The characters in Clint Eastwood’s films are famously associated with rugged individualism and violent directness. The films early in Eastwood’s popular success, such as the spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone, the Dirty Harry series, and films such as Hang ’Em High (1968) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970)—notably, films that Eastwood did not himself direct—highlight characters that are solitary, brutal, and resourceful. These Eastwood characters are loners, even when they team up with others, as when Eastwood’s Schaffer is the sole American in a British special-ops team in Where Eagles Dare (1968); masters of their circumstances, even when facing challenges and temporary setbacks, as in Coogan’s Bluff (1968); subject to no law other than that which they impose on themselves in order to survive in a hostile environment. The stories set tasks before these figures, the characters resourcefully tackle the tasks, and viewers enjoy the vicarious pleasure of seeing the task successfully completed.1
Even after Eastwood began producing and directing films in the early 1970s, memorable characters carried forward the theme of violent and solitary individualism, in the continuation of the Dirty Harry franchise and films such as High Plains Drifter (1973), The Eiger Sanction (1975), and The Gauntlet (1977). The characters of these films, along with those of Eastwood’s earlier work, are those that largely define Eastwood’s public and cinematic persona. The American Film Institute Desk Reference biography of Eastwood finds continuity in Eastwood’s screen character: “His persona, then and now, is tough, laconic, and towering.”2 Even where critics discern different phases of Eastwood’s character, they typically find them variations on a single theme, emphasizing solitude, action, and cynicism.3
Given the canonical status of Eastwoodian solitary individualism, Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971), offers a striking contrast. The dramatic energy of the story is driven by the increasing perplexity and helplessness of radio host David Garver (Eastwood) in the face of stalking by an unhinged admirer, Evelyn (Jessica Walter). Garver is no isolated loner; the film explores his faltering attempts to build a relationship with his girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills), and it is his appetite for one-night stands that exposes him to Evelyn’s stalking. Indeed, the film assigns partial responsibility for Evelyn’s actions to Garver, to the extent that he willingly initiates a relationship with her, hesitates in acting to end it, and deceives others to evade responsibility as events spin out of control. This is clearly a different moral universe than that inhabited by Dirty Harry.
While his films are multidimensional in plot, setting, and affect, Misty marks the introduction of a set of themes that characterize the stories Eastwood has brought to the screen as a director and producer. First, Eastwood has shown a persistent interest in exposing the limitations of isolated individualism and tentatively exploring themes of community and human connection. Concomitantly with attention to community, Eastwood’s stories highlight the moral complexity of human situations. Romantic pairings, families, surrogate family associations, and friendships form the nexus within which moral choices are made concrete. In different ways, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Bronco Billy (1980) herald the emergence of this theme, as both stories depict the voluntary gathering of groups that function as surrogate families. Even when the characters portrayed in the films are deeply flawed, the films themselves create a moral framework that highlights both their humanness and the implications of their choices and actions. As I will argue, this linkage of community and moral agency is evocative of classical Stoicism, with its emphasis on deliberate moral agency within a wider moral community.
Second, Eastwood’s films confront characters not with discrete plot problems to solve, but with crises that demand deliberate moral agency. Often the stakes of the crisis are amplified by some mortal threat, such as the quarry who becomes the stalker in Tightrope (1984) or the twin dangers of urban violence and diseased old age in Gran Torino (2008). In all cases, however, the common factor is the existential quest for a meaningful vocation, the challenge to answer the question “How do I live?” Thus Eastwood’s characters find themselves in what Catholic novelist Walker Percy has called “the search,” which is “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”4 The contrast to the search is everydayness, the condition that Kierkegaard called “despair” and Nietzsche called “herd thinking,” zombielike immersion in self-alienated identification with established social practices and beliefs in such a way that obscures human agency and the most pressing human concerns.5
Third, Eastwood’s characters find themselves in a world where religious and spiritual symbols are at best ambiguous in their import and at worst drained of meaning. Characters pray and attend church, priests and pastors appear in the plots, and biblical stories and themes are referenced, but in the end these resources provide little guidance or comfort. Josey Wales recites words of scripture as a prayer over the grave of his murdered family, but the wooden cross with which he marks their grave cannot bear the weight of his grief or vengeful anger. The existential crises of Eastwood’s characters thus occur in the shadow of what Nietzsche called “the death of God,” the cataclysmic collapse of traditional Christianity.6
Eastwood’s films reflect the post-Christian milieu of late modernity, but they also offer hints of transcendence, a sense that the quest for community and exercise of moral agency cannot be rooted in or exhausted by the immediate goals and choices of a solitary individual. Sometimes the intimations of transcendence are religious or supernatural, sometimes not, but they widen the moral context of the choices and actions the characters pursue.
I propose to explore this set of themes in Eastwood’s films. I will begin by sketching out the stereotypical individualist Eastwood persona, in order to provide a foil for the richer view of the human condition that emerges in his later films. Next, I will argue that there is a coherent structure to the themes of community, moral agency, cultural collapse, and transcendence, which I will refer to as post-Christian Stoic existentialism, appealing to A Perfect World (1993) to exhibit how these themes are treated by Eastwood. After constructing a general interpretive frame, I will explore how these themes concretely appear in five representative Eastwood films: Pale Rider (1985), where the themes emerge clearly, albeit ambivalently, for the first time; Unforgiven (1992), which juxtaposes justice denied with the faint hope of grace; Bridges of Madison County (1995), in which passionate impulse is contrasted to lifelong relational commitment; Million Dollar Baby (2004), which explores the potential discontinuity between love and theological-ethical principles; and Gran Torino (2008), where the decay of a Detroit neighborhood forms the backdrop for the possibility of re-created community.
