Unforgiven

by Edward Buscombe
BFI, London, UK, 2004
96 pp., illus. Paper, £8.99
ISBN: 1-84457-033-9.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, Leuven, Belgium

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be)

Edward Buscombe’s study of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece, Unforgiven (1992), for many scholars the western that brings the history of the genre to its end, is a good example of sound and solid scholarship and a perfect illustration of the didactic philosophy of the BFI Modern Classics series. In 96 short, well-written and wonderfully (full-colour) illustrated pages, the author, a specialist of the western, manages to offer what the most demanding reader would not dare to ask for: a faithful description of the movie, which is analyzed thoroughly sequence after sequence; a clear contextualization of the author, his work, the film, and the genre it belongs to; an in-depth comparison with the screenplay by David Webb Peoples (written in the 70s and left mostly unchanged by later rewritings); and a critical evaluation of both Unforgiven itself and the critical discourse on the movie. All this without falling into easy polemic or self-conscious belletrist writing. In short, a model of what a series like this should be.

Yet what Buscombe is saying in this modest but important book is far from evident. Actually, his book has the ambition to critically assess, and finally reject, the two basic points that have been made on Eastwood’s movie (and that launched the commercial and academic success of Unforgiven). First the idea that this is a "revisionist" western, i.e. a western that goes against the grain of the fundamental features of the genre (such as machismo, the frontier ideology, the necessary link between law and violence). Second the idea that this is also a western with a clear message, i.e. a western making a strong plea against the use of violence.
What Buscombe is suggesting in order to counter the politically correct doxa on Unforgiven as a kind of unconventional, feminist western, on the one hand, and as a manifesto against violence, on the other hand, is twofold.

In the first place, his knowledge of the history of the genre enables him to criticize the oversimplifying definitions that are used to prove the innovative character of Eastwood’s work, for instance as the representation of the hero or that of all types of "minorities" (women, Black people, native Americans). At the same time, Buscombe demonstrates also very convincingly that Unforgiven is, on all these points, more conventional than one may be willing to accept.

In the second place, and this is of course the crucial issue, Buscombe’s reading is very critical of the anti-violence stance foregrounded by the author’s and the main actors’s comments on the movie. The outburst of extreme and gratuitous violence at the end of the movie cannot easily be interpreted, argues Buscombe, as a warning against the violence representing the bottom-line of the classic western, not only because the classic western has a much more nuanced vision on this problem, but also because the movie itself does nothing to impose such a reading. In this respect, Unforgiven presents the audience with a perfect double bind, so that the spectator is both encouraged to reject and to embrace the extremely violent behaviour of a "new", i.e. politically correct hero whose good intentions eventually sound very hollow. As Buscombe puts it in the last sentence of the book: "Munny’s viciousness and his reformation cannot be reconciled", despite the movie’s attempt to "have its cake and eat it".

The critical rereading of the unchallenged doxa on Unforgiven is, however, not at all an example of Eastwood-debunking. On the contrary, Buscombe stresses the immense qualities of Eastwood as an actor and as a director, and his book aims first of all at increasing our admiration of Unforgiven, albeit in a less naïve way.