“I don’t think you’d call it an anti-western”: the movie Clint Eastwood called mythbreaking
Any genre with a fixed set of tropes, trappings, and backdrops is obligated to evolve in order to remain relevant, with Clint Eastwood positioned at the forefront of ushering the western into not just one but two brand new eras.
With the days of John Wayne and cinema’s classic cowboys drawing to a close as the Old West began to become a lesser concern in the eyes of the moviegoing public, a shakeup was needed. Fortunately, Eastwood landed his first major leading role in a feature film at exactly the right time, with A Fistful of Dollars giving rise to the medium’s spaghettified offshoot.
From there, Eastwood made a habit of deconstructing the mythology of the genre in a number of films, including High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider, to name but three. The revisionist western subverted the old-fashioned good versus evil nature of the art form’s heyday by presenting complex and morally ambiguous characters who’ll do anything in order to survive.
The apex of the western’s third major sea change in the space of less than three decades inevitably came with Eastwood as its focal point, after he opted to bow out of traversing the wide-open plains in seminal style with his ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’-winning masterpiece Unforgiven.
Carrying added heft by doubling as its star and director’s swansong in the style of cinema that made him a superstar in the first place, the elegiac ode to the West saw Eastwood depart on the highest note imaginable. In its own way, Unforgiven was a love letter to the genre, but one of its recurring thematic motifs was taking each one of the archetypes associated with such stories and picking them apart.
“I don’t think you’d call the script of Unforgiven an anti-western,” he said. “I think you’d just call it a mythbreaking western. It destroyed some of the myths that had been built up about the West.” ‘The Duke’ was probably spinning in his grave at that point, given how ardently he defended the classical complexion of the genre, but taking a sledgehammer to the mythos yielded one of Eastwood’s greatest-ever movies.
He was aware that it carried a double meaning from the very beginning, explaining to Empire that “I felt like that was the genre I became known in, it had been so good to me, and that this would be the perfect last western for me.” He was completely correct in that assessment, and while he’s no doubt fielded at least a few tentative offers to return to that particular sandbox in the three decades since then, Eastwood has never moved from his position of his myth-breaking epic remaining the final stand.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Clint Eastwood Newsletter
All the latest stories about Clint Eastwood from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.