The essential atmosphere of Eastwood’s early films is anonymity. Director Sergio Leone especially uses the Western landscape to depict the lonely brutality of the human contexts and characters of the films. In the opening sequence of For a Few Dollars More (1965), for example, the wide shot of the empty Western landscape sets the stage for faceless violence. The wide camera shot allows us to see from a great distance the approach of a lone horseman, and then to witness his apparent killing by an offscreen rifleman.7 We do not know the shooter—is it Monco (Eastwood), Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), or someone else? In a way, it doesn’t matter, because the point is that in a hostile environment such as this, death can come suddenly, unexpectedly, in ways that seem arbitrary, even pointless. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) likewise begins with a desolate Western landscape, but after a split second the face of a killer swivels into view, with the ensuing murderous mayhem punctuated only by coyote howls and the whistling wind of the high desert.
The lonely anonymity of the landscape heralds the sterility of the characters that inhabit it. Blondie (Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach), the eponymous Good and Ugly, alternate in employing the harsh desert landscape as a weapon against one another. When an unexpected turn of events gives a barely alive Blondie a clue to the location of hidden gold, Tuco, who has nearly murdered Blondie by exposure, tries to wheedle the location of the gold with a grotesque parody of sympathy: “You’re very lucky to have me so close when it happened. Think if you’d been on your own. Look, I mean when one is ill, it’s good to have somebody close by—friends or relations. . . . I have you, you have me. Only for a little while, I mean.” Blondie’s reply drips with sarcasm: “I’ll sleep better knowing my good friend is by my side to protect me.”8
As this episode illustrates, the sole community established by Eastwoodian loners is temporarily alliance between suspicious enemies, or at best indifferent acquaintances. This is true not only of the roles Eastwood plays under direction by others, but those roles that carry forward the isolated individualism of his early work.9 As bail bond enforcer Tommy Nowak (Eastwood) says in Pink Cadillac (1989), “I’m not much of a joiner.”
While the landscapes these characters inhabit are expansive and anonymous, the moral context for their actions is governed by a narrowly cramped horizon. Nothing stands beyond the payoff for serving as a hired gun, finding the gold treasure, catching the bad guy, or delivering the witness alive to the courthouse. There is little character development. There is sufficient plot to drive the action of the narrative, but no more. Put another way, stories are offered, but those stories insufficiently reflect the true complexity of human community and human agency. Rugged individualism is a perennially appealing American theme, but as we will see, it is one that Eastwood has increasingly left behind.
The loner characters of Eastwood’s early film success can reasonably be described as “stoic” in the colloquial sense: solitary, emotionless, unaffected by hardships. But the trajectory of Eastwood’s films evokes the far richer form of autonomy and moral rigor found in classical Stoicism, with its synthesis of austere self-governance and recognition of the demands of a wider moral community. To be sure, the Victorian homage to Stoicism by William Ernest Henley that provides the film title and personal inspiration for Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) in Invictus (2009) is perhaps the only explicit Stoic reference in Eastwood’s work. Even here, however, we see individual responsibility and obligation to a community placed in a rich dialectic. While the poem celebrates autonomy and self-mastery, and provided bracing inspiration for Mandela to survive his harsh imprisonment, Eastwood uses the poem (in a voice-over by Freeman) to illustrate the effect that understanding Mandela’s experience has on South African rugby team captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon). This reframes the individualism of the poem in a way that reflects the classical Stoic notion that self-control does not enclose one in individual solitude but draws one into the community formed by all human beings. Emotional reserve does not imply indifference to others, even if it does involve a deep sense of the fragility of human life.10 This is the path of engaged, autonomous, cosmopolitan moral rigor, living by the code articulated by Marcus Aurelius: “Hour by hour resolve firmly, like a Roman and a man, to do what comes to hand with correct and natural dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice.”11
Closely related to the notion of a moral community is the idea of a transcending moral order. Consider the famous dramatic analogy of the Stoic Epictetus: “Remember that you are an actor in a play, which is as the playwright wants it to be: short if he wants it short, long if he wants it long. If he wants you to play a beggar, play even this part skillfully, or a cripple, or a public official, or a private citizen. What is yours is to play the assigned part well. But to choose it belongs to someone else.”12 The notion of “playing a role” has obvious application to the film context, but Epictetus’s outlook is even more directly relevant to Eastwood. The Stoics famously balanced the idea of a broadly deterministic universe with severe demands of self-control.13 While the Stoics worked out with technical precision those things that were subject to human agency and those that were not, Eastwood’s films offer a less technical variant of fixed circumstances and free choices.
Consider Eastwood’s character study A Perfect World (1993). We gradually come to understand that prison escapee Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner) is trapped by the circumstances of his birth to a prostitute and a convict, his upbringing in a New Orleans brothel, and his juvenile incarceration in a strict Texas penal farm for joyriding in a stolen car.14 Many of Haynes’s actions, and the trajectory of his escape, seem preordained consequences of his past. But the task set before Haynes is to “play the assigned part well,” and he does this by surprising us repeatedly throughout his flight, treating the young boy who initially is his hostage but soon becomes his traveling companion, Phillip “Buzz” Perry (T. J. Lowther), with sweetness, gentleness, and humor. Haynes breaks the law as he must to facilitate his flight, but he operates by a clear moral code—for example, affirming to Phillip the wrongness of stealing after Phillip shoplifts a ghost costume. We find that he is capable of violence, even frighteningly explosive violence, as when he erupts against the farmworker who has offered him hospitality, Mack (Wayne Dehart), when Mack cuffs his grandson one too many times.15 Despite all of this, Haynes is not simply a slave of his circumstances, but chooses his path with independence and equanimity. The Stoics captured this view of human existence with another metaphor: “man is like a dog tied to a cart; if he does not walk along, he will be pulled along; but if he is pulled along, he is a bad man.”16
On the other side of the manhunt, Texas Ranger Red Garnett (Eastwood) is sharply constrained by his role and circumstances, serving the will of the governor and bound by the law enforcement conventions that guide a manhunt. Even he has the opportunity to play his part, however, as when he, with essentially impotent but righteous anger, punches the FBI sniper who needlessly and fatally shoots Haynes near the end of the film. His action does not change events, but choosing and doing it reflect the nobility of moral self-assertion.
The relative helplessness of both Haynes and Garnett illustrates a modification of the classical Stoic view in Eastwood’s films. The classical Stoics identified the “authorship” of the cosmos, its transcending moral structure, with the immanent divine rational principle, and regarded it as providential.17 This notion of a benevolent cosmic moral order was adopted and adapted by Christian thinkers, who saw human action as occurring within the context of providential divine care. By contrast, the Stoic framework of Eastwood’s films is post-Christian, where God is absent, silent, or at best hidden, and human beings are largely left to their own devices to determine how to act. Fragments and vestiges of Christianity still dot the landscape, as for example, in A Perfect World, the strict commitment of Phillip’s mother, Gladys Perry (Jennifer Griffin), to her identity as a Jehovah’s Witness, or the desperate intoning of the Lord’s Prayer by Lottie (Mary Alice) in the face of Haynes’s anger. Haynes himself shows familiarity with stories and principles of Christianity (as would any person living in the American South in the 1960s), but they offer him little guidance. The wider moral framework is there, but like the bewildered denizens of the marketplace witnessing Nietzsche’s Madman, Haynes is on his own. As A Perfect World demonstrates, Stoic moral rigor in the modern context leads to existentialist anguish.
Stoicism and existentialism admittedly make odd conceptual partners. Nevertheless, both begin from a notion of self-responsibility, and both emphasize deliberate action in the face of moral crisis. They mark, therefore, alternative responses to the modern human condition. The juxtaposition of these traditions as responses to the crisis of modernity is a recurring and central feature of the works of Catholic novelist Walker Percy.18 While Percy often presents Stoicism and the existential search as alternative means to escape everydayness, he has acknowledged that they are in principle complementary.19 Austere self-governance, effected with deep awareness of the fragility of human life, and pursued in heroic defiance of the collapse of traditional ethical absolutes, provides a reasonable way to live in the wreckage of Western culture.
Despite this milieu of existentialist anxiety, there are hints of transcendence, intimations that the wider cosmic context of human choices and actions is real. The title of A Perfect World is clearly ironic: as criminal psychologist Sally Gerber (Laura Dern) notes, things like murders and prison breaks would not take place in a perfect world. But perhaps the perfect world does exist somewhere.20 The opening sequence of A Perfect World begins the story at the end, with a head and upper chest view of Haynes lying in the grass of the meadow where the film concludes, with paper money blowing across him and Phillip’s ghost mask beside him, ethereal music playing in the background. He cracks open his eyes, sees the sun above him and a helicopter that we come to find out is ferrying Phillip and his mother away, and he smiles. But we find out at the end of the film that Haynes is almost certainly dead by the time the helicopter passes overhead. If not in this world, perhaps perfection is found in some other world.
A Perfect World illustrates the outlook of post-Christian Stoic existentialism. It depicts appealing characters carried along by a rushing tide of circumstances who nevertheless choose and act freely and deliberately. Their lives are shaped by their choices with respect to the ultimate inescapable feature of human life, namely death, whether as a result of increasing age or accumulated transgressions against society. In facing their circumstances, characters like Garnett and Haynes do not passively succumb to convention, but heroically and defiantly press on, even in the absence of moral guarantees. They embrace the inescapable obligation to play the role assigned them.
On one level, Pale Rider is a retelling of the classic Western Shane (1953), which unfolds against the backdrop of the conflict between homesteaders, who represent the new and civilized division of the land, and cattlemen, who violently agitate for the older, open West.21 The opening sequence of Pale Rider dramatically establishes a Shane-style conflict—this time between tinpan hand miners and the large-scale hydrologic mining of local boss Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart) and his men.22 A series of beautifully executed crosscuts contrasts the calm, quiet community of the miner camp and the thundering horses of the LaHood gang as they ride to the camp to inflict harm and mayhem to discourage and drive out the miners.
Although the LaHood gang terrorizes the miners and destroys and damages property, at this point in the story they confine serious harm to killing a few animals. One of those animals is a dog belonging to a young woman in the camp, Megan (Sydney Penny). That killing sets up the second sequence of the film, which leads us beyond Shane. Megan goes into the woods to bury her dog, and after doing so she prays the Lord’s Prayer interlaced with her own entreaties: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But I do want. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul. But they killed my dog. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. But I am afraid.” As Megan continues to pray, ethereal orchestration and choral voices provide background for a series of long shots of the mountains and valleys, underlaid by the rumble of distant thunder. “Thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. If you exist.”23 With that interrogative challenge, a dissolve momentarily superimposes on the scene of Megan a view of a lone horseman, accompanied by menacing brass notes, a move repeated when Megan ends her prayer: “If you don’t help us, we’re all going to die. Please. Just one miracle. Amen.” Then, with the end of her prayer, the scene cuts fully to the horseman, now revealed in a close shot to be the mysterious Preacher (Eastwood).
The result is a repetition of the good-evil confrontation of Shane, but with an added supernatural dimension. Who is the Pale Rider? We never know him by name, only by the sobriquet “Preacher.” But he is not the anonymous Man with No Name. He appears in response to the desperate prayer of a young woman, and eerily, prophetically, he rides into the camp as Megan and her mother, Sarah Wheeler (Carrie Snodgrass), are reading the narrative of the seals from Revelation 6. The Preacher rides a speckled gray horse, matching the description they read: “Come and see. . . . and behold a pale horse, and the one that sat on him was Death. And hell followed with him.”24
A number of clues suggest that he is not just a friendly stranger. Tin-pan miner Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty) sees six bullet wounds in the Preacher’s back, all circling his heart, in a pattern that looks to be necessarily fatal. When LaHood tells his hired gun Marshall Stockburn (John Russell) about the Preacher, he mentions that the Preacher recognized Stockburn’s name. Stockburn admits that he once knew a man matching the Preacher’s description, but the Preacher could not be that man, because he is dead. In the final gunfight of the film, the Preacher is inexplicably able to cross the street to confront individual deputies and pick them off, even though Marshall Stockburn stands at the head of the street supervising the search of the town. Just before the Preacher administers the coup de grâce to Stockburn, we see a flicker of recognition cross Stockburn’s face. The Preacher is the supposedly dead man, somehow miraculously still alive or even resurrected.
