Unforgiven
Eastwood’s Heroic Humbug
From The Blood Poets:
A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-99
The
warlike days are over. . . . I am the last of my kind.
—Count
Dracula
If
Dracula offers us sympathy for the damned, Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed Unforgiven (1992) must be the other side
of the story. Every bit as much a “revisionist” work as Dracula, Unforgiven
exposes a myth in the process of reinventing it, for a new and smarter (if not
wiser) audience. Just as the old conventional standards of “evil” no longer
hold water, so the traditional notion of “good” is found, on close examination,
to be so much hogwash. In Unforgiven,
William Munny (Eastwood) is the Western hero stripped down to the basics: a
lonely, bitter, twisted man lacking social graces and human aspirations, a man
for whom killing has become not only a way of life but also a means for keeping
his inner demons at bay. For all its “reinventing,” however, Unforgiven is a surprisingly
traditional, even conventional work, one that follows all the basic rules, and
fulfills all our expectations of a Clint Eastwood action flick. In the standard
Western format, Munny, long retired since the death of his wife, is enticed
back into the game for one last score (etc., etc; the rest you know, right down
to Munny’s partner, played by Morgan Freeman, being killed, thereby allowing
the repentant Munny to get really mean at the end).
The
only area in which the film differs is thematically, in its rather labored,
philosophic subtext, which is, most vocally, anti-violence. Eastwood has it both ways here, despite all the
protests of the script; knowing that people come to one of his Westerns to see
him kill people, that’s what he does. As
Carl Platinga writes in his illuminating essay, “Spectacles of Death,”
“Deserve,” or justice, may have nothing to do with it, but audience desire certainly does. Like
others, I sensed the deep satisfaction some audience members took when Munny
blows away his enemies on that dark, stormy night, suggesting that for many of
us, the myth of redemptive violence has become so entrenched, and the pleasures
expected of Eastwood’s violent persona so firmly ingrained, that they conflict
with and perhaps override our desire for Munny’s redemption.[1]
The
difference here is that theoretically we are not asked to applaud him for his
show of superhuman skill and prowess, but rather to question, and even pity,
the spectacle of a man driven by his own mercenary motives and inner demons
(represented by the bottle), to commit repeated acts of violence. But of
course, we are really meant to admire him anyway, because this is Clint Eastwood, after all, and the
scrutiny which the script subjects Munny to is directed more at his past than
his present. We are never asked to despise or feel abhorrence for his acts, but
only to feel a new ambivalence as to whether or not they constitute “heroics,”
or whether simply brutality. In this ambivalence, the film fits into the “good
vs. good” category of movie myth; but as its slant is the opposite to that of Dracula (i.e., rather than redeeming the
bad guy, it serves to condemn the goody), it might better be seen as “evil vs.
evil,” or at least corrupt vs. corrupt. All of the male characters are driven
by all-too-human desires, none of them constituting Western heroes or villains
in any ordinary sense. The villain, played by Gene Hackman, is a nasty piece of
work all right, but he’s also a rather mundane chap, motivated by profit and
power, admittedly, but not actively villainous as such, merely unscrupulous
(one feels as though his villainy is reluctant—he considers his ruthlessness to
be necessary to maintain order in the town). This mundaneness, the banality of
his character (Hackman is perfect for the role), actually makes him seem worse, while at the same time it earns
him a begrudging kind of sympathy from us. His last words, “I was building a
house,” give him a rare kind of pathos, and at moments like this he is united
with Munny in a common bond of pitifulness: he is human, all-too-human.
John
Belton writes on the Western hero:
In emerging from and retreating
to the wilderness, the hero remains identified with the natural landscape and
functions as a force of nature, purging that landscape of corruption. In
slaying the enemy of society, who often resembles him in appearance or
character, the western hero symbolically slays himself. Having brought peace to
the community through the use of his superior strength and unique skills, this
western hero is unable to enter the community because it can no longer tolerate
the excessive violence with which he, like his former enemy, remains
identified.[2]
The
most interesting thing about Unforgiven
(which must be one of the most overrated American films in history) is the way
in which Eastwood works with his own
mythos, and reinvents the persona of the mythological “Man with No Name” as an
unprincipled, undiscriminating killer, a man who has been isolated by his own
legend, who lacks any contact with, or understanding for, other people, who is
a loner due as much to his own inadequacy as to his strength, a sad and empty
man and, at bottom, a weak man (his dependence on drink is how the film rather
simplistically denotes this weakness). Yet, at the same time, because it’s
Eastwood we’re talking about here, Munny has a dignity, a poise, and above all
an experience, amounting to a bitter
sort of wisdom, that few men ever attain. He knows things.[3] Hence the film’s philosophy, its supposedly
profound reinterpretation of the familiar fallacies of the Western, come almost
entirely out of Munny’s mouth. He tells us first of all that being a successful
gunfighter has little or nothing to do with aim, skill, or even speed, but most
of all with the capacity to remain cool under fire; he explains that the other
guy will invariably be so stressed that he’ll fire off three or four shots
before he even takes proper aim. Munny admits that much of his “coolness” came
from being half-drunk most of the time. He admits he killed for bounty, or for
convenience, or just when plain riled or soused, and in the mood for being
nasty. When the young apprentice makes a quip about his first victim having “had
it coming,” Munny says flatly, “We’ve all got it coming, kid.” This may not be
Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, but coming out of the mouth of the century’s most
celebrated and enduring cinematic icon of violence, it has a certain ironic
kick to it.
