To Duck or Not to Duck: A Closer Look at Chuck Jones

Quick! Think of your favorite Looney Tunes short! Perhaps it’s a Wile E. Coyote or Road Runner cartoon! Or a classic Bugs-Daffy situation which involves them getting into word-wars and “pronoun trouble” over whether it is duck season or rabbit season? Or perhaps it’s one involving that stinking Maurice Chevalier look-a-like Pepe le Pew? The chances are good that the Looney Tunes shorts everyone remembers, knows, and loves were primarily made by one madman: Mr. Charles M. “Chuck” Jones.

"I draw the line."

When we look at the elements that comprise the humorous Looney Tunes aesthetic, we must acknowledge the crucial importance of Chuck’s manic mind which brought us such abstract creations as Marvin the Martian, the hair-monster Gossamer, and Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf—who are self-aware of their ever-lasting battle and who are friends outside of the shorts that pit them as enemies. Looking at the Looney Tunes shorts as kids or even teens, they laugh and excite us to no extent. To use a rough analogy, Looney Tunes is to Disney what jazz is to classical music: both admirable, intellectually-stimulating genres, but with the former being a bit more daring, bawdier, and looser in structure. It improvises like a mad artist hopped up on reefers, pulsating with a tireless, boundless energy. The gags are what keep us coming back to them and what keep them fresh, no doubt. Humor translates well over language barriers; whether dubbed in French, Spanish, Farsi, or the original Mel Blanc-ian English, the Looney Tunes and its stars—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, among others—keep us coming back for years after we’ve outgrown adolescence.

But Jones’ cartoons are ALWAYS different than the work of the rest of the Looney Tunes directors. They hold a special significance—not only in their innovative approach to humor, but also in their bold style and abstract concepts. Jones is one of the most daring auteurs in animation; he is not constrained by animation, but finds deeper and funnier ways to find humor in the most minimalist of efforts. Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, and Bob Clampett—Jones’ superiors back when he was just a thirty-something in-betweener at Warner Bros.—were primarily gag-driven, broad in their delivery. It was hit-and-miss with their cartoons. They could either found comic-gold (i.e., Freleng’s Pink Panther and Tex Avery’s legendary pairing of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig) or comedic dullness (McKimson’s Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, which are tired, unfunny piles of abuse on a poor, hapless Southern rooster). Their styles certainly never changed throughout the half-century that they were making Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies shorts. Frank Tashlin, the most daring of the early animators, added two key ingredient that many of the other Looney Tunes directors were missing: a frantic, Eisensteinian speed in the editing of the cartoon frames and an emphasis of artistry over humor. His Art-Deco backgrounds, new Scot-Art character designs, and appreciation of cinematic angles in his Looney Tunes cartoons had a huge influence on the budding Charles M. Jones, who struggled to find his funny niche among all of these director-veterans who made shorts before sound was ever introduced. Just for good measure, here's one of Frank Tashlin's Looney Tunes shorts from 1943, "Scrap Happy Daffy," starring Daffy Duck and Adolf Hitler (in a batty cameo):

Chuck Jones started out at Leon Schlesinger Productions—a subdivision of Warner Brothers which exclusively made cartoon-shorts—as a “inbetweener” in 1933. He was initially in charge of simply drawing the intermediate frames between two master-drawing poses of a character to provide the key illusion of movement in an era where everything you saw in a cartoon-drawn had to be hand-drawn. Jones quickly rose up the ranks of “Termite Terrace”—the affectionate name given to the ratty, small building where all of the Looney Tunes animators did their best work—and was given the prestigious position of head-director (then called “supervisor”) in 1938. His early efforts show promise but, like all his fellow freshman directors, had too much of a Disney air to them. “Naughty but Mice”—Jones’ fifth short as director—introduced a character that many of the fellow Looney Tunes directors despised: Sniffles the Mouse. His cutesy charm and gullible googly-eyed expression were not welcomed by Jones's producer Leon Schlesinger, who prided himself on separating Looney Tunes's "give-no-fucks" screwball humor from the more family-friendly, innocent Disney series. In a rare direct chat with a head-director (which, according to Freleng, he only did if was losing money), Schlesinger told Jones to either lose the Disney schtick and find his own sense of humor or hit the road.

Presumably Chuck's reaction to being told his ass was on-the-chopping-block.