While viewers do want to know who the Preacher is, in the narrative his identity is less important than the role he plays encouraging and binding together the tin-pan miners. When LaHood returns from Sacramento and is told that a Preacher has moved into the Carbon Canyon mining camp, he sees disastrous consequences for his plans to drive out the miners: “a preacher—he could give ’em faith. Shit. One ounce of faith they’ll be dug in deeper than ticks on a hound.” We see the effect of the Preacher’s encouragement on the group when they vote against accepting LaHood’s offer to buy out their stakes. Significantly, Hull’s argument for staying in Carbon Canyon goes beyond a vague faith, appealing to family, to dreams, to the debt the miners owe to those who they have now buried, and to dignity. As he notes, loyalty to these values cannot be traded for LaHood’s offer of money. After the miner Spider (Doug McGrath) is murdered by Stockburn and his deputies, the Preacher counsels: “Spider made a mistake—went into town alone. A man alone is easy prey. Only by standing together are you going to be able to beat the LaHoods of the world.”25
The dramatic hinge of the film occurs when Preacher removes his pistols from his Wells Fargo safe-deposit box and drops in his ministerial collar. This event concretely poses a set of significant questions: What is the relationship between revenge and justice? Is religion tainted or discredited by resorting to violence, even to accomplish a just end? Must a religious individual—or an avenging angel—shed his pastoral persona to use force to effect the righting of wrong?
All of these elements demonstrate that Pale Rider represents something qualitatively different from the anonymous self-governance of the Eastwood persona. It’s true that the closing gunfight (all thirteen or so minutes of it) is “classic” Eastwood. But the supernatural elements and the suggestion that both local and cosmic justice are somehow at work subverts interpreting the gunfight as a celebration of amoral violence. The Preacher rides off, again accompanied by the menacing brass soundtrack, but with Megan’s affirmation of love.
Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven is widely acknowledged as a revolutionary reimagining of the Western. On first glance, it seems a thoroughly postmodern take on the Western genre, with antiheroes on every side: the washed-up killer William Munny (Eastwood), his reluctant sidekick Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), the myopic would-be killer for hire the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), cruel and despotic town sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), and truth-stretching celebrity gunman English Bob (Richard Harris). Unforgiven is so rich on so many levels that it has attracted a great deal of comment, and will continue to do so. I’ll confine myself to noting how the film exemplifies the trajectory I’ve identified here, which in my view undercuts reading it as a postmodern tale.
The first thing to note is that the plot of the film revolves around justice denied. After a couple of cowboys cut the face of prostitute Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Thomson) at Greely’s Beer Garden, Sheriff Little Bill Daggett punishes them with a property fine—horses, which they must pay come spring. Delilah and her friends judge the penalty to be offensively inadequate, and they collect money to pay a hired gun to exact revenge.26 Their bounty offer activates the story’s plot, with a variety of gunslingers coming to Big Whiskey in hopes of collecting the payoff. Little Bill’s encounter with English Bob shows that he is more vicious toward hopefuls who come to town hoping to collect than he was toward the offending cowboys, revealing a fundamental shortcoming in his administration of justice and civilization in Big Whiskey.27
Eastwood’s character, William Munny, is an unlikely candidate for righting wrongs. He is a former killer who almost inexplicably went straight, married a young woman, started a family, and turned to farming. One could find this narrative simply unbelievable.28 I find, by contrast, that it illustrates what Ralph Wood, describing the path of novelist Walker Percy’s heroes, calls “an uncanny transformation of grace,” with Munny’s wife as the agent of this grace.29 As the film begins, however, Munny’s redemption has collapsed: his wife has died of smallpox, raising the kids alone is difficult, and Munny is wrestling sick pigs in the mud of a hardscrabble farm. While Munny honors the memory of his wife, and attributes his current moral rectitude dutifully to her, a visit by the Schofield Kid with the story of the doings in Big Whiskey is enough to convince him that one more episode of gunslinging will give him the capital to escape his current travails.
The plot repeatedly gestures toward the question of justice and desert. Ned, the Schofield Kid, and Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) each at one point affirm the cosmic justice of killing the cowboys: “they got it comin’.” Lying on the floor dying at the end of the final gunfight, Little Bill moans, “I don’t . . . deserve this . . . to die this way.” By contrast, Munny understands that all declarations of innocence are transparently false. As he notes to the Kid: “We all have it coming, Kid.”30 The ultimate horizon of this vengeful conception of justice is the finality of death. As Munny notes, “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
Beyond the universality of guilt is the suggestion that attempts to justify acts of violence as serving the cause of justice are hollow. If the cowboy who cut Delilah’s face had it coming, then everyone else in the sordid story will have to pay as well: the Kid’s triumph in committing his first murder quickly turns to horror at the finality of the death he has caused; Ned’s attempt to back out after the first murder leads to his being captured and then tortured and killed by Little Bill; Munny survives, but at the cost of reverting to the violent self he abandoned for the sake of his beloved wife. Eastwood recognized how the moral gravity of the story of Unforgiven differed from his prior Westerns: “In the past, there were a lot of people killed gratuitously in my pictures, and what I liked about this story was that people aren’t killed, and acts of violence aren’t perpetrated, without there being certain consequences.”31 The inevitability of those consequences suggests in turn a Stoic framework within which the apparently chaotic events of the film must be embedded, both fatalistic and providential.32 As Munny rides out of Big Whiskey for the final time, Delilah’s mouth curls into the slightest trace of a smile.33 Perhaps she is recalling Munny’s kindnesses to her, perhaps she is celebrating a sense that amid the violence justice was satisfied.
