Unforgiven (Eastwood, '92)
Genre: Western
Background: Generally popular from the early days of modern narrative film, the Classical Western tended to offer audiences a sanitized vision of the Old West, one that had a fairly black-&-white moral dichotomy between the hero and the "bad guys", as the central men of action fought with various outlaw elements or hordes of "savage Indians" (glossing over the genocide that was committed against them in the process), and where, despite the genre's reliance on using shootouts to settle the landscape's conflicts, there usually wasn't much moral reckoning with the justifiability
of that violence on the part of the "good guys", even in films that built up to such reckonings for their entire runtimes (like
The Searchers), and the bloodshed was still often portrayed as just a tragic necessity at the worst. Because of that, it seemed like a genre that was stuck in the past (partly because it literally was), which is why it needed the shot in the arm that the sub-genre of the Revisionist Western gave it, particularly during the 60's with the popularization of the Spaghetti Western, when West met East(wood), which resulted us a far grittier, more morally ambiguous vision of genre than Hollywood tended to present. This continued into the 70's, the decade in which the screenplay for the film in question here was written, before the aforementioned leading man was finally ready to make it, during something of a revival of the genre in the 90's, as one of the greatest icons of the Western returned to the genre one final time, not to send it a cinematic love letter, but to bury the myths
of the genre once and for all.
How Unforgiven Deconstructs It:
By embracing moral ambiguity and the demythologization of the Old West as its central themes, since
Unforgiven scrutinizes the kind of consistent violence that defined the Western as a genre; this makes its choice of leading man all the more perfect, since, although his roles in the
Dollars trilogy were career-defining performances which came in films that were certainly darker than the typical traditional Western, Leone's movies still often portrayed its quick draw duels (a element that
Unforgiven lacks entirely) as exciting, or even "fun" to watch, with no lingering emotional effects left on The Man With No Name in their aftermath.
On the other hand,
Unforgiven begins decades after that film, and most other Westerns, for that matter, would've ended, with the kind of protagonist most of them would've had as "the baddie" (mirrored by an antagonist who would've been the good guy in a traditional Western to boot), as Will Munny is no badass gunslinger, but a weary old man struggling to run his pig farm, one who nearly dies from a "mere" fever (instead of a bullet) at one point, who's forgotten how to shoot, and who expresses severe emotional torture, both by the memories of the late wife who tried (possibly in vain) to mend his ways, as well as by the tremendous spiritual toll that killing men, women, and children takes upon someone, making Munny feel like he could be an older version of Blondie, one who's grown tired of the killing that helped him prevail over his foes in the past. However, this doesn't mean he's left that violence behind him for good, as, despite his continual protests that he's not the way he used to be, he's still the one to spill the blood when both the older and younger generations of outlaws prove they aren't up to it, as it's Munny who pulls the trigger when his old partner loses the stomach for such bloodshed, as well as when the unjustifiably braggadocious "Schofield Kid" immediately loses the knack he claimed to have for killing as soon as he actually shoots a man for the first time.
In this way, there are no real good or bad guys in the film, as the "villain" of the film, Little Bill, is a man of the law, one who tries to achieve a good end (preserving the peace of his town) through brutal means, and, coming in the year of the Rodney King riots, he transcended the film's historical setting in order to reflect contemporary outrage over modern police brutality (in more ways than one, since Hackman reportedly based his performance off of then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates).
Unforgiven is also about as explicitly deconstructionist as anything else I'll cover in this project, as demonstrated through the sub-plot of English Bob, a gunslinger who builds his legend by feeding wildly inaccurate "eyewitness" accounts of his own exploits to W.W. Beauchamp, a writer of the type of cheap, sensationalistic dime novels that established the romanticized cultural image of the West in the first place. However, when Bill takes the two men into custody (after first unnecessarily beating Bob to an utter pulp, that is), he destroys those myths entirely, informing Beauchamp that Bob didn't shoot a fellow gunslinger (and his six henchmen, as a book portrays it) for "insulting the honor" of a beautiful woman, but as a petty, spur-of-the-moment revenge for the other man placing his reportedly massive manhood (which was the real reason for his nickname "Two Gun") in a French lady that Bob had an eye for, although Bill repeatedly emphasizes the point that he missed his first few shots because of how drunk at the time.
And throughout the entirety of
Unforgiven, it refuses to come to any sort of moral conclusion about its characters, retaining its ambiguity in that regard all the way to the end; was the prostitutes' vendetta against the cowboy justified at all, in light of the light punishment he recieved for his mutilation? Was there any validity in Bill's tactics, considering the relatively wild, rough landscape he was trying to tame? And what kind of a man was Munny; was he still the same bloodthirsty outlaw he seemed to be in his youth, or was he an old man genuinely trying (albeit momentarily failing) to move on from his violent ways? Like the bookending text says, there was nothing on Claudia's grave to explain to her mother why she had married "a known thief and murderer", just like there's nothing in
Unforgiven to give us an answer about Munny, or anyone else in the film; that's what it's so great, and makes it feel like a "Western to end all Westerns", so to speak.
And, even after obtaining his revenge at the end, there's little satisfaction to be had for Munny, as, while at least
The Wild Bunch got to go out in one final, spectacular blaze of glory in their film, Munny is instead faced with the spiritual emptiness of such vengeance, going on to linger in life with a career in dry goods in San Francisco, a fate hardly benefitting a legend of the Old West, although the film itself has avoided such a mediocre fate, instead, winning a richly-deserved Oscar for Best Picture, becoming a cinematic legend in its own right, and one of the greatest examples of the very genre that it deconstructed, once and for all.