American Myth: Part Two – Unforgiven (1992) and a Revision of the Wild West in Two Parts
Written by Euan MacDonald
Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (1992) by Warner Bros.
In part one, a discussion of Eastwood’s foregoing directorial/acting work and an archive of meta-film previous to Unforgiven was warranted, as they all led up to the 1992 picture and its austere notions. It makes sense, as in a genre that finds itself irrefutably stuck in the past, the history is important to the themes. This supporting segment - focusing on the effects of aforementioned influences - will study how Eastwood filters history through a single feature film, and the future of the genre he deconstructed thirty years ago.
Innovation through amalgam
Combining the odd parts and more eccentric elements of this informal triptych fable (comprised of High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider), Unforgiven created the opposite of a classic Wild West rhapsody. Instead of an exuberant, epic romp into Western wildlands with cartoonish periphery characters (see: Lone Watie in Josey, Mordecai in Drifter), Eastwood would drain all saturation and hope from a film you can either view as the last of the great westerns or the first on a long trail of neo-westerns. Either way, with the amalgamation of its influences, it became something undoubtedly different. It had the cruelty of High Plains Drifter, the accompanied-by-posse journey of Josey Wales, and the rebirth followed by the retrograde of Pale Rider. These motifs - all leaning towards the darker side of previously explored themes in Eastwood’s catalogue - would help define the neo-western genre, which kept the vast searches westerns were once known for (see John Ford’s most well-known film) but replaced the mythic conclusion with something less gratifying, or otherwise more sombre. This new era of film ushered in after the checkpoint that was Unforgiven, would seek to no longer explore the heroic aspects of frontier life but instead its twisted roots and influences.
Myth of the rain
Understanding the cultural impact, the cinematographic influence, and the prior filmography: These are sewn stitches that finish the design, and which make Unforgiven discussable as a whole. Like most films, it is not an independent, original idea, but an unflinching look at the baggage of those who work on it, the director most of all: The influence they carry with them, like it or not. The weight Eastwood carries is both double-sided and irrevocably present: He will forever play the same, silent man, and portray the same America - the untamed one. However, he can strip it as far as he likes, the unflinching horribleness of Drifter confirming this for us. Unforgiven doesn’t go as far as creating a circle of hell for the cowboy, but it does revise the myths Eastwood has lived inside by gutting it of its romanticism, one trope at a time.
Familiar faces
The idea of “The Kid” is maybe the most important: In Josey Wales, a young man that Josey views as a sort of proxy son accompanies him for the first forty minutes. He’s injured immediately, and slowly dies of his wound, still fighting until succumbing. He dies a warrior, a gunfighter. Josey surmises as much in his wake - "Brought up in a time of blood and dying, with no complaints." This lie - the idyllic prodigal son of the killer, the “Billy the Kid” archetype - is washed away in Unforgiven. A kid also accompanies Eastwood here (and Morgan Freeman, apparently replacing Lone Watie’s character from Wales): Self-dubbed “The Schofield Kid” (played by Jaimz Woolvett), he constantly inquires how many men the previously legendary William Munny has killed, brags about the men he shot down over nothing, and spreads the tale of the woman who was disfigured and the bounty put up to slay the men who did it (the main plot of the film). The lies here, slowly unravelled, spell out the thesis of Eastwood’s finest picture. The Kid, a transparent allegory for those born believing the myth but never experiencing it themselves (said myth being the Old West), is revealed to be nearsighted. He can’t see anything - nor shoot anything - past a certain amount of feet, crippled in the art of killing. Regardless, he continues to hold onto the proclamation that he has buried five men before - until they find their bounty targets, and he’s forced to commit another. In cold blood, he does murder a man in an outhouse, emptying his revolver into a sitting duck, trousers misshapen around his ankles. But afterwards admits that was the first. He’d never killed five men, and even his most elaborate story, containing threads of truth, actually ended in him having merely “busted his leg with a shovel”. Eastwood faces several fabrications of mythos with this character: An elaborate crime exaggerated, a persona completely forged, and the honour of killing a man. The slaying is brief, unsatisfactory, and almost shameful. And the Schofield Kid can never take it back. It is an unmistakable re-authoring: For those who seek to live up to the myth, there is no paradise for a new generation of killers. But what about the old legends? The Josey Wales, the Pale Riders? There is so much to say about “Little Bill”, the lawman portrayed by Gene Hackman, but more important is the only person