After many hits-and-misses in his early years, he finally stumbled upon the answer to his problems in the 1942 short, “The Dover Boys at Pimento University.”

The story involved three college Don Juans who must save their collective fiancé from the hands of a bloodthirsty stock villain named Dan Backslide. In it, Jones introduced a revolutionary concept that would become an integral part of the Looney Tunes aesthetic: smear animation. Before it, every frame of a Looney Tunes short would be neatly hand-drawn, and the speed effect which they were then known for came from increasing the frame-rate of the final product when it was shown. But with smear animation, Jones achieved a desired effect of increasing the frantic nature of the cartoon even more than his contemporary Tashlin by asking the inbetweeners to merely smear the intermediate frames that connected the two major poses. To demonstrate, here are five separate stills from a sequence in “The Dover Boys” that show the technique in work. Note that this is a continuous sequence and that stills 3 and 5 are the “master-poses” (i.e., the boundaries that the inbetweeners must bridge together):

Smear animation at work in "The Dover Boys."

Not only did this technique make Jones’ timing crisper than any of his colleagues' cartoons, but it also signaled the first foray into the abstract animation that fascinated the young Jones. When “The Dover Boys” was released, Schlesinger and company were horrified; Chuck was hotly criticized by his own superiors for making abstract drawings that they erroneously labeled “limited animation.” What “Dover Boys” actually does is not limited animation; what "Dover Boys" employs is a manner by which the timing and speed of a cartoon may be increased, thus resulting in bigger laughs. It is artistic genius on Jones’ part—the first of many successes which he would find at Warner Bros.

When Frank Tashlin left animated cartoons for good in 1948 for directing his own live-action features, it left a gaping hole in experimentation at Looney Tunes. Jones, ever the budding intellectual, took Tashlin’s best animators and created his own Animation Dream-Team that would help him create his first bona-fide masterpieces. These included Michael Maltese as a screenwriter, Ken Harris for animation, Maurice Noble for backgrounds--and, of course, Mel Blanc and June Foray as the voices of the Looney Tunes themselves. The following year, the first of these masterpieces arrived with “Fast and Furry-Ous”, the cartoon that introduced the world to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. The pace was Tashlinesque, the style minimalist, the humor powerful and to-the-point, the themes fatalistic in their cruel torment of the Coyote and his always-doomed-to-failed schemes to capture the Road Runner, the satire understated as the Coyote places his undying trust in the products of the suspiciously-corporate sounding ACME Corporation, and the gags elegantly crafted--all due to Jones’ astounding sense of comedic timing.

From then-on, Jones hit an artistic stride; in 1949 and for much of the 1950s, he would create some of the most recognizable, funniest products that Looney Tunes ever cranked out. Among these include the surrealist fight of animator versus creation in “Duck Amuck”, the science-fiction send-up in “Duck Dodgers in the 24th and ½ Century,” the reduction of Dick Wagner’s 5 hour opus Die Walküre into a 7-minute Bugs and Elmer short in “What’s Opera, Doc?”, and a Marxian (both Karl and Groucho) riff on the word-wars between Bugs and Daffy in the so-called “Hunting Trilogy”—three cartoons where Daffy, in his typically egotistic manner, attempts to best the much-smarter Bugs by pitting him against the hunter Elmer Fudd.

In directing his cartoons, Jones was awarded a freedom of expression unparalleled in Hollywood. His jabs at the corporate world and pop culture were cleverly masked under the guise of a Looney Tunes cartoon at a movie-house—where the kids who saw these cartoons would have these allusions sail right over their heads, and the adults would turn away their heads in blissful ignorance of the hidden realities of Jones’ work. Chuck also discovered that the subjects he was most interested in—classical music, the surreal, and thought-exercises in Sisyphean fate—were best expressed through the manic world of Looney Tunes. He single-handedly turned the studio’s ignored-star Daffy Duck into his own animated muse--an entity into which he could pour his insecurities about himself. As Jones observes:

“Bugs is confident—it shows on his face and everything about him. But Daffy is never sure because somebody may be trying to get whatever he has to his name, which is very little…I’ve never met anybody who didn’t have some of Daffy Duck in them. If somebody’s going to have the courage to become an animated director, they have to have the courage to reach down inside themselves and pull that character outside themselves and become that character. Bugs is an aspiration. Daffy is the realization. You know that that Daffy is within you; and if it’s allowed to get loose, you’d be just like him.”

