Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity

Drucilla Cornell

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780823230136, 9780823230129
• eBook ISBN: 9780823230143
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism

In this risk-taking book, a major feminist philosopher engages the work of the actor and director who has progressed from being the stereotypical "man's man" to pushing the boundaries of the very genres—the Western, the police thriller, the war or boxing movie—most associated with American masculinity. Cornell's highly appreciative encounter with the films directed by Clint Eastwood revolve around the questions "What is it to be a good man?" and "What is it to be, not just an ethical person, but specifically an ethical man?" Focusing on Eastwood as a director rather than as an actor or cultural icon, she studies Eastwood in relation to major philosophical and ethical themes that have been articulated in her own life's work.In her fresh and revealing readings of the films, Cornell takes up pressing issues of masculinity as it is caught up in the very definition of ideas of revenge, violence, moral repair, and justice. Eastwood grapples with this involvement of masculinity in and through many of the great symbols of American life, including cowboys, boxing, police dramas, and ultimately war—perhaps the single greatest symbol of what it means (or is supposed to mean) to be a man. Cornell discusses films from across Eastwood's career, from his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me to Million Dollar Baby.Cornell's book is not a traditional book of film criticism or a cinematographic biography. Rather, it is a work of social commentary and ethical philosophy. In a world in which we seem to be losing our grip on shared symbols, along with community itself, Eastwood's films work with the fragmented symbols that remain to us in order to engage masculinity with the most profound moral and ethical issues facing us today.

1
Writing the Showdown: What’s Left Behind When the Sun Goes Down

High Plains Drifter (1973)

High Plains Drifter,¹ Eastwood’s first Western, clearly reflects the influence of Sergio Leone. The Stranger (Eastwood) rides into town as the residents gather nervously around, transfixed by the beating hooves of his horse. As Lee Clark Mitchell reminds us, the Western’s beautiful landscape is laden with moral meaning:² here the Stranger rides out to a picturesque town built on the shores of a mountain lake, its tranquility suggesting the quiet beauty of the civilized life the town hopes to establish. Yet from the moment when the town gathers around the hypnotic beat of the horse’s hoof, it is clear that all is not right about the town of Lago. The beautiful landscape belies the social reality.

On the surface Drifter is one of Eastwood’s most violent films, certainly in the beginning. First, the Stranger kills three men who harass him while he is getting a shave, and he hardly even aims when he shoots his gun from under the barber’s cape. Soon after, a woman accosts him on the street, insulting his manhood. He decides to teach her “a lesson in manners,” abruptly dragging her into the nearest barn and raping her until her struggles give way to enjoyment. Here of course there is a risk of the crudest kind of gender stereotype—“rape the woman, kill the man.” The opening scenes of violence and rape certainly highlight this gender distinction. Drifter would hardly be a film to inspire a positive feminist analysis, but once we understand these events in the context of trauma—and how trauma unleashes the evil of what Sue Grand has called “malignant dissociative contagion”—we begin to understand the power of Eastwood’s profound exploration of what happens when a community falls into horrific violence and murder, attempting at the same time both to hide and justify its criminal past.³

We only discover the Stranger’s past through a series of flashbacks, the first of which comes closely after the rape scene, as he lies down for his first night at the hotel. In the flashback, a group of men (whom we meet later as the outlaws Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers) surround the Stranger, whipping him violently as a faceless crowd stands by. Beaten to the point of death, the Stranger reaches out his hand and begs for someone, anyone, to help him. No one moves.

In his work on the Western, Mitchell has written that brutality perpetrated against the male body, and whipping in particular, occurs in part so that we can witness the body’s restoration as once again intact.⁴ Indeed, standing up to such beatings becomes the hallmark of the hero’s masculine self-restraint, the paradoxical power of not acting. But here we see a man prostrate, begging for help. We face at this moment the absolute presence of the perpetrators and the bystanders who allowed the event to unfold—and the bystanders’ absolute lack of compassion multiplies the victim’s trauma, which involves not only the beating itself but also the deep and profound experience of being denied the status of a human being in the onlookers’ eyes. He is being stripped of humanity with each crack of the whip.

Because the story does not cohere—we get only glimpses of meaning through flashbacks—the film can be classified as a broken narrative, but this is not the broken narrative of Sergio Leone’s Westerns.⁵ For Leone, violent acts seem to have their own meaning with very little narratability associated with them—because there really is no meaning to that kind of violence, and it remains only as a disruptive force. But in Eastwood’s Drifter, the lack of narratability is itself meaningful because it reveals the effects of trauma on shared meaning. Since what actually happened to Marshal Jim Duncan has been silenced, denied significance in order to allow civilization to flourish on the lake, the town has doomed itself to collapse under the weight of its own guilt. Gradually, the film begins to identify the Stranger with the murdered marshal, who discovered that the mining company that supports the town was operating illegally on government property. To keep him quiet, the company owners arranged for Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers to execute the marshal, with the cooperation of the town leaders. Marshal Duncan was publicly whipped, left for dead, and thrown into an unmarked grave.

