Cowboys and the Power of Storytelling

From left: Jaimz Woolvett, Morgan Freeman, and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

I saw Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in the cinema when it was first released in 1992, and loved it. Then I didn’t watch it again for thirty years, until this week. Given my family’s conservatism, I grew up surrounded by Westerns, especially John Wayne and James Arness, but my parents specifically exempted Clint Eastwood. My mother disparaged Unforgiven as, in her view, a return to his youthful form of violence for its own sake.

Then as now, I felt Mom misunderstood what happened. When it came to dispensing actual violence, Morgan Freeman’s character, Ned Logan, can’t actually stomach it; he’s grown a conscience in his old age. Eastwood’s William Munny feels every human emotion while sober, and can only become the killer he once was after numbing himself with alcohol. Their ally, the self-proclaimed Schofield Kid, likewise feels every inch of pain.

Rewatching Unforgiven in adulthood, however, I noticed another theme which teenaged Kevin missed. The characters spend remarkable swathes of time telling one another stories. From the moment the Schofield Kid enters Munny’s homestead, he demands to know which among the many legends of Munny’s violent exploits are true—legends which the Kid repeats giddily. The Kid enjoys stories he’s heard, and wants to become a story himself.

Almost simultaneously, the contract enforcer “English Bob” enters Big Whiskey, Wyoming, accompanied by his official biographer. This author, Beauchamp, almost matters more than English Bob himself. Beauchamp has dedicated himself to setting English Bob’s exploits in print, preserving Western storytelling for an Eastern audience thirsty for lurid adventures. When Beauchamp discovers English Bob’s stories are fabricated, he drops his ally and attaches himself to another storyteller.

Beauchamp is himself a fabulist, who uncritically repeats stories of White men dispensing karmic justice, protecting innocent (White) women, and taming a land wrested from savage Indians. He describes a world where judicious applications of White male violence bring order to a putatively disorganized land. His character’s entire point, of course, is that he abandons his preferred story when Sheriff Daggett humiliates English Bob and offers an alternative story.

Much of what we believe we know about the American West comes from fabulists like Beauchamp. People who survived the West told their stories to an uncritical penny press, which devoured their frequently ridiculous memoirs. We remember Wyatt Earp, and forget his arguably more accomplished brothers, because Wyatt survived and had a press agent. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show sold an almost entirely fake account of western settlement.

These characters and their hyperbolic stories made good fodder for the nascent film industry. Early stars like Tom Mix, who pioneered the white-hat cowboy mythology, presented a world of moral absolutes, swift civilian justice, and libertarian freedom. Mix bequeathed the reins to similar morally unambiguous performers like the “singing cowboys,” Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, then to the cowboys my parents loved, Marshall Dillon and Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn.

We mustn’t forget, however, that these performances served a social role. Tom Mix corresponded with the rising social tensions which preceded World War I. Rogers and Autry sang their sermons during the Great Depression, while John Wayne and James Arness flourished during the Cold War. John Wayne arguably kept trying to re-fight the early Cold War well into his seventies, limping along, mortally wounded by exposure to nuclear test fallout.

Owen Wister’s genre-defining Western, The Virginian, begins not with character or action, but with a preface lamenting the disappearance of cowboys. The cowboy, to Wister, represents an absent ethic in American life, a moral purity unadulterated by civilization’s decadence. Just as Homer believed true Greek greatness ended with the Mycenaeans, and Arthurian romance locates chivalry among knights of yore, Westerns imply American greatness happened “back then.”

The spaghetti Westerns which made Eastwood’s career, with their moral ambiguity and their casual brutality, arose as the Cold War dragged on interminably. The Italians who made these movies, including Eastwood’s mentor Sergio Leone, witnessed firsthand how flag-waving stories of bygone national glory looked pale against events actually occurring in Europe. They presented a counter-narrative of the cowboy West as brutal, amoral, and already dead.

By 1993, however, even that counter-narrative had become disappointing. Eastwood presents the differing stories of America’s West—the Kid’s romantic savagery, Beauchamp’s redemptive violence, Daggett’s tales of law and order—as equally disappointing. All characters, in this West, wind up equally lonely, aiming for the same cold clay. “The Wild West,” this movie acknowledges, never existed; it was a story we told ourselves. Like all stories, it has to end.