Page 68 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

58 MichaelJ. Shapiro

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you're living but a life that you're looking through." And he had to in-
vert his characters as well in his cinematic coding because of the way the
West already existed in the audience's received stock of signs. Given what
is always already on the screen as one attempts to write and direct a west-
ern—the platitudes and clichés of the advance of civilization, of the heroic
gunfighter taming a lawless wilderness, and of women who are vehicles
for expanding a stable domesticity westward—Altman's McCabe is thor-
oughly subversive. McCabe is a dressed-up dandy and low-level card shark
who achieves charisma after his arrival because of the character vacuum
that precedes him and because of the false rumor that he has "a big rep,"
spread by a saloon owner, Mr. Sheehan, who claims that McCabe shot the
dangerous Bill Roundtree. And in contrast with the canniness of Ethan
Edwards in The Searchers, a man who anticipates dangers and survives
while rescuing others with his daring and deep knowledge of the land-
and ethnoscape of the West, McCabe is a bumbler. He cannot control
his "chippies" (one of whom is shown attacking a client with a knife); he
proves unable to do the math when he and Mrs. Miller go into business
together; and, fatally, he fails to discern the consequences of rejecting an
offer from the large and predatory mining company to buy out his busi-
ness. Unable to convince him to take their generous offer, they send a
hired killer to get him out of the way.
It is not simply a lack of intelligence that ultimately dooms McCabe,
however, who dies in a snowdrift after being wounded by the company's
hired gun, Butler (Hugh Millais), whom McCabe dispatches as well with
his derringer before he dies. McCabe is done in by his stubborn adherence
to the myth of the small independent entrepreneur; he puts off Sheehan's
early offer of a partnership, aimed at excluding outsiders, with the words,
"Partners is what I came here to get away from." And he is prey to a naive,
moral economy code mouthed by the lawyer he consults, Clement Samu-
els, who, full of pomposities and clichés, says, "When a man goes into the
wilderness and builds something with his own hands, no one is going to
take it away from him." Referring to "the very values that make this coun-
try what it is today," Samuels adds that "'til people start dying for freedom,
they ain't goin' to be free." Ultimately, Samuels encourages McCabe to
"strike a blow for the little man." Clearly the reversed name of Samuel
Clemens (Mark Twain), a writer whose tongue was always planted firmly
in his check, helps to convey Altman's disdain for self-destructive and
unrealistic platitudes. By the time McCabe realizes that pious platitudes