The Cinema of Clint Eastwood

Chronicles of America

David Sterritt

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231850711
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world. Measured by longevity, productivity, and profits, Clint Eastwood is the most successful actor-director-producer in American film history. This book examines the major elements of his career, focusing primarily on his work as a director but also exploring the evolution of his acting style, his long association with screen violence, his interest in jazz, and the political views – sometimes hotly controversial – reflected in his films and public statements. Especially fascinating is the pivotal question that divides critics and moviegoers to this day: is Eastwood a capable director with a photogenic face, a modest acting talent, and a flair for marketing his image? Or is he a true cinematic auteur with a distinctive vision of America's history, traditions, and values? From A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby and beyond, The Cinema of Clint Eastwood takes a close-up look at one of the screen's most influential and charismatic stars.

CHAPTER ONE

Pros and Cons: The Case For/Against Clint

Part 1: The Case For Clint

Eastwood is quintessentially American, a pioneering spirit that goes ever forward into ‘unchartered territory’.

Ric Gentry¹

A theme of this book is Clint Eastwood’s perennial attraction to a pair of meta-genres that can be called the Myth-movie, which tells stories centered on individual lives yet rooted in the collective American unconscious, and the History-picture, which revises and reworks grand narratives of America’s distant and recent past. As noted in the introduction, the steadiness of Eastwood’s pictures in this regard can be cited as evidence of the seriousness and cohesion that signal the presence of an auteur, or – just as logically, for those who dislike his films on aesthetic or thematic grounds – as signs of a narrowness and repetitiveness that betray his secret identity as a Hollywood hack. I incline toward the former view, with reservations that I will discuss in the course of this book; but I also respect some contentions put forth by critics who hold that Eastwood is not an auteur or even a decent cinema craftsman, much less a lucid thinker with worthwhile things to say in his films, and shall explore them in the second part of this chapter. For now I want to look at some of the arguments supporting the idea that the overall consistency of Eastwood’s work shows him to be an authentic auteur, which I take to mean not just a purveyor of ‘personal touches’ but a deliberative artist given to exploring personally compelling subjects that maintain an underlying unity despite the shifts in subject, setting and context called for by individual stories.

Kent Jones recognises Eastwood as an auteur when he says the filmmaker’s major films are variations on the recurring theme of appearance versus reality; as does Richard Schickel when he says Eastwood is drawn to themes ‘that have to do with how the past impinges on the present’. Americans have ‘a short history’, Schickel told me, ‘and we worry a lot about it. Clint does that as well.’² Taking the same position for somewhat different reasons, critic Dave Kehr, who has championed Eastwood strongly over the years, locates the sweeping coherence of his films in their differences as well as their similarities, noting his ‘policy of … seldom repeating a tone, a character, or a genre two films in a row’ and of alternating between ‘personal’ movies and ‘more obviously commercial’ projects; the latter practice echoes the ‘old survival technique’ of Hollywood master John Ford, who liked to make ‘one film for himself [and then] one film for his studio’. Kehr’s preferred way of categorising Eastwood’s movies is to divide them between ‘collective, community oriented films’, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Bronco Billy (1980), and ‘studies of reclusive, unfathomable figures’, such as Charlie Parker in Bird and Dirty Harry in all but the last of that character’s five pictures.³ Yet this very split becomes a unifying theme, as Kehr indicates by describing the contrast in Eastwood’s work between the ‘warm glow of community’ and the ‘fear of loneliness’ on one hand, and the ‘cool breeze of individualism’ and the ‘resentment of compromise’ on the other. As a guiding principle of Eastwood’s oeuvre, this dialectic – between ‘celebrations … of belonging’ and burdensome ‘consequences of social commitment’, in Kehr’s words – presents more evidence of the filmmaker’s auteur status.⁴

Looked at from a different angle, of course, such thematic steadiness can resemble the foolish consistency that Ralph Waldo Emerson famously called the hobgoblin of little minds.⁵ If we turn from Kehr to Pauline Kael, and apply to Eastwood an antiauteurist critique she aimed at an earlier (and greater) director, Alfred Hitchcock, we may conclude that Eastwood’s ‘uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and his cleverness at getting audiences to respond according to his calculations – the feedback he wants and gets from them – reveal not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology’.⁶ Like many of Kael’s pronouncements, punchy and spirited though they often are, this one is awfully vague, applied here to Hitchcock but transferable to any skilled mass-audience filmmaker (and more than a few art-movie directors) whom a critic or spectator happens to dislike; and there were none Kael disliked more than Eastwood, whose very steadiness and consistency were guaranteed to stick in her antiauteurist craw.⁷ For critics who value auteurism on either normative or heuristic grounds, however, Eastwood usually passes whatever litmus tests they apply to him, and the variety of these tests has produced a variety of rationales for his place in this highly regarded critical category. Here is a sampling of opinion on this point.

