Unforgiven Film Analysis

As one of the best American films in the western genre, Unforgiven uniquely portrays a real culture through it’s setting; a pastiche of nineteenth-century Western style, which emphasizes the nature of law and order as the only thing that stands between civilization and chaos. Being both the director and the producer, Clint Eastwood constructs Unforgiven as a self-reflexive medium; which means the film’s aesthetic would consciously make the audience aware of the devices of the film’s construction and the illusory nature of the image. Eastwood deals frankly with the uglier aspects of violence and how complicated truths are distorted into simplistic myths about the Old West. Set in “Big Whiskey,” a fictional place where the practice of justice is non-existent, that acts as a microcosm of the whole country. Big Whiskey …show more content…
justice through it’s setting; not only Big Whiskey validates literal drunkenness, Big Whiskey is also populated with people who are drunk with power and operates as a money-driven society without the constraints of any legal system. To emphasize, the scene where Munny throws an empty bottle in the mud as he rides into town can be seen as the ‘required passport’ needed to enter a town named Big Whiskey, suggesting the need of alcohol to perpetrate violence. As a perfect representation of nineteenth century, Eastwood creates this fictional world with clear boundaries, in which depicts the roughness of society’s life back then. Here, assassination is a way of life and justice has been twisted in knots for political advantage. The audience see the real sense of struggle for balance, a pacifist and an assassin, from Munny’s characterization. His character is the only one that is capable to see justice as black and white, as for the others, the protagonists are somewhat corrupted (or carry personal vendetta) and the antagonists are not all that bad, which leads to the prominence of the motivations for each