Unforgiven Shatters the Myth

In Ryall's essay on Hollywood genres, it was said of genres, "genre films, television, and literature have to a great extent replaced more formal versions of mythic response to existence such as religion and folk tale." According to this idea, film is a medium through which people can view the world, creating a framework of how life is/ should be based on the focus of the screen. This is comparble to the way the ancients used their mythic stories of Gods and heros, or how modern people use religious texts to build a system of morality.
If this idea is applied to classic westerns such as The Searchers, then the prevailing myth would be that of an ideal American Paradise, where strong, independent people lived in a prosperous frontier, performing their duties of expanding the nation's borders, ridding the continent of savages, and using killing as a first resort for justice. This image gives the audience a skewed idea of reality; despite their knowledge to the contrary, they truly want to believe that there was a time and place when problems could be legitimately solved by killing your enemies then forgetting it ever happened. Unforgiven on the other hand, broke down that mythic barrier, showing audiences a realist view of how the world would be if the classic western frame were actually carried out.
From the very beginning, we are shown a main character who has actually lived the life of the classic cowboy figure, killing, drinking, and wandering freely around the new frontier, but in his later years he is not a glorified hero, but a poor, lonely, emotionally unstable man who regrets his past. Upon trying to relive the old days, or in the kid's case, mimic them, the men come to the realization that the system of killing men over disputes is immoral and an act that will leave you feeling bad about yourself. This realist view of a cowboy's mythic lifestyle completely shatters the framework that classic westerns such as The Searchers built up. Instead of walking away feeling the hero's glory from getting his revenge, the audience walks away feeling uneasy, as if they themselves had committed an immoral act simply by wishing for the success of the killing as they had in past westerns. Like other westerns, Unforgiven does provide a moral framework from which one could base their actions, but this time it is not a myth; it is a framework made of a real world where actions have consequences.