Unforgivable

I’ve been thinking about suspending my movie and TV series watching activities for the next year so I can get into a more uninterrupted reading & writing tempo. And in order to satisfactorily get into that I naturally binged on some critically acclaimed classics that had fallen through the cracks. Now I’ve always had zero interest in westerns. It all seemed like a bunch of violence and guns and drinking and prostitution and horses and cranky uncomfortable men who wanna be alphas or die trying—plenty of things that failed to occupy any part of what makes me me. But I am old enough to appreciate that, in art, anything that can be done can be done well. Ideas are dime a dozen. Movie history is filled with great premises that don’t go anywhere. And execution is always king. So I thought I’d give Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven two hours of my time.

The movie was abhorrent in so many unique ways: from the subject material, to the writing, the dramaturgy, the intention behind its making, and the disgusting message it clearly spread through a Hollywood and Oscar sized bullhorn that I had to get into it with my new best frying ChatGPT about it. To my relief, he assured me that there were plenty of critics who deconstructed the movie for its crimes—albeit, unfortunately, many years after its realease. If you’re wondering why America is, as a collective entity, mentally ill in such self and other-destructive ways, you can look at the kind of messaging that was culturally promoted to this country in as recently as 1993 via gigantically influential means like the Academy Awards.

This movie starts with a prostitute making fun of a customer’s small penis and that customer slashing her face until that customer’s friend, Davey, (who was in the other room with another prostitute at the time) intervenes to stop his friend and save the girl. Spoiler, Davey is literally (and I mean it) the only decent person in the movie. Everyone else is absolutely disgusting in nature, despicable in comportment and behavior, and it makes me queasy that I am of the same species as them merely a hundred years or so apart. It’s that bad.

Now let’s blaze through what else happens in this glorious awards-laden Clint Eastwood joint. The micropenis lady slasher, Mike, and his decent human of a bestie Davey are tied up in the aftermath, and the sheriff is called. The sheriff decides that the men will pay back the brothel owner back with horses and will be let go without physical punishment. Supposedly he is doling out his own form of justice and order independent of “law” or whatever. The main whore is unhinged and wants eye-for-an-eye. She wants the men tortured and wants to watch it. The men in charge tell her to get bent, so she schemes (as in, coerces and manipulates the other younger whores to chip in) for a bounty on the perpetrators. And somehow, the list of the accused perpetrators includes Davey, who literally stopped having sex because he heard a woman cry, tried to physically restrain his best friend and partner, and when his partner violently pushed him off his back, he had to pull a gun on his homeboy. And in return, he was tied up as, and subsequently punished, as part of the problem.

The movie’s immediate crime here is that it is not giving a voice to him. Yeah, sure, the movie is actually about how the cycle of violence never ends and vengeance never stops and in the wild Wild West the rules are arbitrary and justice is served to the deserved and the underserved indiscriminately. But no: that happens when the writer or the director lacks either emotional depth in their humanity and hence doesn’t have a proper moral compass, or when the director or the writer is lazy and they confuse bleakness with profundity. Jay Goldin in Bright Light Film Journal (2018) says “ characters’ fates are determined more by chance than by anything else” which makes the pursuit of justice (which is supposed to be a main theme of the movie) simply “futile”. Michael Henley of The Time-Traveling Critic writes in 2011 that the movie is basically a moral confusion and its attempts at appearing complex often result in empty darkness.

I very much believe that “moral confusion” is an important term with significant explanatory power here. It is the lack of internal moral compass someone like Eastwood would lack. The image obsessed, manipulative, perpetually miserable misanthrope who got on stage at that 2012 Republican National Convention with an empty chair, pretended Obama was sitting in that chair, and mocked and berated the imaginary black man who was threatening to lead his country—the country he, I guess, saw as a Wild West where violence was permanent and burned people indiscriminately. Even the republicans of the time had to admit it was unhinged and deranged behavior—although I imagine the Republicans of today would start doing mental gymnastics and gaslight themselves into thinking that it was some sort of genius move within microseconds.

It really is a simple math here though: a person is born with lack of (or reared to not develop) emotional depth, they become superficial (even more so if they are attractive) and try to fill the emptiness inside themselves with external validation; some of them want attention so they want to be movie stars, but of course, it never makes them happy; these people feel instinctively threatened by the presence of more emotionally developed humans around, so they want to project and convince others of their worldview, primarily because these types of people who lack perspective taking ability also lack the ability to imagine other people knowing something they don’t, believe they are always right, and typically want to tell others what to do—part of the reason why they seek status as it allows them to rule, control, or at the very least impose ideas upon other people.

