“Buffalo Bill! The thrill of my life to have invented you!”

When I was a kid one of my favorite places to go was a theme park up near Lake George called Storytown USA.  It was the nearest thing we had to a local Disneyland, scaled way down of course, with rides and attractions based on fairy tales, fables, tall tales, legends, and, without their ever being actually named, TV shows and movies.

It was a modest place, but not chintzy.  What was there was done well, presented with pride and some dash, and clean, shiny, colorful, and fun.  But my favorite part was also the best part, Ghost Town!

Ghost Town was essentially the set of a TV western with probably as many “buildings” that were just false fronts.  But there were plenty of buildings you could go into, like the livery stable, the blacksmith’s, the saloon, the general store, and the jail, enough places to visit that you could feel as though you were wandering the wooden plank sidewalks of real town in the Old West.  It helped that several times a day masked bandits would ride into town and hold up the bank.  A posse, rounded up from the kids on hand, would help the law track down and capture one of the robbers.  Then members of his gang would sneak back into town and there’d be a jail break followed by a shoot out with the good guys that would include, depending on the bravery or recklessness of the college kids playing the bandits that summer, at least one bandit getting shot off the roof of the hotel.

In between the robberies and the gunfights there’d be shows on an outdoor stage built out from the side of the saloon.  The shows would feature “cowgirls” who did rope tricks, “cowboys” who played the guitar and sang, “scouts” who had knife throwing acts, and saloon girls who danced the can-can lifting their skirts high for the bored dads in the audience.  Frankly, I could never imagine getting so old that I would be bored by gunfights, rope tricks, and knife throwing acts that I would think it was a treat when those acts were interrupted by girls who couldn’t do rope tricks or throw knives.

I still haven’t gotten that old.

All of this was presided over by the town marshal, Wild Windy Bill McKay, who was a quick-draw artist and singing cowboy as well as a daring and resourceful upholder of law and order on the violent frontier.

Now, it was obvious to the most gullible kid that Windy Bill wasn’t a real cowboy.  No real cowboy had stars on his boots or wore red jeans and fringed shirts with multi-colored sleeves, except Roy Rogers when he wasn’t working around the ranch.

But even though we knew the truth we accepted it as fact that he spent his days doing exactly what we were watching and helping him do, chase bandits and shoot it out with bad guys.  Ghost Town, to our minds, was more dangerous than Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood combined, and it would be a hundred times worse if it wasn’t for Windy Bill.

For all we knew and I still know Bill McKay had majored in accounting in college or spent years before coming to work at Storytown selling shoes.

But he presented himself as an authentic Western hero and legend and seemed confident that we wouldn’t doubt it and, son of a gun, we didn’t.

To us---to me anyway---for the time we moseyed the dusty streets of Ghost Town, Marshall Wild Windy Bill McKay was as real a lawman as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickcock.

The irony being, of course, that the Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill we knew and admired weren’t any more authentic than Wild Windy Bill McKay. 

All three of them were creations of a hundred years worth of work by dime novelists, playwrights, movie makers, producers of TV shows, and one William F. Cody.

Buffalo Bill.

What went on in Ghost Town borrowed heavily from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, as in fact did every movie and TV western that came after him.  We “know” what an Indian attack and the cavalry riding to the rescue look like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what a stage coach hold-up looks like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what Custer’s Last Stand looked like because of Buffalo Bill.  We know what an authentic Western hero looks like and how he acts because of Buffalo Bill, and by the way even when he’s short and sporting a crew cut and spits tobacco sideways out of the corner of his mouth he still looks and acts like Buffalo Bill, tall, handsome, noble in bearing and in action and in thought.  No matter how far the anti-hero of a revisionist western departs from the image, the image is always with him.  It’s the shadow he casts except when he becomes the shadow cast by the image.

Buffalo Bill didn’t invent the tropes and cliches of the Western but he codified them, clarified them, and set the standards for their presentation.  He didn’t personally rewrite the history of the settlement of the American frontier to turn it into the set of self-congratulatory heroic legends and lies that stood in the place of truth in our collective memory for over a century.  But his revision of the rewrite brought it all together and because his shows were so “real” and so popular and so widely imitated his story of the Wild West became and has remained the most deeply believed, even by movie directors in the process of debunking it.

