It Don't Worry Me: Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

What Altman's masterpiece has to teach us about living through history.

I didn’t understand Robert Altman’s Nashville until Donald Trump became president. I didn’t understand it until the hate-filled rallies, until the misinformation and the noxious conspiracy theories, until the boat parades and billboard-sized lawn signs. I didn’t understand it until the 2020 election, until the lies about its being stolen, until the angry white men cosplaying in tactical gear stormed up the steps of the Capitol while a gallows went up at their backs.

I didn’t understand the movie, in short, until I began to live through the daily horror of history unfolding in real time. Until our day-to-day reality became a waking American nightmare.

Nashville is a film haunted by history, by violence, and by America. In its way it’s as paranoid, as fearful about the crack-up of the democratic order, as the conspiracy thrillers that emerged in the same period—The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation (1974), or Three Days of the Condor (1975), to name merely a few—though it wears its paranoia more lightly than those films. Nashville isn’t a thriller. It’s a freewheeling satire, a musical, a half-improvised ensemble piece with 24 named characters and no central plot. Nonetheless it is, at its heart, a portrait of a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Nashville looks both backwards and forwards, to America’s ugly past and to its uncertain future. Released in 1975, it emerged at end of a period of American upheavals and atrocities, of assassinations and bombings and massacres: JFK and MLK and RFK, Selma and Birmingham, Vietnam, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Chicago 7, Kent State, Nixon, Watergate. (The movie was filmed, incidentally, in the summer of 1974, the summer of Nixon’s impeachment and resignation.) But the film also stands at the cusp of something. The next year would bring the nation’s bicentennial, and a presidential election, and in the face of these events Nashville seems to ask what might be coming next. Newfound stability? Still more violence and upheaval? The end of America?

This simultaneous looking backward and forward is established from the beginning of the film, with a song that plays over the opening credits. Sung in a Nashville studio by Haven Hamilton, one of the movie’s cavalcade of fictional country stars, the verses of the song touch on bits of American history from the Battle of Bunker Hill to World War 2, the chorus concluding: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.” The song is chest-thumpingly patriotic, and Haven Hamilton is just the man to sing it—imperious, self-regarding, glad-handing, and conservative. (Haven halts the recording session by hounding a long-haired hippie piano player out of the studio, telling him, “You don’t belong in Nashville!”)

America has certainly lasted 200 years (many more, now)—but the film can leave us to wonder if the nation is truly “doing something right,” or if it will last much longer than 200 years. As portrayed by Altman, Nashville serves as a microcosm of America as a whole. Preoccupied with fame, obsessed with the rags-to-riches myth, it’s a place where a nobody can ostensibly become a star—though most won’t. The town’s capitalist entertainment ecosystem takes the human longings and sadnesses that give rise to art and turns them into commerce, into a mad scramble for power and status. Nashville is money-grubbing, God-haunted. And it’s deeply racist, as evidenced by white characters’ constant reminders to Black entertainer Tommy Brown (Timothy Brown) of his outsider status, or of the fact that even Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin), a character who we might otherwise like and think of as a good person, is the white lead singer for an otherwise Black gospel group, appropriating a Black musical tradition for her own personal gain. (Interestingly, it is a Brit, Opal from the BBC, who is the most blatantly bigoted of the cast, delivering a few lines that should come with a content warning for racism and ableism—yet we sense that as an outsider she may simply not have learned, as the white Americans have, how to cloak her racism in gentility and manners.)

Yet if Nashville somehow considers America, it’s hard to tell what its ultimate insight might be. The film is unwieldy, difficult to categorize or interpret. (Roger Ebert’s Great Movies essay on the film begins with his question, “What is this story about?” He doesn’t really answer it.) The foolhardiness of interpretation is present in the character of Opal, the BBC reporter, whose constant attempts to make some Big Meaning of what she sees around her are played off as laughably pretentious. (“It’s America!” she says, breathlessly, at the sight of a pileup on the freeway.)

If the film coheres in any way, it is in its persistent intimations of violence—violence that breaks through in a climactic final scene. An outdoor concert and political rally unites all the characters in a single place, where tragedy strikes: a young man (David Hayward) draws a gun and shoots the ethereal Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) as she performs onstage. It’s a characteristically American type of violence that both invites and defies interpretation. Taking place at a political rally, it would seem to be political violence, an assassination—but then why did the assassin shoot not the presidential candidate, the populist Hal Philip Walker, but the country singer serving as his opening act? (Alongside Taxi Driver, Nashville shares the distinction of being among the film texts that most clearly predicted the phenomenon of the gun-wielding disaffected young white man committing a seemingly random act of violence.)

What’s most notable about the scene is not ultimately the assassin’s motive, but the crowd’s response. Haven takes the stage and implores the audience, “Y’all take it easy now—this isn’t Dallas, this is Nashville.” (There’s the ghost of the past again, of the JFK assassination.) And then he hands the microphone to a woman standing by (Barbara Harris), who leads the crowd in a country song. Slowly the camera pulls back, revealing the American flag as the crowd sings the chorus:

It don’t worry me
It don’t worry me
You might say that I ain’t free
But it don’t worry me.

This, then, is the film’s vision of America: a nation and a people who, confronted with violence and a fraying social order, simply refuse to be worried about it.

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It don’t worry me. The scene has been haunting me for weeks. I can’t stop thinking about it. What it reminds me of more than anything is a conversation we’ve been having these past four years, a conversation we can’t seem to stop having. How it will go is, something terrible will happen in the news, and we’ll get together—for drinks, for coffee—to talk about it, agonize over it, even strategize about it. (The getting together is less common now, amidst the pandemic, but the conversation continues in texts and on social media.)

