On Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
Fire and Brimstone: Clint Eastwood Goes to Hell in Unforgiven
In a review of Unforgiven, Harry Brod argues that Eastwood himself should remain “unforgiven” by the public and the film industry because of his past transgressions of making violent films (30). Brod essentially argues that we should refrain from admiring Unforgiven because of stains on the soul of Eastwood himself. I have several problems with this particular form of passing judgment. First is the fact that if we demand sainthood from our artists before accepting their work, we’d have to discount the great majority of the literature, art, etc. produced throughout the history of the world. Second, if we insist on assuming a moralistic attitude, it’s rather hypocritical to deny forgiveness to someone genuinely seeking it. Third, it’s a bit silly to take Unforgiven as a literal quest for atonement anyway. Eastwood was not stepping up to the confessional to request absolution, but making a film. Obviously the film references his own career, but it’s not so much a literal bid for forgiveness as it is an artistic work exploring particular themes. It’s called Unforgiven, not Forgiven. Fourth, since film and culture are interdependent in ways that are so complicated that it would be far too maddening to ever try to figure it out entirely, it’s a bit simplistic to blame film for real world violence. Brod suggests that we should do a “poll of all the surviving victims of male violence during the years Eastwood was one of the top box-office stars in the world, with those closest to deceased victims empowered to cast their votes. Then we’d know if Eastwood should be forgiven or unforgiven” (30). Well, if we really did ask all those individuals, I doubt very many of them would think Clint Eastwood had much to do with it one way or the other. Most people are aware that violence has enormously complicated causes. And anyway, what about all the other violent stars and films in Hollywood? Eastwood certainly hasn’t been the only one in that particular line of work. And what about socio-economic factors in violence? And so on. Though it would be nice to have a whipping boy, Eastwood didn’t invent violence. He’s just a film actor/director who ended up early in his career filling a role within representations of violence that were already well on their way of being perpetuated by others.
My point (if a bit sarcastically stated) is just that I think it’s entirely appropriate to look at Eastwood exceptionally, and grant him “forgiveness” or “respect” or whatever it is that he’s looking for in his films of recent times. The truth is, very few stars who end up as masculine icons closely associated with violence (as Eastwood did) ever question it or veer from it. It’s quite unusual for someone to have built a career on that particular base, and then to have both the guts and the brains to question it. Further, Eastwood is in a particularly effective position to be able to make people look at violence more thoughtfully. Very often, reformed criminals and addicts make the best and most convincing advocates for change. So if some people are going to consider Eastwood a kind of “film criminal,” then we should grant him an opportunity to tell us how he’s changed. With luck, he might change the minds of some other “film criminals.” In any case, I personally find it inappropriate to decide whether or not to condemn Clint Eastwood to eternal damnation. I’ll leave that to some higher power and focus on the subject of damnation in his film instead.
In “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven,” Carl Plantinga offers a summary of Unforgiven which seems to represent the general consensus about the film: Unforgiven “represents a violence that leads to a cycle of senseless revenge and retribution,” and “follows the descending trail of an old gunfighter whose journey offers the possibility of redemption but ends in the life of drunkenness and murder he thought he had left behind” (71). Divergence of opinion about the film, where it exists, seems mostly to focus on the climactic confrontation in Greeley’s saloon, along with the final graveside scene of the film. The arguments say that in various ways these final scenes undermine the careful condemnation of violence of the earlier parts of the film, and therefore diminish the overall power of the film. I will argue that these final scenes are in fact entirely consistent with the rest of the film, and do a very effective job of conveying the damnation of violence through the depiction of William Munny’s “damnation.”