“Daffy believes that everyone’s out there to do him in—which is a perfectly sound supposition, they are out to do him in. And I understand Daffy better because I was Daffy, and am Daffy. I said to myself, ‘I can dream about Bugs Bunny. But when I wake up, I’m just Daffy.’ And there’s no two ways about that.”

Jones’ work is exemplary because he pushes the Looney Tunes humor to its intellectual breaking-point. He continually asks questions on the nature of humor and personality. As "Duck Amuck” posits, does one need the physical manifestation of a character to recognize the personality that exists inside the character?

His later works “High Note” and “The Dot and the Line” try to find humor in the simplest aspects of life—the former in an unremarkable five-line musical staff, and the latter with only a circle, a straight-line, and a squiggle. The results are remarkable because Jones is able to maximize comedy in “High Note” and pathos in “The Dot and the Line” with very few elements at his disposal.

Jones is the man famous for being able to get a laugh out of a simple eyebrow-wiggle or the design of a character’s eyes; he uses the whole body to express humor, and directed the Man of a Thousand Voices, Mel Blanc, to the best voice-over work in his entire career. He does not let himself become encumbered in gag-humor, but is willing to explore the personalities of his characters. His work takes a humbling look at Daffy Duck, who is sublime in his narcissistic imperfections. Jones’ Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd are considerably different from the other Looney Tunes’ directors; they possess an intelligence and craftiness necessary to complement the slow, steady out-doing of Daffy Duck. Jones’ original characters—Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf, the Coyote and the Road Runner, and Pepe Le Pew—also reflect Jones’ interest in fatalism and destiny. These are characters who are aware of their roles in a 7-minute animated cartoon and who continually attempt to change the course of their fates. But they must find out each time that they are at the mercy of the all-powerful Animator; the journey (i.e., the shorts themselves) manage to entertain us while sadly confirming their lack of power beyond the drawn page. What better example is there than the Sheepdog and Wolf cartoons of Jones’ later period—which feature the two unlikely roommates punching in a time-clock, going about a gag-filled cartoon that ends in devastation for the Wolf, and when the whistle blows, finishing the day with an amicable good-bye as they wish each other good night and “Better luck next time”?

Chuck Jones goes against convention by making classic enemies self-conscious actors in a jokey play-of-life.

When Jones took over Tom and Jerry in 1963, he did not repeat the creative gag-driven bombast of the Hanna-Barbara era, but instead placed the classic cat-and-mouse duo into interesting situations which explored the nature of their on-again, off-again friendship. 1963’s “Snow-Body Loves Me” is a perfect example of this, mixing the abstract designs of his Looney Tunes best with a touching warmth that is atypical of Tom and Jerry but which, in his hands, turns into a pure pathotic moment of victory for the series. Jones gleefully bends the typical rules of an animated cartoon, giving him a chance to explore what makes a character a character.

Jones could not continue his magnificent career to the same defiant heights he took it during his classic period between 1951 and 1957. MGM, which employed Jones during most of the 1960s, closed down its animation department. He had to take on odd jobs here and there, including a memorable turn directing the classic Dr. Seuss short "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" in 1966. He gently appropriates Dr. Seuss' grotesque drawing style to suit his neat-lined approach and adds the element that distinguishes Jones cartoons from any other animators' cartoons: timing. His delicate hand is present on every frame of the special. From the transition of Mary Lou Who's apple to the Grinch's coldly red eye, to the extended long-shot that travels from Whoville to the Grinch's lair, to the slithering Grinch stealing all the contraband of the Whos down in Whoville to the tune of Thurl Ravenscroft singing the Carrollian "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch", to the intricately-drawn backgrounds of the Grinch's lair and the town of Whoville designed by his trusty collaborator Maurice Noble (who also drew the backgrounds to such Jones classics as "What's Opera, Doc?" and "Duck Dodgers in the 24th-1/2 Century"), Jones' lavish style in the Grinch special reaches, perhaps even exceeds, the expressive-artistry bar set by the best of his Looney Tunes shorts. Here's a link to the short on DailyMotion to illustrate what I'm talking about.

