Page 77 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 67

mountains), the bartender expresses amazement as he looks at the forlorn
hunting party that has returned empty-handed: "that's the greatest Indian
Hunter of them all!" The bartender/attendant, a peripheral character,
thus has some of the most important lines. But then, in film after film,
bringing the periphery—both visual and aural—into the mix that consti-
tutes a story's intelligibility is what Altman does.

"What Kind of a Man?" None of the Above
The question that Ransom Stoddard poses to the outlaw Liberty
Valance in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—"What kind of a
man are you?"—is central to the issue of the making of the West for Ford.
Will he be the hero of the gun, the hero of the law, an ambiguous mixture
of the two, or what? If Ford seemed to remain ambivalent about the answer
to that question, he showed little ambivalence about the role of gender. If
community rather than anomie was to win in the West, it would be a result
of some kind of masculine agency, whoever those male agents might turn
out to be. His films, both through their story lines and their forms, are
centered by male heroes, however flawed those heroes might be (as is the
case with Ethan Edwards in The Searchers and Ransom Stoddard and Tom
Doniphon [John Wayne] in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance),
In Altman's West the men are antiheroes. In McCabe, as it is put in
Leonard Cohen's lyrics, we encounter a different kind of man from what is
.
characteristic in the classic westerns; it's "that kind of man .. who is reach-
.
ing for the sky just to surrender .. just a Joseph looking for a manger." And
in Buffalo Bill we encounter a thin media invention with a poor grasp of
history and reality. In contrast, Mrs. Miller and her sex workers/ employees
in McCabe display the strength and social sensitivity that is almost totally
absent in the men of Presbyterian Church. If community is at all possible,
it will rest with their initiatives. And in Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, who
threatens to quit if Sitting Bull is fired and forced to return to custody, is
the only character who displays a respect for history and for Native Ameri-
can alterity. If a negotiated, nonexploitative sharing of the West would have
been at all possible, it would have had to rest with a woman like Annie.
Altman, as was his intention, gave us another look, and that look has to
be assessed in terms of the challenge it offers to the heroic Euro-American
nation-building narratives it deforms.