With one shocking gunshot, Paul Thomas Anderson bisected his epochal porn epic Boogie Nights. On New Year’s Eve 1979, William H. Macy’s emasculated assistant director Little Bill walks in on his wife rutting with another man one too many times, so he retrieves his gun from his glovebox, takes their lives, and then his own at the stroke of midnight. In kicking off the new decade with this horrific act of violence (not to mention the grim title card simply marked “80s” that Anderson cuts to directly afterward), Anderson signaled that a great cultural shift had taken place in his vision of America, that the decadent ’70s had given way to the moral corrosion of the ’80s. Every high has its crash.
Robert Altman’s Nashville—another lengthy ensemble film with a kickin’ soundtrack that doubles as a pop-historical document, and a professed influence on Anderson—takes place entirely within that moment of flux, when one dominant national attitude cedes to another. Anderson had the benefit of a couple decades’ worth of hindsight when shooting Boogie Nights, but Altman was reporting live from the era. Nashville witnesses a sociocultural sea change in real time, capturing the moment when the disillusionment of a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate generation of young people collided with the aggressively rosy patriotism that the old guard had trotted out for America’s bicentennial. As much as Nashville is about Nashville, it is also about (continue reading)