With 1967’s “The Bear That Wasn’t” (co-written by none other than the legendary Frank Tashlin who gave Jones the manic inspiration he needed to find his niche), a fitting end came to the Golden Era of Animation and, for the most part, to Chuck's great, unbridled stretch of winning shorts from 1939 to 1967.

He is truly one of the more underrated artists of cinema, which, in my view, is because he chose to make Looney Tunes cartoons. Lots of people assume this means they're merely for quickie viewing-pleasure and not meant to be taken seriously. It's taken on this air of pretentiousness to seriously study those Looney Tunes shorts, and people like Pauline Kael and the like will tell you they're trash and unworthy of serious academic discussion. But I do believe that Jones gives us a lot to work with in the nearly 300+ shorts he did during his long tenure at Termite Terrace, and that, yes, they are worth studying. Jones obviously makes them for kids (the core audience), but like any artist worth their salt who takes pride in what they makes, Jones's cartoons establish behind-the-scenes dialogues with other artists about how to achieve the ultimate in animated-shorts and artistic expression.

I believe what truly defines his work is his rigorous championing of other arts outside of animation. He read a lot, he talked to people and noted down their peculiarities or quirks, he listened to a lot (and I mean a lot) of music, particularly classical music and baroque. He studied the great art movements of his time, and we can see through his progression as an Looney Tunes director that he incorporates these influences in his widely-diverse oeuvre. If you notice, his earlier shorts have the air of classic 30s screwball to them; manic puns rattled off a-mile-of-minute, reminiscent of Preston Sturges's kookiest works or Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938). But as he grew more confident in his abilities as an artist (again, all because he studied painting, architecture, music, etc.), his short-films became much subtler, more sedate, and funnier. He learned the adage that less is more, and it works beautifully for Looney Tunes. By 1955, he could convey to an audience, through the sparse shifting of the construction-worker's eyes in the classic "One Froggy Evening," a sudden change from bemusement....

....to sly greed...

in only two frames. He is a master of suggesting the biggest emotions with the tiniest of details.

I think a lot of today's animators could take lessons from Jones on how to stop wasting precious seconds on superfluous sequences, like the establishment of these vast settings that would look boring if we saw them in live-action, and get right to the meat of the story. There's this tendency in the age of 3D cinema, that MORE IS BETTER, and that the capabilities of CGI animation must be showcased at every given opportunity in order for audiences to be invested in it. Dreamworks and Pixar aren't immune to this problem. And if there's anything Chuck Jones and his ilk show, it's that to be truly artistically superior than anybody else out there, it's always better to be minimalist. Always be on the hunt for where animation can be cut and how one can reduce a lot of talking scenes to their sparse core.

Do not let the bright colors and the frantic pace of the animated cel confuse you; behind all Jones cartoons, there is a more profound, underlying message being woven into the cartoon tapestry. His cartoons showed a man passionately in love with the cartoons—whose whole life philosophy lies embedded with his fascination in the underdogs Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote. As Jones himself says, “The rules are simple. Take your work, but never yourself, seriously. Pour in the love and whatever skill you have, and it will come out.”

Here's an extended list of Chuck's greatest works. The cream-of-the-crop is in astericks, the cream-of-the-crop that are my personal favorites are in bold:

• 1938—The Night Watchman
• 1939—Prest-O Change-O, Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur, Naughty but Mice, Little Lion Hunter, Sniffles and the Bookworm
• 1940—Elmer’s Candid Camera
• 1941—Elmer’s Pet Rabbit
• 1942—Conrad the Sailor, Hold the Lion Please, The Squawkin’ Hawk, *The Dover Boys at Pimento University*, My Favorite Duck, Case of the Missing Hare
• 1943—To Duck or Not to Duck, *Inky and the Minah Bird*
• 1944—Bugs Bunny and the 3 Bears, The Weakly Reporter
• 1945—Odor-Able Kitty, Trap Happy Porky, Hare Conditioned, Hare Tonic
• 1946— Hare-Raising Hare, Fair and Worm-Er
• 1947—Scent-Imental Over You, House-Hunting Mice, Little Orphan Airedale
• 1948—*You Were Never Duckier*, Haredevil Hare, Daffy Dilly, My Bunny Lies Over the Sea, Scaredy Cat
• 1949—Mississippi Hare, Mouse Wreckers, *Long-Haired Hare*, *Fast and Furry-Ous*, *For Scent-Imental Reasons*, *Rabbit Hood*
• 1950—*The Scarlet Pumpernickel*, 8-Ball Bunny, The Ducksters, Rabbit of Seville
• 1951—Scentimental Rodeo, Rabbit Fire, The Wearing of the Grin, Drip-Along Daffy
• 1952—Operation: Rabbit, Feed the Kitty, *Beep-Beep*, Going! Going! Gosh!, Rabbit Seasoning
• 1953—Don’t Give Up the Sheep, Duck Amuck, *Bully for Bugs*, *Duck Dodgers in the 24th and ½ Century*, Duck! Rabbit, Duck!
• 1954—Bewitched Bunny, Baby Buggy Bunny
• 1955—One Froggy Evening, Beanstalk Bunny, Knight-Mare Hare, Rabbit Rampage
• 1956—Broom-Stick Bunny, Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z-z, Rocket-Bye Baby, *Deduce, You Say!*
• 1957—Ali-Baba Bunny, What’s Opera, Doc?
• 1958—*Robin-Hood Daffy*, *Hook, Line, and Stinker!*
• 1959—Baton Bunny
• 1960—Fastest with the Mostest, High Note, Ready Woolen and Able
• 1961—The  Abominable Snow-Rabbit, Compressed Hare
• 1962—A Sheep in the Deep, Martian Through Georgia
• 1963—Now Hear This, Transylvania 6-500, Pent-House Mouse
• 1964—Snow-Body Loves Me
• 1965—The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, Tom-Ic Energy
• 1966—The Cat Above and the Mouse Below, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
• 1967—The Bear That Wasn’t.

The Damndest Thing You'll Ever See: Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975), or America in 160 Minutes

Nashville (1975)

Directed by: Robert Altman 

Rating: ★★★★★ (Masterpiece)

screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury

starring: David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, and Keenan Wynn.

Plot rundown: Over the course of a few hectic days in Nashville, Tennessee,  numerous interrelated people prepare for a political music rally as secrets and lies are surfaced and revealed.

Nashville is something else. It's a panoramic view of the Nashville music business in 1975. The story is told over 5 days, as 24--yes, 24--characters go about their business in the country-music Mecca in preparation for a political rally on the fifth day. There's a waitress who wants to desperately sing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; the only problem is that she's a terrible singer. There's a slimy country-singer who wants to get into the political game, and sees the rally as a way of announcing his own presidential campaign. There's a folk trio--two guys and a girl--where everybody's cheating on everybody else with each other. There's an old uncle who's coming in from Los Angeles to attend to his wife on his deathbed; he tries to get his niece to be with him when his wife dies, but the niece just wants to hang out with a bunch of country-rock-stars, smoke dope, and be an attentive groupie. There's a psychofreak on a tricycle who gives rides to unsuspecting hitchhikers. There's a mousy blonde woman who just wants to sing to a big crowd of people, but can't seem to find the audience because she's on-the-run from her trucker husband. At the end, these electric, zig-zagging personalities all converge at the Parthenon in Nashville, where the presidential rally/concert for the independent presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker (a perfect shoe-in for Bernie Sanders) takes place. The trailer best explains the seeming lunacy of having 24 main characters in one film:

I saw this magical film for the first time about two years ago, receiving the sleek Criterion Blu-Ray as a Christmas present. Let me tell ya: it had such a profound effect on me, as far as storytelling and emotional investment goes. It manages to do what few films bother to attempt nowadays: it gives you a robust view of a weird and striking society--America in the 1970s--by introducing no less than twenty-four major characters and letting them loose upon one another. It goes that extra mile by getting you so emotionally invested in EACH of these off-beat characters, that it breaks your heart when the film ends. I felt like I knew a whole lot more about how people think, how people interact with one another, the tragedies and the hardships they have to suffer. Nashville gave me that communal sense of belonging. I loved eavesdropping in on Lily Tomlin's character Linnea, a well-meaning housewife who is devoted to her hearing-impaired kids and who is neglected by her lawyer-husband (Ned Beatty). It was utterly heart-wrenching seeing Ronee Blakley's Barbara Jean, a successful and happy country music-star on the outside, suffer nervous breakdowns caused by her pot-bellied, domineering husband (Allen Garfield). It was hilarious seeing the pratfalls of Barbara Harris' Winifred, a mousy blonde wife who desperately seeks to break into the Nashville music business, and who shocks everyone in the end, which I won't dare say much about. The ending of this movie is a jolt out of a fantasy unlike any other I felt happen in a movie; I felt like Altman robbed me of a core emotional part of my being, but then the final song comes on, and it's suddenly makes all the more sense.

