The westerns in which Clint Eastwood only acted as well as those he directed are inextricably tied to the frontier thesis forward by Frederic Jackson Turner in his landmark essay “The Significance of the American Frontier in American History.” More specifically, Eastwood’s westerns add another layer to the continuing mythologizing of the west by creating a persistent visual coherency underlining Jackson’s contention that “to the frontier, the American intellect owes its striking characteristics...that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil.”
Clint Eastwood has always been the ultimate symbol of “dominant individualism, working for good and evil” in the western genre. From his spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone and right up to Unforgiven, a familiar template is inevitably acted out: Eastwood’s character begins as a passive non-participant whose particular talents and idiosyncratic individualism are called into service by another party. In rare instance, that third party is someone who does direct harm to Eastwood’s character which stimulates him out of passivity. Once called upon to become an active agency of retributive violence, he becomes full engaged until the job is done. Once the job is done, he disappears.
This template plays out in the story of Unforgiven in which retired gunfighter is lured back into the saddle by the reward money for taking out some abusive cowboys who have no real reason to be allowed to go on living. While he takes on this effort as part of a team approach involving a former comrade and a young buck, inevitably achieving justice is left entirely up to Will Munny. He winds up not only taking care of the business required to get the reward money, but cleans the corrupt regime in charge of the entire town. With nobody left willing to raise against him, he leaves the town almost in shambles as just as much a mysterious figure as when he arrived.
Preacher in Pale Rider does the same thing when he arrives to deal some justice to a corrupt strip mining corporation. Joe Kidd gets drawn into a land dispute between peasants and wealthy landowners and winds up driving a locomotive through the salon before mysterious leaving town with a local girl. In High Plains Drifter, the Stranger reluctantly agrees to help save a town from an unwholesome collection of corrupt bad guys before mysteriously leaving town. With some minor variations and tweaking of the details, another half-dozen Eastwood westerns could be tailored to fit within this general outline realized most artfully and with subtle layers of meaning in Unforgiven.
What all these films taken together suggest—and what Unforgiven explicitly asserts—is a confirmation of the central premise of Jackson’s essay that “the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.” Unforgiven introduces two new elements into the Eastwood western template that serve to punctuate the narrative thrust of those that came before.
English Bob is also arriving in town to kill the cowboys and collect the reward. He denigrates the American culture—or lack thereof—and even suggests that the recent assassination of the President is hardly worthy of attention. Kill a king or queen takes nerves of steel, he suggests, but who wouldn’t kill a President. English Bob is accompanied on his mission by an American biographer who dutifully records all his bluster and boasting as fact. When they finally arrive in town, English Bob is humiliated and beaten to a pulp by the corrupt sheriff and the biographer learns that most of what Bob has said is not true or only half-true. Bob is run out of town and the biographer stays behind to rewrite the narrative according to the corrupt sheriff.
Since the town essentially subsists on the revenue produced by the popular whorehouse, nearly every man there is in the pocket of the sheriff. By the time Munny has dealt out his retribution for their killing his old comrade, very few men are left standing. One of those men is the biographer, but he is not going to get the chance to shift his allegiance once again and rewrite the narrative with the mysterious gunfighter as the hero. Left in ignorance, one can only assume that the biographer will instead mythologize Munny into a completely different character entity altogether.
Eastwood’s westerns present a tapestry of Jackson’s archetypal dominant individual working for both good and evil as circumstances necessitates before moving on as mysteriously as he arrived. For that reason, these people have been left out of the narrative, destined to loom in the history only as mythic figures stripped of biography and in which the evil that they may have done has been transformed into a necessary one for the taming of the west. With the degrading casting out of English Bob, the final chapter in Eastwood’s history makes explicit the assertion that it is the settling of the west that created the American identity and gave it a true cultural background rather the Europeanized East. With the the introduction of the biographer, Unforgiven confirms what the previous films have been saying all along: the lawlessness of the frontier was not civilized by official law enforcement or by an insurrection of settlers against the forces of corruption, but rather by the mysterious individuals not themselves tamed by long-term ties. These forces of individualism remained enigmatic and unknown strangers whose role is known only as a result of the mythologizing of writers and filmmakers.
