In Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood critiques the classic Western myth of the lone gunslinger. Reflecting on the inescapable cycle of violence in which the gunslinger participates, he de-romanticizes the kinds of films through which he earned his fame, such as A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, William Munny, is an aged, retired gunslinger, who has forsaken a life of violence to raise his children. As the film progresses, he is gradually drawn back into the harsh cowboy world which he has worked so hard to leave behind. The maiming of a prostitute, the folly of a young man, and the death of a friend conspire to force him inexorably back into the role of avenger, dealing out vigilante justice on a corrupt sheriff.

In the world of the classic Western, it is typically the miscarriage of justice which underlies the heroic action of the protagonist. Unforgiven follows this model: in the town of Big Whiskey, a prostitute’s face is slashed by one of her clients. The town sheriff, Little Bill, determines that the assailant, and his semi-accomplice friend, must pay the pimp five and two ponies, respectively, for damaging his “property.” Little Bill believes this is sufficient, as his central concern is preserving peace and order, not striving for true justice. The lead prostitute, Alice, is outraged that the assailant will not even be whipped for his crime.

The prostitutes exercise what little agency they have by pooling their money to put a bounty on the heads of the men who maimed one of their own. The sheriff’s failure to enact justice, sets in motion the events that draw William Munny away from his children and his pig farm to take up his gun for the first time in over a decade.

The text with which the film opens describes Will as a man with a “notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition,” yet when we first meet him he seems no more than a weary man struggling to feed his young children. Will’s wife has died, and so he must work to keep his pigs, which are plagued by fever, alive without much comfort or support.

Will’s wife, Claudia, is the one who reformed him, turning him from drunkenness and murder. As with the classic Western, Unforgiven associates Christianity, femininity, and pacifism. All three are combined in the person of Claudia. Yet, Claudia is absent. Will clings to her memory, but without her benevolent influence he is unable to prevent himself from falling back into the cycle of violence and vigilante justice. As Will’s friend Ned says, “If Claudia was alive, you wouldn’t be doin’ this.” Also following the pattern of the classic Western, the female, Christian voice of pacifism is introduced, only to be silenced. Tension is created some woman close to the hero implores him to turn from violence; the hero ultimately disregards the call of pacifism, typically when something so heinous–whether an insult or a killing–is perpetrated that he must respond with force.

As Jane Tompkins argues in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, the “viewpoint which women represent is introduced in order to be swept aside, crushed, or dramatically invalidated” (41) While the Western hero murders allegedly to protect women and children, he never heeds the “discourse of love and peace which women articulate” (41).

The Victorian era firmly established a gendered dichotomy between the male, public world of business, politics, and war on the one hand, and the female, private world of the home, emotion, and religion on the other. This basic bifurcation of life is assumed in the Western, so that manliness is generally severed from religion and emotion.

The Western as a genre thus defines itself, as Tompkins says, “in part by struggling to get rid of Christianity’s enormous cultural weight” (32). The feminine voice calling for mercy is the “enabling condition” for the Western because the “genre’s revenge plot depends on an antithetical world of love and reconciliation” (41) that must be rejected. Tompkins further observes that the shoot-out is the Western’s sacrament of choice. High Noon, for example, “begins in a church, the movement of the entire film–as if to compensate–is away from the sacramental moment of the protagonist’s marriage and toward the apocalyptic moment of his shoot-out, the sacrament the Western substitutes for matrimony” (35).

