The authentic, the real, is what the biographer is searching for throughout the movie.
And it might be what everyone seems to be searching for.
The kid showing up to William’s farm because he is the real deal, the prostitutes seeking authentic justice for one of their own, William seeking his old “authentic” self, or even the authentic justice that Little Bill feels he is underserving of in the end because he is building a house.
The biographer is the character tying this together, first finding kernels of the true and authentic in the Duke of Death, English Bob, and then in greater and greater mouthfuls until he is face-to-face with an authentic killer at the end of the movie.
Everyone’s narrative of who they actually are, the social construction, or how they want to be represented to the world is false—the outlaws routinely embellish the stories of how many people they’ve killed or how it happened, whereas William wants to conceal the truth of what he’s done or claim that his late wife has cured him of.
William recuperates in an abandoned barn, being cared for by the prostitute whose face was cut up.
In his feverish state he claims to be visited by the Angel of Death, seeing all the people he has killed as well as his wife’s skull filled with worms.
Whereas everyone else’s past is something they wish they were proud of and the fabrications of the their past come to haunt them in the present, William’s past is something he is severely ashamed of and because of the real deeds of his past, the horror of the remorse is the thing that haunts him in the present.
The truth haunts William while the false haunts everyone else.
William claims that he thought he was going to die, and what we take away as viewers is that this event is the death of this “good” William who his wife has saved and the rebirth of the “bad” William, the true William who has been concealed the whole time.
It seems like the connotation of the real or the authentic often is one of being somehow good, whereas this shows that isn’t the case—the real is just the real, it is reality as it is without moral judgement, but it is only in the authentic William as “bad” that any form of real justice takes place in the movie.
Ned is innocent and is savagely tortured and killed, whereas the cowboy is guilty and let go.
After William recovers from the edge of death, there is a clear shifting in the color of the movie, as the rebirth happens, with all the nighttime and dark rainy scenes replaced by the snow white daylight background when William is talking to the prostitute “angel” who is scared just like he is.
In this scene he is telling her about his late wife’s effect on his life, the rebirth she carried out in him, turning him from an alcoholic killer into a reformed man.
The Kid and William kill the two cowboys and Ned ends up getting caught by a posse and tortured and killed by Little Bill.
Upon hearing the news, William takes a drink of whiskey and almost immediately is transformed into who he’s been trying to hide.
After denying who he is throughout the movie or downplaying what he’s done, he walks into the saloon where Ned’s body is being displayed and claims that he’s William Munny who’s killed women and children.
He ends up killing the owner, the unarmed Skinny, which ends up appalling Little Bill, whose morals in the movie have been far from upstanding.
William shoots Little Bill, but the gun misfires and he is forced to ditch it and pull out the Scofield he’s confiscated from the Kid, killing Little Bill and about five others in the firefight.
The biographer sees all this and finally finds the killer he has been looking for in all of these outlaw figures.
He is confronted with the authentic.
And he begins an impromptu interview with William, only to discover that William chalks it up to luck, that he’s always had luck in killing fellows.
This is in direct opposition to the high moral ground of the narrative of English Bob’s killing and the almost scientific principles of gunslinging that Little Bill has filled the biographer with.
William is certainly doing what Little Bill has been illuminating, i.e., taking out the most skilled gunslinger first and he’s not the quickest or fastest draw, but is the most level headed.
Because William is the authentic embodiment, however, he cannot discern what he has done and just says it’s luck.
This brief interaction with the biographer is in stark contrast with the other gunslingers the biographer has been profiling.
William, because he isn’t trying to construct a narrative of his exploits, sees little use in the biographer, whereas the biographer would gladly follow him anywhere because he needs him to access what is real in the world.
Every other character needs the biographer to construct what they want to be real, what they want to make authentic in myth, but William is real so myth is constructed from him.
Having killed everyone in the saloon and drunk to excess, he leaves and makes threats in the street that he’ll kill anyone he sees, and a few attempt to pull their weapons on him only to be unable to pull the trigger because they know the truth about him.
The truth is here in this last scene—the authenticity of who William actually is becomes the thing that saves him as he is in the crosshairs of others but they are unable to pull the trigger.
They know that his treats of violence on them and their whole families will come true if they fire on him.
At the close of the movie, there is further hinting at this search for the true and authentic, with William’s late wife’s mother visiting the farmstead only to find it abandoned with only the grave of her late daughter giving no explanation on why she decided to marry a known thief and murderer with an ill temper.
This last cutaway before the credits shows that even the characters outside of the principle ones are searching for the true narratives, the authentic narratives to give meaning to the actions of their lives.
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