But Bridges and the Carlin boys turned out to be more trouble than Lago bargained for. After completing the gruesome task for which they had been hired, they terrorized the town until, in another act of desperation, the townspeople arranged to have the gang imprisoned—on charges unrelated, of course, to the murder of Marshal Duncan. Now, having served their time, the gang has returned to Lago for revenge.

Unable to defend themselves, the town leaders hire the Stranger as their gunfighter, offering him anything he wants and declining to press charges against him for killing their hired guns at the barbershop. As the so-called sheriff tells the Stranger, “Forgive and forget. That’s our motto.” The Stranger agrees to defend the town, but he sets surprising conditions for his service. First, he makes Mordecai “the runt” the new sheriff and mayor of the town. Moreover, rather than taking up the job to shoot the outlaws himself, he trains the townspeople in shooting and has them paint the town red, literally, with red paint. He also has them make a sign that announces, “Welcome Home, Boys.” He instructs them to prepare a picnic and a welcome home party. After a few unsuccessful attempts at resisting his instructions, the town goes along with whatever he says (though they never stop complaining about it).

Only Mrs. Belding, the hotel owner’s wife, begins to take the Stranger’s instructions as more than merely the excessive and arbitrary demands of a violent man who is accustomed to getting what he wants. Reflecting on the murdered Marshal Duncan, she worries that “the dead don’t rest without a marker.” She even seems to suspect that the Stranger may be connected to Duncan somehow, that he might be the dead marshal’s ghost. Alone with the Stranger, only Mrs. Belding can speak frankly with him. “You are a man that makes people afraid, and that makes you dangerous.” The Stranger’s response is telling: “It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid.”

Confronting her husband about the town’s part in the murder, she accuses them of hiding behind words like peace, justice, and faith. “Good words. Damn good words,” her husband responds, but she will not let him escape the hypocrisy. She reminds him, “We hid a murder behind them.” Mr. Belding’s only justification for the crime is that sometimes people have to do such things for the greater good: “It’s the price of progress.” His wife, announcing that she is packing to leave for good, leaves him with the question, “What is the price of a human life?” She does not accept her husband’s utilitarian defense of the murder—and indeed, in a flashback we see that she never really accepted it, that she was the only person who attempted to intervene in the murder of Marshal Duncan. Besides Mrs. Belding, only Mordecai had expressed sorrow or remorse at the brutal beating, crying impotently as he bore witness to the event.

Eventually, Stacey Bridges and the Carlin boys ride into a town that is hardly recognizable, on the surface, as the place that had sent them to jail. The Stranger has gone so far as to rename the town, taking a brush to its welcoming sign and replacing the name “Lago” with “Hell.” Indeed, being in no mood for a picnic, the outlaws quickly put the town’s incompetent defenders to flight and set about completing the image of red-painted buildings by setting fire to the town. As Eastwood shoots it, it does indeed look like Hell.

Abruptly the Stranger appears, outlined in flames that make him the very Devil raised from the pit of Hell. He kills the first Carlin brother, whipping him just as he had whipped Duncan. Indeed, Stacey Bridges stares at the length of rope in recognition, suddenly fearful that the whip buried with Jim Duncan in an unmarked grave had returned to put him in his. The Stranger easily kills the remaining outlaws, but he does not see Mr. Belding, who is angry about the destruction of his hotel and the loss of his wife, taking aim at him from behind a building. It is Mordecai “the runt” who shoots Belding, proving himself more of a man than the people would have believed—indeed, more of a man than any of them—and fully deserving the titles of sheriff and mayor.

The next day as the Stranger rides off, his only smile is for Sarah Belding who prepares to leave behind the horror of a town that has dared to put a price on human life in the name of progress. At the edge of town, the Stranger rides past Mordecai, who has finally marked the grave of Marshal Jim Duncan. Mordecai remarks, “I never did know your name.” The Stranger replies, “Yes, you do. Take care.” In an end typical of this kind of Western, the gunfighter rides back into the landscape from which he emerged. We know this town will never see him again.