Since there is little debate that the violence up until the climax is presented in a manner meant to condemn it, I won’t dwell on it too much. Of all the sources I looked at, only Paul Smith condemns the entirety of Unforgiven in terms of its depictions of violence, saying “Unforgiven suffers from being unable to criticize convincingly the very violence that it itself is involved in and that it does not shrink from re-representing.” He complains that Munny fails to exhibit conscience and is “given little opportunity to reflect upon such sentiments and consequences” (267). But Allen Redmon (and everyone else who cited Smith) disagrees with him. In “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic River” Redmon points out that Eastwood could have more overtly condemned violence in his film, but “explicit denunciations would have come at a price.” That is, “Eastwood would not be able to implicate his audience in the mechanisms of violence in the way that his films can when the violence is loosely veiled in the same fashion that all violence is concealed” (318). In other words, the whole point of the film would have been lost if it had been “preachier.” Platinga also points out that our allegiance toward William Munny and his violence is actually quite conflicted throughout the film, and while Munny “may reflect little upon his actions, the film nonetheless encourages conflicted responses in the spectator and in so doing initiates a questioning process” (74).
However, Platinga then goes on to state his opinion that the film only maintains an effective anti-violence stance up until the climactic shootout at Greeley’s at which point “the film satisfies the spectator’s desire for the dramatic violent purge and emotional release by granting the hero his killing” (79). Many others agree. In “Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven” Catherine Ingrassia says that the film “ultimately affirms rather than resists the conventions of its genre” and that in this climactic scene Munny is “swift and deadly (and consistent with any number of Eastwood vehicles)” (53,57). Brod in his article even sarcastically calls this scene the film’s “final shoot-‘em-up scene, so much like that of Shane that I kept expecting [Beauchamp] to run after Eastwood, yelling “Come back, . . .” (30).
These reactions are all puzzling to me, because every time I’ve seen the film the climactic shootout has been the scene that delivers the full tragedy of the movie to me, and has never failed to bring me to tears. Some of the problems of the interpretation of this scene seem to be connected with the limitations Eastwood’s persona places upon him. As Tim Groves points out in “’We all have it coming, Kid’: Clint Eastwood and the Dying of the Light,” Eastwood’s past films are “inscribed with belligerent, sarcastic, preternatural heroes and cathartic violence.” Many seem to view the climactic scene of Unforgiven in terms of these past Eastwood incarnations. When Richard Corliss reviewed Unforgiven he said, “The movie takes its time letting you watch Clint turn into Clint” (66). That is, many people apparently “see” Clint turn into the “cathartic violence version” of Clint in Unforgiven, as he had in so many movies in the past, rather than “seeing” Clint turn into a vicious murderer, as I seem to.
Ingrassia brings up further problems of expectations, relating not only to persona, but also to genre: “Once in Greeley’s Saloon, Munny (now a fully formed Eastwood character) provides the spectacular explosion of gunfire the genre’s narratological grammar demands” (57). Plantinga also points out that “the western myth assigns a supreme value to the climactic gunfight,” and claims that the shootout is “a compromise and throwback to the conventional western myth, a dissonant chord within an otherwise consistent revisionism” (77). Ingrassia and Plantinga both talk about the end of the film as a “shift” and discuss it as though it exists separately from the rest of the film. But it seems to me that it’s only understood if it’s “felt” in connection to all the other parts of the film and seen as completely organic with everything that has come before it. Ingrassia refers to Ned Logan’s death as the event that causes “the film’s shift into revenge narrative” (57). But as Redmon points out, as Ned is beaten we’re shown the whores’ reaction to the sounds of the whip, reminding the audience “of their responsibility for the violence” and therefore connecting this act to the same stance that has been taken toward all other acts of violence in the film leading up to it (321). If Ned’s death were shown to us explicitly, it would be a more conventionally motivated revenge plot. But what’s shown to us is the senselessness of Ned’s death (i.e. with the emphasis on Little Bill’s sadism), not the death itself. Therefore it does not represent a “shift,” but a continuation of the tragic acts of violence of earlier in the film. Likewise, we are to understand the senselessness of Munny’s subsequent act of vengeance in terms of every act that has preceded it; his actions are as meaningless and pointless as everything that’s come before, including innocent Ned’s own death at the hands of the sadistic sheriff.