Although Will has forsaken his outlaw lifestyle, his drinking and killing ways, he is drawn back into it when the Schofield Kid arrives. The Schofield Kid is an exquisite caricature of the classic Western gunslinger–all bravado and no actual skill. Whereas the classic Western outlaw is preternaturally skilled at shooting, the Kid’s eyesight is so bad that he can only see well enough to shoot accurately at a mere 50 yards. Unforgiven employs the trope of a gunslinger shooting at a cowboy hat to prove his skill for ironic purposes. When Ned discovers how near-sighted the Kid is, the Kid tries to prove his skill by shooting at a cowboy on the ground nearby, in a parody of the scene in For a Few Dollars More, in which Lee Van Cleef’s character, Colonel Mortimer, uses his pistol to prevent Eastwood’s character from retrieving his hat. Will and Ned are unimpressed. While the classic cowboy is a fearless killer, the Kid pretends to have killed five men but has killed none. The Kid has all the recklessness of an outlaw, but no true mettle. He is ultimately a pretender, enamored with, as Will says, “the spectacle, the fancy clothes,” the trappings of being a gunslinger, but unable to truly face mortality without blinking.

The Schofield Kid tells Will about the “whores’ gold” and, out of need of the money, Will eventually joins him. Will recruits his old partner-in-crime, Ned. As they travel together, Will and Ned reflect on the violence of their shared past. Will expresses regret that he shot a man who offended him while drunk. He rues the incongruity between what the man had done, which he does not even remember, and his killing of him. This theme pervades Unforgiven: the incongruity between the wrong perpetrated and the killing it triggers.

Will believes that although he rides toward murder, he can retain his rehabilitated state. He tells Ned, “Claudia, she straightened me up . . . just ’cause I’m goin’ on this killin’ don’t mean I’m goin’ back to the way I was. I just need the money.” The film will dramatize, however, that despite Will’s intentions, in going after the bounty, he will re-metamorphose into exactly the brutal killer he used to be. It is, of course, out of necessity that Will goes on this mission. He does not want his children to starve. Unforgiven forces us to reassess our understanding of “necessity,” as it suggests that acting out of necessity can lead to horrific bloodshed.

Will does not immediately return to the role of gunslinger with enthusiasm. He is filled with regret throughout the early part of the film, which culminates in his paralyzing fever. Alone in Big Whiskey’s saloon, Will is almost comically helpless before Little Bill. With Ned and the Kid upstairs visiting the prostitutes, Will must face Little Bill’s indignation and brutality alone. Although Will huddles meekly, shaking with sickness, Little Bill insists not only on taking his firearm, but also on beating him up. Little Bill enjoys asserting his authority in the name of keeping the peace, and he kicks Will around the saloon until Will crawls out into the rain.

After his beating at Little Bill’s hands, Will descends into feverish delirium. His friends take him to a barn to recover. Will recounts seeing the Angel of Death and the rotting corpse of his wife in his dreams. Despite the haunting, ominous nature of his delirium, when Will recovers his health he also regains his resolve to avenge the prostitute and collect his share of the reward. He does not seem to heed the implicit warning of his nightmares.

Will maintains his virtue for much of the film. As they ride through a storm, Ned offers Will a drink to keep warm; Will refuses. He steadfastly refuses to drink alcohol even when, at Big Whiskey’s saloon, he shivers with fever. He also declines to sleep with the prostitutes, as an advance on the reward money, as Ned and the Kid do, out of fidelity to his late wife. He insists, “I ain’t no crazy, killin’ fool,” yet things begin to change when they hunt down the assailant’s friend.

From the rocks above, Will, Ned, and the Kid watch the assailant’s friend pass beneath with some other men. Ned fires at their target with his rifle, hitting his horse. The horse goes down, crushing the man’s leg. Their target is immobilized, but Ned cannot bring himself to fire again. At this critical juncture, Will takes the rifle from Ned and shoots the prone man. Whereas Ned balks at taking life, Will embraces it.