We may know it’s not true but we want it to be and the most cynical and revisionist Westerns still express that wish.  Nobody can resist the charm and the will of Buffalo Bill.

This isn’t exactly the theme of Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians.  It’s more like the given.

For one thing, this theme, for it to be a theme, must include the fact of the audience’s complicity.  Wild Windy Bill McKay’s existence depended on our willingness to believe in it and our ability to convince ourselves that we did believe it.  There’s no audience complicity in Altman’s film because as far as the script and the camera bother to notice there is no audience. 

I mean an audience watching the performances by the members of Buffalo Bill’s troupe depicted in the movie.  But the same can be said of the audience watching the movie.  Altman, never one to play to his audience’s expectations, seems to have gone out of his way to ignore his audience entirely on this one.  He makes no attempt to draw us in, either into the story itself or into the Wild West show.  We don’t get to feel what it might have been like to watch these spectacles live.   He seems to take it for granted that because we’ve seen all these tricks and stunts a thousand times before we don’t care if we see them again.

Without the audience’s complicity in rewriting history to the point of erasing it and replacing it with myths, legends, and self-serving lies, there’s no real criticism of the process by which a people hide who they really are from themselves.

Which is fine, as long as you understand that Altman didn’t intend to make a movie that was about that.

He didn’t make a revisionist western.  He’d already made one of those.  McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians depends on our having seen that one and others like Little Big Man, Doc, The Wild Bunch, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and note who starred in the last two.

But Buffalo Bill and the Indians is still about watching a performance.  It’s just that it’s about a single person watching a single person perform with the watcher and the watched being the same single person.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians is about Buffalo Bill watching himself being Buffalo Bill.

It’s about a man who has done things that ought to have made him legendary making his living off being not a legend but a fiction.  The Buffalo Bill who’s the star of the show, the reason people come to see the Wild West, has nothing in common with the young scout who earned the nickname Buffalo Bill.  Bill Cody knows he’s had real adventures that should be famous.  But his fortune, his show, his company of cowboys, Indians, trick shot artists, and their families and support staff depend on people paying money to see the phony Buffalo Bill, the one invented to sell dime novels and now tickets.  This is not somebody Bill Cody knows or even truly believes exists.  It’s no wonder then he’s never sure how to be this Buffalo Bill.  He’s always performing, constantly making it up, and it’s not easy.  He loses track of the plot.  He forgets his lines.  He continually finds himself in situations where there’s no way for him to know how “Buffalo Bill” should act or what “he” should say.  And he’s not smart enough or quick enough or cynical enough for the job.

Rather than try to keep it all straight in his head, he’s decided it’s easier to just give in and believe he is who he’s pretending to be.  He’s found that it helps if he never thinks about it and to that end he spends a lot of his time not thinking.

What we have then is the spectacle of one of the most grounded of movie stars playing a man floating through life on his own hot air.  One of the most self-skeptical of movie stars playing a pompous, self-infatuated windbag.  One of the smartest actors going playing someone who has made himself willfully dumb.  One of the coolest of leading men playing a buffoon.

Paul Newman’s performance as Buffalo Bill is a whole lot of fun to watch.

It’s also kind of sad, and I’m not sure all that sadness sticks only to the character.

But that’s something we can work out in the discussion, which is underway…now.

Friday morning update:  Thanks to Michael, Phil, and Bill for making last night’s discussion great.  Comment threads on these posts stay open so feel free to chip in anytime.

Next week’s a double-feature, Secret Honor and Streamers, but we’ll be focusing on how filming plays changed Altman’s style going into the 1990s.

And, remember, in two weeks we’ll be doing Popeye, but instead of a formal discussion I’ll be leading the live-blogging.  We’ll start the fun earlier that night, at 9 PM Eastern.  Mark your calendar and update your Netflix queue.

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Comments

[Michael Bartley]

He (they) may be a device but essential don't you think? The contrast between white and indian (as types maybe more than real people) seems to be at the heart of things.

[Lance]

Wow. Apparently PBS has the whole episode online! I love the internet!

[Lance]

Shoot. Apparently nothing in my intro is an original thought. Anybody who watches the AE show will think I ripped it all off!

