Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven
1998; Salisbury University; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema History and Criticism
ResumoThe popular and critical success of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) has prompted number of discussions about the status of the Western, Eastwood's cinematic persona, and the currency of each in changing cultural landscape. An accepted critical reading of the film that has already emerged suggests that it revises the Western genre.1 The myth of the heroic gunfighter enacting his moral code and resolving some sort of cultural conflict is allegedly laid bare with Unforgiven's depiction of decidedly unheroic, morally ambiguous, and brutal existence. Yet critics eager to find revisionist quality in Eastwood's film ignore the centrality of the text-the written text-both to the film and to the construction of the hero and genre it interrogates. The film recognizes the Western's reliance on the writer to inform and construct the images on which that mythos depends. Unforgiven literally and repeatedly imposes textual account over the cinematic landscape to reveal the gap between sign and signified, between the cultural potency of the Western tradition and the reality it represents. Such devices as the written on-screen prologue and epilogue, the valedictory inscription the end of the film and, most important, the function of the hack writer, W.W. Beauchamp, all recognize the privileged role textual accounts play in this cinematic and cultural tradition. The currency of the written word within the film anchors it within the traditional genre of the Western. Through its exploration of the primarily textual construction of the Western, Unforgiven illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the man of words and the man of actions, and ultimately affirms rather than resists the conventions of its genre. The film opens with the iconic use of cinematic past presenting the silhouette image of solitary man, presumably William Munny (played by Clint Eastwood), against panoramic burnt orange sky.2 Yet Munny's action, digging his wife's grave, grounds the limitless possibilities otherwise suggested by his visual landscape. Similarly, the image collides with the seeming neutrality of the written prologue scrolling up the screen. The prologue offers the brief history of Claudia Feathers Munny, a comely young woman, and not without prospects, who, to her mother's disappointment, entered into marriage with William Munny, known thief and murderer, man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. Mrs. Feather's narrative assumptions for her daughter's future, based on Munny's reputation, do not occur when her daughter dies of smallpox rather than at the hands of Munny. The spectator, like Mrs. Feathers, is immediately confronted with gap between the text he is forced to read coupled with the visual image, both of which have certain weight within the genre, and Munny's real life and his confinement, and seeming contentment, within the domestic sphere. It is connection that Munny has difficulty making as well, and the appearance of the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) forces him to confront the mytho-poetic distance between his current life and his past reputation. The Kid visits Munny to convince him to accompany him to Big Whiskey and kill two abusive cowboys for $1000 reward. The Kid initially regards Munny with suspicion, observing, in the hyperbolic language of dime novel, you don't look like no rootin' tootin' son of bitchin' full-blooded assassin. It is appropriate that the Schofield Kid rouses Munny from his pig-farmer existence since the Kid cannot readily assimilate any gaps texts offer him. Indeed the Kid is the most uncritical reader in the film. He has fully embraced the mythic experience of the fictional West and constructed his own completely fictional past to give himself currency within that primarily textual economy. Renaming himself the Schofield Kid after Smith and Wesson pistol he's never shot, he claims to be a damn killer [him] self. Invested in the tales of Munny's past glories, the Kid compliments him in the linguistic code of the West that subtly suggests the discrepancy between language and meaning: Uncle Pete said if I ever wanted partner you'd be the worst one, the worst meaning the best. …
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