The way I see it, it’s the same mechanism behind what a school shooter does: they believe in a type of worldview, and they want to convince the rest of the world of it: “you think you’re safe? Let me show you what it’s actually like in this world. Because, I see it while you don’t. Let me blast the message from the chosen bullhorn of the day, my firearm—it wonderfully replaces, externally, the things I lack in my humanity”. At least, when it’s a Hollywood star who has a lot going for them and a lot to lose, they just play out their fantasy with fake guns in front of the camera. But rest assured, they totally believe they would do that in real life if necessary. And, to be fair, it’s probably true. The same brain type was protecting the village from strangers, violently so, in the olden days just a few thousand years ago. Those brains are not phased out yet, not even close. Not after needing unempathetic brains with violent tendencies for millions of years. People with brains like these do much worse when given the opportunity and means. But even if are not in a position to physically torture people en masse, they can poison entire cultures and civilizations if they have a big enough platform. In contemporary practice, they flock to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or Hollywood.

An intelligently and thoughtfully made version of this movie is entirely possible. Davey would get a voice, and you can even make it more obvious that the other characters don’t care about his morality and innocence. As a matter of possibility, you can dramaturgically convey that Davey’s decency is an open affront and a threat the to egos of the unhinged people all over the place in this Wild West who are all looking for any excuse to engage in some deranged violent nonsense for actual shits and giggles. Anti-social punishment is a very powerful concept: you merely exist as a decent person in a place with lesser moral standards and wham, you’ll get punished, discriminated against, ostracized, and framed. The funny thing is, Eastwood probably realizes that this happens in the real world—but he doesn’t understand “why” it happens. He likely thinks it’s just the way of the world. He is too blind to not realize that it’s not just “random”.

It’s not random. It’s because the main whore is vengeful psychopath who probably simultaneously loves and hates men—which is way more typical than you would realize. Biologically, she is built to reeeeeally like men, but she is not even comfortable with feelings like intimacy, love, gratitude, or even merely needing someone. Of course, these are also frequently the results of childhood neglect and I can’t imagine that a career prostitute in dustbowl Kansas in the mid 1800’s grew up in a loving home. But, clearly, this lady had darkness in her too. So she hates that she needs men, whether it’s for pleasure or physical connection, or because she needs them as customers because she is reduced to becoming a “vagina as a purse”. And the natural next step is also that it is the patriarchal world that reduced her to that role, which is partly (or wholesale) true, but hell man, if “blame externalization” is not a bitch.

She lies to the brothel owner as to the way the young girl made fun of the slasher boy, clearly doesn’t tell the whole story, is not capable of gratitude. She jumps at the chance to punish as many men as she can, indiscriminately. And Eastwood does something super lazy here that reduces this group of women into mere plot-devices. Because no one sticking up for Davey here depicts an entire brothel full of women stupid and gullible, which they clearly are not—you can’t survive in that world without being crafty, and having some kind of code. We can find excuses thinking that the main ho may have dominated the narrative or something but that’s exactly what it is, making excuses for bad storytelling. I highly doubt Eastwood understands much about women in the first place.

I’m not even getting into the plethora of arbitrarily morally grey male characters in this movie. They are all awful. Literally, all of them. I take back the grey, they are half a shade below black at best. There is nothing admirable about any of them, and none of them are depicted to elicit any insightful moments either. The lot of them are barely two dimensional. Morgan Freeman’s character has some clever dialogue and that’s it. Just assume it’s the worst the humanity has to offer and let’s leave it at that. But I guess we can give credit to (maybe inadvertently) a good depiction of the endless toxically masculine NPC type of algorithmic men that I’m sure was the standard back then, and are still roaming the earth these days in different, less cowboy’s and more fuckboi’y, forms.

So let’s leave them aside, and carry on with the women. Somewhere around the middle of the movie, there is an entire sequence that shows them as sympathetic. It is even reveled that the original story about how bad the inciting assault was was total exaggerated horseshit. That somehow is not called into question, or doesn’t change the behavior of any of the main characters. It is even revealed that prize money doesn’t exist. So essentially the main character is like “Well, I had sworn off violence and had become a family man, and I came out of retirement for one last big score, but apparently there is no score. Oh well! I came this far, I should probably just commit a bunch of murders regardless before I go back home to raise my children.” Heuristics and biases are pains in our collective backsides as a species, but man, if the the sunk-cost bias isn’t the final boss of all final bosses…

