If the Past Could Talk, We Couldn't Understand It: 'Unforgiven'

Why It's Naïve to Think Movies Won't Be About the Present

Several weeks ago, before I absconded to a mountaintop in Colorado for a break from the world, I made a passing quip about people who I thought were "monumentally naïve about the way art works."

In response, several readers reached out to ask what I meant. So I thought that this week I'd try to explain my thoughts in this area, and use, as is my wont, a movie to do so: Clint Eastwood's 1992 film Unforgiven.

Let me start by recapping the issue at hand, because it goes to the heart of a lot of our contemporary debates as well as to the heart of how meaning itself works in film. Briefly, Amazon Prime has released a new series based on some of J.R.R. Tolkien's lesser-known writings, called The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The powers that be at that corporation decided to cast this show in a racially (and gender) diverse manner, so that the elves and dwarves and hobbits and such are portrayed by actors from a wide spectrum of ethnic backgrounds, and there are women as well as men who do heroic things; both of these decisions seem to diverge somewhat from Tolkien's original texts.

In response – as has been the case with the upcoming The Little Mermaid, the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and countless other recent films – a certain (mostly white and male) segment of the fan base launched themselves into paroxysms of rage, denouncing these casting choices as awful and terrible and unholy and a sign of the end of Western Civilization as we know it, and all kinds of other stuff. It was in this context that I mentioned that I didn't have much to say about those folks in the course of putting down my thoughts about The Rings of Power, other than to note that I thought they were sad, silly, and naïve about art.

So what does that have to do with a Western made by Eastwood thirty years ago?

Well, here's the argument: art is, ineradicably and inescapably, about its present. It must be, because every element of it – even its approach to the past or to imaginary worlds – is informed by the impenetrably dense matrix of what's happening now, which neither artist nor audience can ever escape.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once famously wrote that "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." His idea is embedded in a much larger set of arguments about how language (and life) works, but there's at least a kernel of it that's helpful to us here: the context of a lion's life, from its mental processes to the purpose and experiencing of all of the activities it engages in, is so different than ours that (in Wittgenstein's argument), what prevents us from communicating with it isn't simply that we don't share a language. More deeply, it's that we don't share a structure of life with the lion.

This means that, even if the lion could speak English, in order to actually communicate with it, or it with us, we would need to understand, or perhaps even experience, what it was like to be inside the lion's mind, and vice versa. But we can't do that, so even if that lion could speak English, we wouldn't be able to understand what it was saying.

Great, and thanks for that weird excursion, you may be saying, but how in the hell does this relate to movies?

Well, because movies necessarily involve people in the present, communicating to each other. And their settings – the worlds they create and take place in – are very much like the mind of Wittgenstein's lion. We might think that a movie is in some sense about those places (say, Tolkien's Middle Earth, or Gladiator's ancient Rome) and that in watching it we're entering into those places. But we're not, because we cannot enter into them. We can only occupy our own present. Thus, in movies, we are always, and only, talking to ourselves, about ourselves.

And perhaps the best way to understand this is to think about the Western genre.

Unforgiven, which is made from an absolutely fabulous screenplay by David Webb Peoples, is set in 1880. It tells the story of a retired outlaw named Will Munny (Eastwood), who used to be a violent, amoral, drunken man, before he married a woman who reformed him. But she died of smallpox, and now Munny is raising his two young children alone on a farm in Kansas.

Hundreds of miles away, in a town called Big Whiskey, Wyoming, a prostitute (Anna Thomson) has her face sliced up by cowboy and his partner after she giggles when he drops his trousers. The other women in her brothel pool their money and put a bounty of a thousand dollars on the heads of these cowboys.

Soon, a gunfighter named English Bob (Richard Harris) – famous for murdering Chinese workers at the behest of the railroads – shows up in town to kill the cowboys and claim the reward, along with his biographer, a dime-novelist named W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek). But before English Bob can do anything, he's brutally beaten and kicked out of town by the local sheriff, "Little" Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), who's determined that there will be no bounty-collecting in Big Whiskey.

Meanwhile, Munny and his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) are recruited by a naïve young wannabe gunfighter calling himself "The Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett) to go up to Wyoming, kill the cowboys, and collect the reward themselves. They show up in Big Whiskey and immediately clash with Little Bill, who delivers a beating to Munny in the same way he did to English Bob. But Munny, Logan, and the Schofield Kid persist, and eventually kill both the cowboys who were involved with disfiguring the prostitute.

