Unforgiven

[the 'thing' below is a satirical response to and excellent post on KUK that deals with that old chestnut, Masculinity. But it works as a flippant review so I'm posting it here and at the other place]

This is not to say much, or nothing of any real importance. In fact, I wouldn’t have thought to say anything at all…except, this is a really good piece and I figured I’d mar it with a thought or two of my own…if only for the pleasure of spite.

Of course you right, and between “elusive “honour’ and lurking shame” is the mark of a fragile, tortured masculinity – forever surrounded by power without ever being able to ‘recognise’ himself in it…what those ever-allegorical pomo folk might characterise as the traumatic gap that separates the penis and the phallus.

But, on the other hand, William Munny was a ‘marder’!

It would have been sufficient to leave it there had the movie ‘Unforgiven’ been given the attention it deserved. But alas, nobody looks to westerns for the answers to riddles of masculinity, let alone for the tactical positions of an antagonistic politics. William Munny was a bad man, for sure…and he’d sooner kill you than piss on a hot rock. ‘Pure meaness’. But he wasn’t ‘like that no more’.

Redemption however only carries the bitter taste of the symbolic order… the ever-present threat of ‘lurking shame’. And more so for Willaim Munny, who had killed ‘women and children’ and ‘just about everything that walks or crawled’…William Munny who never had a problem ‘when it came to killing’, and who wielded the sovereign decision with all the confidence of someone standing outside the law…shame proportionate to the distance of the fall.

Isn’t this precisely the ambiguity of his declaration of ‘having changed’ in one of the opening sequences of the film:

Ned Logan: You were crazy, Will.
Will Munny: Yeah, no one liked me. Mountain boys all thought I was gonna shoot 'em out of pure meanness.
Ned Logan: Well, like I said, you ain't like that no more.
Will Munny: That's right. I'm just a fella now. I ain't no different than anyone else no more.
(my emphasis)

This ‘lurking shame’, so beautifully arrested in Munny’s addition of ‘no more’ in his assertion of being ‘no different than anyone else’, follows him throughout the movie; from the opening scene of him chasing the pig, to the beating he receives at the hands of the sheriff and his men. But after they kill Ned, Munny shifts beyond “elusive honour and lurking shame’ to become a ‘pure force of antagonism’. Not the shadowy double of (sovereign) public power that had been his former (bad) self (as most people who watch the movie assume), but the expression of a destructive violence whose only purpose for being is the annihilation of power (embodied in the sheriff, Little Bill Daggett). This is why, when Bill Daggett, presents Munny with the name, with all its weight within the symbolic order, Munny can remain indifferent and no longer needs to make reference to his redemption. His is now just the simple assertion purpose:

Little Bill Daggett: You'd be William Munny out of Missouri. Killer of women and children.
Will Munny: That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.

But to get back to the point…and there was a point…one of the most memorable bits of the movie is the scene where Munny walks into the bar, passes Ned’s body set on display, and confronts the man gathered round Bill Daggett. As if enveloped in ‘marderdom’ and quintessence of cool, Munny poses a question:

Will Munny: Who's the fellow owns this shithole?
[pause]
Will Munny: You, fat man. Speak up.
Skinny Dubois: Uh, I... I own this establishment. I bought the place from Greeley for a thousand dollars.
[Will levels the shotgun, and speaks to someone standing behind Skinny]
Will Munny: You better clear outta there.
Man: Yes, sir.
[scampers out of the way]
Little Bill Daggett: Just hold it right there. Hold it...!
[Will shoots Skinny. Screaming, the women scatter upstairs]
Little Bill Daggett: Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a bitch! You just shot an unarmed man!
Will Munny: Well, he should have armed himself if he's going to decorate his saloon with my friend.

So here’s the thing, being an aids denialist is not some same as killing your best friend, and decorating a bar with symbols of a defeated supremacist project is not the same as decorating it with your best friends body. On the other hand, the guy is Ronald Suresh and symbol is the South African flag…so, I’m not white, but I am probably a middle class lefty, but I’m with Munny on this one…you had better arm yourself. The point, I think, is that sometimes you got to be the phallus even at the risk of being a dick. So the next time I’m in Cape Town, if you buy the whiskey - in spite of my pretences to being a reclusive-kipgooier-intellectual - we can go find some fascists and denailists to get into it with.