Look at me fail!

Wow yay the battery in my keyboard didn't randomly die over the week that i decided to do other things! This is amazing, it is also something that doesn't really happen very often. Shut up let me be excited. Anyway in this blog post I will be continueing the western thing. Lucky for me that I am s-m-r-t and I left the first blog on here so I could see where I left off.

[SIDE NOTE] What follows is me failing to write about this topic. I decided to leave it up as a reminder to myself how my creative process works and a to show everyone what me screwing up looks like. What I did wrong is that I never introduced the article that started all of this mess. That needs to be done, because every time I talk about reality or historical realism there is a specific purpose behind it that no one could possilby know because I didn't specificly make this one person look like the idiot they are first. They are an idiot too. So the next time I sit down to this I am going to do that. Once I do that I don't think I will need to do an in depth analysis of Unforgiven or 3:10 to Yuma. I think I will have covered both movies well enough as I beat the crap out of this one guy who deserves it. Then what follows will make a lot more sense...kinda. Oh well lesson learned, apparently that paragraph where you introduce all your research does serve a purpose after all. Who would of thunk. K bye.

This one is mostly going though and prooving some of the stuff I said in the previouse entry regarding unforgiven, while invesitgating the hyper representation that the movie creates in regards to the old west.

Look in order to get anything out of this you really need to see Unforgiven and 3:10 to Yuma. Both are super easy to download so either go do that or rent them, I don't care which.

That said, Unforgiven is more or less a movie compleatly devoid of any moralistic center. It doesn't really have a whole heck of a lot to do with right and wrong but mostly vast amounts of shades of grey, which never really gets resolved because Eastwood shoots just about damn near everyone and calls it a day.

One of the important moments in the movie is when the little weedy rancher tries to make it right with the whore his friend cut up. Man this poor guy just had the misfortune of being friends with the wrong asshole. The nice ranch hand is really set off from all the other charecters in the movie because he goes above and beyond what the sheriff asked him to do in order to make it right to a whore who he had nothing to do with. A pony is no small gift, it is a source of capital in of itself, and selling it most likely would of raised more money than the 5 whores had combined.

He was also the first to die. He didn't die easy either. He was shot in the leg, then he was gut shot, before he finnaly expired begging for water and feeling generally miserable. He didn't do anything he just got caught up in a bad situation that had more or less nothing to do with him. Actually now that I think of it the same goes for all the deputies. They didn't even know what was going on really, they all just died more or less horribly. That's the way of the movie though, it isn't really about anything. It is more or less a week in the life of some old guy who picks up a gun again for the first time in years because he needs money to build a better life. Pig farming sucks. All this will be imporant in a minute so hang onto it.

The way the movie ends is Hackman's charecter is looking up at Eastwood and he patheticly cries out, "I don't deserve this"
Eastwood stone faced with a voice of gravel replies, "that has nothing to do with it" then he shoots him. Yay violence! The funny thing is that both of them are right. Hackman's charecter is prolly one of the most interesting things about the movie. Like Eastwood and Freeman he is a man with a wild blood soaked past who only wishes to settle down and lead a quiet life as possible. However, unlike Eastwood and Freeman he goes to live in a town and becomes the Sherrif based mostly on his reputation I wager. Now Hackman came up with a pretty decent system, take everyone's guns away from them as they come into town. If someone disagrees they get all the deputies together...which is something like 6 of them and they all grab guns and usually someone doesn't put up to much resistence under that situation. Then Hackman will kick the living crap out of the person. Hackman establishes that he is the lead dick, while not putting himself in any real danger. All good stuff.

He's kinda a half assed Sherriff though and that's what got him into trouble. God that's it. This isn't working. Don't know how some english majors can stand to just sit around and summerize things and call it literary criticism. This is boring as shit.

So bapapapa Alright, here is what we do. I got enough shit lying around up there to make my point.

Most movies create a hyperspace...that is thier own wierd little distorted versions of reality within themselves. These spaces can make reality seem more real or intense than reality itself. It is imporant to remeber to leave a hyperspace with the movie. Okay we are set up, now the crux of Unforgiven's hyperspace lies within Hackman's charecter. To be honest he is that movie, because Eastwood is boring as shit. He presents a realistic view of law and how law works. He has power, his laws are focuses around him keeping that power, and the ability to display it so he doesn't need to keep enforcing it in the future. Hence his 8 million deputies. He keeps peace and that is more than most people got at that time so he really isn't that bad.

However, he is a megomanical fuck and the movie does a good job showing you that. Damnit I am screwing this up. I have 15 minuts to launch a salvage operation.

Okay. This movie is hailed as one of the greatest westerns of all time, it has been the subject of scholarly essays, and blah blah blah. At the same time post modernism is in full swing and its influence is just starting to reach the core of the american public. For most people the old west is a series of John Wayne whithat, vs black hat shootemups that always involve the good guy coming out on top and the bad people all dying.

Then comes unforgiven which inverts a lot of that. None of the charecters are all good or all bad. Eastwood over the course of the movie rediscovers that he is a stone cold killer and that there really isn't anything that will change that. Hackman is a viciouse power hungry fuck who is deeply insecure. It was a movie that had Eastwood killing good fairly innocent people, like the good ranch hand, and most of the deputies, out of anger or for cold profit. And it had him killing bad people. Essentially the movie tries to make you say, "Now that is what the west is like, none of that John Wayne crap".

The thing is that it WASN'T like that. Most of the time people just herded horses and lived thier life with only brief moments of excitement. It wasn't a constant firefight christ sakes. When I put it like that it definatly has a no duh sound to it, but you wouldn't beleive the number of people who will tell you that this movie gives an accurate representation of such and such, or this movies fails to because of reason X,Y,Z. Unforgiven came around at a time where the deromantification of history was in vouge.

It was around the time when we started to say more and more often how Columbus was a bastard, manifest desitiny was a shitty thing to do, we were asshole to the japanese during world war 2, et cetera et cetera. Columbus seems to be people's favorite one though. So Unforgiven rolls along and people go, "look that is what it was like, it is the old West deromanticised. That must mean what it was really like". NO the only thing Unforgiven does is that it commits the opposite crime of misrepresentation in that it makes the old west seems much worse than it really was. It made it a place without true redemption, where love ones dies, where innocent people get shot, where the guilty go unpunished unless someone takes the law into thier own hands. That is the world of Unforgiven and it doesn't really have any bareing on the real one at all in term of historical accuracy or context. Hell the movie seem to try extra hard not to place itself within any specific time period within the old west. There is no idea regarding historical accuracy because it is a movie without any sort of distinc time period.

I realize now my error.

I'mn going to put a note up top.