In the process, however, Logan is killed by the cowboys' friends, and his body is put on display in front of a saloon in Big Whiskey as a warning to other "assassins." In response, Munny gets drunk – he's been sober for ten years, which is notable, because all of his violent exploits in the past occurred when he was drinking – and goes into town, where, without mercy or hesitation, he kills Little Bill, the saloon owner, and three of Little Bill's deputies before riding off into the night. The film ends by telling us that Munny subsequently disappeared with his kids, and it was rumored that he moved to San Francisco and prospered in the dry-goods business.

The movie is generally (and rightfully) classified as a "revisionist Western." This is a term used to denote a group of movies that started being made in the 1950s and had the implicit or explicit goal of revising some of the standard heroic tropes that had come to be associated with both earlier Western movies and the national image of the West itself (which had been in large part formed by those movies).

So, in Unforgiven, for example, we get a direct (and accurate) assault on the notion of what the gunfighter actually was. Rather than the man-in-a-white-hat standing in the street and engaging his enemy in a quick draw, we get a vision of gunfighters as casually violent, often drunk, and disregarding all of the trappings of fair play and honor that cinematic and pulp-novel tales had imbued them with. Munny, although a tragic character, is not a particularly heroic one. And Little Bill, although representing the forces of law and order against the wanton violence of the bounty hunters, is cruel and unfair and an egotist.

This is precisely what's meant by "revisionist." In its presentation of the reasons and ways gun battles occurred, the film works to alter, or make us reconsider, the parameters of the traditional heroic western story in which the protagonist represented the moral forces of justice, and the villain represented the forces of immoral chaos.

But for my purposes today, the point isn't necessarily the meaning of Unforgiven or this revisionist approach. Instead, it's to simply note how deeply that meaning and approach are tied into the world of 1992 that produced the film, rather than the world of 1880 the film purports to be "about."

There are a couple of easy ways to understand this. The first is to be clear about how intimately connected the film is to the history, and entertainment history, of 1992. In short, any "revisionist" work must lean heavily on what it is revising.

Unforgiven, in other words, was made for an audience whose understanding of the American West, and more general notions of American heroism, had been formed, whether they were aware of it or not, by a long cultural history that included all kinds of earlier movies. Eastwood's film did not, in 1992, exist in some kind of vacuum; more significantly, it was not, in any real sense, directly about the actualities of life in 1880.

This latter seems like a big claim, right? I can already hear people typing fuming responses about how "historically accurate" Unforgiven is, particularly in comparison to earlier Westerns.

Well yes, it very well may be. But what does that accuracy really mean? To get to the heart of that question, let's move to the second way to understand this aspect of the film, which is to try to imagine what an audience watching in 1880 would have made of it.

In some senses, they would absolutely have understood the movie, and would have recognized that it was about the world they occupied. Perhaps the production design and costuming departments of the film did a sterling job, and the audience of 1880 would have exclaimed how much the film actually looked like their own world. (We are, of course, putting aside the fact that in 1880, audiences had no idea what a movie was, and the idea of giant men and women riding around on a screen blasting each other would have taken a bit of getting used to.)

But before you go any further, stop for a moment and consider how extraordinarily different the experience of the guy or gal in 1880, sitting there with those newfangled (and delicious) inventions called "popcorn" and "soda," would be from ours (or the audience of 1992), when we watch the movie.

First off, folks in 1880 would have no idea who Clint Eastwood is. (Or Gene Hackman or Richard Harris or Morgan Freeman, etc.) Does this matter? Of course it does!

Whether you like it or not, your conception of any movie with a recognizable person in it is unavoidably affected by your awareness of that person. The film exists, in other words, in the deep context of Eastwood's career, and the impact of that carrer on the viewer. Simply from having seen him so many times on the screen, the we carry with us a host of conscious and unconscious associations about him and what he represents; in exactly the same way, Eastwood as director and star cannot help but operate in relation to where he's been and what he's done.

If you're tempted to doubt the significance of this, consider the popular conception of Eastwood in 1992 and now. Then, he was seen as generally apolitical, and the film, as far as it could be placed on the political spectrum, was seen as a rebuke to the kind of pro-violence masculinity often associated with political conservatives. Now, particularly after his bizarre empty-chair speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention, he's often seen (in one of the best examples of how terrible our entertainment commentariat is at understanding the relationship between politics and film) as a straight-line Republican reactionary.