Despite the harsh moral equilibrium of the film, there are hints of friendship and fidelity. Munny tries to stay faithful to his departed wife, and, as the references to his family at the beginning and end of the film show, takes his responsibility for his children seriously. He tries to be kind to Delilah, who sees herself as worthless as a result of her facial scars. Neither the prospect of money, nor danger, nor illness can induce Munny to revert to the drinking that he gave up for his wife and continued to avoid to honor her after her death; it takes the news that his friend Ned has been captured and tortured to death to transform him atavistically to a whiskey-fueled killer. We do not know the details of the friendship between Munny and Logan, only that it has survived a long time and a transition from crime to anonymous respectability. But the friendship is sufficient to weigh against Munny’s obedience to the wishes and principles of his dead wife.
The film’s conclusion is ambiguous. We are told only in a text crawl that Munny disappeared from the farm with the children, perhaps to San Francisco. And years later when Munny’s mother-in-law visited her daughter’s grave, “there was nothing on the marker to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” Presumably Mrs. Feathers knew nothing of the terrible events in Big Whiskey. She never accepted Munny’s initial conversion by grace, much less his apostasy and reconversion.
The puzzle of the film’s conclusion is related to its title. The title of Unforgiven is significant, because it was chosen by Eastwood to replace the screenplay author’s title.34 Who is unforgiven, and by whom? Certainly the unforgiveness of Strawberry Alice and the other prostitutes at Greely’s saloon propels the story forward. But the unforgiveness in the film is bigger than any one character, and raises a series of questions. Is the condition of being unforgiven permanent, or is grace possible? Certainly Munny’s mother-in-law was not inclined to forgive Munny, even though Munny’s wife’s death was the result of smallpox, not any violence from Munny’s own hand. Nor is forgiveness or grace evident in the harsh and rough justice meted out by the characters to one another. This suggests that the title is ironic: Munny in fact was forgiven by his wife for his years of violence and crime, and the grace she extended to him redeemed him. The Big Whiskey episode was a violation of her grace to him, but the only hint we are given—that he took his children with him and was never again heard from—suggests that grace nevertheless remained open to him as he returned to a law-abiding and civilized life.35 The violent man who deeply understood his guilt was not unforgiven after all.
Consequently, Unforgiven illustrates the themes of post-Christian Stoic existentialism. Christian principles such as fidelity, mercy, and justice are, just like their divine author, present only by absence, as silent as the dead Mrs. Munny. The story draws the characters into an inexorable motion, a near-inevitable progression in which they must nevertheless chart their own pathways. And through it all, the faintest hope of redemption still flickers.
It is true that Eastwood receives top billing in The Bridges of Madison County, but Eastwood’s Robert Kincaid is neither the narrative center nor the hero of the film. That role falls to Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), and the reason it does is central to my claim about the trajectory of Eastwood’s films.36 Kincaid is, in a sense, a variation on the stereotypical Eastwood loner. But he is more than a loner: he is disconnected from the routine and stability of family life, and consequently is detached from ordinary rhythms of place and custom, the sort of rhythms we see in Francesca’s cooking, cleaning, and caring for her family. As Kincaid tells Francesca, his favorite place is Africa, not only for aesthetic reasons, the colors in the air, but also because it is a place beyond morality. Kincaid is beyond morality in a way that allows him to drop into human life like Zeus descending from Olympus, unconcerned about the implications and consequences of his actions. He is not a bad man, but his habitual detachment exemplifies the personality Walker Percy calls a “transcending self.” Percy identifies scientists and artists as paradigm cases of these transcendent selves, persons whose self-conception places them outside of the world of everydayness—largely because their professions require that they objectify the world and treat it as god-like observers—and thereby gives them distance from ordinary human concerns and entanglements. Surely a photographer is such a transcending self, and Kincaid thinks of himself as one.37
While Kincaid is a transcending self, the good, solid people of Madison County exist at the opposite extreme, mired in conventionality, routine, and unreflectiveness. Their everydayness normally manifests itself as blind adherence to custom and social expectation, but we also see it in the gentle cruelty that enforces social norms through reputation and gossip. They therefore represent the everydayness that is a horror for Percy’s Binx Bolling, and that Francesca Johnson also recognizes as a threat. It is the suffocation of that everydayness that pushes Francesca toward Kincaid in the first place. We see small hints of this in the family’s patterns of interaction: Francesca’s daughter, Carolyn (Sarah Kathryn Schmitt), brusquely ignores Francesca’s choice of music on the family radio, she mocks Francesca’s pious wish to have the family join together in saying grace before their meals (she literally says the word “grace” and the family tucks into dinner). We see a more ominous variation of this everydayness in the way the townspeople treat the marriage problems and affairs of those in the community. Even Francesca’s husband, Richard (Jim Haynie), who loves her in his simple, unreflective way, exhibits immersion in everydayness at the end of the film when he and Francesca are waiting at the traffic light behind Kincaid’s truck, in what Francesca knows will be the last time she will see Kincaid. Francesca’s desperate anguish is palpable. Richard is perceptive enough to ask what is wrong, but when her answers are repeatedly evasive, he gives up and turns on the farm report on the radio rather than exploring further. An opportunity to push beyond everydayness is lost.
