David Webb Peoples and Clint Eastwood, 1992
spoils theentire movie
#19 of 28 in the 20th century series
Mind the sled. →
This movie is basically a master class in how to deploy the sort of false ceiling I refer to in Pattern 11. Say you’ve got an idea for a Western that concludes with a grizzled badass, a real Clint Eastwood type, appearing in the doorway of a saloon to avenge his only friend, who’s been beaten to death by the local sheriff—a two-bit despot whose idea of justice is to decree that a brute who slashes the face of a young prostitute to ribbons must surrender a few horses to the man who owns the brothel where she works. The figure in the doorway will squint, growl a few pithy lines, and miraculously emerge from a firefight with a dozen lawmen as the last man standing. The problem: how do you keep the audience from having to stifle a yawn? We’ve seen this sort of thing so many times that I could sum up the type in a few words and you could say, oh, okay, one of those. Superhero universes have the same problem. If there’s only one superhero, then Zot flying around an empty gym is so miraculous that it’s hard to keep from tearing up. But when there are half a dozen omega mutants on every corner, the ability to turn the galaxy inside out is ho‑hum. What to do?
Unforgiven’s solution is to spend two hours establishing that the badass Western antihero does not exist. For instance, early on we’re introduced to a fellow who looks like he fits the bill: his name is English Bob, and he’s got both the prowess (taking down eight pheasants in ten shots, when his rival can only manage one) and the attitude (“Well, I mean, why not shoot the president?”) to establish himself as a larger-than-life figure. And the sheriff promptly takes him apart. English Bob’s biographer—writing up and publishing his exploits as “the Duke of Death”—has him give a flowery speech before outdrawing a villain who had insulted a lady’s honor; in reality, the sheriff reveals, English Bob had taken some drunken potshots at the guy, missed wildly, and only survived because his rival blew off his own toe with his first shot, drawing too fast, and then lost his hand when his gun exploded on his second shot. Scene after scene is dedicated to exhaustively demythologizing the Old West in this manner. We meet “the Schofield Kid”, an young roughneck eager to start building his own legend… who turns out to be too nearsighted to be able to hit Gannett Peak at twenty paces. When he does get his first kill, it’s not in a showdown at high noon in the town square: he ambushes a guy sitting on the toilet in an outhouse, and doesn’t even get the right outhouse the first time around. As for the Clint Eastwood character, William Munny—we hear that he used to be “the meanest goddamn sonofabitch alive”, but what we see is a graying old coot, covered in mud and pig shit as over and over he loses his footing chasing hogs on his farm. He takes six shots at a target, nearly point blank, and misses them all, and then can’t even get on his horse without landing in a heap on the first few attempts. When he gets into town, he’s so sick from riding through the cold rain that he can barely sit up. Clearly, Unforgiven demonstrates, the dramatic climax described at the top of this article is impossible—the notion that this guy could be the one standing in the doorway, doubly so.
And then it happens. False ceiling: shattered. Audience: wowed. Oscar: won. I think that this time around, this landed just below pantheon range for me—prior to the climax, the lead performance didn’t ring 100% true—but I’m having trouble thinking of a better example of strategically demythologizing a genre to lend power to the moment of remythologizing it.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |