Great essay on a movie I continue to have deeply ambivalent feelings about. I remember the image of the jerry-built house as a metaphor for Bill’s general incompetence being mentioned in at least one early review. But you nicely expand to the larger social & political frame of the movie.
One thing, though, is that Ordinance 14 would have been seen as neither unconstitutional nor unusual at the time. Town “gun check” laws were common in the Old West, and broadly effective, particularly in consolidating “cow towns” that now lean heavily into their supposed romantically “wild” pasts. Interestingly, it seems actual violence was much higher in company-run mining & railroad camps, where the bosses seem to have been broadly indifferent to intra-communal violence.
The Supreme Court’s Heller decision of 2008 was particularly stunning because it completely reversed the entire history of 2nd Amendment interpretation to that point with respect to federal deference to local authority to regulate private ownership & use of firearms.
One final thought, chiming with your beautiful Deadwood piece: Big Whiskey is a kind of anti-Deadwood in its lack of a real communal body, in any meaning of the term. Little Bill is not the only culprit, to the extent that the community has put itself into his hands & lets him do what he does. Maybe that’s the thing that’s always left me most queasy about the movie: to what extent do the town’s citizens also “get what they deserve,” or not, in the orgy of bloodshed at the end?
Enjoyed the piece. Interesting view of one of my all time favorite movies. And “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it” is one of my all time favorite film lines.
BTW, you mentioned reading the Cicero biography. I would agree that the end of the Roman republic is relevant to today. Clodius is downright Trumpian. I would recommend two other end-of-empire books, both with interesting parallels. One is Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. The other is 1177 BC, about the collapse of the bronze age, by Eric Cline.
Well, Little Bill was competent at the thing he wanted to be competent at, which is ruling his small corner with an iron fist. The rest of it he doesn't care about until he comes face to face with William Munny. Not that much different than a lot of people.
I always liked this film. I always interpreted it as a sort of existentialist text, in the Cliff Notes Sartre sense - Munny and Little Bill are victims of their choices, but Munny has come to (after the death of his wife, who tried to neuter them) embrace them, while Little Bill keeps indulging in them, but is too stupid to understand their consequences.
Sorry, you have categorically misunderstood the film, Little Bill and William Munny. First Little Bill has created justice. The town has no gunslingers and everything is ok. The sign *is* the laws written down. People were not very literate then so many warnings were on edge of town like that. It means his rule is not arbitrary.
Second Strawberry Alice says this isn’t fair but she is already a criminal, morally compromised ie property so does *not* have a say. She says she does because, as she says later to the other whores,
“Just because we let them smelly fools ride us like horses don’t mean we gotta let ‘em brand us like horses. Maybe we ain’t nothing but whores but, by God, we ain’t horses.””
She is appealing to a higher justice, literally the appeal to God, that they may be whores but they are humans not animals. This is a classic tension explored in the play Antigone where Antigone flouts Cleon’s law by an appeal to the ancient law. Thus Little Bill is not incompetent nor is his justice incomplete he is fair in the context. She changes the context like Antigone (and Strawberry Alice is right but she misplays it because they want the cowboys killed which is disproportionate to their crime or wounding and scarring. Disproportional justice isn’t justice and that is what hau rs the town. Why? Because Will Munny comes in like God’s Old Testament and wipes out Little Bill and nearly all forms of justice. The one surviving deputy runs away and will not shoot at Will Munny even from a hiding spot because he cannot act—he is broken. Will Munny doesn’t change when he hears Ned is dead. He accepts that is his or Ned’s fate for a bad life. Remember he says “we’ve all got it coming”when explaining the life to the Kid. What he could not abide was his friend was a decoration that dishonoured him for a crime he did not commit and was Ned’s responsibility and Will Munny extracts vengeance on Little Bill so the scales are closed.
You missed the significance of when William Munny becomes the killer. Not when he was told Ned was dead. It is the moment she really says who he is William Munny” it is at that exact moment William Munny takes his first drink. He is going to turn into the man Ned warned them about and Little Bill thought he had the measure of. The difference was Will Munny wants to kill Little Bill. He is not concerned with justice he wants revenge. He becomes that which he disavowed and the Kid shrinks before him realizing he is literally been trash talking a cold blooded killer of nightmares. US Marshalls were tough SOBs so to go up against one and kill them like it was nothing was serious and Ned even said he killed three men in the fight. He had killed so many he could not even remember all of them. Note William Munny doesn’t get drunk. He takes the drink to unleash the killer. He is moderating his drinking and his killing. Therein the deeper change in William Munny.
