Sunday Pages: "Unforgiven"

A film by Clint Eastwood

Gene Hackman, RIP.

Dear Reader,

On July 2, 1881, James Garfield was at the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station—on the site of what is today the National Gallery of Art’s West Building—waiting to board a train. He was deep in conversation with James G. Blaine, his Secretary of State. His two sons stood nearby, wilting in the malarial D.C. humidity.

Just as the train pulled into the station, a disgruntled would-be office-seeker named Charles Guiteau emerged from a hiding spot near the ladies’ room, brandishing a .44 British Bulldog revolver. Guiteau was a psychopath who had delusions of grandeur. He’d been stalking Garfield all summer, with murder in his mind. This was his last opportunity before the President left for the summer, and he took it. He fired two shots at Garfield and was immediately apprehended; he would be tried, convicted, and hanged within the year. (Also at the station that day was the Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the former president; incredibly, he would a few years later be at the Expo in Buffalo, not far from President McKinley when he was shot.)

Garfield, who had been president for just four months, did not immediately die. Instead, the wound became infected—probably by a bunch of doctors sticking their grubby fingers inside his body to trace the path of the bullet—and he wasted away to nothing until finally expiring that September, elevating the plump, well-heeled mediocrity Chester Arthur to the presidency.

[pauses, stares wistfully out the window, sighs]

Early July 1881 is also when the events in Unforgiven take place—far away from the nation’s capital, in a fictional town called Big Whiskey, in the very real Wyoming Territory. Clint Eastwood was my father’s all-time favorite actor, and Unforgiven was my father’s all-time favorite film, but I’m thinking about Unforgiven this week because of Gene Hackman—who will, I assume, occupy the final slot in the “Remembrance” montage at tonight’s Oscars. He won two of them, including the Best Supporting Actor award for what is my favorite Hackman performance: the charming, charismatic, sadistic, and tyrannical sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, in Clint Eastwood’s classic “revisionist” Western.

In the three plus decades since its 1992 release, much has been written about how Unforgiven takes everything we thought we knew about the Western and turns it upside down. Eastwood and the screenwriter David Webb Peoples—who also co-wrote Blade Runner!—tear down and reconstruct all of the genre’s clichés, myths, ethical conflicts, frontier characters, and epic showdowns. Nothing is quite what we expect: The tall tales of the Old West are exposed as frauds. The violence—whether delivered by knife, gun, bullwhip, or cowboy boot—is drawn out and realistic. There are plenty of bad guys—that is, guys who are bad—but no true villains, nor are there unequivocal heroes. As Brian Eggert writes at Deep Focus Review, the universe of Unforgiven reveals “the hard and unpleasant fact about the West—that heroes and villains were nowhere to be found. Legends did not exist. There were only men fueled by drink and lawlessness, armed and riding free on the plains. Someone else embossed them into mythic status.” Heck, even Clint Eastwood is not Clint Eastwood; the Man With No Name has now acquired one—William Munny—and his best gunslinging days are clearly behind him; in Unforgiven, he’s mostly bad and ugly, not good.

What is less remarked upon—although I am hardly the first to point this out; we had a discussion about it, I recall, in my screenwriting class in ‘92—is that Unforgiven is also a political allegory. The virtues and drawbacks of three distinct political systems—monarchy, tyranny, and vigilantism—are shown in the film, each represented by a central character: respectively, English Bob (Richard Harris), Little Bill, and Munny.

English Bob, the “Duke of Death,” who is from Britain but is not the aristocrat he pretends to be, is a dandy, a crack shot, and something of a shit-stirrer. He makes his living menacing and killing Chinese laborers for the railroad company. We first meet him on the train, traveling in the company of a hero-worshipping dime novelist, his “biographer,” W. W. Beauchamp. He is reading in the paper about the shooting of President Garfield, and one of the other passengers asks if the assassin is a “John Bull”—that is, an Englishman.

No, English Bob says, Guiteau sounds like a Frenchman—even though Frenchmen, he notes, are notoriously lousy shots. And then he editorializes condescendingly: “Well, sir, again I don’t wish to give offense when I suggest that this country should select a king—or even a queen—instead of a president. One isn’t that quick to shoot a king or a queen. The majesty of royalty, you see.”