The MUSIC in Nashville is out of this world. It is entirely country music, but if you hate country, not to worry. These songs are performed with the utmost of energy, manic or otherwise, and are certifiable earworms worthy of any pop-radio-station. Seriously, if you're not humming "It don't worry me, it don't worry me, you may say 'I ain't free', but it don't worry me..." by the end of the movie, you'd better check your pulse. Altman's shifting soundtrack is part satire, part send-up, part tribute. We register country music has a wide variety of sounds—jingoistic patriotism (“200 Years), chugging “Tennessee-Three”-style romping (“Tapedeck in His Tractor”), Dylanesque acoustic folk (“I’m Easy”)—but, at the end of the day, it returns to the core of music. The feeling of joy and togetherness it brings to people. The simplicity of the message of Keith Carradine’s song, now sung with unbelievable gospel verve by Barbara Haris: “Hey, we may have a lot of shit going for us, but that’s not gonna keep me from trying my hardest to be happy. We have our lot in it together. Let’s keep a-goin’ for all our sakes!” The actors all write and perform their own songs: a feat on its own. In fact, there's actually only one real country-star in the cast: Ronee Blakley, who plays the tortured country muse Barbara Jean. She feels the adoration of all her adoring fans, but inside she's living a silent hell at the hands of her husband who won't let her rest. We never truly get a sense of the problems that plague Barbara Jean, but the harrowing scene in the hospital is enough of an indication that things aren't so rosy when the curtain goes down and the microphones are turned off. Listen closely to her singing "Dues" here and admire the conviction with which she belts out that mean song:

These characters are people we know, people we encounter on a daily basis on a street, and who've got fascinating stories to tell, but we are too self-absorbed to even care about them. Altman dares to make you care. I know I mentioned Tomlin, Blakley, and Harris, but there are so many other dynamite performances in here. The chauffeur, the folk trio on the verge of a breakup, the ridiculed black singer ("the whitest nigger in town! A regular Oreo!" says the chef played by Robert Doqui; Nashville does a tremendous job of making you feel the palpable racial tension in the town, and how little we've come in terms of eradicating racism), the ridiculous white midget country-singer, his neurotic mistress, and Opal. Oh Opal. The busy-body BBC reporter who sticks her nose in the wrong places, whose church on Sundays is a graveyard of buses for her scoop on Nashville in her BBC documentary. The great irony of her missing the big event at the film's end should not be lost on anybody.

There's a particular moment at the end of Nashville where Keith Carradine (the self-absorbed womanizer Tom) sings "I'm Easy" and the camera cuts to Geraldine Chaplin (Opal) looking to Keith. She looks elated, she feels powerfully confident as she realizes that the song may be for her. That one look solidifies the movie for me; it's such a great cut, because in five silent seconds, we know the score. And we feel so much sadness for Opal when she realizes that no, the song's not for her. This is filmmaking at its finest; that shot of Opal's sad face doesn't need to be in there. But because it is, Altman clues us in that this film functions on a much subtler level than we expect of films. We expect American films to dazzle us with taut plots and a tight narrative. Nashville isn't like that. It's panoramic. It seems to break all the rules and puts them all back together. We don't watch Nashville for the stories; moreso for the people, to see true-blue Americans talking with one another, honestly or dishonestly. It is slowly becoming my favorite film the more I watch it; the pain Altman portrays is gritty and realistic, but the optimism he presents is unbridled.

It's a long film, for sure, but it is truly a masterpiece to be beheld. It's for movie lovers and for anybody who's interested in ensemble dramas. Every couple months or so, I watch it again and feel like I'm meeting old friends who haven't changed...but I have. It's almost an entire world condensed into 160 lightning-quick minutes of virtuouso 70s filmmaking unparalleled by any other. And it's, at its core, America. It's America, man. It's all of its ugly contradictions and triumphant moments, its ups and downs, its obsessive celebrity crushes and its missed connections, its affairs, its children, its brothers, its lovers: it's all there, and it's beautiful.