[Lance]

Definitely essential. They're good character. And it's crushing when Halsey turns up at the end playing "Sitting Bull."

[Michael Bartley]

It was a solid episode. They also had one on Kit Carson (after Hampton Sides book) that I thought was better. Also, I thought We Shall Remain by Native American filmakers, etc. was excellent you should see the series if you haven't already.
Okay, well I'm done in. Thanks Lance maybe we will carry this on another time.
Finally, your work here is excellent. I really appreciate your talent as a writer and thinker. This site is special.

[Michael Bartley]

...and original thinking is one of your strengths.

[Lance]

Michael, thanks. And thanks for chipping in here. I hope you feel better. (PS. I like the Sides book on Carson.)

[Phil Nugent]

I was really excited when Lance announced he was doing these Altman discussions, and then I wound up not saying anything during the early ones, because I love the bejesus out of "California Split" and "Thieves Like Us", and it turns out that I've been babbling about how much I love them that I'm all talked out about them. But I could talk about this one till the cows come home, because I've never liked it much, and (unliked some other Altman movies that I was sort of indifferent to from the first time I heard about them, like "A Perfect Couple"), I always really wanted to like it, and I'm still trying to work out why I don't.

Lance (great essay, Lance!) nails the core reason why I have a problem with it when he writes that Altman never draws you in. I can't imagine that this was deliberate, though. Altman was a showman who, coming straight from "Nashville", enjoyed dazzling you with how many balls he could keep in the air, and he probably could have easily identified with Buffalo Bill if he hadn't apparently decided that the old boy was in need of debunking. (I'm not sure how much Paul Newman identified with him, either. I was watching "Hud" the other night, and admiring how gracefully he could play a braggart and a bastard. Here, he's ineffectual, and that might be okay if he didn't wear it on his sleeve. Newman was a guy who, because of his looks and charm, never had to raise his voice to stand out in a crowd. The role might have been better entrusted to an actor who knew what it felt like to have to fight a little for the world's attention.)

It's a strange movie, because it has so many people rolling around in it, but so much of the time they seem to be there to help carry the ideas that not many of them get the chance to turn into characters. (For me, the big exceptions are Geraldine Chaplin and John Considine, two actors whose careers were closely bound up with Altman and other filmmakers he had a hand in getting started as directors.) At one point, E. L. Doctorow, uncredited and looking insanely pleased with himself, turns up in what amounts to a sea of cameos. He was hanging around because Altman was going to make "Ragtime" next, and he and Altman were working on the script together, and I guess Altman decided that he might as well put him to work. But his presence might make you realize how much better the movie's flat, stylized tone might have worked with Doctorow's material, and make you wonder if Altman was looking forward to his next project while he was supposed to be focused on this one. In any case, it turned out that his next project wasn't "Ragtime" after all, because after the commercial wipeout of "Buffalo Bill", the producer, Dino ("When the monkey die, everybody cry.") de Laurentiis wanted nothing more to do with him.

One thing I remember being surprised by the first time I saw the movie: the Wild West show doesn't go anyplace. I don't know as much about the actual Buffalo Bill as Lance does, but I imagined that, in a movie that spans a fair amount of time, they'd pack up and barnstorm across the country and play to different audiences in different parts of the country, and that the mechanics of that would be something to see. But they just spend the whole movie planted on the same patch of terrain, and I think that sense of stasis adds to the lack of a feeling of life going on, the feeling that we're seeing a bunch of conceits glued together. There are times when the movie reminds me of one of those ghost stories about departed spirits who are doomed to spend eternity tied to the same place, acting out the same rituals over and over. Maybe that's part of the point, but it adds to the feeling that you're watching a movie made by an energy vampire.

The static set-up also makes it feel as if you're watching a play, which is ironic, considering that Altman treated Kopit's play with the kind of lofty disregard that he'd gotten in the habit of treating screenplays that didn't go where he wanted them to. I think the next couple of movies up are from his filmed-theater period in the '80s, when he was recording plays and taking pride in not changing a word of the written texts. That ought to make for an interesting comparison.

