The Potential of Nashville's Mad Max Future

Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s decisive electoral victory proved Nashville has no compunction with the progressive ideas that have irrevocably altered metro areas like Chicago and San Francisco. However, its residents have proven remarkably skeptical about far-reaching transit reforms as the embarrassing landslide defeat of the Barry Era “Let’s Move” campaign indicates.

As Nashville media personality and former candidate for Metro Council Dan Fitzpatrick alluded to in a recent tweet, the one point all but the fringe of Nashville voters can agree on is antipathy for the city’s transit fetishists—the type of people who yawp in exultation when WeGo deep cleans bus seats but shrug off the rote violence plaguing the service’s terminals. 

It wasn’t so long ago that the thrill of travel by car and motorcycle was the territory of lefty exuberance. Jack Kerouac wrote the seminal Beat novel about it a decade before Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, and Easy Rider kicked off the counterculture and brought Hollywood into its most free-wheeling and fruitful artistic period. 

Amid such hallowed works of American culture, no place exists for the equivalent of contemporary transit stans. They are an outgrowth of the Left who revere spreadsheets over holistic ideals, the type of people who would rather remark on the consistency of the asphalt than the unbridled potential of the open road. When Jack Nicholson says, “They’ll talk to ya and talk to ya and talk to ya about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em,” in Easy Rider, he was prophesying these hordes of budding bureaucrats that were the organic product of the Woodstock resistance.  

So it seems fitting that director Jeff Nichols sets the most important scene of The Bikeriders, his new film about the origins of the Chicago Vandals motorcycle gang, in front of a theater showing the movie that made Nicholson and Dennis Hopper household names. A lifelong biker (Norman Reedus) works as a hype man decked out like Peter Fonda in the film–an authentic cross-country easy rider slowly succumbing to the erosion of his culture just as it becomes a pillar of Hollywood product. It’s a thematic moment similar to one in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—the first road movie of this summer movie season—that finds the titular heroine (Anya Taylor-Joy) facing off with the dictator Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) as he says, “Where are you going, so full of hope? There is no hope!”

Of course, the film proves Dementus wrong. There’s always hope in movement—in the freedom of going place to place. As road movies have long told us, the death of the human spirit comes with the stillness. In our own less-glamorous lives, it’s the wait for the surge-priced Uber or the WeGo bus that never arrives, the rigid transit dogma that offers a future more akin to Mad Max than its adherents would ever acknowledge.

💥 Clash Over “Peace” Resolution The morning after Tuesday’s council meeting, a disappointed Councilmember Zulfat Suara took to X. “Our Peace bill was withdrawn last night,” she announced, before thanking her colleague and co-sponsor, Councilmember Jacob Kupin: “Sorry you had to endure attacks from your own community.” Drawn up last week, the resolution called for an “end to the violence between Israel and Palestine,” citing death tolls from the Gaza Ministry of Health and noting that almost two million Palestinians “[are] at risk of death from starvation, unsanitary conditions, and lack of healthcare,” due to the Israeli Government’s retaliation after October 7th. Though the legislation condemned “all forms of Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, and bigotry,” some members of Nashville’s Jewish community weren’t pleased. 

“The deranged gaslighting from [Zulfat Suara] is next level,” wrote architectural photographer Alyssa Rosenheck. “Don’t be fooled by her talk of ‘peace’ or her attempt to blame the Jewish community.” According to Rosenheck, the resolution was a template from the USCPR, a group she claims [funnels] “tax-exempt donations to a Palestinian coalition including Hamas.”

Suara clarified that the legislation was drafted by the council office and written by a Jewish author, but the onslaught in the comment section had already begun. While council members Sandra Sepulveda, Jordan Huffman, and Brenda Gadd came to both Suara and Kupin’s defense on X, Rosenheck’s posts also continued to gain traction on multiple social media platforms. Though Suara indicated that she will be bringing forward a revised resolution in the future during Tuesday’s council meeting, a new document is yet to be filed. MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

🎓 Students Beating Up Teachers The Tennessean published a pretty damning story by Vivian Jones this morning about students in MNPS assaulting teachers, highlighting a few of the more brutal incidents. For example, when  Mark Hayes, a teacher with MNPS for 24 years, was assaulted by a student, his school’s disciplinary actions were so paltry that just a few days later, he was back in the classroom teaching the same student. As a result of the incident and the school’s limp response, Hayes packed up his desk and quit. During the 2023-2024 school year, there were 325 incidences of assault on a teacher or staff member. Across the state, there were 1,918 such incidents, the most over the past five years.