When he gets to Big Whiskey, English Bob continues this pro-monarchist lecture—which, incidentally, is untrue; there had been numerous attempts on the life of Queen Victoria by 1881—as he sits at the barber’s.

“There’s a dignity to royalty,” he explains. “A majesty that precludes the likelihood of assassination. If you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen, your hands would shakes as though palsied,” he says. “I can assure you, if you did, that the sight of royalty would cause you to dismiss all thoughts of bloodshed and you would stand—how shall I put it? In awe.

“Now, a president...well, I mean...why not shoot a president?”

With that rhetorical question, English Bob has crossed a line—the same sort of moral boundary that Donald Trump and JD Vance crossed in the Oval Office on Friday. He’s pushed it too far. His insults cannot be ignored, any more than they can be waved off. By showing such contemptuous disrespect—again, like our current Garfield and Arthur did two days ago—he’s ignited our patriotism. How dare he talk like that! As an American moviegoer watching this unfold on the big screen, I certainly wanted this arrogant son of a bitch to get his comeuppance.

And so he does. When English Bob steps outside, Little Bill is waiting for him, flashing that winsome Gene Hackman smile, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Talking about the Queen again? On Independence Day?” And then, as the entire population of the tiny town gathers to watch, he beats Bob to a bloody pulp.

Thus is monarchy (allegorically) defeated.

When Bill first socks English Bob in the jaw, we cheer him on. Little Bill’s punch feels good, because this “John Bull” deserves it—not unlike another foreigner arrived in the halls of American power with a strange accent, yen for monarchy, sycophantic biographer, and contempt for our institutions who’s in desperate need of a punch in the face that comes to mind.

[pauses, stares wistfully out the window, sighs]

And this is the genius of Unforgiven: it upends our attitudes toward cinematic violence, which is generally designed to give us the dopamine hit of righteous anger vented. Hero takes out villain, fuck yeah! Here, it’s a lot messier.

Little Bill, too, takes it too far. The beating is long and relentless—way over the top. At a certain point, the initial vicarious thrill of the first punch turns to nausea, as we realize that Bill is not a hero, just a cop with toxic masculinity issues looking for an excuse to unload on someone. As Cody Morgan writes at Smash Cut Culture, Unforgiven “takes the highly welcome path of demonizing violence itself.”

As the beating continues (note: the morale does not improve), we also understand that Bill is making an example of English Bob. He knows that bounty hunters will soon descend on Big Whiskey in search of “whore’s gold,” and he wants the bloody bloke to serve as a deterrent. As he repeatedly kicks Bob, who writhes in the dust, we see the fear in Bill’s eyes—he knows he will soon lose control of the situation, and he cannot bear to lose control.

Little Bill is no monarchist. He may be a patriot. But he is also a tyrant. He’s the Hammurabi of Big Whiskey, Draco in a Stetson. And while he can be just and honorable, the local laws are subject to his own caprices. The reason English Bob turned up at all is to chase a bounty on two cowboys who sliced up a local sex worker (she giggled at one of them naked); the bounty was raised by the other sex workers at the brothel, because Little Bill’s idea of punishment for the violent crime was for the cowboys to deliver some horses to the owner of the bar and brothel. In Bill’s eyes, the victim was not the disfigured sex worker, but her trafficker. (The thousand dollars they raise for the bounty, incidentally, is exactly how much the proprietor paid for the brothel to begin with.)

In certain libertarian circles, Unforgiven is read as a commentary on firearms restrictions. Morgan writes, in a short essay reprinted by the Foundation for Economic Education:

The inability of the disarmed population of Big Whiskey to use violence when necessary is deceptively key to the plot. If history has anything to teach us, it is that when things become illegal, they become profitable. Had the town been armed, the prostitutes [would] have had much cheaper and faster alternatives to pursue the justice they felt they had been denied…

Given the amount of power that Little Bill has acquired as a result of banning firearms, one has to wonder whether that vulnerability and the consequent need for a strong protector is a feature, rather than a bug, of weapons bans.