Little Bill cannot build the house do something creative is correct because that is beyond his role. He founded the town in that he brought justice by the disarming and beating down of gun slingers always with more men than the gunslinger will have. What he cannot do is rule. Again a classic tension between founders and rulers. This is correlated to his flawed judgement of the punishment for the crime. The whores were not considered and their honour was disfigured by him in the way the cowboy had disfigured Delilah. He is not incompetent so much as unsuited but unable to change. Romulus founds Rome in a crime Machiavelli’s focal point that such creation requires a crime but because he is a criminal he cannot rule and the rulers that follow needed that founding crime even as they try to avoid referring to it or having to replicated it as the seek to rule not refound in bloodshed and crime. William Munnny is not refounding the city. He leaves it. The town must decide whether or not it will seek justice or collapse but they are not tainted by the founding crime so they have or the next ruler has a chance.
In the end William Munny saying deserve’s got nothing to do with it is completing what he said to the Kid “we’ve all got it coming” we being the criminals and that includes Little Bill as much as he was insisting g he was building a home he was the criminal for what he had done and William Munny brought him justice and justice for the whores for which he was paid.
Munny gets the fate he deserves but had he been killed later he would not of complained of being undeserved. What it shows is he drank in moderation enough to unleash the killer and achieve justice. He also earned the money so he could and did return to the life promised his wife and raise the kids. He gets a peaceful death not one in crime and violence because he left it behind for good in part because he has no more killing to do.
Oh yeah I just watched seen where he takes the bottle. That's a serious third of the whisky he starts on and finishes before he’s done! No way that’s moderate!
This is a strong rebuttal that is undermined by various mechanics and usage errors that would be much more persuasive with some editing. I find both readings persuasive. It's worth saying that Bill was trying to build something that would endure, even if his methods eventually provoked his comeuppance.
I will say that, being familiar with whiskey and having hard liquor after a long abeyance, there's nothing moderate about Munny's drinking at the end of the film. Two to three shots would be more than enough to push him way beyond moderately drunk and I reckon he finished a quarter bottle at the least. When he leaves and throws the bottle, rest assured, he is very drunk, but nonetheless more than capable of unleashing the mayhem he visits on the town of Big Whisky.
Stop. He takes two hits hardly glugs or shots off the bottle. He does NOT finish a third of the bottle. He puts the cork in it and puts it down and asks for the Scholfield.
He has done enough to unleash the monster within to become Will Munny as described. He is vengeance incarnate and the “kid” now realizes he has been riding with an experienced cold blooded psychopathic gunslinger the likes of which he only read about. He also says “I’m not like you”. Note the Kid never sees him wipe out Little Bill but he would know the story is true and is not exaggerated (as was English Bob was shown to be).
Little Bill was making his life easier just as he built a flawed house for himself he built a flawed justice within the town that worked for him. Note there is no woman in his life although there was one for Will Munny showing Munny did reform while Little Bill put on a badge but never changed.
Look, i’ve drunk that stuff and he’s drunk more than that because he comes at dark. As an American familiar with the history of the temperance movement that emerged after this moment, brown whisky is not a small drink for someone who's been sober for years. I’ll go ahead and argue that it's just goofy to say he had a moderate drink and killed all those people, given his self confessed reputation as a drunken murderer. He’s certainly not a moderate killer.
Ok, just as an FYI I am an American. I am pretty aware of the temperance movement. He does not take large slugs. Look at his mouth. Note he doesn’t flinch nor gag nor make a face when drinking unlike the Kid. When he confronts Little Bill he is prepared. He is a primed killing machine. He is not a staggering English Bob of Little Bill’s telling gunning down another staggering drunk. He is focused, alert and ready. He comes in fully as William Munny the cold blooded killer Ned warned about and prophesied. He wipes out Little Bill and his deputies with only six shots in his Scholfield. He makes his shots count so is not “blazing away” that is not a drunk man that is a man who is cold blooded and has unleashed his monster to destroy Little Bill. Note his kills Little Bill with Ned’s rifle to avenge him and close that account.
Look, being around a bunch of violent drinkers and the like in my early life, I'll stand by my personal response and my own response to whiskey after not drinking it for a long time. It doesn't take much if you've abstained and lost tolerance. People who struggle with alcoholism like Munny invariably "can't hold their liquor" - otherwise they wouldn't be completely abstaining from alcohol.
I'll even go ahead and say sure he didn't finish it - but if he didn't keep drinking it, why take it off to town, beyond it being a nice finishing gesture? Let me tell you, if I'm riding off on a revenge killing and probable death, I'm going to have another - just like he does after he blasts them. You watch that and how he gulps at least a double right before he kills Little Bill and tell me that's moderate. To me that looks like he's looking to maintain.