What is the upshot? Francesca has a torrid and passionate affair with Kincaid, he leaves, and they never again see one another. The details of their affair are revealed only after both Francesca and Kincaid have died, at which time they request to be cremated and to have their ashes scattered together. So passion and eros conquer all, and Bridges of Madison County is affirmed as a romantic film.38
No, because Francesca decides to subordinate her romantic passion for the concrete reality of what she calls the “details” of the lives of her husband and children. It is something Francesca can barely do, as we see when she holds the door of the truck with a death-grip as they wait for the light to change behind Kincaid’s truck.39 But as she testifies, the concrete details of family life provide the anchors that allow her to stay rooted in and committed to her family. A conventional romantic version of the story would have Francesca stick it out with her family for some finite time (perhaps until the children have left the home), and then flee to Kincaid. That is not the direction the film takes. Francesca notes the fragility of her love for Kincaid, and sees it as inseparable from her love for her husband: “What Robert and I had could not continue if we were together. What Richard and I shared would vanish if we were apart.” Just as the classical Stoics recognized, Francesca understands that the success and meaning of her life is rooted in the proper governance of impulse.40 The subordination of what she wants to what she knows is right is precisely the sort of transcending ethical nobility praised by the Stoics.
Francesca’s deliberate, painful, and nearly impossible choice to stay with her quiet, ordinary, and good husband, to “give her life to her family,” and to raise her children accomplishes something much deeper and more significant. The rhythms of Francesca’s life together with Richard have none of the thrill and ecstasy of her four days with Kincaid, but they share years that are sweet, tender, and solid, as the scene of Francesca gently caring for an ailing and elderly Richard makes evident. Francesca chooses to follow the path of the Stoic and rightly to govern her impulses based on her sense of obligation to her family. For his part, Richard knows that he has not been able to fulfill Francesca’s dreams, and that awareness colors and intensifies his love for her as their shared life comes to an end. Perhaps he cannot generate even a fraction of the passionate fire of Kincaid, but he is a good man.
Something similar happens with Francesca’s children. Her devoted care for them is, in a sense, unremarkable among the good people of Madison County. However, placed in the wider context of her deep desire to flee with Kincaid, which is disclosed to her children after her death, her love for her family and for Kincaid has the effect of giving her children a renewed sense of the possibilities of their own lives, including with their families. Carolyn, now an adult (Annie Corley), feels free to stay in Madison County for a while and reevaluate how her own damaged marriage will proceed. Son Michael (Victor Slezak) experiences a sense of the possible emergence of his own marriage from everyday routine.
Strangely enough, Francesca’s fidelity to her family also roots the rootless Kincaid. Of course, his sense of loss is no less than hers, as we see when he stands forlorn in the pouring rain across the street from her, knowing it is the last time he will see her. His life continues to be one of wandering, but Francesca becomes for him such a reference point that he maintains a kind of fidelity to her for the rest of his life. She finds out only after his death, via a package from his attorney, that he had followed her advice to publish a photography book. More tellingly, the package Kincaid arranged to bequeath to Francesca includes key “details” of his own life, including the cameras that were his livelihood and his means of creating art.
Francesca’s act of fidelity to her family and her self-disclosure to those she loved has the effect of redeeming them from the everydayness that propelled her to Kincaid. We do not know what long-term effects her revelation had for her children, but Francesca’s choices and actions, at the very least, spurred awareness of the possibilities of the moral life and the transcending frame of obligations that can serve to contextualize one’s difficult choices. In the end, therefore, this love story is a synthesis of romance and family fidelity that celebrates not the isolated value of self-centered happiness and autonomy, but the concrete details of family life and the transcending value of properly governed eros.41
Like Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby is a film that speaks on a number of levels. Most critical for our purposes here is that it explores broken and damaged relationships, and the costs of maintaining, reestablishing, or replacing them. The main character, boxing gym owner and trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), is a man with dark shadows of guilt. Some unknown offense has estranged him from his absent daughter, Katy, and though he writes her faithfully every week, the letters are unerringly returned to him undelivered. His close friendship with ex-boxer Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman) is tainted by Frankie’s guilt over Scrap’s loss of sight in one of his eyes, for which Frankie—perhaps unreasonably—feels responsible. Frankie’s priest, Father Horvak (Brían O’Byrne), who Frankie makes a practice of baiting and annoying with mock-serious theological questions, sees that Frankie’s ironic attitude and persistent faithful church attendance mask a deep sense of guilt.
Aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) seems to have it even worse: she is poor and is past the reasonable age to begin a boxing career. What Maggie calls the “simple truth” of her background is that it is a trap of white-trash degradation. She needs Frankie to train her because it is her only way out of that trap, the only way for her to do—and possibly succeed at—the one thing she really loves.42
The over-the-top dysfunctionality of Maggie’s family and the irrevocable estrangement of Frankie from his daughter perhaps make it inevitable that Frankie and Maggie will become close. Frankie initially resists the idea of training Maggie, then reluctantly trains her, and then takes her on fully after another trainer uses her as a pawn to arrange fights for other boxers. After their reconciliation, Maggie asks, somewhat accusingly, “You gave me away. How was that protecting me?” Frankie’s promise that he will never leave her again confirms that although souls adrift, they have found adoptive family with one another. As Maggie notes, “I got nobody but you, Frankie.” To which Frankie replies, “Well, you’ve got me.”
It is easy to see the conclusion of the film as an ethical-political statement on assisted suicide. The bioethics controversy conceals a deeper theme, however: the demands and limits of loyalty and commitment that are the result of love.43 Abandoned by their biological families, Frankie and Maggie have formed an adoptive family. After Maggie’s crippling injury, Frankie’s genuine affection makes it easy for him to stay with Maggie, to arrange her care, and even to protect her from her money-grubbing, lawyered-up family. The final crisis for Frankie is not that Maggie demands of Frankie something that he personally finds morally objectionable. That is too facile. It is rather that Frankie is in the impossible place of loving Maggie so deeply that he wants what is best for her and at the same time knowing that it is wrong to help her in the way she wants. Sin melds with love, which blends with Frankie’s selfish reluctance to let Maggie go despite her broken condition.44
Maggie’s condition, and Frankie’s response to it, highlights another key value in the Stoic moral universe: autonomy. Even though her condition is not fatal, and she can live a meaningful and productive life (which Frankie urges her to do), her capacity to choose her own death becomes the acid test for her of her remaining power to act.45 Of course, Frankie’s desperate need to help her is complicated by his wish to preserve her autonomy even as he, choosing autonomously for himself, wants nothing more than to live out his days with her. As Frankie puts it to his priest: “But now she wants to die, and I just want to keep her with me. And I swear to God, Father, it’s committing a sin to do it. By keeping her alive, I’m killing her. How do I get around that? . . . She’s not asking for God’s help, she’s asking for mine.” In adjudicating a conflict between obedience to theological principle and the obligation of love, Frankie is willing to risk estrangement from the unseen God to meet his concrete obligation to Maggie.46 Frankie’s revelation of the meaning of his Gaelic nickname for Maggie, mo cuishle—my darling, my blood—is his final affirmation of love and family commitment to Maggie before he injects the adrenaline that will kill her.
