Essay Questions

One of the recurring themes in this movie is that people often pretend to be something they aren't. Discuss three examples of deceptive characters, and analyze their motives for misrepresenting themselves.

Little Bill Daggett masquerades as a polite, friendly, and law-abiding sheriff. In reality he is a violent psychotic who uses his authority as an officer of the law to give him an excuse to beat people and even execute them, employing far more violence than is necessary to enforce law and order in Big Whiskey. He beats English Bob and publicly executes Ned Logan. Little Bill maintains his facade because he remains sheriff only through the approval of the townspeople. If he were to drop his act and behave violently toward everybody all the time, he would lose his position of authority. He values his position of authority not only because it gives him power over others but because it provides a relatively safe way to channel his violent temper into something socially productive.

The Schofield Kid is a young man with a pistol who falsely presents himself as a gunfighter. He likes the respect and the way people treat him when they think he is dangerous. In reality he is a young man with a big appetite for glory. The image he presents does not reflect his real ambition or his true nature: when he manages to actually kill someone he is instantly remorseful.

William Munny, formerly a cold-blooded killer, has convinced himself and everyone else that he's left the life behind and is now a farmer. He accepts the bounty hunt because of the money (notice the similarity with his last name) and at the end returns to his habitual way of doing things. In Munny's case, his deception was a genuine attempt to turn away from his past and to become a different and better person, but he did not succeed.

How does this film present the stereotypical Western gunslinger movie theme in which a hero battles against bad people?

This film reverses the popular notion of the heroic gunslinger. None of the characters are conventionally "good". The sheriff is a violent madman, one of the bounty hunters is a kid with delusions of grandeur while two of the others are retired, and the "good" men who are tracking down two cowboys are not avenging an attack on an innocent woman, but on a whore (who according to the standards of the time was expendable). The cowboys being tracked down are not hard-bitten felons but rough men who took what they believed to believe an appropriate revenge on a woman who made one of them feel bad about his penis size. They are outarmed and outnumbered by the bounty hunters.

In the film, there is no clear definition of good or evil. At first the sheriff appears to be good because he drives the bounty hunters out of town to maintain public order, but over the course of the movie it becomes obvious that he's only feeding his megalomania.

Even Munny, the film's protagonist, is not able to maintain his principles or stick to his plan to collect the money and go home. Despite his determination to abandon violence as a way of life, he ends up going on a killing spree to avenge Logan's murder.

How are female characters depicted in this movie?

As with most movies of the era, there were no female characters in "Unforgiven" except the ones whose gender was relevant to the plot. They appear on the set only when there's a need for gratuitous eye candy, otherwise the action is off-screen.

The plot movement starts because a young prostitute named Delilah has had her face slashed by some drunken cowboys after accidentally laughing at one of them. As with most of the revenge in the movie, the retribution against Delilah was grossly out of proportion with her actual offense. The scars on her face make her less effective as a prostitute and her career is effectively over. But she is not compensated for this in any way: the compensation is not paid to her but to the male owner of the brothel where she works.

The prostitutes display initiative and agency by pooling their resources to put together a thousand-dollar bounty on the men who mutilated Delilah. They can't give her back her looks or her career, but they can at least make their presence known. But even though they outnumber the hapless cowboys, they follow the conventional movie trope of women refusing to take direct action: they take action only through men. Accordingly, they do not seek direct revenge against the men who hurt their colleague, but they put out a bounty so that some man might take action on their behalf. They take initiative, but they do it in a stereotypically Hollywood way. Furthermore, most of their discussion and action takes place prior to the beginning of the movie.

Although some of the male characters are married, their wives and daughters do not appear on the set in any significant way. Munny's wife is deceased, and the need to feed and care for their children is a factor in his decision to chase the bounty.

What is the significance of the Beauchamp character?

Beauchamp is a foil for the men he wants to depict as "heroes" of the West. He makes his living much like Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey: by writing exaggerated stories about noble, law-abiding sheriffs or heroic bounty hunters and desperate villains. In Beauchamp's books, which represent the traditional notions and expectations of Western books and films, there is a clear dividing line between good and evil. In many ways, Beauchamp's idealism causes him to believe in the things he writes about. He comes West hoping to get closer to the kind of characters he'd written about in his books, but the people he meets aren't what he expects.

The ongoing contrast between Beauchamp's naïve perspective and reality creates a subplot in which he becomes gradually disillusioned when he witnesses the nuanced and sometimes dubious moral decisions made by the other characters. He even interprets Little Bill's actions as heroic, making excuses for his violent behavior until it strains even Beauchamp's credulity to the breaking point.