The Role Where Gene Hackman Was State Violence Personified
Hackman's performance as "Little Bill" Daggett in Unforgiven is an unflinching portrayal of how far the state will go to protect its corrupt monopoly on violence.
When Clint Eastwood tried to recruit Gene Hackman to co-star in what would be his last Western film, Hackman initially turned him down. The actor was tired of doing violent films, and the script Eastwood had shown him was indeed violent.
Eventually, Eastwood managed to change Hackman's mind by insisting that his new project would ultimately have a pacifistic message.
"I think we can make a great statement against violence and killing if we do this right," Eastwood recalls telling him in an interview posted to YouTube in 2009 by the American Film Institute.
Hackman, who was found dead along with his wife in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home on Wednesday, was won over. The result was the 1992 film Unforgiven.
To say the film, which Eastwood directs and stars in, was "done right" is an understatement. Unforgiven has gone down as a revisionist Western masterpiece that unflinchingly depicts the toll that violence takes on both victim and perpetrator.
Key to delivering the film's message is Hackman's performance as lawman Bill "Little Bill" Daggett, for which he'd win an Academy Award for best supporting actor.
Hackman's Daggett is the sheriff of Big Whiskey, Nebraska, who is obsessed with trying to stop two contract killers (played by Eastwood and co-star Morgan Freeman) from fulfilling a murder-for-hire contract taken out on two local cowboys by a group of vengeful prostitutes.
From that brief sketch, one might assume that Daggett would be the good guy—a frontier lawman trying to prevent a fresh cycle of bloody retribution from upending the town's fragile order.
Instead, Hackman is the film's violent and unstable antagonist, whose version of justice is just as warped and brutal as that of the gunslingers he's squaring off against.
The reason that the prostitutes take out a hit on the two cowboys is because they viciously assaulted one of their own at the very beginning of the film.
Instead of hanging the two cowboys, Daggett agrees to let them off on the condition that they pay restitution in the form of a few horses to the brothel owner, not the girl they attacked.
This outrages the other prostitutes, who are justly offended that Daggett is treating the assault of one of their own as mere vandalism.
The sheriff's version of justice is clear. He's there to protect the property of the powerful instead of shielding the truly vulnerable from harm.
This sets up a clear feminist and anti-capitalist critique of state power at the beginning of the film: The police "keep the peace" by preserving an unjust status quo at the expense of providing justice to its victims.
And yet, Unforgiven upsets this framing pretty quickly. A more standard plot might have involved the prostitutes allying with the strangers who come to town to overthrow the corrupt Daggett and create a more equitable Big Whiskey.
Instead, the aggrieved whores opt for an almost anarcho-capitalist solution. Ill-served by state-provided rights enforcement, they crowdfund a bounty on their aggressors.
It's when these profit-seeking rights-enforcers start arriving in town that the film's anarcho-capitalist themes truly start to emerge.
Daggett engages in any number of civil liberties abuses to stop them from fulfilling their contract: enforcing a total prohibition of private gun ownership, assaulting suspects, and torturing witnesses to death.
Throughout it all, the sheriff's abiding concern is protecting his monopoly on violence against private competition.
Unforgiven is rich enough to give the sheriff a plausibly altruistic rationale for his violence.
Daggett, we're told, worked "tough towns" overcome by gun-toting bounty hunters and criminals. Brutal as his monopolistic tactics might be, the sheriff has managed to keep the violence that's overcome the rest of the West from flooding into Big Whiskey, too.
While Eastwood and Freeman's characters are hired out of retirement by sympathetic victims, the film makes clear that these men were anything but righteous in their past lives.
Daggett's deputies, meanwhile, are portrayed not as thuggish henchmen but as seemingly well-meaning lawmen.
Nevertheless, whether he's publicly spirited or simply psychotic, Daggett's internal motivations ultimately prove irrelevant.
His imperative as the monopoly provider of justice is to crush the competition by whatever means necessary.
And Daggett's escalating brutality to enforce his monopoly on violence eventually undermines any justification for it. At best, he's just as bad as the hired guns he's waging war on. At worst, he's willing to engage in insane acts of violence to protect the real criminals from people hired to deliver some rough justice.
As it turns out, it's all for naught. Daggett's monopoly on violence ends in a bloody massacre that claims his life and the lives of most of his deputies.
Unforgiven's subversion of classic Western tropes is primarily focused on the psychological. Unlike the other spurs-and-saddle romps Eastwood starred in, hardened gunslingers and lawmen in this film aren't immune to the fear, guilt, and trauma inflicted by the violence around them.
But there's a subversive political message as well. A story about the anarchic Wild West ultimately becomes a cutting critique of state power and the supposed righteousness of the people who wield it.
To be sure, Unforgiven isn't primarily an anti-state movie. It's an anti-violence movie. Privatized rights enforcement and socialized security provision both depend on horrific violence to settle disputes. Neither is ideal or even desirable.
The film's anarchism is ultimately pacifistic. Eastwood's character starts the movie as a quiet pig farmer. A brief epilogue suggests that after the events of Unforgiven, he lives the rest of his life as a peaceful merchant.
The possibility of exit is real; one can give up on violence and live at peace with the world if one chooses.
Throughout his long and storied career, Hackman played in a number of movies with libertarian themes. Films like The Conversation and Enemy of the State are powerful critiques of surveillance. The French Connection is a remarkably unromantic portrayal of a morally ambiguous drug war.
But it's in Unforgiven that the actor delivers the most powerful libertarian message of all: Violence is bad, even when the state does it. RIP.
