Unforgiven: A Revisionist Shane Anonymous College

Within any genre the individual gears and cogs of a film may vary in degrees, but the film still ascribes to a set of rules preordained by the genre’s progenitors. Like a meme, genre films such as the Western will warp and intentionally borrow from themselves to apply a deeper discussion of ideology within the frame of the genre and thus by proxy discuss its discourse with the prior and future films of its genre. Furthermore being a space of pseudo-history the Western protagonist like Unforgiven’s Will Munny must be a response to the genre’s prior protagonists. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is a Western that contains multiple instances of characters inhabiting false personae in order to represent a symptom of the genre, and within that subtext the characters are forced into catharsis by the inevitable conclusion of the film.

Eastwood’s Unforgiven is a Western that contains multiple instances of characters perpetuating false personae to themselves based on the meta-lore of the evolving frontier. According to literary historian Richard Slotkin the “genre space” but more particularly the Western/frontier film is a “Pseudo-historical setting that is powerfully associated with stories and concerns rooted in the culture’s...