The Philosophy of the Western

THE NORTHWESTERN: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

241 THE NORTHWESTERN McCabe and Mrs. Miller Deborah Knight and George McKnight An End-of-Genre Western Set near the Pacific Ocean in a heavily forested, frequently overcast corner of Washington State that is alternatively rain-soaked and muddy or snow-covered and cold, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) is not a classic western in the way that, say, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) and George Stevens’s Shane (1953) are classic. The setting is a first clear indication that McCabe and Mrs. Miller differs from classic westerns. Gone are the familiar landmarks we conventionally expect to see, the open wilderness and frequent wide-angle shots of a sun-drenched landscape. Nothing is to be seen here remotely like Utah’s Monument Valley (John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949) or the scenic grandeur of Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains (Shane) or the Nevada desert landscape in The Stalking Moon (Robert Mulligan , 1969). McCabe is an end-of-genre western, a film made toward the end of a variety of different but related stories that had celebrated the settlement of the American wilderness within this most central genre of American filmmaking. The classic western tells the story about expansion westward.1 McCabe tells what happened when the idealization of western expansion and the mystique developed around the figure of the western hero faltered in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is not a film centrally featuring cowboys, soldiers, sheriffs, or homesteaders, or the need to protect the new and developing community from incursions from lawless individuals, cattle barons, or Native Americans. It is not a film whose central protagonist has a clear moral commitment to the community he is either already a member of or that he enters in order 242 Deborah Knight and George McKnight to take on duties such as enforcing the law or defending the innocent. McCabe is set in the extreme northwest, not the open west of the classic western, and the central characters and conventional features of the classic western as a genre have been completely rethought by Altman, who not only directed the film but cowrote the screenplay. The westerns that emerged after World War II were ultimately tales of moral optimism developed around moral conflict between western heroes and those who challenged them (My Darling Clementine). During the 1950s, westerns were much more morally cautious, introducing protagonists with questionable pasts such as we find in The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950) or The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953). At this time, too, we find protagonists with possibly morally objectionable plans of action directed toward the future, although, in the end, these protagonists came through with morally laudable conclusions to their endeavors (The Searchers, John Ford, 1956). The group of films that we place in the category of “the endof -genre western” are those in which the initial values of the classic western , even though challenged to some degree by the late-classic westerns of the 1950s or early 1960s, have broken down. While there were end-ofgenre westerns made prior to McCabe, for instance, The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958), as well as since McCabe, notably a group of films from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) through to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), Altman’s film merits attention for at least three philosophically interesting reasons. First, McCabe is a western in the ironic mode. Thus, it asks us to look at what Northrop Frye, developing ideas central to Aristotle’s Poetics, might have called the mythos of the classic western from a very different perspective.2 Second, it asks us to align ourselves with characters who are marginal in classic westerns. McCabe (Warren Beatty), for example, is the antithesis of a Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine) or an Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in The Searchers). Earp and Ethan are heroes; McCabe is not. The western as a genre has featured whores principally in secondary roles from early days—consider Dallas (Claire Trevor) in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) or Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) in My Darling Clementine. Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), by contrast, is not a secondary character at all but a protagonist in her own right, yet hardly the nurturing and virtuous female protagonist of the classic western, such as Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) in My Darling Clementine or Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur) in Shane. Third, this is a film that manifests its ironic perspective aesthetically as well as...