Study Questions: Week Eight

The Distrust of Institutional Authority

Nashville (1976)

Bronco Billy (1980)

1. How do the screen creditsin Nashville, which parody TV advertisements for country music records, anticipate both the subject and the socio-political themes of the film?

2. What is the thematic significance of the mysterious sound truck playing the political speeches of Hal Philip Walker, the Replacement Party candidate.? In what ways does Walker's political platform anticipate a more recent presidential candidate? Why is Walker never actually seen?

3. In what ways has country music become a metaphor for a form of right-wing populism? How is that metaphor established in Haven Hamilton"s opening song, "We Must Be Doing Something Right?" In what way does the contrast between the idealism of the song and the expressions on Hamilton's face suggest a deep division between professed values and actual experience? Consider his attack on the "hippie" musician.

4. How does Altman use the various family groups in the film to comment on the concept of "family values"? Consider the Hamiltons, the Reese family, the couple in the rock group, Billy Jean Barnett and her husband, and the rooming house owner with the ill wife and the New Age niece.

5. In what ways does music, as in Five Easy Pieces, point up serious political and social divisions within the country? Consider the contrasts drawn between country and rock. Also the influence of Tom, who sings "I'm Easy."

6. How might the contrast between her professional life as a popular singer and the nature of the songs which she sings be the key to Billy Jean's mental collapse?

7. What social and economic trends are embodied in John Triplett, the public relations advance man for the Walker campaign? Consider the way he dresses, his attitude toward the music and the musicians, etc.

8. The film is filled with characters who function as doubles representing opposing interpretations of the American Dream. In what ways do the Army sergeant and the would-be musician turned killer represent antithetical examples of one aspect of the American Dream?

9. How does the humiliation of the hopelessly untalented singer, Suleen Gaye, satirize the promise of success in pursuit of one's dreams?

10. What is the significance of the long sequence in which Hamilton's wife recalls the days of John Kennedy and concludes by heaping contempt on the "dumbheads" of Tennessee for favoring Richard Nixon?

11. What is the significance of introducing Elliot Gould and Julie Christie playing themselves? How does their presence tend to disrupt the illusion of reality and ask the audience to think about the meaning of the narrative's artificiality?

12. What is the significance of Opel, the documentary filmmaker from Great Britain? How does her overwhelming ignorance coupled with enormous intellectual arrogance and compulsive celebrity-chasing comment on what passes for "high culture"?

13. How does Hamilton's rendition of "Keep a Going" identify him as an ironic exemplification of the American Dream?

14. Why, do you think, Billy Jean is the target of an assassin rather than Haven Hamilton? Why is the shooting coupled with the American bicentennial and an election year?

15. How does the final sequence of the film offer an interpretation of the tragedy. What is the significance of the ambitious singer taking the stage and singing "It Don't Bother me"? The crowd scenes which pick out the major characters? The appearance of the black chorus? The long camera pan from the flag-decked stage to an empty blue sky? 16. How is Altman's theme reflected in his fragmented, elliptical narrative style?

17. Could you argue that the end of this film paints a bleaker picture of America than the similar conclusion of The Manchurian Candidate? What specific examples could you offer?

18. So far in the films we have seen, the central characters have changed from bankers, manufacturers, and physicians to members of the mass media and the entertainment world. What might this imply about shifts in cultural values and how does Robert Altman call attention to the implication of these shifts in Nashville?

19. In Bronco Billy, how are weto take (seriously or ironically) the messages of hope and traditional values Billy offers to his "little pardners"?

20.How do the visua limages and the sound track ("everybody Loves Cowboys and Clowns") which accompany the opening credits both recall the values of self-reliance associated with the Western and, at the same time, suggest that those values may be outdated in contemporary America?

21.In what ways does the first error-ridden performance of Billy's Wild West Show (and its sorry economic condition) symbolize the decline of traditional American values. associated with the cowboy and the frontier in general?

22. Whgat is the thematic significance of identifying Antionette Lily (Sondra Locke) and her fiance with New York City? In what ways does the City serve as the moral and cultural antithesis of the Wild West Show?

23. How does the stop at the Catholic orphanage present Billy as both a comic figure and as a true hero? What other sequences in the film offer the same ambivalent portrait of Billy and his troupe.

24.In what ways does the scene between Lily's mother's lawyer abd her fuance manage to reveal the world which Billy has rejected and which he campaigns against?

25. How does thge barroom brawl both satirize and justify similar fights which are a familiar convention in Westerns? Think of the Westerns such as Shane where you have seen them.

26. What, would you say, Billy means when he says "I'm what I want to be"? What is he? A self-deluded fantasit of a self-made embodiment of heroic virture.

27. What is the thematic significance of having the old tent replaced with one made of American flags? How is the conclusion of Bronco Billy similar to the end of Nashville. How is the flag used to symbolize the prospects of a troubled America in the 1970s? How does each film reflect very ideological reactions to rhose troubles?

28. How has joining the Wild West Show (that is embracing an older set of cultural myths) redeem each member of the troupe? How does it save Antionette in particular?