The whole scene is a wonderfully grotesque de-romanticizing of the classic Western portrayal of death: instead of a suspenseful, dramatic killing, in which a single bullet shatters the victim’s life and sends him flying from his horse to land irrevocably flat on the ground, this death is awkwardly prolonged. As soon as his horse falls on top of him, the victim begins moaning to his friends taking cover nearby. He calls for help and whines that his leg is broken. Moreover, Will’s fatal shot hits the victim, crawling in vain for the safety of the rocks, in the stomach. This man dies as slowly as possible. He gets plenty of screen-time to tell his friends that he is dying, and to declare how thirsty he is. Will finally tells the men below that he will not shoot if they will get their friend some water. This dismal scene, like Unforgiven as a whole, strips the glamor, glory, and nobility from the myth of the outlaw gunslinger.

Though lacking in drama, this man’s death is still poignant because he is one of the least guilty characters in the film. He is guilty only by association with the man who cut the prostitute’s face. In fact, he is the only character with the intuition that true justice involves restitution more than retribution. When he and his friend return to Big Whiskey to pay the pimp with their ponies, this man brings an additional pony–his finest–with him. He offers this pony to the victimized prostitute as recompense for what was done to her. Alice and the other prostitutes, however, cannot understand his action and, on behalf of the maimed woman (who is never consulted), they reject this gift and revile the man who offers it.

Restitution is integral to the biblical conception of justice. According to the Torah, it is not enough to merely replace what one steals: “If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep” (Exodus 22:1). Likewise, after encountering Jesus, Zacchaeus the tax collector follows the Law in making restitution for the money he had stolen from the people: as he promises Jesus, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:8). In Unforgiven, the possibility of restitution, like the voice of pacifism, is raised only to be shoved aside to make way for retribution.

While there are certainly a number of crimes punishable by death in the Torah–“Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 24:17)–they were designed to obviate endless blood feuding. The genius of this kind of retribution is that the death toll stops at one. The community puts the murderer to death, making it unnecessary for relatives of the victim to seek to avenge their kin and thus avoiding multi-generational cycles of violence.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the Torah’s prescriptions for retribution: “If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him” (Leviticus 24:19-20). Jesus teaches, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38-39). Jesus seems to understand the Torah’s commands about retribution as he treats its stipulations about divorce–as a necessary and temporary concession to weak, sinful people. As Jesus tells the Pharisees, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). Laws about retribution were likewise necessary for maintaining justice, but not themselves the ideal pattern for God’s people. Even before the giving of the Torah to the Israelites, God spared Cain, the first murderer, from retribution (Genesis 4).

After the murder in the canyon, Ned is so disturbed that he abandons the mission. He has again tasted the life of the gunslinger and found it too bitter. The Kid reviles Ned, and he and Will continue on their own. Ned is unnerved and loses his confidence; Will is invigorated. His earlier paralyzing indecision, symbolized in his debilitating fever, vanishes as he embraces the role of avenger.

Little Bill’s men capture Ned. Seeking information about the whereabouts of Will and the Schofield Kid, Little Bill mercilessly whips Ned. Through the character of Little Bill, Unforgiven shows that justice entails far more than simply maintaining law and order. Little Bill ends up beating Ned to death, not precisely on purpose, but certainly without much restraint. The scene could be far more graphic than it is, but it is wrenching not only because of Ned’s relative innocence, but also in the image of a white man beating a black one.

Meanwhile, Will and the Kid track down the man who maimed the prostitute. In a scene much like the one in which Will shoots the assailant’s friend, the Kid kills the assailant in a highly unglamorous way. The assailant leaves the shelter of his hideout to use the outhouse. The Kid opens the outhouse door and shoots his victim three times. The victim’s companions come outside and fire at Will and the Kid as they make their getaway.

