Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I suspect that if you were to take 100 people who’d not seen the movie, make them watch it up until just past that point, and then have them fill out a questionnaire about how the rest of the movie would go, many of them would predict that Little Bill would turn out to be the hero. His beating of English Bob isn’t just justified - it’s the LEAST violent way of getting rid of him, in all likelihood, and Little Bill is clearly doing it for the express purpose of keeping murderers from coming to collect the bounty.
English Bob is, as I recall, the only character who is explicitly racist - he brags about how much he enjoys killing Chinamen. In the modern cinematic lexicon, that justifies nearly any horrible thing any other character chooses to do to him.
Along those lines, though, I do wonder if we’re supposed to read a racial element into Little Bill’s whipping of Ned.
That’s just it. They weren’t offered justice of any kind, so they went looking for it.
Little Bill was sending out a message; anyone riding into town to kill the two cowboys and collect the whores’ bounty was going to meet overwhelming force and get the shit kicked out of them. :I guess you think I’m kicking you, Bob. But it ain’t so. What I’m doing is talking, you hear? I’m talking to all those villains down there in Kansas. I’m talking to all those villains in Missouri. And all those villains down there in Cheyenne. And what I’m saying is there ain’t no whore’s gold. And if there was, how they wouldn’t want to come looking for it anyhow.
The supposed moral conflict is more a manufacture of our modern expectations, both in cinema and the real world. Remember, this is a local problem, and Bill can’t just call up the district U.S. Marshall, even if he could get ahold of him. While Bill might seem somewhat hypocritical, expressing as he does to Beauchamp his disgust with “assassins, or men of low character,” by any practical standard he is doing the smart and safe thing, confronting would-be assassins with excessive force and making examples of them pour encourager les outres. Our view of law enforcement today as custodians of legal statute, and the unacceptability of the use of excessive force comes from an expectation that criminals will surrender or suffer dire consequences when confronted, which is drawn from movies and television (especially during the Hayes Production Code era, where such results were mandatory). Little Bill, on the other hand, is effectively his own law.
However, I wouldn’t say that this makes Bill “the good guy”; not only does he brutally torture Ned and act dismissive toward renumeration for the whore that was injured, he also shows an enthusiasm of atavistic, needless violence. His jailhouse baiting of the battered English Bob, for instance, in which he basically humiliates Bob, or seeks and excuse to kill him. Bill indicates in his stories to Beauchamp (after Bob leaves town) that he’s hung around the crowd of gunslingers for a good portion of his life; although he may not be quite as degraded as others, he’s clearly a man that seeks violence and responds accordingly, even if his goal at Big Whiskey is to build a house and sit on the porch smoking his pipe. (Notice how badly all the real gunslingers are at making any other life for themselves; Muny is a failure as a hog farmer, Ned has no family, Bill can’t put a straight corner into his leaky house to save his life.) Bill is the type of man needed for the role at the time. Good and bad aren’t the point (or, as Muny notes in his parting shot to Bill, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
Regarding Muny, the reason he gets to ride out alive is he was simply the most brutal, cool-headed of the lot, and not just slightly lucky as well. In the end, he isn’t compromised by self-doubt the way Ned and the Kid are. The characters try to spend the entire film justifying their actions to each other and themselves, but when Muny gets drunk and goes back for vengeance, there isn’t any attempt at justification; he’s just a bloodthirsty killer looking for revenge. It’s no longer about right and wrong: “Any sumbitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only gonna kill him, but I’m gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down.” This is how such men lived.
As for Skinny, he proudly displayed Ned out in front of his saloon. His entire interest in this was squeezing out his investment in Delilah; he could care less about the injury to her, and in fact taunts her deformity. He’s hardly innocent of wrong-doing, even if he is largely a passive player. “Any man don’t wanna get killed better clear on out the back.”
Beauchamp is the audience’s connection with these people; he’s essentially a tool to give both Little Bill and Will Muny someone to provide exposition in order to express the experience and internal states of the characters. He’s hardly innocent, either; he romanticizes the violence, which in turn recruits people like the Schofield Kid into wanting to be a gunslinger (and the kid, of course, inflates his own experience).
There are no good guys in this film, and conversely, no irredeemably bad ones, either. Even Muny, “a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition,” can be tamed and lead a peaceful existence, but some people are drawn to violence like moths to a flame. This film stands in stark contrast to other Eastwood films like Pale Rider, which present a clear, manufactured dichotomy of good and bad. It would make a good pairing with High Plains Drifter, another film where there are no innocent victims, and in which the violence that is received upon the town is begat by their previous actions.
Stranger
Good stuff everyone, and you all highlight what I love about the film. There are no absolutes, no good guys, no bad guys. The narrative doesn’t pan out in heroic western fashion and I’m never quite sure who I should be rooting for.
I’m sure I’m not the only one that felt sorry for Little Bill when Munny kills him. I shouldn’t feel sorry, but I did.
I loves me some ambiguities in a film!
He was building a house, damnit!
Stranger
Ned had an Indian wife. Will tells his kids to go see her if they run into problems, and IIRC tells the Kid to bring his share of the money to her if he doesn’t come back from the town. There’s no indication Ned wasn’t doing pretty well until his friend tells gets him to come along on one more adventure. And Ned’s having a great time - riding with friends, freebies from whores, shootin shit over the campfire - until he shoots Davey. I’m guessing that’s part of Will’s anger - he knows Ned would be home happy if he hadn’t convinced him to come along.
