This book is about Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, which is a quintessential 1975 film, but also relevant for the present moment of political cynicism, polarization, and violence. While the movie is about interpersonal relationships, its undercurrent deals with the fallout from Watergate, Vietnam, and very specifically, Nixon. The film started shooting on July 4th, 1974 – perfect timing. When they started filming, the Watergate hearings were underway—in fact, being broadcast on TV—and Nixon resigned in the course of the production. So, that political feeling is always there, even though the movie is also about the less overtly political issue of how people treat each other and the foibles of human relationships.

Nashville is implicitly tackling the fallout from Vietnam, and everything that happened in 1968 – violence in the streets, the Chicago Democratic National Convention, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. It is a very human film that doesn't seem like a political film in the way that a documentary would, but to my mind, being informed by that politics helps you understand the film and what it has to say about America.The first and last paragraphs of the book are very precisely the frame for what I'm doing – the whole book . I’d rather people read it from cover to cover, but if you read the first and the last paragraph, you would really have a sense of the importance of the film, and of my feelings about it as a political text, but also as a work very much about human relationships.