[Michael Bartley]

Just stopped by for a last comment and read Phil's. So, while he waits for Lance, I'll just say that while I love the movie and find Altman's work fascinating, Cody's life is so big that another artist could find many trails to explore. For example, Phil's point about stasis, The Wild West did travel all over the USA and enjoyed extended wildly popular runs all over Europe including a performance for Queen Victoria. The show also, though an unofficial participant, became the most popular event at the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exposition. I think a filmmaker could have an interesting time contrasting the visuals of the "old west" in the performance with the grit and complexity of the urban world. They had great success in NYC for example and the contrasts, the wide open west performed in the turn of the century city, the throngs of immigrants in the stands (which suddenly makes me think of the Seinfeld line about why would an immigrant leave a land filled with ponies), all would be entertaining and powerful.
Also, I think that static performance, intentional or not, ends up reflecting the problem Cody had with the transition to the new medium of film. He failed because from his earliest performances on small stages to his Congress of the Roughriders massive shows, they were all performed at a distance. The stage shows were particularly stilted, mostly standing around telling stories. The arena show were bigger and more wonderous than any circus. Yet, all of them were seen from the perspective of the stage. Cody never understood the close-up, the small moment of film. Apparently, that is why his one film was a failure. I would be very interested in yours, Lance's, and Bill Rennie's thoughts on this aspect of storytelling.

[Michael Bartley]

Finally, I meant to discuss this last night but, Bill suggested spirits and...
Two points. One, I always love the fact that Altman in his westerns maintains his frantic pace in dialogue and human movement, I think here especially of Beatty's crackling rush's up and down the streets in Mcabe, in contrast to the westerns typicaly laconic nature. In this film it is particularly strong when you put the nearly mute Sitting Bull in the room with the manic energy of the wild west perfomers, publicist, and manager.
Two, I love the look of the film. The antique sepia quality works perfect for this film. I would be interested in everyone's thoughts on the visual style of Altman. I think both Mcabe and Buffalo Bill are visually stunning films up there with the very best of western (the genre)film.

[Phil Nugent]

It is a great-looking movie. Sometimes, though, I catch myself thinking that "McCabe" might be the best-looking movie ever made.

You know, the look of "McCabe" was achieved partly through "flashing" the film (i.e., exposing it after it had been shot), and because they were so sure that it would work out the way they hoped it would, and because they were afraid that the studio wouldn't release their version if they had any choice about it, Altman gave the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, the go-ahead the flash the negative, without making a back-up copy. To go by his comments in the oral bio, Warren Beatty, whose last words are probably going to be "I'm glad I made 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller', really!" still hasn't gotten over his shock at this, and I can see his point, but it's kind of awe-inspiring that Altman and Zsigmond decided that they'd rather risk turning the whole shoot into a snow vacation than give anyone else the power to assemble a version of the movie substantially different from the one they had in their heads. Reminds me of something Gordon Willis once said about working on "The Godfather", that his attitude was to plan and be careful and allow for mistakes, and Coppola's attitude was more like, "I'll set my clothes on fire, and if I can make it to the other side of the room, it'll be spectacular!"

[JasonM]

Never seen this until tonight. A few thoughts:
1.I don't know the history of this film, but it felt like something was missing,as though the studio or Dino De Laurentiis edited it to death.

2.During the scene where the Indian is given a flag("enemies in 1875,friends in 1886" or what ever he said),my wife pointed out how that's not very different from the recent Olympics' Open Ceremony,featuring dancers from the First Nations. Just drives home how much influence still has today.

3.The only real eye-rolling moment I had was Ed Goodman's (Keitel) line about how there's "no business like show business". It's an obvious reference to 'Annie Get Your Gun'(also about the Wild West show), a little too cutsy, Altman should be better than that.

[mac macgillicuddy]

This has nothing to do with Robert Altman or the movie. But I also remember going to Story Town and visiting Ghost Town. I'm not sure if either is still going, but I do think that some time between then and now, Story Town got bigger and changed its name to The Great Escape, or something like that.

Anyway, two things I remember clearly about Story Town. You could see it sprawling along the mountainside from I-87 North (aka the Northway) and that site always, always, made you want to get off at the exit and go there. And (2), I can see the bank robber in my mind's eye dropping from the roof as if it were yesterday. I also remember the horse pulling the bars out of the jail window.

Now, THAT was the wild west!