The trope in the title of Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood refers to a duality that author William Beard identifies across the length and breadth of Eastwood’s oeuvre.⁸ Eastwood directed his first film in 1971, at the start of a decade when social and cultural changes undermined moviegoers’ ability to believe in ‘a classical heroic masculinity’ of the kind that had hitherto dominated Hollywood movies. This does not mean that traditional displays of masculine power lost their popular appeal, however – they may even have grown more appealing at a time when the conventional comforts of patriarchal ideology were in a tailspin. Eastwood’s answer to this ‘schizophrenic condition’ was twofold: to embody ‘a hero who is in some way impossible’, too heroic, authentic, powerful, prosocial and redolent of time-tested values to be believed; and also to call that persona into serious and explicit question, revealing its contradictions and impossibilities such that ‘the impossibility of the viewer’s wishes’ are disavowed and displaced into ‘the mystery and unknowableness’ of the character’s transcendent nature.⁹

Beard gets to the heart of early-1970s pop culture, which lay close to the heart of America in the tumultuous Vietnam era, in his first chapter:

The good fight, the fight that John Wayne always won, could not be won anymore: it had been lost definitively. Whoever pretended to win such a fight was either lying or deluded, and it was a virtue of Eastwood (and Charles Bronson, and all the other, smaller incarnations of heroic contempt) that he recognized the fight was fixed and the whole stage corrupted and manipulated. […] What a smart man, a strong man, must do is not play by the rules and not be taken in by the charade of official morality. This spectacle – a skeptical and consequently ruthless hero as a figure who had seen through the tired old shibboleths of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common good – appealed to audiences in the 1960s and ’70s, and was another precise symptom of the death of classicism.¹⁰

Eastwood’s response over the next few decades is embodied in movies of two kinds – those that capitalize on the impossible hero, such as the Dirty Harry films, and those that deconstruct the impossibility, such as White Hunter Black Heart and The Gauntlet (1977). He carries out his project, moreover, in such a way that each of these two movie-types carries within it the trace or shadow of the other, so that the films with transcendent heroes couch their formulas in gestures of irony and reflexivity that neutralise the quasi-realism and naïveté that make postmodern viewers squirm, while the deconstructive movies offer the gratifications of heroism in stylised, flattened forms that postmodern viewers can accept.

In sum, Eastwood built his career by exploiting post-1960s scepticism toward transcendent heroes even as he catered to nostalgia for them, and when ‘traditional values’ made a comeback in the Reagan era, he even more ingeniously revived the heroic traits he had been suppressing and reinvented himself as ‘a reborn classical hero’. The upshot of these processes is the astoundingly supple Eastwood persona, ‘more ironized and impossible than a classical hero of masculinity like John Wayne, more substantial and authoritative than a postmodern one like Arnold Schwarzenegger … both flat and not-flat; mythically enlarged and two-dimensional; but with a suggestion of hidden depths and primordial authenticity’.¹¹ So consistently and methodically has Eastwood realised the career-long project outlined here that it is no surprise to read the conclusions Beard has drawn. ‘Eastwood’s films are magnetic to any auteur-oriented approach’, he writes near the beginning of his book, ‘because they combine a relentless restaging and repetition of persona-characteristics, narrative forms, and individual tropes with a constant juggling and reconfiguring of these same elements to see them in a different light. It is strange and fascinating, too, to see films and a persona which are simultaneously so prominent in ideology and dominant commodity-culture and yet so persistent in a project of self-definition and self-deconstruction. […] Eastwood emerges as … an artistic presence second to none in the American cinema of the past three decades.’¹² A more ringing testimony for the defense is hard to imagine.

In his book Directed by Clint Eastwood: Eighteen Films Analyzed, film scholar Laurence F. Knapp sets forth a new term for the authorial status of important directors (Eastwood, Charles Chaplin, William S. Hart) who star in their own films – starteur, combining ‘auteur’ with the ‘star’ quality they accrue when their creativity intersects with the cultural contexts in which their works are made and seen.¹³ Ascribing much importance to Eastwood’s skillful and loyal crew at Malpaso (his own production company), which has worked with him long and consistently enough to achieve an intuitive grasp of his distinctive style and the best ways to realise it on screen, Knapp cites nine cinematic markers as evidence of that style:

• expressive uses of low-key backlighting;

• use of 180-degree ‘reverse master’ sequences in which the director ‘creates the illusion of a composite 360-degree space by crossing the action axis and alternating between two shot and reverse shots that share a 180-degree axis’, thereby creating ‘a compound sense of place and mood’ by splintering space while preserving the flow of time;

• a preference for cool, muted tones (green, brown) over primary colors;

• extensive shooting on location, coupled with a conviction that landscape should be filmed so as ‘to create a mood and atmosphere’ rather than mere ‘scenic’ visual impact;

• montage that balances formal (shots of near-equal length) and invisible (cutting on action for an impression of seamless continuity) modes with accelerated (abrupt, jagged assemblages) and elliptical (condensing, extending or distorting time) modes;

• mise-en-scène that combines fixed and fluid elements, keeping space and perspective ‘linear, but also fluid and elliptical’ so as to place the viewer ‘in the midst of a scene without being too intrusive or remote’;

• circular narrative constructions that allow Eastwood to ...