Unforgiven-Chris Jones

The film Unforgiven is clearly a revisionist Western almost from the first time we see Clint Eastwood on his farm. In classic Westerns our alpha male cowboy never had a family and certainly would not have been a single father. It is shown almost instantly that Eastwoods skills are rusty as well, and that he can barely even get on his horse. These types of faults are not the type we see in a classic alpha male cowboy, but instead those we had usually seen shown by the "others". The next shocking point of the film we see is that Morgan Freeman's character is on equal footing with Eastwood's. This introduction of an African American as a main character in a western should instantly point out that Unforgiven is a revisionist Western because African Americans were never main characters in classic Westerns. The third point that was different from a classic Western was that the Scofield Kid was severely near sighted and couldn't see a target more than 50 feet away. This further cements that idea that there is no real alpha male cowboy in Unforgiven because each possible candidate has something that would not have fit at all within the mold of the original alpha male cowboy archetype.