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Showing posts from October, 2014

Brutality and Myth in Clint Eastwood’s "Unforgiven"

Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven is a very unique, nontraditional western. On its very surface it purports to be an action-revenge tale, where self-aggrandizing gunfighters attempt to collect a bounty on two men who have attacked a young girl, in a small Wyoming town in the late nineteenth century. But in the first five minutes of the film, Eastwood quickly whisks us deep beneath those conventions and gives us not an illustration of how good triumphs over evil but instead a demonstration of degrees of brutality and how they play against each other. Throughout the film, three of its five lead characters--William Munny, Little Bill Daggett, and English Bob--are presented to us, the viewer, as practicing violence for the sake of violence, they like the thrill of killing and brutality--it seems to be in their nature. We see the film’s main character, William Munny, ostensibly having some past experience as a very successful gunfighter, at the film’s outset, a pig farmer an