Playing Out the String

Fiction. Robert McCabe is a professor of film at a Tennessee university. Until this semester he's passed his time trading film quotes with another professor to make a game of current events. Then a woman accuses him of exposing himself in the university library over the summer, and the quotes take on a new seriousness, starting with Ernest Borgnine's "playing out the string" from his movie The Wild Bunch. Borgnine says this directly to indicate a fatalistic will to continue despite overwhelming odds. And sure enough, he and his friends are killed by gunfire. Amid mounting accusations will McCabe end in a similar spiral?