If we know one thing about cowboys, it's that they love the sauce. And Unforgiven is especially whiskey-happy: not only does everyone suck it down like Gatorade, but they do so in a town called…Big Whiskey.

And whiskey in this movie serves a couple of symbolic functions.

First, we know that whiskey is kind of like the devil on William Munny's shoulder. When he was a killing machine, he did a lot of his murdering when under the influence.

WILL: He didn't do anything to deserve to get shot. At least nothing I could remember when I sobered up.

We also know that his deceased wife Claudia cured him of his boozing—think of the memory of Claudia as the angel on Munny's other shoulder.

Will successfully resists the temptation of hooch for most of the film—even when he's sick and feverish (and whiskey actually wouldn't be such a bad idea, from a medicinal standpoint) he refuses to take a drop. But after killing Davey, seeing the Kid's remorse after killing Quick Mike, and learning of Ned's death at the hands of Little Bill, Munny gives in to temptation and starts swigging from a bottle of the hard stuff.

It's at this point we know: no more Mr. Nice Guy.

And Munny isn't the only notorious killer whose misdeeds are linked to whiskey. We learn that English Bob also liked to assassinate while drunk. The difference between the two of them, however, is that while Bob's aim and general performance gets way worse when he's been drinking (he easily shoots multiple pheasants out of the sky while sober, but in the story of the Blue Bottle Saloon, he has to shoot at point-blank range in order to make a kill), Munny's gets better.

We think that's because the whiskey helps to eradicate the humanity in Munny. (We also have some thoughts about how he lacks humanity in general—check out our Character Analysis for more on that—but the whiskey certainly enhances his robotic tendencies.) While he's drunk, Munny feels zero remorse, zero compassion, and zero fear:

THE KID: Was you ever scared in them days?

WILL: I can't remember. I was drunk most of the time.

To be fair, that fearlessness is not unlike the effect of whiskey on most people…but most people don't make a habit of walking around armed to the teeth when they're shmammered.