Bridge Scene from McCabe and Mrs Miller

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS 51-YEAR-OLD MOVIE.

So why does Kid kill Cowboy on the bridge? I get they're foreshadowing how McCabe tries to evade death but can't. But in the context of the movie, do they give a reason for killing Cowboy that I missed, or was it for nothing?

I don't remember there being a specific reason for it, I think the Kid did it just because he could (though it does show us how casually he can kill someone, of course).

I think he does it because he can. He does it for fun.

And he totally gets away with it, even though several people understand that he cheaply staged the whole thing.

It's a brutal reminder of the kind of setting it is, and a reminder not to think that just because we like characters they will have any kind of a chance of surviving.

It’s very similar to a scene from Shane, where the villain picks a fight simply to send a message.

It's been long enough the exact particulars aren't cemented into my brain, but I think it was more the idea of the kid acting tough, picking a fight, to prove his manliness. In a bully sort of way, but more lethal. But also boredom. e.g. IIRC him and his companions were having a competition shooting bottles on the ice beforehand. So it's kind of a, someone inexperienced coming along with a gun, let's pick a duel with them to assert themselves as a manly marksman.


Granted, my recollection is also thinking they had just asked him where he came from, so him coming from the brothel with a gun, may have also signaled the possibility he could have been a hired mercenary, or maybe it was more just a message of shooting the clientele of their target (which I think was closer to the Shane example).


Most of the variations though have a nuance to them that mostly does get summarized with, "because he could."


While know the soundtrack is a famous Leonard Cohen song, that one scene does make me think of Johnny Cash's Don't Bring your Guns to Town.

Three Leonard Cohen songs: "The Stranger Song", "Sisters of Mercy", and "Winter Lady".

__________________
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Thank you for the correction, for some reason it's The Stranger Song that got burnt into mind for being associated with the movie.

That one does serve as sort of McCabe's theme, "Winter Lady" as Constance Miller's, and "Sisters of Mercy" the whores'.

Here is Roger Ebert's take on the bridge scene...

Thanks on digging up the two clips. I had forgotten a lot more details of the Shane clip. I think the Shane clip is the more stereotypical scene of a tyrannical villain pressing his thumb on a town's populace (as I recall in terms of sending a message, there is a deliberate desire to run people off of the land). And while McCabe's scene might also be qualified as being a version of the stereotype of the dangerous, macho villain forcing bystanders into a contest to demonstrate how bad they are (which I think is also a thing in westerns), in McCabe, because the character is so young, it's that weird mix of insecurity mixed with the arrogance of youth that rings a lot more true to me. I mean, it feels like we all knew someone like that kid at some point in the younger part of our lives.

(Despite the embarrassing gaps in my memory of the film, I do consider McCabe & Mrs. Miller as my favorite western. Admittedly, a genre that I'm not probably not as big on as other people).

That would be my answer as well, as there is no Kid and no Cowboy, they don't exist except in a writer's imagination. So the motivation is for the audience to see just how much of a threat the Kid character is.

I think that there's one more thing that the scene does, which is to show that you can't necessarily "play fair" in this environment and expect to survive. Characters sometimes have to be selfish or even "cheat" to stay alive. I think it makes you a little more empathetic toward some of the choices made by the main characters.