How Unforgiven laid the classic movie
western to rest
Clint Eastwood’s gritty 1992 film dispelled many of
the myths which he helped to popularise.
Ever since John Ford
admitted to printing the legend in his 1962 masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the traditional mythology of the Old West has
undergone an extensive series of cinematic reappraisals. From The Wild Bunch to Heaven’s Gate, gritty revisionist westerns and so-called
‘anti-westerns’ have sought to counteract the romantic misrepresentations of
violence, history and heroism perpetuated by the genre’s talented mythmakers in
an effort to bring audiences an undiluted dose of the ‘real’ Wild West.
As the effortlessly cool protagonist of
Sergio Leone’s seminal Dollars Trilogy, Clint Eastwood once helped usher
in a new wave of westerns that would dispel some of the falsehoods of the John
Ford era while popularising plenty of fresh ones. As the director and star of Unforgiven, he provided the final word on half a century’s worth
of horse-mounted do-gooders and lone wolf gunmen. Neither the most disparaging
nor most realistic of the various cinematic responses to the genre’s
creaky archetypes, it is nonetheless gratifyingly direct and
psychologically astute, stripping the gloss and pretence from the old tropes to
reveal their raw, bloody origins in both American history and the modern day
moviegoer’s own escapist needs.
Like the Leone westerns before it, Unforgiven
takes place in a dangerous world full of rugged sons of bitches, killing
each other for money, pride or in the name of vengeance. The key difference
lies in our response to the brutality on display. Whenever Eastwood’s
legendary Man with No Name dispensed justice, the questionable nature
of his acts was rendered moot by the fact that his adversaries were
always depicted as being more unambiguously wicked than him. In Unforgiven, when Eastwood’s retired
bandit William Munny is hired to kill two men who cut up a prostitute’s face,
their capital punishment is carried out in entirely joyless fashion.
At the same time, David Webb Peoples’ script is saturated with unnerving
reminders of Munny’s own horrific, booze-fuelled track record. In a land where
cocky gunslingers fraudulently brag about past murders (which either
happened not as reported or not at all), Munny is the only one to actively
downplay his own body count out of a sense of remorse for what he’s done –
and fear of what he might yet do.
Of course, even in the era of Leone any suggestion of moral
righteousness was mere window dressing to the real reason for watching
these films. When stylish works like A
Fistful of Dollars dragged the western into meaner terrain, the genre
wasn’t de-romanticised so much as it was given a fresh shot of testosterone.
This was a rougher wild west than the one John Wayne had inhabited, and so the
heroes (and by extension the viewer) had to be even tougher in order to
thrive in it. Unforgiven short
circuits this arrangement by turning the implicit into the explicit – namely,
that what this really all comes down to is men and their dicks.
When those men set the film’s grim events in motion by
mutilating Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Levine), they do so as a furious
response to Fitzgerald giggling at her client’s “teensy little pecker”. By
contrast, local sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) tells the story of
‘Two-Gun Corcoran’, who earned his name from the pistol he held in his
hand and the considerably larger weapon stored in his
pants, recalling how bounty hunter English Bob killed Corcoran in a
drunken act of jealousy. Combine these obvious phallic references
with images of Munny struggling to mount his horse or his gun failing to
fire, and suddenly his mission to avenge the damsel in distress doesn’t seem so
dignified.
Sheriff Daggett, meanwhile, sees right through the performances of these
arrogant, self-styled killers and conmen – yet he too is a striking subversion
of a timeworn archetype. His ruthless response to the crimes of Munny and
his contemporaries positions him as the primary antagonist of the piece,
but it’s not hard to imagine Daggett being the hero of this story in the same
vein as John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper. Like Marshal Will Kane in
High Noon and Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, Daggett is a
steadfast, arguably well-intentioned proponent of law and order.
Nonetheless, his vindictive side emerges once trouble comes to his
town, mirroring the violent sense of justice enforced by the very outlaws he
beats to a pulp. While Daggett’s final line, “I’ll see you in hell, William
Munny,” may read like a typical tough guy kiss-off, in the context of the
graceless, primeval omnishambles that results from one woman laughing at a
man’s dick, his words become a chilling admission.
In the 25 years since Unforgiven’s
release, the western has thrived as an arthouse genre that continues to probe
the themes explored by Eastwood’s film and other revisionist forebears – be it
in issues of masculinity (Meek’s
Cutoff) or
mythmaking (The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) – with even the most crowd-pleasing and
action-centric of recent entries tending to contain some element of
critique. It seems that any attempt to rejuvenate the screen outlaws and lawmen
of yore now comes with a twinge of guilt. As for Eastwood himself, Unforgiven was perhaps the
statement he needed to make in order to step away from the genre
once and for all.
9 AUG 2017
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