How are we to understand the violent acts that open the film? As I have suggested, Eastwood’s Stranger is not simply a replication of the role of No Name in Leone’s famous Dollar trilogy; he is instead the no-self of the trauma survivor, irreparably marked by the traumatic event. In her excellent work on the reproduction of evil, Sue Grand has written that often the dead self of the trauma survivor can only impose himself on the other unilaterally, at least if there is not meaningful moral repair on the other side. He accomplishes this through acts of cruelty and violence that make him known in his very deadness.

Through the victim’s mind and body, the survivor-perpetrator registers his longing for the absent other, “who could have and should have been there” (Benjamin 1995, p. 193) in the moment of execution. Through the disappearance of the victim’s interior, the perpetrator recreates the missing other who is never there and can never be there. The survivor works out his trauma on the human race by “trying to bring others to an equivalent Fall” (Bollas 1995, p. 1184): he lives, masters, transforms, and reobliterates the forgotten forms of his own traumatic past. And the no-self of survival is sustained by the imminence of contact, while evading the dangerous properties of contact by extinguishing the other before too much contact is made.⁶

As the Stranger rides into town, the people are clearly frightened by a presence that reminds them of what they refuse to know; and he imposes on them the eruption of their own fear, simply by living up to the violence that they dread—the violence they know they deserve in retribution for their own dreadful acts. Again, to quote Grand,

Through revictimization, through a renewed link to a perpetrator, some survivors attempt to be seen in the area of the no-self. Through perpetration, the survivor who becomes a perpetrator attempts to share his no-self by evacuating it into his victim. In both revictimization and perpetration, there is a meeting which is no meeting in the execution itself.⁷

Only through the violence that he perpetrates does the Stranger present himself as the living dead, but the history of his trauma makes him a very different kind of living dead than the almost automatic, stylized cruelty of No Name in the Dollar trilogy. The solitariness that seems to enshroud the Stranger in an impenetrable barrier is for Grand one of the deepest signs of trauma. Indeed, she finds that the reproduction of evil itself occurs in the victim’s attempt to answer, as she puts it, “the riddle of catastrophic loneliness” confronted in the wake of a terrible trauma.⁸ As she explains,

The reproduction of evil is the survivor’s continual reentry into the moment of execution, where “death is the irreducible common denominator of men” (King, 1963, p. 117). The survivor has been waiting to be known, not merely in the memory of the execution, but in the execution itself. It is here that her solitude was defined; it is here that she attempts to be known in her solitude.⁹

The town’s anxiety is precisely that of the perpetrators’ denial of what they had done, and it signals their fear that something must happen to pay them back for the murder of Marshal Duncan, who died for no other reason than that he tried to do the right thing. Indeed, the Stranger must confront the perpetrators as well as the people who stood by silently during the crime, but he can no longer bear the name of his pre-traumatic self. Thus, his confrontation can take place only through the medium of violence. No one greets him, no one knows him, yet everyone is immediately afraid of him because, as the Stranger remarks, they are really afraid of what they know about themselves, about their own horrific capacity for murder.

How does one share a “no-self” that is living dead, the psychic dead for whom shared meaning has been lost in the experience of absolute cruelty? As Grand explains, both perpetrator and bystander refuse to understand, and it is this refusal that traps the no-self of the survivor into the cold, cruel recreation of violence—in a sense, to make them understand.

Only in the context of evil is it possible to achieve radical contact with another at the pinnacle of loneliness and the precipice of death. Only perpetrator and bystander recreate and encounter the no-self of torture’s vacuity, and only they can be in the presence of that no-self without any pretense of knowing it. In perpetrator and bystander, there is neither the desire for, nor the illusion of “understanding” the no-self. In the perpetrator-bystander-victim relation, the no-self is in the presence of others who confirm the truth of catastrophic loneliness, even as these others do not know this loneliness.¹⁰

As Drifter opens, the evacuation of the no-self into his victim takes the form of a rape perpetrated to remind the woman of how she played into his own torture—even if she does not know it was his—by participating as a bystander to the act, betraying any moral relationship to him as a human being. Of course, rape as such a gross and tragic violation of a woman’s body and therefore as a castrating act to the men who can’t protect her seems, even in the context of the analysis I am making of trauma, to be unquestioned in its promotion of violence against women as an inevitable act of vengeance. Like the woman who is raped, Mrs. Belding ultimately resists the Stranger only to give way to her passion for him. In each case, of course, there is the ambiguity that both women are portrayed in stereotypic narrowness and the only sign of life in the Stranger is his sexual potency. Thus the Stranger can, in a sense, preserve his masculinity, even though that goes against the traumatic undoing of the man he once was. And the men in the town, who can neither protect their women nor keep them from being seduced, are cast in a stereotyped castrated masculinity of their own. The use of sexual violence in this film to the degree that it allows the Stranger to maintain phallic power despite trauma seems to run against the underlying theme of traumatic undoing that the film so graphically portrays.