The first such conversation I remember participating in was in January 2016, after Trump’s election but before his inauguration. I met with three or four other guys at a brewery, traded pleasantries as we stood in line at the bar, then found a table. I don’t recall if talking about Trump was the purpose for our meeting that day, but our conversation inevitably turned to him either way. We were stunned, the shock of it still present in our faces, the far-off looks in our eyes. We’d just seen something we never thought we’d see, and all the rules seemed to be up for negotiation now. How bad is this really? we were asking each other that evening. I know it’s bad. But is it, like, regular-Republican-presidency bad? Or, you know, fascism bad? And what should we do about it?

Four years later, I think it’s safe to say the Trump era has been far worse than any of us predicted over those beers. And at each step along the way, I’ve been continuing to have some version of that same conversation, checking in on the latest horror, expressing shock or dismay, then asking: but what now? What happens next? And how worried should we be?

It don’t worry me…

Comedian John Mulaney offered what is perhaps the best metaphor for what this time has been like: It’s like there’s a horse loose in a hospital. He even imagined the conversations between concerned friends, the ones where we get together for brunch and someone says something like, “I don’t think there should be a horse in a hospital!” Which is true! But the exasperated response, inevitably, must be:

It’s an important part of the dynamic, I think, this rejoinder: We’re well past that! Whatever the situation—the travel ban, the wall, family separation, yet another conservative Supreme Court justice, the winking and dog whistling with white supremacists, or the fact of Trump’s presidency itself—the truest and best thing to say about it is always that it is very very bad and simply should not be happening. Yet it is also the most frustrating thing to hear, because it is so useless, impotent in its obviousness.

There’s a natural human tendency to simply accept what is, I’ve come to realize, to look at what has happened and incorporate it into our framework for dealing with reality. Okay, the human mind says in reaction to the latest horror. That happened. That’s a thing that can happen. What now?

Perhaps this is the reason that, whatever the subject, whatever new and horrible thing Donald Trump did or said in the past four years, the conversation so often came down to some version of it don’t worry me.

It’s bad, but it can’t possibly get any worse than this. It’s bad, but what he’s trying is never going to work. It’s bad, but a court will overturn it. It’s bad, but Mueller will save us. It’s bad, but we can reverse it when a Democrat is back in the White House. It’s bad, but we can fix it. It’s bad, but his supporters will finally turn on him now. It’s bad, but the guard rails will hold.

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It don’t worry me… What does it even mean? What is its significance?

Is it a chorus of apathy, of complacency, of privilege and ignorance? Not everyone has the luxury of proclaiming that they’re not worried by the convulsions of history. If the Nashville crowd can sing of their lack of concern about what just happened, it is because they dodged the assassin’s bullet; the bleeding Barbara Jean being carried from the stage, if she’s even conscious, is plenty worried. Perhaps the guard rails will hold and American democracy will persist or recover—but what of the people who’ve already died, who’ve already had their lives ruined? To say in the face of the horrors of the Trump era that you are not worried is simply to confess that the horror hasn’t come for you personally yet. Why aren’t people talking about this?! some will say, or If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention, the implication being that if we all worried more, if we all got together and worried about the same thing at the same time, then maybe we could do something about it. It don’t worry me is an opiate of the masses. You might say that I ain’t free—yes, and until we all get worried, we will never be free.

There are other ways to look at it. In context, it don’t worry me can also convey the opposite of its literal meaning. A person who runs around saying that they’re not worried is a person who is, in fact, extremely worried. In this way, the chorus reminds me of the ubiquitous cartoon that gets trotted out for every occasion, for every new chapter in the Trump saga. You know the one: it’s got a dog sitting at a table with a coffee cup in front of him, and the house is on fire, but the dog isn’t worried—he’s smiling blissfully and telling himself, “This is fine.”

It’s not fine, that’s the joke. None of this is fine. It’s all terrible. The house is on fire, and someone should probably do something about it. But it’s hard to be mad at that poor dog. He’s just trying to get through the day. He’s in trouble, and I think he probably knows it—as do we. But he can’t think about that right now. He just wants to sit and enjoy his coffee.

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Nashville is not only a political film—it is also, and perhaps primarily, a film bursting with life in all its contradictions. 24 characters, each with their own dreams, their own loves, their own angers, their own disappointments. A loveless marriage, a hope of fame that will never be realized, an overbearing father, an affair, a betrayal, a deathbed, an opportunity that becomes a humiliation.

There’s politics there too—I hope I’ve demonstrated that above—but as often as not the characters are doing their best to ignore it. The populist slogans of third party candidate Hal Philip Walker echo throughout the film, literally blasted from a bullhorn, but the characters mostly don’t hear them. They’re too busy living their lives. If you’re Woodward and Bernstein in a film like All the President’s Men (1976) you can do something about history, you can dig and expose lies and hold them up for all the world to see; you can shout, “Look at this!” But this isn’t All the President’s Men, this is Nashville. For must of us, history is something that acts upon us, not the other way around; it’s something that must be lived through, something that must be endured. We take part in its story however we can—we vote, we protest, we write letters and call our elected officials. We get angry. We get involved. We worry.

But also, we go on living, and this is the best and most hopeful interpretation of it don’t worry me. You might say that we’re not free, but we the people have a kind of freedom that you will never understand, that the powers of death and violence can never touch—in our love and in our humanity and in our joy we together possess a freedom, a life force, that cannot be contained, and that defies the terrible movements of history.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I have a feeling—a worrisome feeling, a foreboding feeling—that we’re closer to the beginning or the middle of the story than to its end. What has been unleashed cannot be put back without a long struggle.

What I do know—or think I know—is that in the face of whatever happens, we will go on fighting, go on living. And we’ll go on singing, together, a song whose ambiguous chorus defies history, standing somewhere between self-delusion and hope.

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