According to the report, multiple teachers contacted by The Tennessean declined to comment on their experiences with student assaults out of fear of retaliation from MNPS leadership. Spokesperson Sean Braisted, who has made an appearance in our reporting before, responded to inquiries from The Tennessean, emphasizing the social-emotional learning supports the district uses to help students “experiencing emotional dysregulation."

Currently, MNPS requires up to a five-day suspension for assault and a number of other, more serious crimes. Fortunately, at the state level, Governor Lee recently signed a law requiring a one-year suspension for students who assault teachers. The law took effect last month. DAVIS HUNT

🦄 Pride, Year-Round Nashville’s Pride festival continues tomorrow, and the day kicks off with a parade down Broadway at 10 a.m. A month ago, Mayor O’Connell announced that he will be in attendance, along with numerous other notable figures and community fixtures, including Edgehill’s GracePointe Church. The “Progressive Christian community” announced they will be marching in the event, and church volunteers will be tending a booth to spread their “beloved, included, affirmed” message.

To round out this year’s month of pride, Nashville will get its first rainbow crosswalk next Saturday. The project secured approval from multiple Metro government entities and was greenlit by the Nashville Department of Transportation. According to the Tennessee Star, the mayor’s office has distanced itself from the mural: reportedly, his administration says they “did not sign off on the project.”

The mural will be on Woodland Street in front of The Lipstick Lounge, East Nashville’s lesbian-owned bar. Though multiple cities have commissioned similar displays, not everyone is excited about the project. “Provocative. Divisive,” one citizen commented on X. “Would council support painting the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag? If not, let's keep our streets flag free.” Another argued The Lipstick Lounge was receiving preferential treatment from Metro. Though controversy seems inevitable, the bar is encouraging attendance to the event and searching for 100 volunteers to help complete the task. MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

DEVELOPMENT

• Christie Cookie to relocate production out of Nashville (NBJ)
• Top-level men's golf returns after 78 years with LIV Golf Nashville (Post)
• Images released for downtown church project (Post)
• Centennial Park-area building listed for $4.2M (Post)
• River North-area warehouse sells for $5.7M (Post)

THINGS TO DO

View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.

📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.

🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.

👨🏻‍🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide and yearly festival guide.

TONIGHT

🎸 Quasi @ The Blue Room, 7p, $32.36, Info
+ Pacific Northwest rock legends Quasi play their 1998 classic album Featuring "Birds"

🎻 Smokey Robinson with the Nashville Symphony @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 7:30p, $78+, Info

🪕 Greenwood Rye @ Jane's Hideaway, 8p, Info

🪕 The Cowpokes @ Acme Feed & Seed, 12p, Free, Info

🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info

🎸 Kelley’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info

✹ WEEKLY FILM RUNDOWN: June 21-27

The latest releases and special screenings hitting Music City this week. For a complete list of upcoming releases, check out our 2024 Film Guide.

The Bike Riders Jeff Nichols (Mud, Loving) returns from an eight-year hiatus with this examination of the development and descent of a 60s biker gang featuring Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Jodie Comer, and Elvis’s Austin Butler. As we talk about in today’s feature article, it’s a low-key triumph from one of America’s most unassuming talents. Now playing in theaters. 

Thelma When a great-grandmother (June Squibb) falls victim to a con artist, she goes on a vigilante trek through the L.A. underworld to reclaim what’s here in a mashup of Point Break and Mission: Impossible that’s earned some of the year’s best reviews. Now playing in theaters. 

1999 @ The Belcourt Throughout June, The Belcourt offers twenty-five titles in celebration of the best movie year ever’s 25th anniversary. This week’s must-sees are Spike Jonze’s trippy Being John Malkovich, Jim Carrey’s career-best turn as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, teen movie Shakespeare adaptation 10 Things I Hate About You, horror phenomenon The Blair Witch Project, and Cuban music doc Buena Vista Social Club. The series also offers encores of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and German import Run Lola Run. Hands down the can’t-miss cinematic event of the summer. 

A Celebration of Nicole Kidman @ The Belcourt As if 1999 weren’t enough, Nashville’s nonprofit cinema has assembled a career retrospective of the city’s most famous resident in honor of her recent American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. Kidman hand-selected eight of her best films, which will all screen twice, beginning with Gus Van Sant’s neo-noir To Die For and Kubrick’s farewell to 1999, Eyes Wide Shut. The series also includes Dogville, Cold Mountain, Birth, Rabbit Hole, Moulin Rouge!, and The Others–the latter of which Kidman will introduce on June 29th.