Unforgiven: a hermeneutical reading

© 2012 Dr. Ditte FriedmanThis thesis proposes an existential analysis of the ethical dimension of film. Its goal is to illuminate the role of fiction in creating and testing moral worlds. It does so by examining Unforgiven, a Western film by Clint Eastwood. This examination provides the grounded analysis of a specific moral universe, relating it to earlier analyses of the Western genre. In doing so, the thesis stakes a claim for ethical textual analysis as an alternative to formalism and other established approaches to analyzing film. This thesis examines film as an ethically significant art form. It argues that film is a crucial laboratory for ethical discussion in which the lifeworld, and the representation of lifeworld are interdependent. This interdependence creates a locus of ethical obligation requiring ethical consideration. One issue inherent in film as a locus of ethical obligation is Paul Ricoeur’s concept that relations among human beings are symmetrical. This symmetry is intrinsic to the relation between film viewers and the characters in the films they view. For films to have emotional and intellectual meaning, viewers must understand film characters as persons who confront the audience with ethical dilemmas and actions. These characters are important precisely because the ethical dilemmas they face and the actions they take resemble those of viewers who watch a film. In this perspective, films participate in constructing the nomothetic universe of the viewer, enabling the viewer to reflect upon the nomos a film evokes. The viewer experiences film as an ethical and existential text, enabling the viewer to reflect in ways similar to Ricoeur’s description of philosophy as reflection on human existence. The symbolic form of film experience renders the ethical and existential issues of human experience accessible. This permits the viewer to grasp these issues in human concrete terms. Film genres present human experience by representing a lifeworld that permits engagement and reflection. In this thesis, scene-by-scene analysis of the unfolding narrative recapitulates the experience of viewing the film. The temporal experience of viewing emulates Ricoeur’s narrative structure of ethical decision as well as the structure of interpretation. As narrative, Unforgiven creates a world to tell a story. As philosophy, Unforgiven highlights the ethical and existential problems of human responsibility and the status of the subject. As a work of art, Unforgiven creates a surplus of meaning that meets each viewer on a hermeneutical horizon as individual and different as one viewer is from the next