If only we could cajole Robert Altman back to life at this surreal moment in American politics. Even for fifteen minutes. Five minutes would be spent on the pitch: Listen, Bob, it’s 2016, and Donald Trump has somehow become the Republican presidential nominee. He wants to be the King of America. He has promised a ban on Muslim immigrants and was endorsed by Charles Manson and David Duke. There have been riots at his rallies, and he has encouraged people to beat up protesters. He alluded to his penis in one of the debates.
A minute or two for Altman to finish laughing and absorb the shock. Then the remaining minutes for him to level some devastating, trenchant commentary. Maybe he’d come up with a spontaneous idea for a twenty-first-century super-meta mockumentary that would put the whole bewildering phenomenon in perspective.
The reason to imagine such a scenario is part of the prehistory of our current “golden age of television.” Back in 1988 Altman released Tanner ’88, a brilliant, kinetic miniseries that originally aired on HBO, running right up to election time that year. Altman himself called this faux political documentary “the most creative work I ever did.” Even so, many Altman fans never got around to seeing it at the time. The series ran a fictional candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination named Jack Tanner and followed him on the campaign trail. Tanner is sincere and intent on cutting the crap. He’s a progressive democrat from Michigan, running on legalizing drugs, divesting in South Africa, and helping the inner cities. As played by Michael Murphy, he’s got an earnest manner and honest teeth — in some ways he resembles a younger Bernie Sanders, albeit with more polish and movie star looks.
There’s a crucial scene in the first episode of Tanner, when a cameraman catches Jack giving a spontaneous, impassioned speech to his campaign team. Jack doesn’t know he’s being filmed. The angle is surreptitious — it’s shot from the cameraman’s vantage point while he’s lying on the floor, upward through a glass coffee table. Tanner is rhapsodizing about “honest inquiry . . . We’ve got to keep asking the [pertinent] questions. That’s what the American experiment is about.” He’s grappling and searching, and Altman shows him to be genuinely invested, not for ego’s sake. And Tanner is a little reckless. After he gets arrested for trespassing at the South African embassy, his campaign manager (played by Pamela Reed) says with exasperation, “When is this candidate ever going to grow up?”
Tanner’s campaign slogan is “For Real” — two simple words that resonate with an almost eerie quality for a viewer looking back through decades of Survivors, Housewives, Jersey Shores, and — yes — Apprentices. Real was always relative, of course, and even back then, Altman was playing with the notion of real versus fake. Altman’s “documentary” is constantly sliding between real and contrived. Real people show up to interact with the show’s fictional characters: Pat Robertson, Bruce Babbitt, Bob Dole, and Kitty Dukakis make appearances, seamlessly worked into the action. One of the most audacious elements is the way Altman and his troupe infiltrate actual events. Often you can’t tell if the scenarios have been set up or intruded upon. The camera work is kamikaze. And this is years before mockumentaries became a Netflix genre and Sacha Baron Cohen (along with his less gonzo colleagues on venues like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report) made the fake interview a satirical trope.
Is it true that real was realer in 1988? More easily accessed, buried beneath fewer layers of simulacra? Even discounting the haze of nostalgia, it seems so: the Trump persona is too many funhouse mirrors removed from the actual person to keep track of any longer. He was the star of a reality show, after all, and this latest incarnation doesn’t seem to be much of a departure. Yet for all of the obvious fakery in his campaign, Trump’s supporters insist he’s the truly authentic one, unafraid to “tell it like it is.” Are we, the voters, just the larger audience to a political process that plays out like writer’s room dreck?
The funny thing is that Tanner ’88, back in its day, was itself a joyous screw-you to the establishment. It came at a time when Altman hadn’t yet had his Hollywood comeback with The Player, in 1992, and Short Cuts, in 1993. Political cartoonist Garry Trudeau was handpicked by HBO to write Tanner, and it was only after he insisted that Altman direct that he officially signed on. Altman was persona non grata in the film world anyway, so why not do it the way he wanted. He felt he was reinventing television, he later said, and looking at it now you see where he busted through the walls.
Altman’s work was always essentially American. Nashville was about American celebrity. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, American greed and progress. Short Cuts, American self-destruction. After I fell in love with his movies, I always knew that even in a more or less failed project (Prêt-à-Porter comes to mind) he would show me something important about myself and my fellow Americans. I would always feel somehow implicated, yet still not judged. I was no better and no worse than his greatest flawed characters. So now, I wish there were some way for Altman to help me find my place in this current spectacle. Am I — are we — as insane as I think? I’m looking, more than anything, for a moment of respite and clear thinking, and the sort of moment of grace his films allowed even his most hapless characters.
For a show that is sometimes ridiculously comical and now so obviously dated — look at the shoulder pads, the giant telephones, the terrible eyeglasses — Tanner has its share of grace. Even twenty-seven years after it was made, parts of it can still tear your heart out. In the eighth episode, Tanner is campaigning in Detroit, where he meets with a black community group devoted to addressing the senseless killing of kids in the inner city. Urban areas are being forsaken, crack is everywhere, and mothers who have lost children to gun violence are giving speeches. After the event, Tanner sits surrounded by people telling their stories and speaking their piece. It seems these could not possibly be actors — it sounds so unscripted and passionate — and the effect is to connect the story with the real losses being suffered in these communities, in a way that few political dramas manage.
Some truth is captured there, something meaningful transpires. When Altman said he was reinventing television, maybe that’s what he meant: In between the genres, he got reality. I won’t reveal if Jack Tanner wins the nomination in this alternate universe. But I will tell you it was sweet that Altman even let him try.
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Sig Nordal 