Mythologizing the West
A persistent theme is the way that the history of the American west came to be mythologized. Some refer to the film as an attempt to demythologize the western genre when it in fact it what the film really does is portray the processes at work in constructing myth. By showing how myth is created, of course, the result is inescapably to demythologize, so the confusion is natural. The character of W.W. Beauchamp is as essential to this theme as he is superfluous to the narrative events. The very same story could be told of Will Munny coming to town to clean up Little Bill’s fascist utopia without his character and lose nothing in the bargain. The addition of a biographer of western figures introduces the thematic overview of how this story would have been told in one way if English Bob had dominated, another if Little Bill had dominated and a third with Munny dominating. The same story told from the perspective of a different victor is the fuel that drives the engine of myth and without the myth of the west, there would never have been a movie called Unforgiven.
The Civilizing of the Frontier
Unforgiven has much in common with Shane. Both feature a protagonist trying to escape his past as gunslinger not always on the side of right. Both films present the attempted redemption of that past through the intervention of the former gunslinger into a town ruled by the iron fist of a fascist authoritarian. A political dynamic is thus at the center of both films as the gunslinger becomes the agency by which the politics and economics of the past are associated with the evil of the gunslinger’s past and his redemption is associated with an evolution in the settling of the frontier. Will Munny, like Shane, is the necessary link between the necessary fascism of Little Bill to institute order from pure chaos and the future of democratic equality essential for the civilized expansion of American ideals into the newly tamed wilderness.
Redemption
Also like Shane, redemption is at the heart of Unforgiven. Unlike Shane, however, the redemption that comes is not for its gunslinger wishing to escape the sins of his past. If anything, Will Munny has ensured himself a legacy of becoming a mythic gunslinger thanks to allowing W.W. to survive. Kill the messenger and you kill the message, but Munny neglects to do this. Perhaps because W.W. isn’t deserving of death…but as he himself puts, “deserving’s got nothing to do with it.” A more likely reason for Munny not including W.W. in his bloodbath is that he knows he’s legacy is going to be associated with violence and that redemption is only possibly as a private issue. So where is the redemption in Unforgiven? By allowing W.W. and his book to survive, the film is implicitly redeeming the myth of the west. To have killed off W.W. in one way or another—surely, he could have died accidentally in the massive exchange of gunfire just as easily as being target by Munny—the film could have punctuated its thematic examination of the process of creating myth by symbolically destroying it. The decision to allow W.W. to live and go forward with his myth-making, that myth-making is redeemed. And why not? The film is a western, the ultimate beneficiary of that mythologizing.
