Unforgiven: Fausse Reconnaissance

Gift and duel go unto death.

—Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge

Global mass media focus increasingly on the notion of witnessing an event from a distance, and thus on surviving it, be it a violent confrontation or a meteorological danger. These events are repeated relentlessly, always presented as news: whenever something happens—a gunfight, a thunderstorm—it simultaneously confirms and disturbs the experience of time. The technically enhanced surveillance of any fleeting, volatile, unrepeatable occurrence in turn gives rise to general coverage: media thrive on the very unrepeatability of that which they strive to repeat. The event would simply disappear if subsumed under a general notion of "violence" or "weather," and thus its singularity is only recognizable when it is split off from the impact or harm by distance. Media rely on disappearance as a negative function of repetition in their coverage. ¹ Globally, events are covered up by screen memories, and this detachment represses all questions of judgment in favor of pure replay. The screening over of morality and justice produces a return of notions that evoke systems of belief—such as finitude of life, transcendence of time, the promise of a future under immemorial threats. On the one hand, ever more refined time axis manipulation is the technical pivot of modern media, and on the other hand, violence and weather have become two mainstays of media coverage—precisely as a result of their statistical recurrence and recuperation after the fact.

One may wonder whether repetition and novelty, the serial and the singular are mediated differently in art. It is possible to argue that here, news media diverge from cinema. While one accentuates the transience of the instant, the other stores its moving images for posterity; news loses most of its interest after a short while, movies are supposed to accumulate it—if only because they remain available for comparison and other modes of critical attention. However, both capture our attention by means of difference and repetition. ² Both uses of the moving image serve our distraction economy by similar technical means, and if we were to insist on a fundamental difference, we might say that the artful use of the medium heightens the traits that characterize all of its forms. ³ That classic among movie genres, the Western, stages the convergence of violence and weather, ending in a hailstorm of bullets. When this genre returns, like yesterday's news, in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), it repeats certain aspects that may have slipped our attention the first time around.

The myth of the American West, the promised land, has found one of its pioneering mediatic representations in the Western, a movie genre that has its roots in the dime novels of the nineteenth century, the paintings of Frederic Remington, and in countless retellings of legends about Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, and "Billy the Kid" Bonney. Men on their horses, exploring the very edge of civilization, pioneering the way of life that was to become America: this is the formula of Western storytelling. In those outposts, any moral ambiguities had to be reluctantly settled by violence; the revolver is the symbol of the law as well as of the outlaw. Common to both is a code of honor that expressed itself not only in the idealized reluctance to use violence, but above all in the duel: the man-to-man, eye-to-eye combat in the tradition of divine judgment. The gun duel is the most hallowed and clichéd convention of the Western. The settling of accounts may turn into a suicidal last stand, but above all, it is the accepted code of the confrontation and resolution of conflict—even if it shows the hero as a killer. The gun is not only the symbol of manliness and justice, but also the only means for reconciliation. And while the manly heroics of the lone rider are played out in the foreground, the landscape of the North American West is playing...