Ron Collins
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

When referred to as doing nothing there are too many possible options.

“I’m a big believer in doing nothing”, states gambler/gunfighter Paden, played by Kevin Kline in the all-time classic western, Silverado.

But was he?

The topic at the moment, was whether or not to get in the middle of a local feud, and use his considerable skills with sidearms to help resolve it. In that instance his “doing nothing” was component to a much more loaded and challenging ideogram, of doing nothing about something. Doing nothing was not actually nothing, at all. It was not a question, as it turns out later in the story, merely of his decision to remain passively neutral in a conflict he began by concluding was none of his business. He finds that doing nothing, was actually quite something in itself, which was to stand by and allow people who had become his friends to come to harm, when he had the means to help protect them or to see justice done to their enemies.

It was the night of the fire, when the homestead office was burned down and the young son of the land agent was kidnapped by the local cattle baron’s men, and the boy’s mother assaulted in the act, the nephew and sister of the two of the three friends he’d come to town with after the elder of the two brothers had first saved his life then had sprung him from a wrongful imprisonment, that he decided that doing nothing amounted to being on the wrong side, and to betraying his friends.

Then he learns that the third friend, Malachi (Danny Glover) has lost his father to the hired guns who had earlier driven him off his land, and that Malachi’s sister was now in danger for hiding her wounded brother in the very saloon run by his new friend Stella, and it turns out that both the women work for the bought-off lawman Cobb (Brian Dennehy) who owns the saloon but whose badge is owned by the arch-villain cattle baron….

It’s just a movie, of course. But in its way, what appears to be primarily a gunsy horse opera packed with cliches (and it is absolutely that), can also be taken as one of the greatest melodramas of moral dilemma ever to appear on film. Probably the core line of the piece, in a script packed with cowboy philosophies and a continual examination of just how laissez-faire a frontier life of minding one’s own business can ever really be, is when Stella the barkeep first appears.

Stella, an unusually tiny woman played delightfully by the unusually tiny Linda Hunt, is in her way the powerhouse character whose towering stature as a human being ties the entire multi-dimensional narrative together. In her first scene, Paden meets her in the saloon she runs, is immediately smitten with her undeniable charm and outsized self-confidence in such a small package, and sees her step up onto a ramp behind the bar which allows her to do her job at all. He gives her a quizzical look, and she says:

“The world is what you make of it, friend. If it doesn’t fit, you make alterations.”

The entire complex of story lines comes to examine in depth, this one idea: is the world what we make of it, or do we do nothing about how it doesn’t fit?

In a piece which manages to explore everything from gun control to racism to collectivism-vs-oligarchy to motherhood to filial piety to upholding the dignity of sex workers (“dance hall girls”), it all comes down to this central moral query:

What might we each feel called on to do, to alter the world, when it doesn’t fit?

Of course, many of us might never be faced with any one of the dire and immediate crises that come at us nonstop, in a western shootemup meant primarily to entertain us.

Or we might. We might, and not even know it. What we do about it might come as naturally as breathing, or it might provoke great inner torment in deciding what side to take or whether to take one at all.

As for your own tale, Erika Sauter, I see more moral dilemma being played out than maybe you do. A question of getting up early on a Saturday, or of going to church on a Sunday, probably represents a far larger moral code to be obeyed both for you and your husband, than first meets the eye. He may well feel more compelled by his “check-marks” than he is able to articulate: checking them, seems his way of answering his own inner requirements to be the human being he believes he must be. Both enjoying your idle times to the fullest, and going to church, may be among your ways of answering yours. That you each go about it so very differently, and each have firmly-resolved reasons to, probably has a great deal to do with how you each know you can love and need and hold onto and depend on one another, when the rubber meets the road.

But then, you probably knew that already.

In my experience, the loves that last, are between people who spend years mostly annoying the living daylights out of each other, and now and then can each imagine no other individual they would rather have at their side. Unlike a splashy western movie full of gunfights and staggering moral conundrae, life doesn’t always have the rubber need to meet the road quite so inescapably or nearly so often.

But when it does, those two already know both who they are, and why they chose whom they chose.

Otherwise, as Emmett House (Scott Glenn) understates in an early scene, when he recounts fighting for his life with no one but himself to rely on:

“I had to get up anyway…”

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s