Further, when he pulls that rifle up to his eye, looming over Little Bill, and aims real slow and careful at him, he looks drunk - which also echoes Bill's story about a drunken English Bob walking up real slow and precise to shoot a man when he miraculously survives due to the man's gun blowing up in his hand.
If your film characterizes you from the jump as a drunken murderer who reformed, and the protagonist laments his drunken violent past, it simply strains credulity that he would just take two mild swigs merely to get "primed" and stop. He went on a killing binge and, rest assured, he didn't fail to hit that bottle on the way into town.
Repeatedly, both Bills talk about killers invariably being drunk during their exploits. It's harder for me to believe that he wasn't genuinely drunk when he walked into that saloon than to believe he primed himself to kill with a bit of a refresher and nothing more.
Interesting, but I think I disagree. Competence is Unforgiven is largely about competence in doing violence—being a truly dangerous man. There are three of them in the movie: English Bob, Little Bill, and Will Munny. Maybe Ned Logan was too back in the day but he’s lost the stomach for it.
Other men—the cowboys, the deputies, the Schofield Kid—can carry guns and even use them as long as they are surrounded by friends and led by a dangerous man. But one truly dangerous man can walk into a barroom and face down almost any number of ordinary men.
By this standard—which is the standard that matters in the movie—Little Bill is competent. He holds the town together; he puts steel in the spines of his deputies; he creates order, albeit arbitrary and brutal order, where it wouldn’t otherwise exist.
You could fault the competence of Bob, Ned, and Will in any number of ways too. Bob is a blowhard who lets himself get surrounded and disarmed because he isn’t paying attention. Ned is distracted by getting “free ones” from the girls and fails to evade Bill’s posse. Will is a failure as a pig farmer (though that may not be his fault), and also lets himself get surrounded and disarmed. But regardless of their various flaws, these few men are competent at the thing that matters. They can do the hard thing, and so everyone else orbits around them and rises and falls based on their decisions.
Great essay on a movie I continue to have deeply ambivalent feelings about. I remember the image of the jerry-built house as a metaphor for Bill’s general incompetence being mentioned in at least one early review. But you nicely expand to the larger social & political frame of the movie.
One thing, though, is that Ordinance 14 would have been seen as neither unconstitutional nor unusual at the time. Town “gun check” laws were common in the Old West, and broadly effective, particularly in consolidating “cow towns” that now lean heavily into their supposed romantically “wild” pasts. Interestingly, it seems actual violence was much higher in company-run mining & railroad camps, where the bosses seem to have been broadly indifferent to intra-communal violence.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/
The Supreme Court’s Heller decision of 2008 was particularly stunning because it completely reversed the entire history of 2nd Amendment interpretation to that point with respect to federal deference to local authority to regulate private ownership & use of firearms.
https://govfacts.org/rights-freedoms/constitutional-rights/right-to-bear-arms/how-three-supreme-court-cases-transformed-americas-gun-rights/#
One final thought, chiming with your beautiful Deadwood piece: Big Whiskey is a kind of anti-Deadwood in its lack of a real communal body, in any meaning of the term. Little Bill is not the only culprit, to the extent that the community has put itself into his hands & lets him do what he does. Maybe that’s the thing that’s always left me most queasy about the movie: to what extent do the town’s citizens also “get what they deserve,” or not, in the orgy of bloodshed at the end?
thanks! i fixed this. others noted the error too.
Enjoyed the piece. Interesting view of one of my all time favorite movies. And “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it” is one of my all time favorite film lines.
I love the way you walk us through movies.
BTW, you mentioned reading the Cicero biography. I would agree that the end of the Roman republic is relevant to today. Clodius is downright Trumpian. I would recommend two other end-of-empire books, both with interesting parallels. One is Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. The other is 1177 BC, about the collapse of the bronze age, by Eric Cline.
thank you! i love 1177 bc! so fascinating. will definitely check the other out too.
Well, Little Bill was competent at the thing he wanted to be competent at, which is ruling his small corner with an iron fist. The rest of it he doesn't care about until he comes face to face with William Munny. Not that much different than a lot of people.
I always liked this film. I always interpreted it as a sort of existentialist text, in the Cliff Notes Sartre sense - Munny and Little Bill are victims of their choices, but Munny has come to (after the death of his wife, who tried to neuter them) embrace them, while Little Bill keeps indulging in them, but is too stupid to understand their consequences.