I would argue that if the guns in Unforgiven represent anything, it’s the armed forces of various nations. By demilitarizing other countries, Little Bill’s dictatorship can impose imperial control on the entire global sphere of influence. Because, like, I mean, has Morgan watched the movie all the way to the end? The last thing Unforgiven needs is more guns.

Freud would say that a gun represents the phallus. Indeed, one of the outlaws alluded to in Beauchamp’s book The Duke of Death, Two Barrel, was so called because his schlong was longer than the barrel of his pistol. There’s more than enough toxic masculinity to go around in the movie. But Unforgiven is, above all, a commentary on male fragility—what Keely Weiss, in Ms. Magazine, defines as “the refusal to accept no, the inability to accept that one is not entitled to something, the violent aversion to being mocked or devalued.”

Look at all the horrible things that happen in Unforgiven: Both of the cowboys the bounty hunters came for are gunned down. Little Bill is killed, and all of his deputies, and Skinny the pimp. Ned Logan—Munny’s friend, played by Morgan Freeman—is tortured to death. English Bob is beaten to within an inch of his life. So is William Munny. All of that death, all of that violence, all of that bloodshed, and how does it start? An incel couldn’t handle a woman laughing at his little pecker. Somehow Clint Eastwood, of all people, made a movie about the Trump Redux—in 1992!

The climax of Unforgiven—which is, incidentally, my father’s favorite scene of any movie ever—is a repudiation of the usual hero-takes-out-villain-in-epic-showdown ending of Westerns, while also being a perfect example of a hero taking out the villain in an epic showdown in a Western. Roger Ebert explains it well:

There is one exchange in the movie that has long stayed with me. After he is fatally wounded, Little Bill says, “I don’t deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house.” And Munny says, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” Actually, deserve has everything to do with it, and although Ned Logan and Delilah [the sex worker] do not get what they deserve, William Munny sees that the others do. That implacable moral balance, in which good eventually silences evil, is at the heart of the Western, and Eastwood is not shy about saying so.

The thing is, Munny is not really a hero. He represents vigilante justice, which, as Ebert points out, may achieve the right moral balance—but also leaves the town a bloody mess.

As Philip French noted in The Guardian back in 1992, Unforgiven, “like all serious Westerns, is a meditation on history and the American experience, and an allegorical commentary on the state of the Union.” He finds himself contemplating contemporary events:

Watching the movie we inevitably think of Rodney King and the Los Angeles Police, of the invasion of Panama and the “turkey shoots” in the Gulf War. At times Sheriff Daggett has a striking resemblance to George Bush—invariably away from his office working on his emblematic jerry-built house while trouble is brewing, then over-reacting with excessive violence when threatened from outside and putting on his broadest grin to suggest that it isn’t all serious.

“Unforgiven” is an odd word. It doesn’t mean the same thing as “unforgivable,” which carries connotations of hopelessness. It implies that forgiveness is inevitable; it will come, in time, but hasn’t happened yet—like justice. The original sins of the United States remain unforgiven, but absolution is possible, is within our grasp.

Watching Unforgiven now, I see the climactic showdown as a metaphor for our federal political system. Munny is the United States of America. He has endured a brutal past that involved a lot of indiscriminate killing, including of women and children; he is an alcoholic, whose drunken debauchery was only cured by his wife’s love and prohibition; he was violent and too fond of firearms. He strives to be good but still has evil urges. In a word, he is flawed.

Even as he tastes his first whiskey in many years, even as he steps into the saloon with his rifle raised, to avenge the brutal killing of his friend Ned Logan, Munny has already undergone a transformation. He knows right from wrong now. And he’s come to confront the tyrant. To slay the dragon. He has come to tell Little Bill that no quarter will be given for male fragility or rape culture; that violence against women must be punished appropriately; that the justice system has to be fair and impartial, and cannot hinge on the whims of one powerful and sadistic man; and—given Morgan Freeman’s dead body displayed like a trophy in the window of the saloon—that Black Lives Matter.

And then Clint Eastwood the filmmaker and Clint Eastwood the actor join forces to show us the best and only way to deal with sadistic tyrants and their poltroonish enablers.

Sic semper tyrannis.

---

ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was the actress, author, and activist Heather Thomas:

---

Photo credit: Gene Hackman as Little Bill.