It is certainly strongly suggested that the reader view the clip and think about it before reading my take on it.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller was hailed at the time for being a different take on the Western and that it was. It is said to be much about the dying of the West at end of the 19th Century. Taking place in a mining town two business people, a man and a women in competition  with, among other things, brothels become entangled. 

This clip starts with a screen showing a gaggle of the ladies of the night outside the nicer of the two brothels tenderly showing off a naive cowboy who they have just shown a good time. Few movies have taken such pains to give a sense of time and place as this one. Here the women seem at ease with themselves and for a moment there is peace. The kid thinks he has wondered into paradise. 

This whole section, however, has nothing to do with the plot per se. It does do much to set the overall theme of the movie which seems to be the dying of the West. The inevitable onslaught of the corporate monster, the inescapableness of organization, the death of the individual. You get trapped one way or another. The West was where the individual could be heroic and the Colt was the "great equalizer". 

So here we cut to, importantly, a short, young man on a porch who is with a very board looking native American. As we note he fires at a jug and misses. He explains immediately that "the trick is not to hit the jug but to make it float." His onlooker seems to care less but our gun slinger proceeds to shoot around the jug and "make it float". 

While certainly not vital to interpreting anything about what happens and indeed this is the power of the scene for those that do not know the movie I will mention that this young man is in town as a "hit man". So that said it seems to me that he too is board, he is looking for an audience. He sets himself up in his own eyes. He  is first and foremost his own audience. He finds himself with this Native American but again I think he is more than anything his own audience and he sets himself the task of hitting the jug, and missing. This is devastating beyond what any of us can probably imagine, or maybe not, depending on our own experiences with such things. But I say he is devastated. This failure quickly becomes "magnified" and "amplified" in his minds eye and the pain becomes unbearable. Note again that his audience could really care less and he probably senses this which just deepens the wound. Even though he has done a beautiful job of covering his "error" he must still redeem himself. He must recover from his humiliation. He must restage the trauma so to speak and this time triumph and so he masterfully sets up the kill to the amazement of all.

So this is all a humiliation that took place internal to this young man. He humiliated himself. Humiliation was a "cognition" for him. To miss the jug made him "bad", inadequate, totally unacceptable. This he had to have learned somewhere prior. This harsh judgment that once was produced by an outside party now is internalized by a scolding self and the pain is unbearable and one way to get away from the pain is to go after someone else. To humiliate other.

What do you think?