Clint Eastwood and the attractive murderer

In an earlier post I mentioned Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven. It was suggested I give it another chance, and since it was available on HD DVD, I did.

It certainly looks beautiful in HD. And I admit it is a very good film with a lot of good points, perfect timing, excellent acting, good characters, the works. And it has a lot more nuance than westerns normally have.

But I will contend that ultimately it still boils down to the same old thing: admiration for a killer.

When William Munny, in the charismatic and handsome frame of Clint Eastwood, rides out of Big Whiskey in the end, saying that if anybody hurt the prostitutes for putting up the blood money, he will come back and kill everybody, there is pretty much not anybody watching who does not feel deep in his/her gut: "my god, there is a man!" You just can't help it, it's in our dark nature.

And you can even see this excemplified in the admiring and longing looks given him by the writer fellow and by the prostitute with the scars, as they watch him leave.

There is no way around it: it is gut-level admiration for a man who by his own admission has killed many innocent men, and women, and children, and who killed several more just minutes ago. And the film aims for it, it is where it gets its marketing power.

I am shocked that I've been unable to find any other reviewers who really question this. It is not a "great wrong", but there's certainly nothing beautiful about it, and it needs to be recognized.

In a documentary about Eastwood, the narrator says about Unforgiven: "the sherif has tortured and killed Will's best friend. He has no choice but vengeance." And that's the exact untruth to be uncovered. There is always a choice. Violence begets violence, and he who breaks the chain, wins.

Don't get me wrong, I am not villainizing "the Clint" here. His hyper-violent movie characters are merely reflecting an important aspect of human nature. I'm just saying it's an aspect we'd do well to look at some more.

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The following is from Wikipedia, and I have not checked the accuracy, so like all Wikipedia entries take it with a grain of salt:

"... although many critics and viewers consider the film emphatically anti-violence, David Webb Peoples has stated in interviews that this was not his intention: he wished to present violence as morally complex, as opposed to simply "wrong". Further evidence of this is the statement in the closing moments of the film that Munny is rumored to have gone to San Francisco and prospered in dry goods, lending support to the idea that Munny's brutal slaughter of Big Whiskey's sheriff and deputies at the film's climax was in some sense redemptive."

Eolake is back (and don't know how to stop):
Yes, or it surely depicts the idea that you can commit such horrible acts without any price to your life or soul.

Obviously I'm not immune to the charm of the movie, otherwise I'd not be upset by it. :)

Another way to express my problem with it: if you listen to the movie, it is clearly against violence. The characters say it many times. But if you look at the movie, it is clearly for it. The violence is presented in a way so it is enjoyable. A friend of mine said that the final big gun battle was "like an orgasm".

In other words it is not so much "ambiguous" as it is hypocritical. It is like "don't do what I do, do what I say."

By the way, I'm just watching the docu about the film, and the wiki entry is pretty correct, DW Peoples (the writer) does say that the reason people think it's an anti-violence movie is that most other movies are "pro-violence" in the sense that if it is the good guy doing it to the bad guy, it's OK. But that reality is more complex, and that it's often difficult to pinpoint who's the "good guy" and who's the "bad guy". Which I think is wise. You'll notice that each participant in a fight always thinks of himself as the good guy.

An interesting detail rarely pointed out is that the most hateful and vengeful character in the movie might be Alice, the prostitute madam. It is her who insists that the offending cowboys die and arranges for the blood money reward. This is despite the fact that one of them is a good man and pretty much innocent except for not having acted fast enough to stop his friend. And when he returns he attempts to do right by the scarred woman by giving her an extra pony of his own, which he was not required to do. And then Alice refuses this nice offer (without asking the victim) and drives him away into the arms of the killers. Not big on forgiveness.

I will concede that within the framework of a big, popular, Hollywood movie, this film is probably as far as we can currently go towards an anti-violence movie. If you'd made a movie like this and not made the violence seductive and aesthetic, it would instantly have lost 90% of its audience. At least.