Although the Kid boasts about his killing prowess throughout the film, actually killing a man unnerves him, like Ned. “Was that what it was like in the old days?” and “Were you ever scared in them days?” the Kid asks Will. Will replies that he was drunk most of the time. The Kid admits that this killing was his first, and eventually breaks into tears. One of the climactic moments of the classic Western–avenging a wrong against a woman–is here reduced to the grotesque shooting of a man on the toilet, or “three shots while he was takin’ a shit” as the Kid says. The irrevocable nature of what he has done (“all on account of pullin’ a trigger”), as well as the utter lack of glamor, comes home to the Schofield Kid, so much so that he resolves never to kill again. The Kid tries to assuage his conscience by appealing to a comforting narrative of guilt and retribution, saying that the dead man had it coming. Will replies bluntly that “We all have it comin'”. Unforgiven thus counters the assumptions which the classic Western makes about guilt and innocence with a picture of universally guilty, that is, sinful, humanity. The film unravels the Western’s myth of the justness of revenge by asserting that all are guilty, all deserve death.

After avenging the prostitute, Will and the Schofield Kid learn from her that Ned has died under Little Bill’s whip. Hearing of his friend’s death, Will finally takes back to the bottle. Relapsing for the first time is a prelude to his fully embracing his old nature–his “notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition”–as he re-metamorphoses into his former gunslinger self to avenge his comrade.

While the Schofield Kid “won’t kill nobody no more,” Will returns to Big Whiskey’s saloon to confront Little Bill. Animated by fury, Will avenges Ned far beyond what even retributive justice would deem necessary. First, he guns down the pimp, taking the saloon’s crowd, grossly celebrating Little Bill’s triumph over Ned the “assassin,” by surprise. He then faces off against Little Bill and four other armed men. Little Bill orders his men to fire on Will as soon as he empties the other barrel of his shotgun. Will hurls his shotgun at Little Bill, and then draws his pistol. He fatally wounds all five men before him, including Little Bill, before they can shoot him. He kills a few of the saloon’s fleeing patrons for good measure.

Unforgiven‘s criticism of the classic Western reaches its peak in this climactic scene, as the film actually shifts fully into the register of the classic Western itself. This scene closely resembles similar epic confrontations between the lone gunslinger and a slew of opponents. In A Fistful of Dollars, for instance, Eastwood’s grim-faced, cigar-smoking character blasts four opponents into oblivion in the instant before they can even get a shot off. Within the arc of the normal Western narrative, one feels that the hero is wholly justified in his killing, however excessive it may be. Unforgiven, in contrast, undercuts this feeling of satisfaction by emphasizing the ease and gratuity with which death is dealt out.

Little Bill’s final words are an appeal for the mercy he did not grant to Ned: “I don’t deserve this, to die like this.” Will’s infamous reply, delivered in Eastwood’s trademark gruff, uncompromising voice, “Deserves got nothin’ to do with it,” is followed by Will finishing off Little Bill. Deserving death, indeed, has nothing to do with being killed in the world of Unforgiven. Or, rather, the reasons for which the characters are killed are incommensurate with the finality of death. Whatever his past crimes may have been, Ned did not deserve to die, nor certainly did the friend of the man who cut the prostitute’s face. Even the offender, who is a despicable man, did not deserve death for cutting the prostitute’s face. Little Bill, perhaps, deserves to die for beating Ned to death, but Will kills his four deputies along with him, who are guilty only by association. Unforgiven displays the gratuitous nature of the cycle of violence: one death leads to another and another, from the man who cut the prostitute’s face to Ned to Little Bill. As reprehensible as the maiming of the prostitute is, how can it possibly have triggered the deaths of a dozen men?

Although he repudiates killing early in the film, by its end, Will has returned to being the man who has “killed just about every thing that walks or crawls.” Those who miss Unforgiven‘s ironic treatment of the Western’s mythos, may wrongly cheer rather than lament Will’s transformation. It is easy to rejoice that Will’s long latent “notoriously violent and intemperate disposition” has been reawakened, and even to applaud the gruesome discharge of death at the film’s conclusion. Will’s sinful nature, though banished by his wife’s presence and repressed for over a decade, has not been eradicated.

The meditation on violence, justice, and sacrifice begun in Unforgiven reaches its conclusion in Gran Torino, in which the protagonist chooses self-sacrifice over vengeance, martyrdom over murder, and breaks the cycle of violence.