William Munny, Unforgiven, and the making of the narratives we tell ourselves, Part 1…

The other night I watched the 1992 Clint Eastwood western, Unforgiven.

I hadn’t seen it in years, but it’s a movie that has always provoked thinking about narratives and our common constructions of them.

I’m definitely not spoiling anything about the movie since it’s over 30 years old as I write this, but the themes in it are something that I’ve been thinking about recently as people from my past have recently reached out. Reached out to contradict the constructed narratives I have of people.

Every time I’ve watched the film, it always makes me think of this old channel on TV back when everyone had cable, TNT, because my memory of that channel was they were always playing the movie.

I remember how dark the movie always looked to my young eyes, the black and rainy backgrounds, the low lighting of the saloon at night, everyone drenched in rain, their clothes giving off a dark rain-drenched reflection in the low candle light.

While I associate this memory with the movie, as memory takes hold, as it’s prone to do, TNT always reminds me of WCW wrestling and how a friend and I would watch it after school, often trying to imitate them until it all ended with me pulling his neck trying to do a suplex move only to wind up choking him out and him crying and running away.

I remember buying the film on DVD in college when I took an Asian Studies film class about the knight errant in martial arts films.

A knight errant was a character from medieval chivalric romance who became the typical trope of the wandering hero seeking out adventures for love or for an ideal, like justice. Don Quixote plays on the trope, while more recently it can be seen in figures such as Batman or Jack Reacher.

I became obsessed with the movie because of all the different levels that you could read the movie, from the revisionism of the good guys are actually the bad guys or how the saintly women are replaced by prostitutes, or a feminist reading that the whores are the only ones with actual agency where everything else in the plot is a reaction to something they’ve done, from the laugh at the beginning of the movie to the bounty itself which drives the action, a structuralist reading of things done in the light—reflecting justice—and things done in the dark—the injustice.

Certainly the critics see this multiple play of meanings, as it is constantly on the lists of the best movies ever made and it certainly has an appeal outside of the strictly male audience of Westerns and shoot ‘em up movies.

In the film, we see a typical knight errant journey in the western genre but with a revisionist twist.

The film begins with the event that drives all the action, a prostitute in a Wyoming outlaw town gets her face cut up by a cowboy when she starts laughing at his small penis.

Disappointed in the justice that the town sheriff, Little Bill, played by Gene Hackman, dispenses on the cowboys, the prostitutes band their money together and put out a bounty on the two cowboys involved.

One could argue that Little Bill’s outlawing firearms in the town is the whole reason for the movie—had the cowboy killed the prostitute, Little Bill would have done his eye-for-an-eye justice, killing the cowboy, and the prostitutes would have had no reason to set up the bounty.

Meanwhile, a young gunslinger who calls himself The Schofield Kid shows up to the retired outlaw William Munny’s, played by Eastwood, pig farm because the young gunslinger was raised on stories about how William was the baddest man in the west.

However, William hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in over a decade, claiming that his late wife had transformed him into a new man.

This begins the narrative accounts with people claiming to be larger than life trying to paint this facade of who they are not or embellished versions of themselves, while William is constantly trying to recognize and assert this new identity of being reborn, of having transformed from a hardened killer into a reformed man.

What’s interesting at the outset with the stories told of William is that these stories grow in time, from the killing of a few men told by the Kid to Ned’s correcting of the event as eye witness to greater and greater numbers of men killed and then including women and children.

Meanwhile, everyone else’s narratives of who they are diminish over time as more and more of the truth comes out, from English Bob to the Kid himself.

The Kid claims to have killed five men, and as we see the truth revealed of who he is and the narrative fades throughout the film, we see him reduced from being the gun-toting braggadocio to a man weeping into the bottle over taking a life, unable to bear what he has done.

William decides to recruit his old partner Ned, played by Morgan Freeman, to help him kill the two cowboys, and they all set off from Kansas to Wyoming.

Along the way they learn that The Kid is severely near-sighted and that who he claims to be is in fact made up, with both Ned and William seeing through the facade he has constructed fairly easily.

William gets sick en route, arriving at the outlaw town only to be severely beaten by Sheriff Little Bill for arriving with a firearm.

Little Bill has been hoping to dissuade other gunslingers from coming to the town to collect on the bounty by trouncing anyone who shows up, namely English Bob, who came to town with a biographer who has been chronicling his larger-than-life exploits.

English Bob and his biographer become the central subject of truth and narrative in the plot, bringing the latent background theme of the construction of narratives and, by extension, the nature of myth-making, to the foreground.

Little Bill usurps the biographer from English Bob by stripping him of the false narrative because he was there when the events happened.

He is an eye witness to what the biographer hears secondhand.

He has the truth.

He is authentic.

Continued in Part 2…

• William Munny, Unforgiven, and the making of the narratives we tell ourselves, Part 2…
• William Munny, Unforgiven, and the making of the narratives we tell ourselves, Part 3…
• Why Ignoring Art Limits Your Success and Personal Growth
• Love, Obsession, and the Lie We Tell Ourselves About Desire
• What was read this week: Mar 9-15

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