This town is an allegory, but not in the sense that it represents any overt political reality. As Mitchell reminds us, the complex narrative and dramatic elements of a Western cannot be reduced to allegory in the sense that they have a meaningful connection to some concrete historical reality. Westerns are, however, allegorical in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the word, in that the ideals associated with the post-traumatic self of Marshal Duncan remain only as what he is not.¹¹ Once an upholder of justice and law, it is his return as the fearsome no-self, a physical but not a psychic survivor of trauma, that lends the film its allegorical character. When evil actions overtake ordinary people, when a person suffers the cruelty invoked against Duncan, the sense of it always escapes the simple grasp of narrative knowledge. As Grand explains,

In this obfuscation of the truth, evil eludes accountability and justice. Secrecy, concealment, denial, ambiguity, confusion: these are Satan’s fellow travelers, requiring elaborate interpersonal and intra-psychic collusion between perpetrators and bystanders. The operations of silence potentiate evil and remove all impediments from its path.¹²

Walter Benjamin has written that allegory is the retinue of destruction. But I am thinking of allegory here in the sense that evil, defined by Grand as the annihilation of history and subjectivity for the victim, can never be known directly; and therefore we can approach it only through a series of signs that break up the very sources of meaning upon which we ordinarily rely to understand our world. The film does not, as we have seen, proceed by way of a traditional narrative. Through the Stranger’s acts of violence, through the disorientation he imposes on the town as they begin to know what they cannot admit to knowing, we come to grapple with the total evacuation of the ideals represented by the young marshal. The film proceeds allegorically through an elusive and elliptical set of flashbacks that takes the audience back to an event that really happened, but which cannot achieve any kind of reparative closure because the act itself will not be recognized and given voice—let alone given voice by anyone who is expressing true sorrow and is capable of begging forgiveness. Instead, the no-self that remains of Marshal Duncan turns into the opposite of what he was as a man psychically alive, a man of the law. Here we see two well-known versions of law at play. The first in a sense is psychoanalytic. Duncan, at least from what we know of his stance against the mining company, was bearing out the virtues of masculinity, which by the standard of many different schools of psychoanalysis means behaving as a mature man—someone who imposes the law upon himself and lives by it in uprightness. Of course much of psychoanalytic theory has been criticized for the phallic underpinnings of this masculine uprightness. That Duncan is also the marshal, the one who stands by the law, not in its letter but with its ideals that in turn reflect the deep underlying structures of masculinity, underscores a theme that we will see again and again in Eastwood’s films—when the law fails to be true to these masculine ideals, it exiles the one who seeks to uphold his own masculine understanding of the law, even before the exile is made actual. In a deep and profound sense Marshal Duncan becomes a stranger to himself, because the injustice inscribed upon his body completely breaks his ability to identify himself as a potent agent of the law—leaving him the way we see him in the flashbacks, as a victim begging for help.

In a sense, the town’s “forgive and forget” motto is willing to take the no-self of the Stranger literally, which further unravels his ability to identify with the so-called order that has been imposed on the town as “law” and indeed with the inevitable “law” of progress. They give him a position as a gunfighter, burying him further in a cloak of invisibility: even his acts of vengeance make no sense, since no one will admit to who he is. His ideality seemingly lingers in its very absence.

The Stranger’s ruthless and effective disorientation of the town replicates his own traumatic experience, in which his uprightness as an officer of the law was not only dishonored; it was turned into the excuse for his own murder. To achieve vengeance he would have to be recognized, but the townspeople deny him again. Thus, there is in the Stranger both the trauma revealed through flashbacks, the actual bodily violation, and the further violation entailed in the town’s refusal to remember him, to remember what they did. In the town meetings that ineffectively seek to take action against the Stranger’s seemingly arbitrary demands, their own disorientation recalls the disorientation of a sense of trauma, in which no one can come to terms with what is actually happening because the moral truth has been so thoroughly covered up by hypocrisy and lies.

Thus, the allegory here is an alleg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shooting Eastwood
• 1 Writing the Showdown: What’s Left Behind When the Sun Goes Down
• 2 Dancing with the Double: Reaching Out from the Darkness Within
• 3 Ties That Bind: The Legacy of a Mother’s Love
• 4 Psychic Scars: Transformative Relationships and Moral Repair
• 5 Parables of Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River Roger Berkowitz and Drucilla Cornell
• 6 Militarized Manhood: Shattered Images and the Trauma of War
• 7 Shades of Recognition: Privilege, Dignity, and the Hubris of White Masculinity
• Conclusion: The Last Take
• Notes
• Filmography: Clint Eastwood as Director
• Index