The
film’s spoken message seems to be
that, in a chaotic and violent universe, violent behavior can often be mistaken
for heroics, but that heroes, as such, do not exist, which only leaves us
with violent men. The film tells us that these men are invariably haunted by
the ghosts of their own dead, or more precisely, of their own actions; they
know deep down what no one else knows, that they killed not for justice or
righteousness (or even revenge or profit), but because that was all they knew
how to do. Hence the film appears
to be making a statement similar in meaning to that of the gospel’s
declaration: “It is necessary that evil come into the world, but woe unto him
through whom it comes.” Munny is seen above all as a sufferer—he is plagued and tormented by the guilt, or “karma,” accumulated through his violent past.
And yet—and it’s a mighty big “and yet”—the film’s unspoken, dramatic meaning is totally at odds with this more overt
and moralistic one, seeing as Unforgiven
basically follows the old Western formula of “good man with bad past comes out
of retirement, loses friend and wreaks vengeance, thereby liberating oppressed
people.” In other words, although it shows the hero himself as anything but
heroic—as a displaced and maladjusted person—it shows his deeds as basically necessary, and therefore good. In some strange,
implicit way, it presents Munny every bit as much as a force of nature, of
cosmic justice or balance, as The Man
with No Name.
Unforgiven is more complicated than deep—its complexity comes
not from a conscious ambiguity, so much as a kind of schizophrenia that exists
between its intentions and its methods. There is no way, finally, for Clint
Eastwood to play anything but the hero, and exposing him as a nasty, unethical
killer who shoots women, children, and unarmed men (we only ever see him do the
latter, however) does little, finally, to undermine our respect and affection
for the icon which he embodies. The failure of Unforgiven rests squarely on Clint’s broad shoulders, I’m afraid,
and indeed all the scenes in which he doesn’t appear (most especially the ones
between Hackman and Richard Harris) work fine. Eastwood is a generous director
and works well with actors. But he is simply not enough of an actor himself to
play this complex, deeply troubled and profoundly ordinary man; quite simply we can’t believe in Eastwood as a drunken murderer, any more than we can
believe in him in the early scenes as a hog farmer. Nonetheless, for all its
flaws, and despite the absurd excess of praise which was showered upon it, Unforgiven is a basically honorable,
thoughtful work, one which serves (much as Dracula
serves, for all its flaws, to end an
era of horror films) as a worthy enough epitaph for the Western, and perhaps even
for the whole popular myth (in both senses of the word) of the righteous hero,
“doing what a man’s got to do.”
In
the final scene, as Munny stands in the rain with the U.S. flag behind him—his
cracked voice admonishing the townspeople to live right or else “I’ll be back
to kill every last one of you”—borders on low camp. It’s a deliberate parody of
the angel-of-vengeance archetype which Eastwood, perhaps more than any other
actor alive, served to consolidate in our collective fantasies. By so exposing the
myth as a myth, the legend as a lie,
it effectively strips us of a once-valuable illusion which we have used,
perhaps unwisely, to keep ourselves secure in the face of chaos. That illusion
is of a righteous force, or presence, a personal protector, god, or savior, who
looks over us and keeps us safe, punishing evil doers and thereby rescuing the
decent, pure folk from evil. Unforgiven
exposes this force to be just that—an impersonal, ruthless force, not of
justice but of nature, a blind force that has “no respect for persons” and
neither punishes evil not protects goodness (though it does respond to both).
And as Munny says to the whimpering Hackman as he dies, “‘Deserves’ got nothing
to do with it.” (And yet the Hackman character does die, and largely because he does deserve it). Any person, then, who pretends otherwise, who
pretends to represent this blind force, unless he really is an angel (like No Name), is just that, a pretender, a mere man;
and in the case of William Munny, a drunken, miserable man at that, a sinner
driven by his own demons to raise hell wherever he goes.
Of
course, insofar as he rights an imbalance or brings an unacceptable corruption
to light (sometimes hell just has to
be raised), he is serving this force.
But then, so is the bad guy. Destroying evil isn’t the same as doing good, and
slaying dragons does not a saint, or even a knight, make. Whatever the legend
says, in his own mind William Munny will always be a monster.
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