Well, robluvsnic, your initial post about forgiveness coupled with KC's question as to just who was "unforgiven" in this movie led me to wonder why I hadn't really pondered this before. Who is "unforgiven" - who, specifically?
I think (this week, anyway) that I must have never regarded the movie's title as an adjective for any individual within the story, but rather as an adjective for the story itself. We're all unforgiven. Life is unforgiven. Humanity itself, beyond redemption. So
this train of thought, rightly or wrongly, got me to thinking about what that meant. If everyone is unforgiven, who exactly is finding them all so unforgivable? Better yet, is it instead because there is no one outside of humanity with the power to forgive us?
I think perhaps the reason this movie chills on such a subliminal level is because it asks us to contemplate, for a few hours, a world without a god. At least, a world without a loving god. Now I'm not bringing this up to offend anyone's religious sensibilities; I'm just following a train of thought to the station it leads me to. It could be I'm way off base here. But it seems to me that references to god and a perhaps customary appearance of some sort of religious iconography is notably absent in
Unforgiven. Maybe I'm forgetting something. I don't recall seeing any shots of a church in Big Whiskey. But they've sure got a whorehouse. Aside from Claudia's crude marker, no crosses. God is mentioned briefly in reference to Claudia ("God rest her" - I'll get to that in a moment) and in a few curses - interestingly.
A few stick out. The Schofield Kid tries to intimate that he is a "goddamned killer" himself - in comparison to Munny, who has been damned? Munny curses his horse, perhaps a reference to his younger days when he was given to dispensing damnation of his own almost casually. Little Bill refers to English Bob as being "hell and Jesus with a pistol". Hell, Jesus, and a pistol all in one sentence. All one and the same in this story? Or, here, do opposing poles of religious iconography cancel themselves out, leaving us with just the pistol? Just the pistol.
I don't know. It seemed like a tenous, tangential connection at best, until I considered all of those wide-open vista shots, the beautiful, unspoiled scenery which has been described elsewhere as the haunting beauty of
Unforgiven. Well, why is it so haunting? Why isn't it just beautiful? It seems like most westerns traditionally offer some strong moral and/or religious element
somewhere. This one does not.
And, as mentioned before, no character is redeemed. Not even Delilah, in my eyes. She didn't want any blood on her hands, and now has to live with the fact that several men were murdered on account of the bounty put up on her behalf. Similarly, the other prostitutes are not redeemed. Ned thinks better of killing Davey, and is beaten to death. The Kid leads us to believe that he's going straight, but all we really know is that he murdered Quick Mike and then got frightened by the implications. By the power of simply pulling a trigger. A very lone, human action. No one is forgiven, and, IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS ONE STORY, god is just... absent. It's just us. Just people, alone in a big, beautiful world, killing each other over sex, money and power.
However, visions of hell are NOT absent. Munny sees horrible visions of Eagle Hendershott and his wife, followed by the appearance of the Angel Of Death. And finally, Little Bill's exiting words, "I'll see you in Hell, William Munny". Is this the first time in the movie that either Heaven or Hell is mentioned as a destination in the afterlife? Remember, Claudia is referred to as watching over Munny's children in a very tangible sense. It never came across to me personally as watching from on high; more like tethered to this earth, this spot of ground where she left her family. Munny as much as says so when Delilah asks where his wife is. She is more ghost than angel.
I could go on, but I'm kind of meandering at this point
Could be that there are some more religious references I'm forgetting or missing. But I do think this absence of a presence for divine forgiveness is less accidental than contemplative. Consider a world without a god to save us; not as any refutation or advancement of a religious view, but to make us forego the comforting answers and look at the hard, unanswered questions that remain in their wake. With only ourselves to damn us to hell, the beautiful landscape does begin to look haunting, and the underlying, bleak nature of this story becomes less shadow and more concrete.
When tied into Clint's stated concern with the morality of gunplay, it begs the question, "Who, then, will step in and save us from ourselves?" with a great, disturbing immediacy...
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If there's a sense that political views are hurting any actor or film's chances this year, I have yet to notice it in any of the "oscarbuzz" articles I've been reading.
(Voting is still open 