The only time I felt sorry for the death of a Gene Hackman character was in “The Royal Tenenbaums”. And that’s only because he died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship.
I saw it the same way, and the irony of it is, they went for William Munny, a notoriously brutal man who openly bragged about killing women and children. The only way to get justice, was to turn to a vicious maniac, so to speak.
The fact that after all the killing, Munny rides off, simply reinforces the “deserve has nothing to do with it” thread running through the movie. . If anything, in most westerns, Munny would have been shot or hanged years before. The same would/should have happened to English Bob, who gets away with a beating from Bill and a set of ruined guns.
All the characters were flawed in some way, and “we all got it coming” was a true statement, when Munny says it. And yet, the meanest and arguably most evil one simply rides away and disappears into obscurity.
That is what made the film so powerful. The good guys don’t win. There is no happy ending. Not really.
Just so you’ll know, “mores” is the word you are looking for. “Morays” are eels.
Answering without reading the thread, I’d say this:
There are no good guys – in the traditional, Western, white-hat sense – in Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood’s character comes closest, but he’d deny he was a hero if anyone called him one, which no one in his world would. And his massacre of Little Bill and his men at the end is not a victory, and he did not think of it as such.
They couldn’t accept the justice they were offered for the same reason they couldn’t accept the gold-plated latinum they were offered.
I’ve always liked this explanation of the film.
Both characters were evil. The difference is that Munny knew it and fought his demons every day, while Bill never thought of himself as evil.
Munny instructed the compañeros of the gut-shot and slow-dying man to bring him water. He gave them safe passage, unharassed by rifle fire, to do so – even though it took a good deal of convincing.
Little Bill bull-whipped a man to death under questioning and was an all-around bastard at every single opportunity.
The audience’s sympathies were with Munny from start to finish. The beating of English Bob crosses a line into a certain kind of brutality that the audience was supposed to - and I think largely did - find off-putting and egregious. Munny is doing it for his kids, he’s reformed, he’s tortured by the thought of returning demons – the character was designed for us to morally align with him like no one else in the film.
Munny’s regret is a big part of the film. He’s been reformed for years and is reluctantly doing the job for his kids’ benefit. So yeah, he’s the protagonist. Little Bill may be trying to keep order in his town, but he’s excessively brutal (although others have pointed out that he was sending a message in English Bob’s case) and a complete hypocrite when criticising violent gunmen while daring English Bob to try to kill him in jail. Combined with my previous post about his disregard for the whores, it tips the scales against him. The great thing about this film is that it really shows how Little Bill considered himself the good guy.
Indeed, I think it’s a little disingen… disingenue… you know, to pretend that the movie doesn’t ultimately cast Little Bill as the bad guy in opposition to Munny. While you can have some this way/that way about Little Bill for most of the movie, his torture and murder of Ned is simply evil.
The thing is that Munny’s sins are largely in the past, as retold by the opening crawl, his own stories, and the stories of the Schofield Kid and Little Bill, as well as Ned’s acknowledgment that Munny was once a real bastard. But it’s all just stories, really, and until the very end it’s hard to tell what parts of the stories are real and which parts are total bullshit. Until the orgy of violence in Greeley’s, we don’t know for sure what a ferocious killer Munny actually is.
The audience is set up to sympathize with Munny until that point because they don’t see Munny being as much of a bastard - he does murder Davey, of course, but he seems almost civilized about it - as they do Little Bill, whose barbarism explodes on screen several times before Greeley’s.
Of course, AFTERWARDS, you’re left with the question… who was worse, Will Munny or Little Bill? (Incidentally, I do not for one instant believe it was an accident that they’re both named William.) That’s the genius of the movie; that’s why the movie makes you sympathize with William Munny. They took a very conventional Western story, led you through it, and at the end you find yourself thinking, “Wait a minute… was I rooting for the villain this entire time?”
Off the subject, but I have a question: How and why would English Bob have “worked for the railroad shooting Chinamen”?
A lot of the work on the western railroad construction (that is, the portions built eastwards from the west coast) was done by chinese labor. The chinese were treated poorly, very poorly. It’s no stretch to imagine a railroad hiring a low-down bastard to shoot any chinese workers who get out of line by asking to not be brutalized.
I think its worth considering the townspeoples opinions on Little Bill when thinking about who is good or bad. Agree or disagree with his methods, but I bet most of the townspeople were glad to have him around.
Consider, they defer immediately to his judgements, but its not because of fear. In a town with a stereotypical “bad” sheriff, the townspeople would be a little cowed, afraid to speak their minds. Instead Skinny is confident enough that he can demand justice/payment for his “whores”. The deputies seem happy enough in their roles, just happy to defer to Little Bill on the bigger issues. Even the girls are quick enough to chew Little Bill out for not being harsh enough on the cowboys. Would they shout at him like that if he was “bad”?
Even the climatic scene in the bar starts with Bill promising to sort out expenses for the posse, a posse that seems in very good humour and content to work with Little Bill.
The image presented in the film is definately one of Bill as a hard man, but a man who is doing a good job for the town. So is Bill a good guy? I bet the townspeople would say he was.