Which is to say that, because of the influence of popular discourse, which oozes in and out of all of us, like it or not, we bring a much different set of understandings to Unforgiven than did an audience of 1992; the movie may be the same, but it exists for us differently than it did for people in 1992. And how much different would the conception of him and his character been in 1880, when they would have had absolutely no associations with him at all!

Still not convinced? Then think about how the audience of 1880 might respond to the basic archetypal elements of the story that Unforgiven puts on the screen. The prostitutes in the film are, for example, clearly sympathetic characters. In fact, the tragic structure of the story depends on it. They are mistreated by the men around them, which means that when they offer the blood-money reward, we are presented with a morally complicated situation: they were wronged, but it's also wrong to pay money to have someone killed. This terrible impossibility – a wrong leading to another wrong – lies at the ethical heart of the film.

But would an audience of 1880 have understood this in the same way we do? Would their sympathies for prostitutes have worked in the way ours do? Put simply, the answer is no.

Remember that they were living in a world closer to Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter (1850), in which the moral struggle revolves around the impulse to banish a woman from society for adultery, which is a far lighter sin (as these things might have gone in the mind of religiously-oriented American society) than prostitution. Nor had American culture yet seen many of the kind of stories focusing on women's perspectives on social issues – like Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) or Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" (1894) – that would begin to slowly alter our narrative landscape when they appeared.

People in 1880 also lived in a world in which women could not vote, were subject to a host of laws that made what we would think of as their civil rights subject to the whims of the men around them, and were still three-quarters of a century away from the modern feminist movement. Which is to say that they had a radically different relationship to stories about "sinning" women, or even stories which were sympathetic to sexualized women, than does a modern audience.

Ultimately, there's no real way to know how much sympathy an audience of 1880 would have had for the prostitutes in Unforgiven, but it does seem obvious that their relationship to the moral valences of the story, the right and wrong of it in terms of the treatment of these women, would not have been the same as ours. This is analogous to Wittgenstein's lion, who might look at the same African Savannah that I do but will comprehend that vista in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for me to understand.

I could continue: our understanding of the role of pulp novelist, our understanding of the nature of violence itself, our understanding of heroism, and justice, and history, and virtually everything else in the film are informed by the dense matrix of our experiences in our own world. And the understanding of the audience of 1880 would be informed by their dense matrix of understanding of what was, 140 years ago, a very different world.

So this is what I meant above when I said that Unforgiven is not directly about the actualities of life in 1880. It tells a story about that time, yes. It does its best to show that time accurately, yes. But what it's about is the dilemmas and issues – moral, historical, entertainment-based, gender-based, etc. – of the moment in which it was made.

And this, in turn, is what I meant when I said that the trolls attacking The Rings of Power are monumentally naïve about the way art works. What are the issues and dilemmas of our time? Very clearly, both nationally and in the entertainment industry, questions of race and representation, gender and power and the like, are an inextricable part of the matrix in which we live. And the art we produce is one of the ways that we try to process this matrix; it its thus, unavoidably, about our time.

To demand that a show like The Rings of Power present an all-white cast with only men in the heroic roles would be precisely like demanding that Clint Eastwood make a movie in 1992 that ignored the filmic and cultural history of much of the 20th century. It would be like hollering that he should stop messing around with all his thinky revisionism, stop trying to address the actual world around him, and just make a movie that saw the world in exactly the same way as did Stagecoach, from 1939 (or hell, as did Cooper's The Deerslayer, from 1841) when men were men, heroes were heroic, and women and minorities had no role to play.

To demand that The Rings of Power be all-white and male-focused, in other words, is to demand that the people making it not do precisely what it is that art does, which is grapple with the present. Is to demand that the show instead submit to the childish fantasies of people who wish the world would just go back to being the way it used to be, or who grew up mistakenly thinking that the world would always cater to their insecurities and deficits and petulant insistence that they are the center of the universe. And it is to demand, not incidentally, that the people behind the show not try to maximize their profits – for audiences want art that speaks to them, not to a long-dead world – which is one of the main drivers behind decisions like these in Hollywood.

The world changes. And art – particularly popular art – changes with it. Our understanding of what constitutes our fantasies ­– and who embodies those fantasies – changes. The way that our culture conceives of itself and envisions itself changes. Tolkien's novels were a product of his time; Eastwood's movie was a product of its time; the Amazon show is a product of ours. Throw all the tantrums you want, but to not understand that is to be naïve.

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