The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood

Bad Men at Play

95 bad men at Play On the Banality of Goodness in Unforgiven Richard Gilmore Bad Men from Bodie weren’t ordinary scoundrels, they came with the land, and you could no more cope with them than you could with dust or hailstones. —E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times Clint Eastwood is not obviously a philosopher. There are, however, two parallel traditions of Western philosophy, both of which can be said to originate with Plato. One tradition, associated with the middle and later works of Plato, is the idea of philosophy as the pursuit of knowledge, which becomes for Plato knowledge of the Forms. There is another tradition, another idea of what philosophy is about, in the earlier, so-called Socratic works of Plato. The idea of philosophy in those earlier works is of philosophy as a kind of wisdom, specifically, the wisdom to understand that we do not always really know what we think we know. It is this wisdom that I see Eastwood developing in Unforgiven (1992). Most profoundly, what we do not know that we think we know is: what we want. We think we want a certain kind of power, the power of the gun, for example; or the power to do whatever we want, to instill fear in others, to dominate. We want this power in order to flee the banality of our obsequious and conforming lives. These desires, I see Eastwood arguing in Unforgiven, are more complicated than they may seem, and our real desires may not be as we think they are. 96 Richard Gilmore Metaphysical Levels of Mise-en-Scène and Metaphysical Levels of Reality Unforgiven begins with a complicated series of cuts that suggest multiple narrative levels and even multiple metaphysical levels. The opening shot is of a house, a man, and a tree just after sunset. The house, man, and tree are seen in silhouette as they are backlit by the orange of fading day. The man has finished the work of filling in a grave, the grave of his dead wife. We know it is his dead wife because accompanying this image is a text that explains who this man is, who his wife was, and what happened to her. The text provides particulars to the silhouetted forms that the image alone does not provide. As silhouetted forms, without particular characteristics identifiable , the image suggests that these are primordial, universal forms, the frontier house, Iggsydryl, the original tree, Man, in his primordial, universal activity, burying a loved one. Just this opening shot implies multiple levels of reality. “Mise-en-scène” refers to anything that is “put” in the scene. In this case, the mise-en-scène includes both the text and the silhouetted figures of man, tree, and house, which implies at least two levels of reality. There is the reality of the man at work burying his dead wife. There is the reality of the text on the screen. And there is also the reality suggested by the point of view of the camera, a point of view bearing witness to this painful scene, which then points to still another reality beyond the reality of the framed shot because we, as the audience, share this point of view, and this act of bearing witness. The ambiguity of the opening shot compels the audience to interpret it, which is to compel the audience to reflect and think, which is part of what it means to do philosophy. I take it that part of what Unforgiven is about is a reflection on the nature of what it means to be a human being, and perhaps more specifically, even though there are some very strong women characters in the film, what it means to be a man. Some of the issues the movie addresses have to do with what love means, what friendship means, what loyalty and duty mean, what family means, and what life means. These are deep philosophical issues and each of the characters in the movie will encounter these issues in different ways and arrive at different solutions to the problems these issues pose. It is not clear to me that the movie itself proposes a preferred solution for the life issues it addresses so much as it suggests the tragic inadequacy of all attempts to resolve these issues in a fully satisfactory way. Bad Men at Play 97 The second shot of...