By 1980, Altman was unable to find financing for his projects in Hollywood. He directed plays in New York, then moved to Paris and directed opera, TV and small films. He returned to Hollywood moviemaking in 1992 with "The Player." By then, the baby boomers were running the joint. By now, they have set the tone in the media for 20 years. It's striking how on-the-money Altman is in "Nashville" about the dark side of the baby boomers. Even when they're successes, and even when they view themselves ironically as such, they always see themselves as outlaws. The character Keith Carradine plays -- in his leather vest, his sun-kissed tresses, his contempt and his sensitivity -- rings true in his vanity, his sense of entitlement and his selfishness. A character played by Cristina Raines is so wrapped up in her narcissism and masochism that she can barely bring herself to make baby talk. In the film, the older characters make an effort to keep up appearances. The hip, solipsistic younger people generally just act out.

In American movies, what the 25 years since the release of "Nashville" have brought is an evolution in the direction of selling the story and the hook -- the movie equivalent of pop music's three chords in 4/4 time. It's as though the goal of filmmakers has become to make the package and the product one -- to make the movie live up to its ad campaign. Given this, it isn't surprising that Altman's influence has been greater on TV than on movies. A few kinds of new-Hollywood film genres reflect his work: the ensemble film organized around a lifestyle or occupation theme ("Parenthood," "Pushing Tin"), and the Mad-magazine style movie spoof ("Airplane," the various "National Lampoon" movies). On TV, his influence can seem to be everywhere. "Hill Street Blues" and its mixed-mode, ensemble-cast descendants ("ER," for instance) are straight out of "MASH." The projects that combine story and documentary material in new ways, from the dramatic reenactments on shows like "A Current Affair" to attempts like Court TV and "Cops," come out of Altman's experiments in mixing fact and fiction.

In the years the baby boomers have been in charge, I've fallen out of love with moviegoing. What American movies deliver now are, on the one hand, Hollywood marketing extravaganzas and, on the other, what's somewhat optimistically called the "independent cinema." The extravaganzas are essentially big-budget versions of what were once known as exploitation pictures. The '50s and '60s exploitation films were often happy-go-lucky time-wasters and pocket-pickers. You could feel fond of a Roger Corman or a William Castle for aiming so low, and for taking the money and running. You didn't resent them any more than you did the people who ran a carnival.

It's hard to feel any fondness for the people behind films like "Dinosaur" or "Gone in 60 Seconds." These films do the same kind of button-pushing as the old B pictures, and they often give the same impression of being made out of recycled stock footage. But there's an immense commercial anxiety behind them, and you can sense that they're basically respectable. (You can feel the careers hanging in the balance.) The people involved don't seem to be entertaining vulgarians or small-time opportunists -- they feel like yuppies taking advantage of our reflexes. Tony Scott, the director of such aggressive marketing machines as "Top Gun" and "Crimson Tide," has had his tasteful, serene house written up in interior-design magazines. And the independent films aren't any more motivated by aesthetic concerns than the smasheroo studio films. They're either illustrating a p.c. point or projecting a flip "alternative" attitude. The independent directors and producers often seem to think that the best response to database-driven commercial moviemaking is no technique at all. The result is anorexic filmmaking.

The language developed over a hundred years by such people as Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, William Wyler and Marcel Carne can sometimes seem to be a vanishing thing. I long ago became used to the fact that the movies I love don't often succeed financially. What's recently come as a surprise is how many of the films I've enjoyed most -- from "Devil in a Blue Dress" to "The Last Bolshevik" to "Breakdown" to "Romance" -- aren't even talked about. They're just ignored. I can't help noticing that something these low-key films share is that they speak the language of movies. They draw on movie history and respond to it. I suspect that that's what makes them irrelevant to most people.

In 1975, film was potentially the greatest of all the arts; in 2000, it's one data stream among many. The hierarchical, centralized culture the baby boomers reacted against could be exclusionary, and its emphasis on ego and on greatness could be annoying. But it offered the possibility of something called "depth," and it also provided a shared culture and language. The atomized, decentered culture we have now allows for horizontal ranging about; the new digital tools (and media) are irresistible; and the openness to cultural mixing is certainly a relief. But this mix-and-match culture can also seem shallow. If everything's always available, why bother trying to unearth anything? (If it isn't on a database, it doesn't exist.)

A young Ivy League graduate I know made a success in arts journalism without ever having seen a Bergman picture. When she finally caught up with one, she was stunned to realize that there'd once been a time when people went to a movie theater to watch characters agonize and philosophize at each other. She hasn't seen another Bergman since, and she hasn't gone on to read any Scandinavian literature, or to search out further examples of Swedish films either. In Altman's "The Player," a comedy about what has become of Hollywood, a young studio executive is watching his career dissolve, and recovers his momentum only when he learns to stop worrying about integrity and depth. During my lunch with him, Altman observed wryly that one thing he could say for the executives he'd battled in the '70s was that they cared enough about the work being done to get angry at you, and to hate your movies. Nowadays, when someone takes an idea upstairs for a decision, there's nothing there but a computer.

Watched on videotape today, "Nashville" seems in its element in a way many movies don't. It's alive, and it doesn't suffer from the fragmenting effects of stop-and-start, at-home viewing. This may be because Altman is instinctively drawn to multiple points of view and unresolved resolutions. It doesn't exactly cohere, but it seems to bring our channel-surfing minds and experiences into some kind of loose relationship. It gives the impression of being a video installation rather than a routine feature; you can get the feeling that it's playing on several monitors at once. Watching it made me think that one way of conceiving of TV is as movies gone to pieces and turned into wallpaper.

It also made me think that an upbeat way of looking at where we've arrived is this: We have been freed -- perhaps against our will -- of our attachment to the idea of art as a rebel activity, a gesture toward freedom made for the sake of the unconscious and revolution. Now it has become simply an activity some people pursue, and perhaps get something out of -- as legitimate as (but no more vanguard than) business, cleaning, sports, science and child-rearing. "Nashville," seen at this distance, looks like a snapshot of the moment when substance began to vaporize into information.

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