wife runs a phone sex business. Penn’s character begins to service the pool of an aging Jazz singer whose daughter commits suicide when she hears about the death of the neighbor’s boy, the same kid who is killed by Lili Tomlin.
In telling these separate, yet intertwined stories, Altman seems to be showing us 20th century American life, its hap-hazard dynamics, misplaced values, empty and unfulfilled relationship and the lack of its inhabitants understanding their meaningless, even when nature sends pestilence in the form of the Medfly that must be killed by nightly sprayings of insecticides by helicopters.
The characters in SHORT CUTS are so unfulfilled that any small incident can set off a creepy baker for whom a cake that is not picked up by the parents of the dead child results in an obsessive campaign of stalking by telephone. Somewhere nearby is the pool sweep, played by Chris Penn, whose sexless marriage to a phone sex operator creates a dynamic so frustrating that the pool sweep acts out his impotence by murdering a flirtatious teenager he picks up at a park.
When Altman sees no hope for humanity, he ends his film with a massive earthquake, ‘the big one’ as most of his characters predict. Yet even God or nature, through the hand of the writer, is not able to clean up the ills of society that Altman exhibits as the definitive reality of modern day America.
In SHORT CUTS, Atlman incorporated universal themes that reflect the dynamic of men and women living in modern day America, trying to survive, breaking up with their husbands and wives, confiding in one another, measuring themselves against the successes of others and looking to get lucky. Yet, these lives are as chaotic as the city in which they live. There is no uniformity or sense of community in the world created by Altman, and when a talented and beautiful musician’s own mother is not able to give her what she needs most, love and validation of emotions, the musician, played by Lori Singer, chooses to take her life rather than live in a place of loneliness and pain, in a place full of people who are unable to love and touch each other.
Finally, Altman’s reflective body of work takes the viewer to the heart of America, to the heart of country music, the music of America, the music that tells the folk stories of Americans, their hopes, their hardships, their dreams and their history. With its multiple viewpoints, NASHVILLE is a panoramic view of the people who make country music and hence make the country that calls itself the United States of America.
In this film are dozens of characters, whose lives connect through art and politics and a geographic and cultural midpoint, are all searching for a leader or looking to lead. The characters are all part of show business, they are the artists like the gospel singer, the managers like the law student, reporters like the idiotic BBC broadcaster, the lovers like the redneck “Star,” and they are also the fans who keep a vigil outside a singer’s hospital room.
On another level, these are not only the fans, but they are the masses that have come to participate in the democractic process. They have arrived for an historic weekend to fuel the campaign of their soon-to-be elected leader and rallying for him while others rally against him and plot his murder. They have arrived to bring significance to their lives and leave witnessing a gruesome, true-to-life crime in the form of an on-stage assasination.
NASHVILLE captures the real soul of America, not just through its depiction of the men and women who want to be the singers of America’s songs, but also the politicians who want to lead the nation and the masses who are victims and witnesses of crime. But here, in the heartland of country music, chaos rules the world and the viewer is not able to tell the difference between the world of art and the world of reality. Here, in Nashville, politics is the false reality of a country music concert.
In all these films cited, Altman is showing us the alienated modern American, men and women who are so self-serving and so proud of their success that they forget to be human. Their selfishness destroys the possibility of relationships and therefore the possibility of fulfillment and happiness.
In THE PLAYER, the creators of media are so oblivious of the world they impact that they are able to get away with murder. In MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, opportunists allow the rape of not only prostitutes but of the West; and in turn, they are done-in by the stronger entities of corporate America. In SHORT CUTS, success, fame and the inability for mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, wives and husbands to love one another results in the filmmaker, Robert Altman, trying to wipe away the Medfly and the pests in society, failing, then attempting to kill society off by an earthquake.
Finally, in NASHVILLE, Robert Altman examines the politics of life and the dynamics of how people rally and lobby for political and commercial fame. As with his other films, Altman the satiral observer, is telling the viewer that amidst this fight for power and control that the essence of not only country music but the country is diluted and that those who want to carry the country’s soul are assasinated. Altman’s reflective mirror, through his chosen medium, thus compells that Americans pay attention to their reality and perhaps examine the dynamics in their lives.
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