Mining Westerns: Seeking Sustainable Development in Pale Rider and McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Abstract

McCabe and Mrs. Miller illustrates how Western U.S. legal history works for and against community building and the sustainable development ideals behind it. The film inspires an ecocentric postmodern reading for several reasons. First the film rests on a naturalist philosophy and takes a connection between dying men and a dying landscape even further than Ride the High Country, since the film’s hero, McCabe (Warren Beatty), literally dies in the snow, his body buried in a blowing drift while the rest of the town of Presbyterian Church attempts to put out a fire burning down their house of worship. The film also grapples with the same “big guys” versus “little guys” conflict found in other mining films, catalyzing with an altercation between McCabe and a mining corporation from Bear Claw, the town down the mountain from Presbyterian Church, but in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the community nearly fails and is either bought or destroyed by a corporate mining company. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, eco-resistance destroys corporate gunslingers. But McCabe and Mrs. Miller illustrates the cost of that vigilante justice: the death of a hero and the community he attempts to build.