The anti-Western

I've written in this space before how Die Hard works as a meta-level defense of the masculine American hero, with its tacit ridicule of McClane's doubters and naysayers in corporate sleazeball Harry Ellis and Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T Robinson. Total Recall does something similar… both formally in its male fantasy plot, and informally during the pivotal pill scene with Dr. Edgemar. The evidence supporting Dr. Edgemar's argument that Quaid dreamed everything after going under at Rekall is rock-solid, but you the viewer reject it because the adventure you're on is too fun to not believe in, real world be damned.

Westerns on TV and the big screen featured the kinds of heros Die Hard extolled, but the genre suffered a mortal blow in the late '60s and '70s when a darkening of public thought retinged American history with cynicism and shame. The revisionist Western, featuring morally gray heros, became de rigueur.

If anyone was going to revive the Western, it would have been Clint Eastwood, star of Sergio Leonne's Dollars trilogy and other Western classics like Two Mules for Sister Sarah, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and my personal favorite, Pale Rider. Spoiler alert: He did not.

"We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work… I can't think of one good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST." –Sonia Chernus, screenwriter of The Outlaw Josey Wales

Unforgiven won the Academy Award for Best Picture and is hailed by many as the best Western of all time. It's supposedly so good that it's the reason no one has tried to make a Western in 30 years (except for the vastly more entertaining Tombstone). That's wrong. No one has tried to make a Western since Unforgiven because Unforgiven systematically deconstructed and destroyed the genre. As film critic Jason Hellerman says, "what we saw made us not want to look back for a long time."

If Die Hard and Total Recall tried to revive or at least venerate heroism and escapism, Unforgiven shoots them in the back and stomps them into the mud. It's brutal, nihilistic, and joyless. The "hero," an assassin who abandons his young children, would be the villain in any other movie. (He even has a Villains wiki page.) The "villain," a sheriff protecting a Wyoming town from assassins, would be the hero in any other movie. The inversion is masterfully executed, but I hesitate to call it "good."

Daggett: "I'll see you in hell, William Munny."

Munny: "Yeah." [shoots Daggett in the head]

An example of how this movie deconstructs the Western is its portrayal of "saloon girls." What some women did to keep food on the table in the Old West was rarely hinted at in Hays Code–era Hollywood, to the extent the hero could flirt with a prostitute and a child who happened to be watching would be none the wiser. Unforgiven is not so politic and duly earns its Restricted rating in the very first scene by showing a man butcher a prostitute's face because she laughed when she saw his penis.

If that doesn't sound like typical Western fare, that's because it's not. The point of that scene (in addition to initiate the plot) is to hit the viewer between the eyes with the vulgarity of the Old West. It's a comment less about the Old West and more about the genre that artfully obscured the vulgar and profane to tell you a story, maybe even a wholesome story about men with moral fiber. Put another way, those stories were lies. This, here, is unvarnished truth. Get it?

As if Eastwood's intent wasn't clear enough, there's a character called Beauchamp, a writer of pulp Western novels, who is portrayed as a coward who lives vicariously through his heros, who sugar-coats and glorifies violence. The sheriff takes him under his wing to teach him how the West really is: lawless, amoral, unheroic. Even the way gunfights play out comes down to dumb luck. You see? Everything is meaningless!

It's ironic when a fan of this movie talks about this movie with any kind of reverence when the movie all but screams that it doesn't want to be revered. This person might even say his favorite scene is when Eastwood's Bill Munny shoots up a saloon to avenge his friend. It's a great gunfight, and it stands out as the only time the ostensible hero lets morality direct his actions. The same gunfight with same set-up would have a bigger impact in a true Western.

It took chutzpah for Eastwood to make Unforgiven, an indictment of the genre that made him famous. I'd hold it against him personally if he didn't have oodles of good will stored up from everything else he's acted in and directed. But for those whom the Western is near and dear, I wouldn't be surprised if he's still unforgiven.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.