In a parallel to the conclusion of Unforgiven, Frankie disappears after Maggie’s death. He never returns to the gym. Viewers of the film realize that Scrap has been telling the entire story in the form of a letter to Frankie’s still-estranged daughter. He closes with a note of hope for grace: “Frankie didn’t leave a note, and nobody knew where he went. I hoped he’d gone to find you, to ask you one more time to forgive him, but maybe he didn’t have anything left in his heart.” It’s only a wisp of hope, one in conflict with the enormity of what Frankie has done, but entirely in keeping with Scrap’s final attempt to reveal Frankie to his daughter, and in keeping with the sort of grace that redeemed William Munny.
Again, we have a set of related themes: the halting struggle for community in the wreckage of broken and dysfunctional existing relationships; the ebbing influence of traditional culture and religion; individuals playing out a role assigned to them by circumstances beyond their own choices and actions. The only transcendence on the horizon is the Kierkegaardian suggestion that a suspension of universal ethical norms might be legitimized by the particular needs of a concrete individual.47 But neither Frankie nor Maggie is Abraham, and neither is responding to the command of God. Beyond that is only the barest hope for redemption.
The suburban Detroit neighborhood inhabited by retired autoworker Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a riot of battling gangs, peeling paint, ill-kept yards, impolite kids, and weeds sprouting through the pavement.48 As such, it can be taken as a metaphor for the crisis of modern nihilism, the challenge of finding meaning and purpose in the midst of cultural decay. Walt’s well-maintained house and yard provide a kind of oasis of assertive autonomy in the midst of the collapse, but Walt knows that individual assertiveness is inadequate for meaning. This is the lesson of his experience in the Korean War, which revealed that war breeds horror and guilt, not camaraderie, courage, and heroic sacrifice. Walt’s recently deceased wife found comfort in the church, but Walt rejects that consolation. While the church stands solid among the ruins of his neighborhood, in Walt’s view it is corrupted from the inside out: it is the haunt of immature and inexperienced priests, such as Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), who prey on old ladies who are near to death (such as his own recently deceased wife). It is, as Nietzsche put it, the grave of gods.49
Walt’s family is a disaster as well. He is estranged from his sons, one of whom, Mitch (Brian Haley), sells Japanese cars in what amounts to an assault on Walt’s entire career defending America in war and building America by assembling Ford cars in a Michigan plant. (Eastwood accentuates Walt’s American identity by camera angles of his house and front porch that emphasize his proudly displayed American flag.) His grandchildren are even more alien, with clothes, habits, and attitudes that Walt categorizes on a range from annoying to offensive.
Part of Walt’s disgust with the church and his family, and his general misanthropy, is his understanding that all are sunk into banal everydayness. Father Janovich’s knowledge of life and death is “pathetic” and trite nonsense learned at “priest school,” especially in comparison to the reality of death that Walt experienced in Korea, hacking seventeen-year-olds to death with shovels. The notion of consumer religion is likewise ridiculously hollow. When Father Janovich asks why Walt confronted the Hmong gang members rather than calling the police, Walt deadpans, “Well, you know, I prayed that they would show up, but nobody answered.” Walt sarcastically reads his birthday horoscope from the newspaper to his dog, Daisy: “This year, you have to make a choice between two life paths. Second chances come your way. Extraordinary events culminate in what might seem to be an anticlimax.” Sometimes, however, there is a message amid the banal drivel, if only one has ears to hear.50
Where Frankie and Maggie created an adoptive family in Million Dollar Baby, the unfolding of events in Gran Torino leads to the construction of a community in the ruins of an old neighborhood as Walt, the putative patriarch, is himself gradually adopted into an alternate family. Walt’s racist rudeness to the Hmong who now populate his old eastern European neighborhood (of course, he’s rude and racist to everyone, not just to the Hmong, though his rudeness to his friends always has a playful edge) has the inadvertent effect of making him a hero when he drives away Hmong gang members who threaten the neighborhood and have targeted the young man living next door, Thao (Bee Vang). A friendly overture by Thao’s assertive sister, Sue (Ahney Her), leads to a surprise for Walt: he actually likes his neighbors, perhaps better than his own kids and grandkids. Ultimately Walt reciprocally “adopts” Thao, toward whom he takes a kind of mentor role, teaching him how to “be a man,” to work, to ask girls out.51 The proof of Walt’s affection for Sue and Thao is initially when he enjoys a backyard barbecue with them, much as one might expect him to do with his own family. Still more we see his affection when the Hmong gang shoots up Sue and Thao’s house and then assaults and rapes Sue as retaliation for Walt’s attack on one of the gang members. The angry tear on Walt’s face as he storms back to his house manifests not only his sense of responsibility for instigating the war with the gang that led to their attack, but also his genuine affection for Sue. The commitment is evident to Sue and Thao, to such an extent that Thao expects Walt to live up to it: “Don’t let me down, Walt. Not you.” The final concrete affirmation of Walt’s integration into his adoptive family comes near the end of the film, when Walt entrusts the care of his dog, Daisy, to the curmudgeonly grandmother of the Hmong clan next door (Chee Thao).
