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Unforgiven
Clint Eastwood
stars in "Unforgiven," the most
honored movie of 1992. What a film! Beautifully written, acted,
directed. Kind of a realistic debunking of western stereotypes,
which nevertheless provides all the standard excitement we expect from Westerns:
the gunplay, the moral quandaries, the battle of good and evil.
Gene Hackman's
sheriff, "little Bill" Daggett, is
an affable debunker of western gunmen and legends, a kind of
secular humanist. Reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton.
Rational, calculating, thoroughly secular. He loves polite
civilization, but has no feeling for the mythic spirit of the west. He has
no sense of the need of retribution, thinks that every wrong may
be taken care of with a handout and a smile. Everybody, he thinks, should
forgive and forget and just get along. Don't worry about justice in any
metaphysical sense. Just do what you're told, and especially obey the gun
control ordinance. But this pleasant situation ethicist
turns out to be a worse sadist than any of the gunmen he dispatches. He
supplements his gun control program by beating the daylights out of anyone
he suspects might intend to make trouble.
He is building a house for himself,
having, he thinks, pacified the town and brought civilization to the area.
This pattern evokes a Biblical theme: the great King-- God
at creation, Moses, David, Christ-- builds his house after he
has subdued his wicked enemies. But Little Bill is not a very
good Messiah-figure, either in subduing evil or in building his
house. Visitors keep noticing that there are all kinds of leaks in
the roof and other evidences of architectural incompetence, but
Bill does not warm to criticism. Is this a subtle commentary,
perhaps, on the bureaucratic institutions erected by our secular
humanist government?
Eastwood,
a very imperfect good guy in this movie, nevertheless draws cheers when he
lays out little Bill. Eastwood's almost-reformed
gunslinger turns out to be something of a Puritan at heart.
The film has its share of
politically correct attitudes. Eastwood's
companion is African American, whose wife is Native American. They are
going to arrange justice for some abused prostitutes. But there is paradox
there. In fighting for women's rights, the film in effect endorses capital
punishment, which is not nearly so popular today among the politically
correct.
The fact is that "Unforgiven" evokes an earlier time, and earlier
values, and does it convincingly. The deceased wife of the Eastwood character had gotten him off drink and swayed
him away from violence, turning him into a peaceful (and dirty)
pig farmer. Now he tries to communicate his wife's values to
their two little children. He wants the blood money for their sake,
and he can hardly bring himself to shoot the prostitute-abusers, for whom
the script evokes some sympathy. But when Daggett
tortures and murders Eastwood's friend and
publicly displays his body, Eastwood becomes the "famous gunfighter" of old. Fortifying himself with a bottle of
whiskey, he walks into Daggett's headquarters
and dispatches the bad guys with relish.
In general, however, the killing in
the movie is bumbling. It shows vividly, as Alfred Hitchcock
once said, "how difficult it really is to kill a human being."
Thus there is a certain debunking of the ethos of western legend in the
main body of the film; but in the end the legend is vindicated. Eastwood's character becomes the hero (his
accomplishment doubtless to be embellished by legend) and Hackman's humanist is relegated to the dustbin.
Christianity, of course, is far more
than a myth; but it is also more than casual historical truth. People who
try to debunk the gospel are, like Daggett,
debunking something larger than they are. The same must be said for the
social traditions: capital punishment, respect for women, equal justice
under the law, heroic defending of the powerless, that Christianity
has championed in western society. The interplay of such
traditions with modern unbelief (and its social fruits) is what makes
this movie theologically interesting.
Clearly, the film concludes, we must have something more than Daggett's humanism if we are to build a lasting house of civilization. We need more than small-minded historicism, let's-all-get-along optimism, and gun control. We also need the epic courage of inspired, if flawed, heroes, who stand for divine justice and mercy.