Let’s not overthink this
Michael Wood on Clint Eastwood
Current films are full of regrets and second chances, none more so than the recent work of Clint Eastwood. In the Line of Fire, which opened last month, has him playing an American Secret Service man haunted by his failure to protect John Kennedy on the day everyone remembers. Now another assassin, John Malkovich no less, is stalking another President: a risk for the incumbent but a chance of redemption for our hero. The regrets on the subject of violence are particularly murky. ‘Penance’ was the word Eastwood used in a Rolling Stone interview in relation to Unforgiven, his last film as star and director and one which brought him his first Oscar and a new respectability in the movie world. In conversation Eastwood made the fim sound more like a prayer then a Western. It was as if he was apologising on the screen for all his old movie misdeeds; and the film itself has at its core a long, illustrated sermon on the pain and horror of violent death. Penance here seems to mean moral confusion rather than anything like steady contrition. Unforgiven is a good movie because it doesn’t shirk the contradictions it raises, indeed it displays them with stately elegance; not a great movie because the contradictions, beneath the elegance, are a sprawling mess, a mirror of the muddle of our thoughts about violence.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 19 · 7 October 1993
From John Lee
I enjoyed Michael Wood’s sympathetic account of Clint Eastwood’s work (LRB, 9 September). However, when he came to deal with Unforgiven, inaccuracies crept in, which tended to simplify and misrepresent that film’s concerns. Take, for example, when William Munny, Ned and the Schofield Kid catch up with the cowhands. Wood writes: ‘Ned won’t shoot … Munny himself is still not much of a shot, even with a rifle, but he does manage to wing one man, and finally to wound him enough to make him die.’ But, to start with, Ned does shoot, bringing down the cowhand’s horse and breaking his leg. The cowhand then begins to drag himself into cover, crying out fearfully to his friends. Ned won’t shoot in this yet-colder blood; Munny, however, takes his rifle. Only, never having been good with a rifle (as he tells us), he misses once, but hits the boy the second time – in the gut. It’s a slow, vocal and frightened death. Is the lesson to be drawn here that ‘these are assassins, not heroes’? They’re certainly not heroes, but they’re also not assassins. Ned certainly isn’t an assassin (at least not any more), and the Kid will soon learn that he isn’t. At the risk of ‘overthinking’ the film, the Kid’s short-sightedness is a good symbol for his inability to see what killing entails until he gets up close.
Unforgiven, in fact, argues consistently and eloquently against stereotypes. Instead of assassins and heroes it has men (in this example), some of whom can kill and some of whom can’t. And, pace Wood, killing isn’t easy, except in its mechanics. Killing is sickening and hard, and if you can do it, it never goes away. Munny is ‘unforgiven’ not because others haven’t forgiven him (though they haven’t), but because he is unable to forgive or forget himself.
Yet he keeps on killing. The Kid, seeking to justify his killing of a man, says hopefully: ‘I guess he had it comin’.’ Munny replies: ‘We all have it comin’, kid.’ Wood likes this, ‘because it says both that we all die and that we all deserve to die.’ Quite so, but the line is spoken as a rebuke, a ‘so what if we all have it comin’?’ Munny’s point is that people deserve more than just their deserts. Or, to put it another way, nobody deserves to die thirstily, as a young man, with their gut split open under the sun and behind a rock. Munny knows this, but he is still willing to kill, as killing is, for him, easier money than pig-rearing. (Might William Munny be meant to suggest bill money?)
The final shoot-out emphasises this divorce between knowledge and action. It is not confusedly tacked-on, but is rather a culmination. It concludes the strand of the film’s argument about killing which is carried on through the use of weapons (a strand which Wood’s inaccuracies blur). Munny does not, as Wood says, ‘mow’ down the sheriff and ‘most of the other people in the saloon’. Rather, he calmly shoots the saloon manager with one barrel of his shotgun, and then aims at the sheriff. The shotgun misfires, but Munny doesn’t panic. Others have already started firing, but they’re panicking and missing. Munny doesn’t have skill (did he ever?) but killing doesn’t excite him. So Munny, though incompetent with pistols, poor with rifles and unlucky with shotguns, slowly kills five men who have drawn on him. It is an incredible feat, so we are told, but we realise that it is also beyond the pale. Munny rides off as something other than human, but to his children. It is an intolerable contradiction. Unforgivable. Unforgiven.
John Lee
Bristol