Sorry, you have categorically misunderstood the film, Little Bill and William Munny. First Little Bill has created justice. The town has no gunslingers and everything is ok. The sign *is* the laws written down. People were not very literate then so many warnings were on edge of town like that. It means his rule is not arbitrary.
Second Strawberry Alice says this isn’t fair but she is already a criminal, morally compromised ie property so does *not* have a say. She says she does because, as she says later to the other whores,
“Just because we let them smelly fools ride us like horses don’t mean we gotta let ‘em brand us like horses. Maybe we ain’t nothing but whores but, by God, we ain’t horses.””
She is appealing to a higher justice, literally the appeal to God, that they may be whores but they are humans not animals. This is a classic tension explored in the play Antigone where Antigone flouts Cleon’s law by an appeal to the ancient law. Thus Little Bill is not incompetent nor is his justice incomplete he is fair in the context. She changes the context like Antigone (and Strawberry Alice is right but she misplays it because they want the cowboys killed which is disproportionate to their crime or wounding and scarring. Disproportional justice isn’t justice and that is what hau rs the town. Why? Because Will Munny comes in like God’s Old Testament and wipes out Little Bill and nearly all forms of justice. The one surviving deputy runs away and will not shoot at Will Munny even from a hiding spot because he cannot act—he is broken. Will Munny doesn’t change when he hears Ned is dead. He accepts that is his or Ned’s fate for a bad life. Remember he says “we’ve all got it coming”when explaining the life to the Kid. What he could not abide was his friend was a decoration that dishonoured him for a crime he did not commit and was Ned’s responsibility and Will Munny extracts vengeance on Little Bill so the scales are closed.
You missed the significance of when William Munny becomes the killer. Not when he was told Ned was dead. It is the moment she really says who he is William Munny” it is at that exact moment William Munny takes his first drink. He is going to turn into the man Ned warned them about and Little Bill thought he had the measure of. The difference was Will Munny wants to kill Little Bill. He is not concerned with justice he wants revenge. He becomes that which he disavowed and the Kid shrinks before him realizing he is literally been trash talking a cold blooded killer of nightmares. US Marshalls were tough SOBs so to go up against one and kill them like it was nothing was serious and Ned even said he killed three men in the fight. He had killed so many he could not even remember all of them. Note William Munny doesn’t get drunk. He takes the drink to unleash the killer. He is moderating his drinking and his killing. Therein the deeper change in William Munny.
Little Bill cannot build the house do something creative is correct because that is beyond his role. He founded the town in that he brought justice by the disarming and beating down of gun slingers always with more men than the gunslinger will have. What he cannot do is rule. Again a classic tension between founders and rulers. This is correlated to his flawed judgement of the punishment for the crime. The whores were not considered and their honour was disfigured by him in the way the cowboy had disfigured Delilah. He is not incompetent so much as unsuited but unable to change. Romulus founds Rome in a crime Machiavelli’s focal point that such creation requires a crime but because he is a criminal he cannot rule and the rulers that follow needed that founding crime even as they try to avoid referring to it or having to replicated it as the seek to rule not refound in bloodshed and crime. William Munnny is not refounding the city. He leaves it. The town must decide whether or not it will seek justice or collapse but they are not tainted by the founding crime so they have or the next ruler has a chance.
In the end William Munny saying deserve’s got nothing to do with it is completing what he said to the Kid “we’ve all got it coming” we being the criminals and that includes Little Bill as much as he was insisting g he was building a home he was the criminal for what he had done and William Munny brought him justice and justice for the whores for which he was paid.
Munny gets the fate he deserves but had he been killed later he would not of complained of being undeserved. What it shows is he drank in moderation enough to unleash the killer and achieve justice. He also earned the money so he could and did return to the life promised his wife and raise the kids. He gets a peaceful death not one in crime and violence because he left it behind for good in part because he has no more killing to do.
Oh yeah I just watched seen where he takes the bottle. That's a serious third of the whisky he starts on and finishes before he’s done! No way that’s moderate!
Watch it again please he does NOT finish the bottle. https://youtu.be/Pzy85Cv19u0?si=hrt96PlnaL78_1Co
This is a strong rebuttal that is undermined by various mechanics and usage errors that would be much more persuasive with some editing. I find both readings persuasive. It's worth saying that Bill was trying to build something that would endure, even if his methods eventually provoked his comeuppance.
I will say that, being familiar with whiskey and having hard liquor after a long abeyance, there's nothing moderate about Munny's drinking at the end of the film. Two to three shots would be more than enough to push him way beyond moderately drunk and I reckon he finished a quarter bottle at the least. When he leaves and throws the bottle, rest assured, he is very drunk, but nonetheless more than capable of unleashing the mayhem he visits on the town of Big Whisky.