who ever writes something down in the film: A comic book author, W.W. Beauchamp (played by Saul Rubinek), who is told self-serving folklore by the sheriff about his heroism. The Kid is a product of archivists like him: Who would’ve ever fact-checked the near-sighted boy who claimed himself a maniac? This is what gets published, and what is told to Americans for the next century or so. Everything else is whisperings, and nothing is concrete. This is the reality of an “untamed” world - the truth is rare, and only Shakespearian tales can survive decades without libraries. This rewrites how we remember. But what about the men like Munny? The real gunslingers? Because one real thing is the amount of graves. People did die. But Munny is here to remind us what a killer of his magnitude is: A serial murderer, no different from any Zodiac or Son of Sam. A cold-blooded sociopath. Why - with words such as “gunslinger” or “cowboy” - has our view changed? Do we imagine all their victims being claimed in duels or showdowns at the O.K. Corral? No. Killers are killers. This platitude, widely accepted in the modern world, appears absent from any of Eastwood’s previous films - even Drifter exists on the premise that a morally neutral cowboy can engage in sanctioned killings - as both Pale Rider and Josey Wales exist within a world where any man who possesses armaments has a moral choice between shooting “good guys” and “bad guys”. Eastwood’s most important treatise here may be saying no - there’s just killing.
Dust settling
The world has moved on from westerns, in all ways. Unforgiven was released more than thirty years ago, and today, Eastwood finishes post-production on what appears to be the 94-year-old’s final film (the working title being Juror #2). But that does not mean the United States has moved on from the geographical West, or that it’s finished with westerns: A new subgenre for the contemporary era has emerged in the wake of the picturesque spectacle: the neo-western, taking a modern look at an old land. Unforgiven marked the beginning of its emergence in film, being still a Western geographically but robbed of its pureness and naivete. The birth of the categorisation is more aptly traced to author Cormac McCarthy, who has written a plethora of novels concerning America’s history with violence and confusion: Among them are his books within the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) and the 1985 crown jewel referred to by many critics as one of the great American novels, Blood Meridian. McCarthy lives on in film, as the Coen brothers adapted his 2005 novel into another best-picture-winning film of the same titular graveness, No Country for Old Men (2007) 15 years after Eastwood’s win. Other crucial works within the subgenre include Lone Star (1996), There Will Be Blood (2007), Sicario (2015), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Not all these films follow Unforgiven’s letterhead, but many hold its elements: Most specifically the goodness that can be wrapped around a cocooned evil, only waiting to scratch the surface. Many also follow the narrative ambiguity the film gives us, not exactly putting Munny’s legend to rest. It gives the film a strange conclusion, leaving him as still partly a fairy tale. All Eastwood makes clear is that the good men die young, and the evil lives on: Not in William Munny or any other individual creature, but under the surface of America. Always scratching.
To conclude, a monolith has come and passed in the artistic space of genre. As usually happens in such areas, this advancement was marked by a specific piece of work. As Wilder did before Bogdanovich before Eastwood, Unforgiven has given a macabre ending to a great American era. It is a funeral many attended, as chronicled in this work: Eastwood himself, as a hundred different characters across his career. He embodies a certain vision of America, either fragmented in each film or put together to form a certain abomination of old Western hallucinations. From present to future works, many stand over the Western body with contempt for its adverse effects. Most of all the neo-western works mentioned, with many more trailing. But still, contemporaries attend, owing many of their narrative features to the older works of Eastwood and company. This passing is part of the whole of this giant: The idea that a film can breathe a culture’s last breath. It is not the first nor the last but to this generation the most recent. Maybe this is another moment of importance: One that gives us the ability to make educated assumptions. Which era will come to rise and fall next? One current colossus is obvious. But foresight is always easier. Stories are easier, and it’s worth noting that’s the bottom line of the film: Someone profits on morals, on winners, on happy endings. It was Winston Churchill who said, “History is written by the victors.” In this case, that’s killers and drunkards. Why not make themselves into cultural martyrs, snuffed out slowly for romantic lawlessness? The most important revision of the film is the erasure of such feigned conclusions and satisfactions. Things like these - wild ones - end for good, ugly reasons. The last word is, of course, with Eastwood and Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it”.