McCabe & Mrs. Miller Postscript
2.12.03
Heavy Spoilers

During the 1970s Robert Altman took it upon himself to methodically work through genres, simultaneously deconstructing and revitalizing them (artistically, not necessarily commercially). In 1971 Altman cast his camera to the Western, and his McCabe & Mrs. Miller transformed the staid classicism of old Westerns into a far more complex, challenging work, setting a new benchmark for the genre that has arguably never been equaled since. Whereas most classical Westerns blindly embraced civilization as a positive force that the story's hero would eventually bring to a rugged, feral town, McCabe & Mrs. Miller skeptically threw a weary eye to that inane notion. Never complacent to settle for false absolutes, Altman's ambivalence dominants McCabe & Mrs. Miller and here is finally a civilization hierarchy in which nothing is as cut and dry a platitude as 'bad wild versus good civilized.' On one level of the hierarchy there is protagonist McCabe (Warren Beatty) himself, budding entrepreneur, who comes to the ramshackle town of Presbyterian Church and attempts to reconfigure it with himself as the leading citizen, installing a new brothel and bathhouse as the primary forms of leisure/entertainment. Prior to McCabe's arrival the only real source of recreation was that de facto staple of Western iconography, the town's broken down saloon, good for some solid gambling and drinking but really nothing more; meanwhile everyone in Presbyterian Church was very much living a life of makeshift bohemianism. So while McCabe can certainly be read as a positive influence (i.e. the townspeople [or at least the males, but that problematic genre issue is neither here nor there right now] genuinely enjoy their new forms of recreation while still getting to keep their old one [the saloon]), his form and manner of civilizing is modest (i.e. the townspeople can still retain their bohemian lifestyle and are not at McCabe's whim). For McCabe is, after all, still a single man with no interests in any larger companies or greater financial aims other than simply making a decent living. He is also a man of the people in a sense; in addition to being a jovial fellow who is eminently approachable and seems to fraternize with the townspeople on occasion, it doesn't seem as if he has any plans to leave Presbyterian Church once his businesses are running a profitable model. This is in stark contrast to Julie Christie's Mrs. Miller, who chides McCabe for his smalltime goals and expresses her personal desire to eventually move onto a larger enterprise in San Francisco. Moreover, McCabe is not an expert businessman by any stretch; in fact he must rely on Miller's assistance in running the brothel (his first major moneymaker).

Above McCabe on the civilization hierarchy is a massive, local mining company who wants to buy out all of McCabe's (and therefore essentially the town's) holdings. This company represents the spirit of civilization more common to classic westerns, a large corporation taking over nature with the undoubted, eventual hope to mimic the big cities that had already risen across the United States. But whereas classical westerns bathe these large civilizing forces in a for-the-good-of-mankind, angelic glow, Altman stares intently at their cold, harsh, ruthless underpinnings. At first McCabe will not sell, but eventually the mining company hires carnal killers to dispose of McCabe and insure their own expansion. Here Altman is making a potent comment that the cultured and uncultured, tamed and untamed, civilized and uncivilized are all closely interwoven. That is, regardless of where we live or how pervasive crass, centralized homogeny is, we can never escape our base, more animalistic impulses since we require them to a certain extent. He is also letting us know that civilization has just as many faults and evil streaks as a raw community (or rather tellingly, in McCabe the raw community has even less, considering how peacefully it runs even without any kind of law enforcement). With McCabe eventually struck down and the town he built indifferent, McCabe & Mrs. Miller's handling of the dynamics of civilizing forces can be read as a commentary on the inherent facelessness of capitalism. The single dreamer has no place in the world of big business. Altman pointedly sets McCabe & Mrs. Miller in the Pacific Northwest which was, of course, the very last frontier and its overriding message that even the final holdouts eventually succumb to capitalism -- though not by ascent but through futile resistance -- is both practical and unsettling.

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