McCabe & Mrs. Miller · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera finds him almost by accident. Snow has come down so thick the frame has nearly closed over, and somewhere in the white McCabe is dying — crawling, then not — while the lens drifts as if it isn't sure he's worth following. No music swells to mark it. Across town a church is burning and the citizens have formed a bucket line, busy and useful, with no idea that the man who built their saloon is freezing in an alley fifty yards off. Nobody witnesses the hero's death. The film seems almost embarrassed to be looking at all.

That refusal to dramatize is the whole picture, and Deleuze gave it a name: the crisis of the action-image. Classic cinema runs on what he called the sensory-motor circuit — a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves that chain. The Western is the purest engine ever built for it. A threat rides in; a man answers; the street is cleared. McCabe cannot complete that circuit. His reputation for toughness is hearsay he half-believes himself. He bluffs through a buyout negotiation he doesn't understand, mutters his lines as if talking to himself, and when the hired killers finally come he doesn't face them down in the sunlit street. He hides. He shoots from behind a post. The situation has grown too large for anyone to answer it, and the gambler who fancied himself a player turns out to be a man the table is quietly clearing away. Deleuze pointed to Altman directly as one of the filmmakers who made this crisis into a method, and McCabe is where the method first goes deep.

Watch how the town itself is built. Deleuze's first symptom of the crisis is the dispersive situation: many characters, weakly linked, with no protagonist strong enough to gather the world into a single line of action. Altman wired his cast with radio mics and recorded several conversations at once, so the saloon comes to us as ambient community noise — people talking past each other, conducting their own business, half-hearing what McCabe hears. There is no single correct place to look, and you will miss things. This is the inheritance of Renoir's The Rules of the Game, where deep-focus staging let a whole society move at once with no figure granted dramatic priority. Altman transposes it to a muddy frontier brothel and adds the dirt and ambient racket of neorealism, the Bicycle Thieves idea that a character exists inside a social environment rather than performing in front of it.

The cutting matches. Lou Lombardo — who had just fractured Peckinpah's ambushes in The Wild Bunch — applies the same elliptical hand to talk instead of gunfire. Scenes begin late and end early; the deal that matters is implied, not shown; a town grows from a clearing to a settlement in what feels like weeks. Deleuze calls this slackening of cause and effect the weak link, and it is the connective tissue of the new kind of film, where one event no longer obviously produces the next.

Then there is the light, and here the film reaches its strangest beauty. Zsigmond pre-fogged the negative, flashing it with white before processing, which lifted the blacks and gave everything a milky, antique haze. As the story darkens the snow and fog literally take over the image until McCabe is hard to locate within it. Space stops being a stage for action. Deleuze's term is the any-space-whatever — a place emptied of its function as setting, charged instead with pure feeling — and its whitest variant is what he called lyrical abstraction, the luminous field where a soul is weighed. The snow is not scenery. It is the indifference of the world made visible, the same wide blank across which Bergman marched his knight to an unmourned death in The Seventh Seal. McCabe stops being an agent and becomes what Deleuze names the seer: someone who can only look and endure, while around him a world that no longer needs him keeps moving.

The final crosscut is the masterstroke and the quiet revolution. Griffith built American montage on convergence — two lines of action racing toward a meeting, the cavalry arriving in time, the rescue. Altman cuts between McCabe's lonely gunfight and the church fire, and the two have no causal connection whatsoever. They never meet. The fire is an accident; the killing is corporate business; the citizens save a building nobody worships in while their founder dies unseen. The cut joins across a gap and hands you the irony to assemble yourself. The rescue has been killed off, and with it the genre's promise that struggle means something.

What McCabe did to film was to take the most mythologizing form America had — the Western, its whole machinery of decisive action — and run it without the myth. The deaths in Ride the High Country were elegies for individual men; Altman turned the elegy structural, mourning the economic order that ate the frontier. He proved a mainstream studio picture could disperse its attention, refuse its hero, and let folk songs carry the grief that a score would have faked, the way Easy Rider had just shown pre-existing music could. Everything Altman did next — Nashville above all — lives in the room this film opened. Watch it again, and watch where the camera doesn't quite look. The whole argument is in the corner of the frame.