American Myth: Part One – Unforgiven (1992) and a Revision of the Wild West in Two Parts

Written by Euan MacDonald

Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (1992) by Warner Bros. 

With Clint Eastwood’s final film on the horizon - Juror No. 2, his 41st at the age of 94 - and one of his two best-picture-winning films passing the thirty-year mark recently, a retrospective of his finest picture is in order. Unforgiven (1992), a “revisionist western” holding neo-western elements and ripping through forty years of Wild West mythos, is deserving of an article that explores its depths. From the line in the sand it draws between old west and new west, ancient Hollywood and modern, and the pivot in culture since a genre’s demise. 

Stories to Tell Ourselves

Few films hold the historical weight to both illuminate genre antecedents and engage in meta-cinema. Even fewer have the leading stars to play their past selves. They are calculable on one hand: Boris Karloff directed by Peter Bogdanovich in Targets (1968); Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, and Erich von Stroheim in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950); and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (1992). They are works of innovation and tribute, films that usher in a new era of cinema and offer a tribute to the bygone Hollywood epoch that undoubtedly influenced the new generation. These works mark checkpoints, a changing of hands between directorial classes: Most overtly Wilder taking over for Stroheim and Swanson’s silent era in Sunset. And in rare cases, they breach a discussion of purely film archives and leap over another barrier to discuss events of the real world through a contemporary lens. Targets famously trades melodrama for cynicism, replacing fantasy horror found in Karloff’s early creature features for the real-world horror of gun violence: Vampires and ghouls are replaced by all-American men from Christian families who wake up one day with an incomprehensible urge for serial murder. It was not only a prediction for the future of America’s ongoing epidemic of bullets, but also a story based upon a real shooting occurring at the University of Texas. Unforgiven follows a similar - albeit more ingrained and ancient - path, essentially rewriting the American myth of the Wild West (one Eastwood spent the better half of his career defining) and all the platitudes it drags with it: Honour in murder, honour in murderers, and the myth of the gunfighter. It is a re-authoring bent on acknowledging a truth modern cinema has jumped upon: That one life taken is two souls lost. 

A Dire Fable

The story of Unforgiven is, like all westerns, a story of America. The thirty years between the beginning of industry and the end of the last untamed border (1865-95) is seen by most as a crucial moment in American culture: The dawn of the final days on the last frontier. On the horizon is a new world, where the United States is a superpower fueled by a not-yet-fully-formed landmass of epic proportions, rich with resources ready for global trade. This moment in time - itself, a changing of the hands - is seen as the moment Americans defined themselves, and wrangled their own identities: No longer were they flanked on either side by previous British colonisation or a conflict with Robert E. Lee’s forces; the people were free to choose. And this perspective of a certain bundle of Western states at the dawn of the 20th century, the positive side, was what westerns depicted for a majority of their time in the spotlight of popular American film: Independence, freedom, universal gun ownership, vast landscapes, wildlife, and - most of all - heroic bloodshed. Someone always died in a western, and it was always romantic. For a country just finding its footing, this unabashed celebration formed strong chains of identity, linking an entire populace together. And chains is the right word, for it not only rooted America in its traditions of respected killings but kept them there: For more than a century, a dark side would go unanswered. It is a side reparation is still being paid to, and one which will most likely always remain as a stain. It includes a firearms culture generations of Americans have continued to revere (despite ignorant roots), a view on a certain type of “justifiable homicide”, and - most importantly to our topic - the urban myth of the cowboy. Lies had been sewn deep into the American fabric, and during a film career spanning four decades, Eastwood would slowly attempt a narrative shift that would culminate at an apex in the shape of Unforgiven - an effort to create new incisions in the cinematic tissue of western grit. 

Clint Eastwood, Aline Levasseur, and Shane Thomas Meier in Unforgiven (1992) by Warner Bros. 

