Clint Eastwood: Mellowing archetype

It has been apparent for some time that Clint Eastwood is an important filmmaker, but he is an even more important mythologizer. Over the past half century, no one has represented the American male more iconically, both to Americans themselves and to the world. It is a longer and at this point more undisputed run than anyone else in film history has enjoyed— longer than Gary Cooper (whom in some respects Eastwood most resembles), longer than Clark Gable, longer than John Wayne.

That he has achieved such status at all, after the deconstruction of the male psyche carried out by Marlon Brando, and that he sustains it at the age of 78, is perhaps most remarkable. There isn't supposed to be an American male any longer— only a fragmented series of role players, more or less beleaguered, more or less bewildered, more or less lost. Still less is there supposed to be room for an icon.

Eastwood himself started out in the deconstruction business. The films that brought him to popular attention were the spaghetti Westerns he made in the 1960s with Sergio Leone. These films, part ritual and part satire, were at once an homage to and a send-up of the classical Western. Eastwood himself, motionless on a horse or cupping his cigarillo, was as unidimensional as a Kabuki figure: a man entirely in his role, but at the same time standing entirely apart, inconceivable as part of any social setting or historical formation.

In this sense he was the anti-Brando, for instead of revealing himself as an actor and a man, Eastwood perfected an art of concealment. This itself was an old dodge: the strong, silent type.

Gary Cooper's values vs. no values at all

The difference between Cooper and Eastwood was that while Cooper was affirming the value of the solitary hero, Eastwood and Leone were emblematizing— branding— it. Cooper's Will Kane in High Noon was a man wrestling with a moral dilemma, and willing to face death alone to resolve it. The Eastwood of For a Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly stands for no value at all; his only goal is to beat his rivals to a fortune, and the only thing that distinguishes him from them is the elegance and economy of his gestures, as if all emotion— even greed— is only waste motion. The Eastwood figure of the Leone series isn't even an antihero, but a Warhol cutout, who repeats his single iconic pose on an infinity of screens.

That American culture of the 1960s so readily accepted such a figure suggests the disillusion that underlay it, and that was both cause and effect of the Vietnam War. Eastwood went on in the next decade to update another stereotypic figure, the detective who straddles both sides of the law, in his Dirty Harry series. Bogart had owned this role, but Eastwood— with his breezy, insouciant approach to violence and his programmatic contempt for authority— caught something else in the spirit of the times: the frustration with urban anomie and bureaucratic restraint. Harry Callahan was outrageous but also liberating, and one could indulge him, in part at least, because it was clear that Eastwood was winking at his audience, and once again satirizing his genre.

A new role as a helpless male

No actor could go on like this indefinitely— Bogart, too, had learned complexity as he began to age— and Eastwood, beginning to direct his own movies, showed the flip side of Harry in such films as Play Misty for Me, The Beguiled and Two Mules for Sister Sara, in which helpless males are beset by predatory or otherwise dominant females. This was an extraordinarily risky thing to do with one's image, but one of the attractive things about Eastwood has always been his contrarian streak.

Similarly, he revisited his Western heroes in the mid-'70s in The Outlaw Josey Wales and High Plains Drifter, giving vulnerability to them and back-story to their motivations. These were serious and successful works within a genre thought dead, and it's a fact that no one but Eastwood has been able to do Westerns without irony or pretension over the past 30 years—perhaps because his first essays with Leone were so drenched in both.

The macho icon at a social dead end

Eastwood's career treaded water in the '80s, but with Unforgiven (1992) and most of the films he has directed or performed in since, he has turned a wholly different page. If Eastwood's earlier heroes embodied (and perhaps emboldened) the American propensity to violence, his later ones have uniformly depicted it as a personal and social dead end. The repentant gunfighter Will Munny is drawn back into a last showdown in Unforgiven that fails to redeem his career of violence and instead only deepens his sense of self-contempt. The confused kidnapper played by Kevin Costner in A Perfect World is fatally entrapped in the cycle of violence he initiates. Frank Horrigan in In the Line of Fire is obsessed with the assassination he failed to prevent. Sean Penn kills an innocent man he has judged by the code of the streets in Mystic River and casts a stone of destruction whose ripple claims not only himself but everyone he knows.

Similarly, if in early Eastwood films the hero seems to materialize on a distant horizon and disappear back into it in classic Western style (Harry Callahan, too, lives alone in his bachelor pad), the later Eastwood protagonist is enmeshed in a web of (invariably failed) family relationships: a daughter who won't speak to him; sons he's turned into angry, careerist failures who can't wait for him to kick the bucket. The most intimate kind of violence is family violence; it's also precisely the kind that can't be redeemed with a single heroic gesture or a final showdown.

A hero who never kills anyone

These elements are all on display in Gran Torino, a film that Eastwood's more uncritical admirers will doubtless read as a throwback to his early shoot-'em-up types, though in fact his Walt Kowalski never kills anyone (those days are in his past) and gives his life at the end in an unmistakably Christ-like gesture to break the cycle of violence.

In its weaker moments, the film offers a scared-straight homily from Kowalski to his surrogate son, Thao (Bee Vang), the next-door teenager of an immigrant Hmong family who is under pressure to join a local gang. But it is Walt's one lapse into violence that precipitates the final tragedy.

Aficionados of Eastwood's Harry Callahan days will relish Walt's nonstop stream of profanity and racial abuse, as well as the working-class slanging matches he engages in with his male compeers (he's a retired Ford assembly line worker, hence the Gran Torino of the film's title). In a sense, the politically incorrect dialogue— and only Eastwood, at this stage of his career, could get away with it— is a substitute for Dirty Harry's violence. But Walt cleans up his act as his relationship with the Hmong deepens. And however often he reaches for his gun, he never fires it.

A turn against violence

Walt's trauma is rooted in his battlefield experience in Korea, as are his racial attitudes, at least toward Asians. (This war was Eastwood's, too.) Yet the film is really about reconciliation, with the Hmong as stand-ins not only for the Koreans but for the Vietnamese as well, in whose society the Hmong were a minority. If we recall Eastwood's recent diptych about Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, we can see that reconciliation as an overarching project, and the condemnation of war as the culmination of his turn against violence.

Eastwood is all the more effective in that he wraps this turn in no liberal pieties, but acknowledges the tragic rootedness of violence in the human animal. His hero's name is probably no coincidence: Walt is Stanley Kowalski 50 years down the line, a burnt-out case clinging to the wreckage of his past, but finally capable, against all the odds, of change and hope. If Brando's signature role redefined masculinity for its time, Eastwood, in bringing that character as it were full circle, has brought the stamp of revision to his own career, and his rethinking of America's career as well.

Clint the moralist, in the twilight of his days? He'd give you Dirty Harry's waggish wink and grin if you suggested it to him. Behind it, though, is an artist who has found ways to raise dark questions about American manhood and American nationhood, while managing to persuade us that we're still being entertained.



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