Other interrelationships of the film also strongly suggest that the shootout should be read as a condemnation of William Munny, and of violence. As Redmon points out, “In many ways, the final scene is a collection of each of the individual charges that have been brought against the mechanisms of violence throughout the film” (323). Munny’s rivals are unarmed and unprepared, violating the codes of the “good guy” gunfighters of traditional westerns. Unlike all the characters earlier in the film, Munny rejects Beauchamp’s myth-making in regards to violence. And by having established Munny and Little Bill as similar men throughout the film, “Eastwood creates a situation in which the murder that is sure to take place of one of these two characters at the film’s conclusion cannot be entirely celebrated” (320). We’re forced to stare into the shotgun with Little Bill before Munny blows him away. And so, “by working to ensure that each of the acts of violence in the film is portrayed from the perspective of the victim, Eastwood has ensured that the film’s final act of violence is an honest description of the ramifications of the mechanisms of violence” (322).
In regards to genre, no one can argue against the fact that a final confrontation between gunfighters (like the scene in Greeley’s) is an expected convention of the Western genre. But it’s certainly possible to argue about the overall effectiveness of this scene within Unforgiven’s interrelationships. Redmon believes that “critics who have found fault with the final scenes in Big Whiskey have failed to recognize what Eastwood is representing in this final sequence, and that this representation is the only way in which one can ultimately expose the mechanisms of violence for what they are” (322). Since this scene represents our strongest expectations for the genre, it’s the most powerful way possible to show the futility of violence. The ultimate statement of the film - its damnation of Munny - is contained in the very act that we traditionally associate with the gunfighter’s crowning glory, the scene that makes him a hero. I personally can’t imagine a more ironically tragic way to show the culmination of all the acts of violence in Unforgiven than through a carefully revised form of this “traditional” scene. As Platinga points out, ”The complexity of the Greeley’s debacle . . . stems from its combination of dramatic satisfaction with emotional and thematic ambiguity” (79). For him, this is a count against the film, but to me, it’s this complication that makes the scene work. It’s more challenging and asks more questions about our relationship to violence than if the scene were either entirely abhorrent or (obviously) entirely cathartic. And so the scene serves to emphasize the film’s points in a way that little else would have. If, for example, Munny simply walked away as a pacifist after Ned’s murder, the film would have had a very difficult time showing the repercussions of violence for the killer. And Eastwood has made it plain that he wanted to show the “consequences to the violence . . . [for] both the perpetrator as well as the victim” (Plantinga 66).
These consequences of violence for the killer are made plain in the final graveside scene of the film, which shows what happens to William Munny following the shootout. However, Redmon claims that because of this scene, Unforgiven fails to “successfully expose the mechanisms of violence” and capture “the ‘hell’ that exists for those caught in these mechanisms.” His complaint is that the text on the screen tells us that Munny uses the money from his killing to take his kids to San Francisco, where he then prospers in dry goods. Redmon objects that “this advancement comes at the expense of a handful of cowboys, a sheriff, countless unnamed townspeople, and his dear friend,” and refers to this ending as “the promise of a new beginning” (323). But I beg to differ; this text is not meant to be taken literally, and is most certainly not the promise of a new beginning. It is ”a coded summary the viewer recognizes as both true and utterly false” (Ingrassia 59). As Ingrassia writes, “Unforgiven literally and repeatedly imposes a textual account over the cinematic landscape to reveal the gap between sign and signified” (53). Unforgiven explicitly teaches us how to look at this gap between words and reality throughout the course of the film, just as it teaches us how to look at each of its acts of violence. The character of Beauchamp, the Schofield Kid’s confusion between the myth and the reality of death, Little Bill’s debunking of the myth of the “Duke of Death,” and the exaggerating of Delilah’s wounds as the assassins retell her story, are all examples of this. Since this “gap” is emphasized throughout the entire film, there shouldn’t be any real mystery about how to interpret the text at the end. We’re not supposed to believe the words on the screen, but to recognize that they contain a great irony and sadness, and that they have no relation to who William Munny really is or how he really feels.