So the movie, with its silence and sympathetic portrayal, endorses the disgusting behavior that started this entire cycle of violence. And I have a bigger problem with this because I personally have higher expectations from women. Sure, they can be equally bad as men—just in different ways. They usually try to harass and harm people indirectly, socially or psychologically, instead of physically. And they frequently use men as tools to inflict that harm on a world that makes them unhappy. But on the flip side of that ability of psychological harm, is deeper psychological insight. Women on average have bigger capacities at understanding emotional nuance and also forgiveness. The main character is the “Unforgiven” one, right? The whores are nice to him, seemingly forgiving the unforgivable. So while I can buy the dumb violent shit that the idiot men in this movie do (and to be fair, they are doing it via some sort of code that is somewhat consistent—that’s just how they were in the west [BOYS WILL BE BOYS!]). I really would’ve expected better from the women.

Davey gets the most violent and drawn out death in the movie. Supposedly it’s on purpose to demonstrate the cruelty and blah blah of the west, but of course, it’s more of Eastwood’s bleak mind wanting to depict some torture porn. And apparently that contrasts with the guy with the micropenis dying a very quick death. WOW, ART!

The end of the movie is a long sequence where Eastwood murders literally 2/3rds of an entire town and the peacing out saying “if you people ever do something I don’t like again, I’ll come back and kill the rest of you”. Jesus fucking Christ. And to be somewhat fair, he does this last one (after already killing the micropenis) because the sheriff and his goons catch and torture to death Eastwood’s buddy, Morgan Freeman. Yes, the law enforcement, that let go the guy who tortured the woman at the beginning, tortured to death a citizen who was going after a legal bounty. Also that last sequence is basically pitch black on a dark screen and you can only see a little bit of the movement if the room you are watching it in is hermetically sealed shut with blackout curtains. Don’t even think about checking your phone as the lowest level of light from your iPhone will prevent you from seeing anything on the screen. I guess this was the precursor to that unwatchable Game of Thrones episode that confounded an entire world.

So if you’re wondering who becomes police, law, etc in uncivilized countries, it’s these types of people. This is the world they see, this is the worldview they believe in, and they project it wherever they look. On the other hand, normal, more evolved people who innately have a moral compass and act decently would never wanna do these jobs. Well, someone needs to do these jobs. People who see the world through control and authority and are paranoid about what people like them might do. And they are right. Just like they are sociopathic, emotionally blank animals, there are others like them out there, and it is valid that we need protection from those agents. And using versions of those agents that we can control to police the ones we can’t is a genius idea which mostly works. We just need strong oversight, checks and balances, and a culture that doesn’t pump violence porn into people’s eyesights from every angle. I’m quite positive that police or law enforcement in Andorra or Liechtenstein isn’t like this. But if this is your art and this is your culture as a society and you spend too many years endorsing and lionizing the wrong virtues, you end up with a prison planet where everyone is unhappy. I’d know, I therapized hundreds of people for thousands of hours on that prison planet.

We so often see in movies or other media, caricaturized villains who want to “raze the world, and remake it in [their] own image”. When I worked with psychopathic clients, so much to my surprise, I realized that this was not a caricature. They talk like Dr. Doom does in normal everyday conversations. There are brains that really think this way, and given the power, they really wanna “raze the world” (and rid it of the weak or some shit) and always have some image of how the world “ought to be”. I guess I wouldn’t be shocked if one day America does that to itself. I also wouldn’t be shocked if they actually don’t have any other solutions that would work (which, of course, is completely unverifiable). If those are the rules of the Wild West, the solutions needs to come from their own standards and practices. Until they have their civil wars, get their populations decimated, and then come out to a more civilized clearing in the aftermath. After all, that’s how Europe got to its currently mostly peaceful state—through endless pools of blood. Now it’s mostly high-trust societies where policing is only minimally necessary and it revolves around nude sunbathing without anyone bothering you, delicious food that people take their time ceremonially preparing and consuming, and everyone minding their own business.

So fight your childhood playground fights, you 500 year old little infant of a civilization, and let the rest of the world know when you’ve matured enough to hang out with the adults. In the meantime, Eastwood can keep yelling at empty chairs, tell Spike Lee to shut and dribble, and try to suppress a biography that very accurately depicts him as an image-conscious manipulator with extremist authoritarian beliefs who routinely sacrificed his personal relationships for fame.

I think I might be definitively turning off the Hollywood IV drip that had been inserted into my median cubical vein for most of my life. It’s time to read some 400 year old books instead.

(Walks off into sunset, in a speedo, completely unarmed—scene)