Robert Altman doesn’t want us to mourn him.
That’s the message sent in what now stands as the last offering of the venerable, prodigious director, who died yesterday at 81. A Prairie Home Companion is, on its surface, an untenable work—an epitaph for a radio show that is still on the air and faces no foreseeable doom—but it is also Altman’s eulogy to himself, a meditation on death that begs survivors to ensure the show goes on.
“There is no tragedy in the death of an old man,” a Prairie character declares after an elderly singing cowboy expires in his dressing room. This doesn’t satisfy Lindsey Lohan’s ingenue, who begs for a memorial. “What if you die some day?” she asks. “Don’t you want people to remember you?” Garrison Keillor offers a muted retort: “I don’t want them to be told to remember me.” Another woman suggests a moment of silence. “Silence on the radio…” Keillor ruminates. “I don’t know how that works.”
Altman never knew how it worked either. In 35 movies, his performers talk over each other, under each other, and around each other, in an endless cacophony of voices. (They rarely talk to each other, an absence that suggests Altman had the most natural grasp of all that “alienation” business being spouted in the ‘70s.) The ensemble chats are often imitated—most ably by Paul Thomas Anderson—but no director has matched Altman’s ear for the music of the crowd. And it takes a certain kind of man to allow his 14-year-old son to pen a theme song for the blood-soaked war movie MASH, especially when the song is entitled “Suicide is Painless.”
It may be true that no artistic canon is safe from reevaluation until the demise of its creator, but as recently as 2001 it was clear that Altman stood as one of only two ’70s gold-age directors to avoid becoming parodic shells of their younger selves. (Martin Scorsese – a very different kind of auteur – was the other.) He did it by remaining attuned to the various rhythms of human conversation. And if his movies tell us anything, they argue that the conversation should go on, even if the toastmaster’s voice is silenced.
“They can’t do this to us here in Nashville!” a hero of Altman’s 1975 masterwork roars after an assassination attempt. “Let’s show them what we’re made of. Come on everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!” Now, faced with the temptation of another moment of silence, filmmakers should heed another call: Somebody, talk.
and to quote Fark, “Funeral expected to be star-studded, rambling, plotless”.