Stop. He takes two hits hardly glugs or shots off the bottle. He does NOT finish a third of the bottle. He puts the cork in it and puts it down and asks for the Scholfield.
https://youtu.be/Pzy85Cv19u0?si=hrt96PlnaL78_1Co
He has done enough to unleash the monster within to become Will Munny as described. He is vengeance incarnate and the “kid” now realizes he has been riding with an experienced cold blooded psychopathic gunslinger the likes of which he only read about. He also says “I’m not like you”. Note the Kid never sees him wipe out Little Bill but he would know the story is true and is not exaggerated (as was English Bob was shown to be).
Little Bill was making his life easier just as he built a flawed house for himself he built a flawed justice within the town that worked for him. Note there is no woman in his life although there was one for Will Munny showing Munny did reform while Little Bill put on a badge but never changed.
Look, i’ve drunk that stuff and he’s drunk more than that because he comes at dark. As an American familiar with the history of the temperance movement that emerged after this moment, brown whisky is not a small drink for someone who's been sober for years. I’ll go ahead and argue that it's just goofy to say he had a moderate drink and killed all those people, given his self confessed reputation as a drunken murderer. He’s certainly not a moderate killer.
To each their own.
Ok, just as an FYI I am an American. I am pretty aware of the temperance movement. He does not take large slugs. Look at his mouth. Note he doesn’t flinch nor gag nor make a face when drinking unlike the Kid. When he confronts Little Bill he is prepared. He is a primed killing machine. He is not a staggering English Bob of Little Bill’s telling gunning down another staggering drunk. He is focused, alert and ready. He comes in fully as William Munny the cold blooded killer Ned warned about and prophesied. He wipes out Little Bill and his deputies with only six shots in his Scholfield. He makes his shots count so is not “blazing away” that is not a drunk man that is a man who is cold blooded and has unleashed his monster to destroy Little Bill. Note his kills Little Bill with Ned’s rifle to avenge him and close that account.
Look, being around a bunch of violent drinkers and the like in my early life, I'll stand by my personal response and my own response to whiskey after not drinking it for a long time. It doesn't take much if you've abstained and lost tolerance. People who struggle with alcoholism like Munny invariably "can't hold their liquor" - otherwise they wouldn't be completely abstaining from alcohol.
I'll even go ahead and say sure he didn't finish it - but if he didn't keep drinking it, why take it off to town, beyond it being a nice finishing gesture? Let me tell you, if I'm riding off on a revenge killing and probable death, I'm going to have another - just like he does after he blasts them. You watch that and how he gulps at least a double right before he kills Little Bill and tell me that's moderate. To me that looks like he's looking to maintain.
Further, when he pulls that rifle up to his eye, looming over Little Bill, and aims real slow and careful at him, he looks drunk - which also echoes Bill's story about a drunken English Bob walking up real slow and precise to shoot a man when he miraculously survives due to the man's gun blowing up in his hand.
If your film characterizes you from the jump as a drunken murderer who reformed, and the protagonist laments his drunken violent past, it simply strains credulity that he would just take two mild swigs merely to get "primed" and stop. He went on a killing binge and, rest assured, he didn't fail to hit that bottle on the way into town.
Repeatedly, both Bills talk about killers invariably being drunk during their exploits. It's harder for me to believe that he wasn't genuinely drunk when he walked into that saloon than to believe he primed himself to kill with a bit of a refresher and nothing more.
Interesting, but I think I disagree. Competence is Unforgiven is largely about competence in doing violence—being a truly dangerous man. There are three of them in the movie: English Bob, Little Bill, and Will Munny. Maybe Ned Logan was too back in the day but he’s lost the stomach for it.
Other men—the cowboys, the deputies, the Schofield Kid—can carry guns and even use them as long as they are surrounded by friends and led by a dangerous man. But one truly dangerous man can walk into a barroom and face down almost any number of ordinary men.
By this standard—which is the standard that matters in the movie—Little Bill is competent. He holds the town together; he puts steel in the spines of his deputies; he creates order, albeit arbitrary and brutal order, where it wouldn’t otherwise exist.
You could fault the competence of Bob, Ned, and Will in any number of ways too. Bob is a blowhard who lets himself get surrounded and disarmed because he isn’t paying attention. Ned is distracted by getting “free ones” from the girls and fails to evade Bill’s posse. Will is a failure as a pig farmer (though that may not be his fault), and also lets himself get surrounded and disarmed. But regardless of their various flaws, these few men are competent at the thing that matters. They can do the hard thing, and so everyone else orbits around them and rises and falls based on their decisions.