Among my sources, I was surprised to find how little had been written about the effect of this final scene in relation to the rest of the film. Eastwood has said, “Unforgiven gave me a chance to sum up what I think violence does to the human soul,” and the final scene is rather key to this effect (Jardine 75). Though it’s subtle, to me a great deal of the power and meaning of the movie is contained in this simple ending, as well as the ramifications of the film’s title. Anyone who has ever committed any large act(s) against his or her own conscience knows the great sad irony that life goes on beyond hell, and that this is where most of the pain lies – in a living hell. In fact, the “gap” of the words on the screen point out Munny’s knowledge of living a lie, as it were – knowing that he is “damned,” but that he has to keep putting one foot in front of the other anyway. And just as Mrs. Feathers knows that her daughter “married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition” without adequate explanation, Munny now knows that the soul is prone to committing evil acts with or without adequate explanation; there is no more explanation of evil than there is of love. When personal ethics go out of control, it usually doesn’t make any sense – to the victim or to the perpetrator. Poetic justice doesn’t necessarily follow, and the jaws of hell don’t open up and swallow “villains.” In short, after some grand and tragic act, life doesn’t end and the curtain doesn’t fall, as much drama and film would sometimes have us believe. I praise Unforgiven’s honesty, and yes, realism (which Eastwood is supposed to be so fond of), in using this simple scene to show that ordinary life continues on beyond the torment and hell of guilty deeds. The scene conveys an ineffable sadness that the film would lack if it were simply to end after Greeley’s. And since Eastwood wanted to show the effects of violence “on the soul,” this scene provides a fuller realization. Not only has he shown the effects of violence on all of the other characters earlier in the film, but with this final scene he also suggests the living horror of it for the murderer, which continues on in the mundane words and actions of daily life long past the deaths of all the victims.
As Tim Groves points out, Eastwood’s recent characters are “often beset by regret and remorse, and seek, but do not always find, redemption in various forms.” Though I’ve been arguing that Unforgiven effectively “damns” William Munny and violence, I also have to conclude that Unforgiven is ultimately about redemption. Not long ago my brother was talking about Mystic River and told me that that in spite of its darkness and cynicism, it had the effect of redemption on him by challenging him to look at the events depicted in the film, and then do something about it in relation to himself and the world. This is precisely how I feel about Unforgiven – that though it’s about damnation (not in the religious sense, but in the purely humanistic sense), it’s ultimately about redemption. The message isn’t one of hopelessness, which would be very depressing indeed. Instead, the intent is to ask questions of its audience and present challenges to masculinity and violence.
In his article “Clint Eastwood Goes PC,” Richard Grenier says he thinks the American public can “forgive Eastwood his feminism,” but not his “going soft on the punishment of evildoers.” At the end of the article he asks, “Who will see [Eastwood’s] pictures?” (53). This, I think, has been answered adequately by the passage of time. Grenier was writing in the wake of A Perfect World, which didn’t seem to connect with audiences. But A Perfect World proved to be the exception, not the rule. The majority of Eastwood’s films, since and including Unforgiven, have performed admirably for films of their type, and have all dealt with issues of feminism, masculinity, and/or violence, to varying degrees. A significant portion of the American population does in fact seem to trust Eastwood to provide them with “revised” messages. And frankly, it would be rather foolish of the critics to damn Eastwood to hell when he has so much to say that can have a strong impact on so many people.
Works Cited
Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Brod, Harry. “Unforgiven.” Tikkun 8.3 (May/June 1993): 30.
Corliss, Richard. “The Last Roundup.” Time 140:6 (August 10, 1992): 66.
Grenier, Richard. “Clint Eastwood Goes PC.” Commentary 97.3 (March 1994): 51-53.
Groves, Tim. “’We all have it coming, Kid’: Clint Eastwood and the Dying of the
Light.” Senses of Cinema. January 2001. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/unforgiven.html
Ingrassia, Catherine. “Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven.”
Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 53-59.
Jardine, Gail. “Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change.” Art Journal 53.3
(Fall 1994): 74-75.
Plantinga, C. “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven.”
Cinema Journal 37.2 (Winter 1998): 65-83.
Redmon, Allen. “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic
River.” The Journal of American Culture 27.3 (Sept. 2004): 315-328.
Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1996.
Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1993.