Darkness on the Edge of Town

It’s important to understand this magnum opus did not spawn out of thin air. The work Clint Eastwood had been doing for decades would, by 1992, form a membrane of both cultural staying power and thematic ideas. The staying power - Clint’s constant appearances in pop culture throughout decades of large rumbles in the film industry - is hard to explain, as it blankets film culture the same way the Wild West blankets America. To summarize, it begins with Sergio Leone’s film A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. This would be the first spaghetti western film - a subgenre dubbed so because they were westerns made in Europe and produced by Italians (such as Leone himself). It would also be Eastwood’s breakout role, in which he plays a deadly gunslinger who rarely speaks. Half of his dialogue is a stare, the other half a bullet. Eastwood would reprise this role twice more for Leone in the loosely connected Dollars Trilogy, and would quickly become a staple of the western genre as a whole. Once Eastwood moved to direct his films starting in 1971, the archetype would slowly gain different personas in each western appearance, despite the key characteristics remaining unchanged. The progression behaves like a six-sided die that slowly reveals its symbols; its number of sides never changes, but only unveils its values. The core of Eastwood’s mythical man always remained (cold, quiet, and deadly), but through the actions taken in each film, a new theme - which would compile into Unforgiven - could be discerned. This can be summed up in three movies the actor would direct (and star in) through the 1970s and 80s: High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and Pale Rider (1985). 

American Lazarus

Finishing a final jigsaw of perspective on the American frontier, Unforgiven lives vicariously through this trio of films. Pieces of each picture are taken and remade into a whole puzzle: Sections and figureheads are pasted and improved upon to create what is undoubtedly the most complete of all four films. High Plains Drifter features a shadowy, nameless figure who terrorizes a minuscule outpost town. The movie’s tagline - “Welcome to hell” - clarifies there will be no moral retribution for the protagonist. He is simply made of evil. William Munny, Unforgiven’s protagonist, would echo this demonic presence both in the myths townsfolk and bounty hunters alike had heard, and in his final act transformation. It is a perturbing volta, a staggering turn: Munny, who has renounced the evil deeds he did “back in the day” for the film's runtime up until this point, has entirely reverted to his previous shape. Or did he ever change? Is it possible for a man like that? One of Eastwood’s many questions. The Outlaw Josey Wales is perhaps the sole film out of the three works stated above that deserves the title of a great film. It is epic, raucous, and overpowering, in that order. A man’s family is murdered and their house burned down. He (Josey Wales) seeks revenge upon the “Jay-hawkers” and Union party who ordained the task and joined the Confederate army. This conflict begins and ends within the first twenty minutes. The rest of the film is devoted to a journey across a good half of America, as the titular character of Josey Wales (portrayed by Eastwood, of course) experiences loss, friendship, and love - also in that order. There is also a strong political undercurrent running through the film, but Unforgiven’s brush dabs into a different array of colours: See the relationship Josey holds with an innocent kid yearning to become him, a saintlike wife passing before the film even begins, and a deed that appears to tumble into a spiral of character changes. However, in Wales, these turns of the psyche are for the betterment of our protagonist. One of many optimistic elements Eastwood later revised. But it’s this concept - of the man who lives in the dark being reborn in light or otherwise - that follows this strain of films so closely. Even Drifter features a background for its dark horse cowboy: He appears to look identical to the town’s previously deceased sheriff, whipped to death as the townsfolk watched, killing him indirectly with apathy. Only one man seems to notice he’s returned from the dead to reap what they’ve sown. Enter Pale Rider, also feeding the tale of the American Lazarus: Instead of a man reborn as the devil, or a man reborn thrice over in much more complex formations, Rider is a man reborn literally and spiritually, as a priest enters a mining encampment that is being harassed by a baron running a blasting operation. Almost identical to Drifter, it’s implied in the film that Eastwood’s once-again unnamed man was gunned down in a previous life as a for-hire deputy, but has risen as a messenger of god. However, a second transformation - the one that would echo far and wide for Unforgiven - happens as the priest goes to a lockbox in town two-thirds into the film to retrieve his shooting pistols. It is a return to violence, to brutality. Is it a commentary on God’s work? Divine punishment? It is a path that feels unfinished. Fortunately, all truncations would later be redeemed in 1992. 

Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider (1985) by Warner Bros.

This section - in summary - is all about influence. All kinds, including outside, future, and past. And this is the shape works of innovation take: Not independent, simple edges, but jagged lines that cut across film and life. They live within micro-genres rolled and redistributed many times over, steal from a director’s own previous efforts, and undoubtedly duplicate and forge from the real, live world around them (or in Unforigven’s case, a world that now ceases to be). Part two - to be released on September 17th - will cover how such a blanket of predisposition drapes over Eastwood’s tour de force: In slow movements concerning a purposeful inversion of genre, how the world moved on after 1992, and the bare plot in Unforgiven parting the seas of truth and myth forging its own path within the western. In yet another archetypal revival, Eastwood will return.