characters Minor characters Richard Baskin, the film's musical supervisor, wrote several of the songs performed in the film. He has a cameo as Frog, a session musician, appearing in several scenes. Merle Kilgore as Trout, the owner of a club that has an open-mic talent night that gives Sueleen Gay what she believes is her big break as a singer. There are cameo appearances by Elliott Gould, Julie Christie, Vassar Clements and Howard K. Smith, all playing themselves. Gould and Christie were passing through Nashville when Altman added them. Altman plays Bob, an unseen producer who in the beginning of the film is producing Haven Hamilton's song "200 Years". He can be heard on a speaker when Hamilton gets agitated by Frog's inept piano playing. Analysis and themes In a 1995 academic article published in American Quarterly, Paul Lauter, a professor of American Studies at Trinity College, compared the film to "a poststructuralist theoretical text", adding that "it invites, indeed valorizes, contradiction and seems designed to resist closure." As a result, he explained, "interpretations of the film have been wildly divergent and evaluations contradictory." Political content Film scholars Yoram Allon, Del Cullen, and Hannah Patterson describe Nashville as an "epic study of ambition, greed, talent, and politics in American culture, with the country and western music businesses serving as a microcosm of American society." Ray Sawhill of Salon views the film as reflective of the 1970s' political climate, writing that the film "comes across as a piece of New Journalism; it's like Norman Mailer's reports from conventions and rallies. Altman is using Nashville metaphorically—he's really talking about politics. I wish he didn't make that quite so explicit. There's a reference to Dallas and a few to the Kennedys, as well as some red-white-and-blue visual cues, that the film could have done without. Still, the result is an X-ray of the era's uneasy political soul. What it reveals is a country trying to pull itself together from a nervous breakdown." Celebrity Sawhill suggests that the film is preoccupied with "a populist culture driving itself mad with celebrity" and presents Nashville as a "provincial New York or Hollywood, as one of the places where the culture manufactures its image of itself." He cites the various recording and communication devices present as evidence of this: "wires, phones, intercoms, cameras, mikes, speakers—seem to be everywhere; so does the machinery of publicity and fame. We