The Cowboy as Monk, Unforgiven

I don't know how to take this film at all. The idea that a man can change (as Clint Eastwood [Bill] repeatedly asserts that he has, but proves that he hasn't, in the end) is undermined with this film. And yet, it is a result of his care for his friend, who was unjustly killed, that Bill reverts to the man that he had been, before he was tamed by a woman. Perhaps the message of the film is that a killer can't be tamed--he doesn't do as a father and a farmer and a sober man. And yet a husband/farmer (Ned), who was once a killer, can't be made into a killer again (Ned can't finish the "killing" and leaves for home and his wife). Yet neither way of being is necessarily intrinsically better--Ned, for instance, sleeps with the prostitute, while Bill stays faithful to his dead wife and honors the woman who was cut.

In one of her essays, Dorothy Sayers (unless I'm mistaken) argues for the return of "single vocations," such as the detective. The cowboy is another one of these. I wonder if these are necessary in a Protestant country in which context celibate religious vocations are hard to make sense of.