3 - Rethinking Revisionism
from PART ONE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Summary
‘It's a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have.’
In a review published shortly after the release of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), Harvey R. Greenberg offers the following summary:
Unforgiven's apocalyptic conclusion constitutes an insanely logical outcome – and send-up – of the bellicose John Wayne machismo so frequently celebrated by the genre … Unforgiven underscores how fragile a reed is civilisation, with no hero on a white horse or in a cop car to redeem the threat of humanity's supreme undefendedness. The indomitable thrust to push back the frontier, tame the wilderness, ‘build houses’, seems pitiable or risible against this recognition … appears galactically remote indeed from John Wayne triumphalist pieties.
It is clear that Greenberg considers Unforgiven as a highly conscious response to both the formal structures of the so-called classical Western and the genre's celebration of its most famous heroes: be they mythologised historical figures such as Wyatt Earp, fictitious national allegories like Shane, or that most curious and uneasy synthesis of the two – John Wayne. Critical responses to Unforgiven have tended to fall into one of two broad categories. On the one hand, there are those who, like Greenberg, evidently see in David Webb Peoples’ gloomy script an apocalyptic repudiation of the classical Western's ‘bellicose’ glorification of violence.
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- Information
- Myth of the WesternNew Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative, pp. 114 - 160Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014