Honor and Dignity in the Film Unforgiven: Implications for Sociolegal Theory

This article calls attention to "honor" and "dignity" as two fundamental, antithetical bases of unique value systems, both highly significant to social orders and legal systems in the contemporary Western world. The article argues that in this comparative context, the relatively new dignity-based value system may be better defined and articulated; at the same time, the overlooked, traditional honor-based value system, which underlies much of contemporary reality, can be better identified and replaced or at least modified by a dignity-based one. Rather than look to specific sociolegal realities, the article presents this line of thought from a "law-and-film" perspective, i.e., through the close reading of a single feature film: Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. This contemporary, widely familiar, and immensely popular Western exposes the ugly face of the honor-based value system at the heart of the Western film genre; further, it subversively undermines this value system, replacing it with a dignity-based one. In so doing, the film expresses deep faith in the human capacity to transform, calling on real-world social and legal systems to follow in its footsteps and apply the same critical analysis and reformative activism to Western law and society at large. The task for the Law and Society Association is regularly to challenge its own doggedly conventional assumptions about what is worth studying, about the theories and methods that we use and about what counts as sociolegal scholarship. (Austin Sarat, "Imagining the Law of the Father: Loss, Dread, and Mourning in The Sweet Hereafter") Introduction and Overview This article calls attention to "honor" and "dignity"1 as two fundamental, antithetical values, both firmly rooted at the heart of social orders and legal systems in the contemporary Western world. An antithetical analysis of these concepts has long been suggested, in an anthropological context, by Bourdieu (1966:228), and reframed by Berger (1983) and later, in the context of multiculturalism, by Taylor (1994). I argue for its relevance to contemporary Western societies and their laws. I suggest that honor, that manly basis for behavior codes in cultures throughout history and around the world, is incorrectly misjudged as an archaic, irrelevant remnant of antiquity (Berger 1983:173); it is thus wrongly neglected and ignored in sociopolitical rhetoric as well as in the legal context. Dignity, on the other hand, though officially hailed and embraced by national and international authorities around the world, is mostly left unspecified and amorphous, thus ineffective or, worse, a potentially manipulatable basis for arbitrary decisionmaking. I believe that comparatively viewed as potentially competing, adversarial, fundamental notions, honor and dignity emerge as two antithetical bases of unique value systems. In this comparative context, dignity may be better defined and articulated, while the overlooked, underlying honor-based value system can be better identified, and replaced-or at least modified-by a dignity-based one.2 Examining the manifestations and implications of Western sociolegal systems' underlying honor-based values, and suggesting their replacement (or modification) with alternative, dignity-based ones, is a monumental task.3 In this article I merely outline the described line of thought and offer a preliminary "taste" of its gist. For this purpose, I do not refer to any particular legal system, looking, instead, to another central social discourse: popular culture. Following a basic, antithetical presentation of "honor" and "dignity" (meant to clarify the meaning of dignity as well as highlight the distinction between dignity and honor), I look to a single major contemporary film and read it in a manner that I believe demonstrates the theoretical, jurisprudential, "law and society"4 argument presented above. More specifically, I read Glint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) as revealing the honor code that underlies social and legal norms (as well as many films' generic conventions) while calling to substitute it with a dignity-based one. …