A Review of Unforgiven as it Relates to Hume's Account of Liberty

In Unforgiven, a 1992 Western, we see Clint Eastwood portraying William Munny, in yet another role as a grizzled, scowling hero who emotes just a hint of warmness under all of his dirt and blood. In almost every movie where Eastwood stars, he plays a character that goes through a bunch of extremely sad or dangerous (or both) events in order to kill everyone brutally at the end of the movie and/or emerge the unlikely (which, in Hollywood, means most likely) hero. Usually, Eastwood has motives for his killing, which makes it OK for the viewer to sympathize with a man who is unsympathetically murdering people. In Unforgiven, we see Munny, an infamous cold-blooded killer turned docile, widowed farmer, revert back to his old ways for one last job in order to keep his children and their family farm afloat.

The movie provides two reasons for justifying Munny's return back to bounty-hunting. Aside from the aforementioned fiscal and familial reasons, the two cowboys that Munny (along with his old friend Ned and green assassin The Schofield Kid) is tracking down have sliced a prostitute's face with a knife after a joke that she made. Although in "movie world" this would seem like a solid justification for their death, the movie does take measures to evoke some sympathy on the side of one of the cowboys. He is shown as being sympathetic towards the injured woman, bringing her his best horse as a measure of apology, even though it was not he, but the other cowboy that knifed the girl in the first place. At no point while I was watching the movie did I think that it was reasonable for that man to be killed, yet, he is eventually assassinated by Munny, the "hero" of the movie.

Unforgiven has another serious instance of backwards portrayals of heroism in the case of "Little Bill" (Gene Hackman), who plays a sheriff that goes to brutal, but not death-inducing means, of keeping his town safe. However, when Ned is caught by Little Bill on his way out of town, he is murdered for his contribution to the killing of the two cowboys. Little Bill seems to be set-up as the "bad guy" in the movie. He is the final enemy of Munny, who goes back into town after collecting his bounty in order to exact revenge on the death of his partner. Although Little Bill acts as a fearless upholder of peace throughout the entire movie, he is too brought down by the bullets of Clint Eastwood's hero. It is worth noting that in the final scene of the movie, Munny kills about half a dozen men after killing Little Bill; men that were not portrayed as being either "good guys" or "bad guys" in the movie up to that point.

Here is what I've been contemplating since finishing the movie: Why does Unforgiven go to such lengths to create a hero that acts (on paper) so much like a villain? Sure, Eastwood gives warmth to Munny with his tender interactions with Delilah, the injured prostitute, his relationship with Ned, and his undying love towards his family. But when he kills Little Bill we get the signature line of the movie, from the murderer to the murdered - "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

Hume says that liberty is simply the ability to follow one's own will. The opposite of liberty; however, should not be considered as the idea of necessity. Because people have inferred causal relationships instead of simply recognizing correlations on almost everything observable in the world, we have come to think that nothing is random, that everything can be explained through a cause and effect relationship. This directly relates to the way that movies are watched; people do not feel satisfied when they think that a movie "doesn't make sense." Cause and effect drives cinema and makes people happy. Entire movies, namely prequels like X-Men Origins or the Star Wars Episodes 1-3, are based around the revealing of plot details that indicate character traits that we know about already from past movies. The tying together of loose ends creates a happy feeling in the viewer, best described as an "A-Ha! moment."

Unforgiven does not play by these rules, in fact, it seems as though it is moving directly against them. Eastwood's character is a hero because he can act on his will, even when his will seems to contradict various laws of nature, reason, or realistic gunfights. The other characters are mowed down in his path simply because their will to protect or will to live is not strong enough to handle Eastwood's gritty determination. At the end of the movie, you are left wondering why Munny wins. It turns out that the only viable reason he "wins" is because he is the hero. He lives because he had more liberty and the other characters had more constraint. There is very little justice in his victory. Hume's account of liberty turns you on your head in a very similar way that Unforgiven acts on its viewers, and this dissension from the norm, I believe, is part of the reason why each is such an important work in its respective field.