Because I didn't have anything else...

I'll put this paper out, it's not very good but it's something to keep my bl0gsp0t alive:

Feel free to use with credit! My name is Dakota Campbell!


18-11-09
Film Genre

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is considered by many a critic to be the hall mark of neutral colored shots with various other movies basing their style on the film. Away from its cinematic acclaim, it also embodies the semi-Nuevo ‘Anti-Western’ sub-genre though still containing many Western mannerisms. The movie’s basic structure is akin to that of many other Westerns, a hero, saloons, a woman, needless violence and, arguably, the most important aspect, gun fights.
Neutral colors are often referred to as Earth tones. They are generally whites, black, grey, browns and occasionally beige. The landscape, located in British Colombia, is, described by David Loftus, an independent film critic, as, “wet, foggy and snowy,” falls firmly into the earthy, neutral colour selection.

Roger Ebert, a journalist for the Sunday Times, wrote that, “people are always coming in…shaking the rain from their hats, and we see the trees whipping in the wind through the windows…But it's a wet autumn and then a cold winter, so people naturally congregate in saloons,” describing the climate that molds itself as the characters’ depth is revealed.
Anti-Westerns’ definition is derived from its own name, anti-western. The sub-genre began after WWII and started to question traditional Westerns, using mayhem and practicality to disagree with conventional motifs. The use of an anti-hero is frequent, stronger roles for women, criticizing big business and the government and greater empathy for Mexican-Americans and Native-Americans.

Though encompassed in this category, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is not true to it altogether. The whole objective of the characters McCabe and Mrs. Miller is to get rich, no matter in what way. This turns them into hypocrites because what they eventually end up fighting is what would be their ultimate goal.

Specifically outlined by McCabe &Mrs. Miller, the Anti-Western, or Revisionist Western, is truly about ideas and ideals, not literal content. These two types of Westerns rest on each other yet are distant. The true combination point is when a movie can encompass the ideals of the Revisionist Western yet still thematically have typical Western effects such as gun fights, whores, violence and depravity.

We, as humans, give connotations to things without much thought, a bias. In the same manner as the soliloquy in the South regarding Coke as all sodas, Westerns have many a theme that are the first things to come to our heads when we hear the word. Cowboys, boots, horses, dust, desert, guns, money, spurs, swinging doors, trains, explosives, banks and violence are just the tip of the list, our brain has a firm image of what we want a Western to be, what we know it to be. McCabe &Mrs. Miller, while using these subconscious guiderails, breaks the metaphorical fourth wall, making the audience revel in the fact that the movie is indeed an unconventional yet extremely effective Western.