Ignoring the black character

The 90s were a weird time for representation in movies. We can pin the start of the trend to include a black side character in big movies to the 1980s, in form of the "heavy weapons nigger", a muscular black character carrying the biggest gun, being cool and stoic, getting one big action scene and being killed off safely before the finale to allow the white hero to shine. 

 

This didn't cut it anymore in the 1990s, where now you had a wider variety of side characters played by black actors. Morgan Freeman got a lot of these roles, from "Robin Hood" to "Unforgiven" to "Shawshank Redemption". I want to talk about "Unforgiven" here, since I watched that one for the first time only a few days ago. 

 

"Unforgiven" is a Western with and by Clint Eastwood from 1993. It's set at the tailend of the era, in 1880, appropriate for Eastwood's age, and more or less a coda on the genre. The plot is not very difficult: an aging ex-outlaw (Eastwood) has found peace, but not money, and when he gets the offer to kill two cowboys who "cut up a whore" for a bounty, after some brief reluctance, he jumps at it, recruiting his old partner (Freeman) to go along. 

 

The pair ultimately succeeds, but the main story shifts from the cowboys to the sheriff of the little town (Gene Hackman), who rules with an iron fist and basically unrestrained and unchecked violence, which is to say, much like police in the US today. It's a long and proud tradition. 

 

What absolutely fascinated me about this movie is that the skin color of Freeman's character is not acknowledged even once. The character is having sex with the whores, is killing white cowboys, running afoul of the laws of the city, but there is no one reacting to this in any way. Instead, the reaction is purely to his actions (a reaction that is framed as way out of line, mind you, and justification for our hero to kill every last man bearing a star in the city). 

 

This is weird, to put it mildly. To me, it points to the evolution of these issues in film. Hollywood realized that they needed to include black characters more (there's a parallel development to this where it comes to women, but that's a whole other topic), but they did this by starting to "cast colorblind" and just include black actors in roles that would have been white roles earlier. In many movies, this is no real problem. I'd even argue that it's a good thing. 

 

But if you produce period pieces, you can't just rewrite history like this. There is no way in hell a saloon in 1880 would not react to a black guy coming in, ordering something at the bar and then getting freebies from the thankful whores everyone else was boning with anything like the indifference that's shown in the movie. 

 

Never ever would law enforcement in 1880 be remiss to reinforce the racial order by showing the black man his place, instead of just reasserting "the law" (imagine Sylvester Stallone's Judge-Dredd-voice here, I guess). And after - spoiler - killing the man, never would they leave the opportunity go by reminding everyone that said racial order was upheld. But nothing of this gets even a word of recognition here. 

 

I guess this also represents a step in Eastwood's own approach to the issue. As his movies mirror his own aging and development, one-and-a-half decades later, he would organize a whole movie around the problem (Gran Torino). But it serves as a showcase now of where the discourse was in the 1990s, and how far we've travelled since then.