Ways of (Un)Seeing Race and History in Clint Eastwood's Revisionist Western Unforgiven

This paper is a kind of interdisciplinary studies which connect a Western film criticism with a criticism of minority literature in America. My purpose in this paper is to put on the table such a sensitive issue as racial representation and representativeness in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven. We admit generally that Western films have contributed to the white American myth-making of how the West was won. Yet, since the mid-1960s, a growing number of revisionist Westerns were produced so as to raise a question about the conventional way of looking at what happened in the American West. In order to analyze the problem inherent in the way of seeing, I pay attention to how the director Eastwood (re)presents a character named W. W. Beauchamp in the film. Presumably, what the character Beauchamp misses in the West can be overlapped with what ordinary film viewers miss in the genre of Westerns. Given this, interrogating both what Beauchamp sees and what he misses within the movie, I attempt to disclose how much of the West has been unseen from his biased viewpoint. By doing so, I argue why it is important to focus on some passing scenes that touch on the irony of a Native American train passenger, the gaze of the mute Native American housewife, the abrupt disappearance of Asian American men, the lynching of African-American ex-cowboy, and the self-determination of the saloon prostitutes. Then I hope that, conservative and mainstream though the director is, his way of revising the Western is not quite far from my minority-conscious critical position.