Law and Politics in Unforgiven

SIMON PETCH & ROSLYN JOLLY Law and Politics in Unforgiven For well over a century after the American Revolution, jurists on both sides of the Atlantic were engaged in a series of conversations about the nature of sovereignty. These conversations were initiated by the Declaration of Independence, and focused on the Constitution of the United States—a document which, famously, avoids the term "sovereignty." Although such discussions took place in two Common Law countries, they were not directly dialogic; indeed, the several voices in both countries are addressed primarily to audiences within their own legal culture, and refer to the other culture for examples of dysfunctional polity. A similar transatlantic exchange about sovereignty takes place in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (which is set in 1880-81), suggesting that the constitutional consciousness of Victorian Britain offers an unlikely but fruitful context in which the film may be interpreted. The character English Bob is our main signpost to the political implications with which the film is richly laden. The film's only overt political theorist, English Bob is an anomaly, a monarchist on the loose in American frontier society. He lives dangerously , for his crude assertions about the superiority of monarchy to presidential government are repeatedly, and offensively, pushed in the faces of his several American auditors. A newspaper headline visible in the railway scene in which he first appears—"President Garfield in Critical Condition"—provides the theme for a discourse on the dangers of democracy and republicanism, which Bob sustains throughout his presence in the film. English Bob is obsessed with the assassination ?????a Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1 , Spring 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-16 10 I2Ó Simon Fetch & Roslyn jolly attempt: he talks about it on the train, on the coach driving into Big Whiskey, and again in the barber's shop. In fact, until the point where he is confronted and arrested, English Bob does almost nothing in the film except talk about the shooting of the President; and his final, bitter words, on leaving town, resume the thematics of law and civilization associated with his socio-political interpretation of that event. The first discussion of this, in the railway carriage, draws upon nationalist prejudices and stereotypes. English Bob refutes the suggestion that a "John Bull" may have been responsible for the Presidential shooting, pointing out that Garfield's "would-be assassin" is "a gentleman of French ancestry"; he then offers the more general observation that the French are "a race of assassins." By stressing the initial syllable of this word (he even breaks the word by pausing after the first syllable), Bob suggests his contempt for regicidal republicans, and, by implication , for the ideological ground shared by the common architects of the American and French Revolutions. He presents the Americans as a people who habitually shoot their Presidents. That this is "the second one they've shot in twenty years" is advanced by English Bob as evidence ofthe savagery of the country in which he finds himself; that savagery itself, he asserts, is an effect ofwhat he calls climate and distances, and what we would call the frontier. "It's uncivilized," he declares as the coach takes him into Big Whiskey, "shooting persons of substance," and in the symmetrical scene in which he leaves the town by coach he amplifies this view in a parting curse upon the inhabitants of the frontier town: "You got no laws, you got no honor, you're a lot of savages." Bob's idea that the Americans are uncivilized because they keep shooting their Presidents, and his curse on the townspeople as savages who have no laws, both derive from his sense of a society in which power does not rest on intrinsically authoritative institutions. The identity and the power of a President—unlike those of a Queen—are, to Bob, merely arbitrary. Inviting an American on the train to join him in a shooting contest, he says "I'll shoot for the Queen, and you for . . . well, whomever." Later, in the barber's shop, he pursues his theme that the intrinsic majesty of the institution of royalty makes it much more difficult to assassinate a Queen...