As with Million Dollar Baby, there is a central dramatic point of Gran Torino: Walt’s decision to sacrifice himself to secure the safety of Sue and Thao. Walt’s sacrifice is saturated in religious significance and symbolism. Before setting his plan into motion, Walt makes an initial confession to Father Janovich. On one level, it is a superficial ritual, done to honor his wife’s dying wish that he submit to the sacrament of confession. So Walt begins with decades-old peccadillos that are hardly worth mentioning, such as a stolen kiss from a woman other than his wife at an office party. However, Walt understands the significance of admitting wrongs, turning at the end to admit a key failure of his life: his inability to develop closeness with his sons. This is an important admission, but Walt’s deepest confession is not to Father Janovich, it is to Thao, whom Walt locks in the basement to prevent him from accompanying Walt to the gang house for the final confrontation. Eastwood visually replicates the confession booth screen with a security screen door separating Walt and Thao as Walt admits the central guilt of his life, the one from which he wants to save Thao: the abortive exercise of autonomy via violence.52 As he told Father Janovich at one point, “The thing that haunts a man the most is what he isn’t ordered to do.” No commanding officer ordered Walt to shoot in the face the Korean who tried to surrender to him, but that killing bred guilt for his entire life. When, in the closing climactic sequence, Walt allows the gang members to conclude mistakenly that he has a gun, their killing of Walt in full view of the neighbors guarantees that they will be put away for a long time, and hence protects Sue and Thao. Everyone who views the film notices that Walt falls on the ground in a cruciform position. But while his sacrifice is a salvific protection for his new Hmong family, it is also a kind of salvation for Walt himself, insofar as it expresses Walt’s own choice about his fate in the face of his serious illness. In the end, Walt’s action accomplishes multiple objectives: it protects people for whom he has come to have deep affection, it solves his problem of facing his own illness with autonomy, and, by an act of sacrificial nonviolence, it potentially atones for the murder of the young enemy soldier in the Korean War.53 On a deeper level, by genuinely caring for someone else, particularly someone as different as his Hmong neighbors, he shows that he understands the possibility of the search: community with others, and deliberate action in service of a transcending goal. Sue’s affirmation to Walt—“You’re a good man”—becomes not only an assuring assessment, but a criterion for living and for dying.
The narrative horizon of Eastwood’s heroic loner films is almost suffocatingly narrow: steal the money, kill the target, find the bad guy, solve the mystery. Harmless entertainment, pleasingly resolved in finite time. By contrast, in the films we have considered here, those characterized by post-Christian Stoic existentialism, there are expansive horizons framed in terms of enduring questions: Is help coming for me, from God or from my neighbor? Must I in some way succor my neighbor? What is the meaning of love and family? How do I live in the face of an impossible choice? Is life possible in the ruins of the world I have spent my life building? The stories address these questions with nuance and complexity, and open up pathways that are difficult to trace neatly. We see intimations of transcendence as well: the value of seeking justice, the costs that justice requires, the easy shift from justice to hungry violence. We see the impulse to act beyond immediate desires and needs. We see the possibility of making real connections with particular people in all of their concrete complexity.
There is a link here back to Walker Percy. Significantly, Percy realizes that movies can play a role in the search. After all, Percy’s observations about the search occur in a novel titled The Moviegoer, the main character of which is a movie addict who tends to reflect his experience through the lens of movie narratives and characters. The connections go deeper than accidental plotting, however; as Binx notes, movies are “onto the search” insofar as they explore the experiences and actions of characters who face the existential question of how to live. But while movies are “onto” the search, Binx concludes that “they screw it up.” As movies depict the search, “the search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place—but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.”54
Percy has in mind here the countless movies that arrange the plot details such that all is neatly packaged up by the end of the story. But to neatly package up the details is to betray the messiness of human existence and to subvert the search. Hegel famously argued for the difficulty of making a beginning. Percy’s argument is that the difficulty of films (and, more broadly, stories of all forms) is in crafting the right ending, one that will open up human possibilities rather than foreclose them.
Understood this way, the themes of community, moral agency, and transcendence in the films of Clint Eastwood invite the cultivation of autonomous moral agency, and clear space for reflection on the human condition. They follow characters in messy situations, and offer tentative and partial resolutions that mimic the tentative and partial resolutions of our own lives. They explore the possibilities of relationships that go beyond the everyday, and explore moments of guilt, forgiveness, redemption, hope, and love.
1. Even in the comedic films such as Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Any Which Way You Can (1980) the Eastwood persona is recognizable. In many comedic Eastwood films, such as Pink Cadillac (1989), the comedy arises from placing a tough loner into incongruous situations.
2. Melinda Corey and George Ochoa, ed., American Film Institute Desk Reference (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2002), 242.
3. See, for example, Marc Eliot, American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood (New York: Harmony, 2009), 4–5.
4. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Knopf, 1961), 13.
5. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 14–27; for Nietzsche on the herd see, for example, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), section 199. Everydayness is articulated as a technical concept by Heidegger (see Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 163–168, 296–304).
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 125 (in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman [New York: Penguin, 1959], 95–96). In Eastwood’s third full-length directorial feature, Breezy (1973), Edith Alice “Breezy” Breezerman (Kay Lenz) raises the question of the death of God in her first conversation with Frank Harmon (William Holden). Her comment is part of a con to convince Frank to feed her, but there is no doubt that the absence of God and concomitant decline of traditional religion are persistent themes in Eastwood’s films.
7. The soundtrack includes what seem to be the sounds of the unseen killer whistling, loading, and then firing, but the sounds are insufficient to identify the shooter.
8. Film quotations in this essay are cited directly from the film soundtracks.
9. A rare exception to this is the conclusion of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), where Eastwood’s character, Joe, generously offers money to help an abused family escape to find peace. Why he does this remains a mystery.
10. See Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 61; Epictetus, The Handbook of Epictetus, trans. Nicholas White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), sections 3 and 11. Here the Stoic notion, developed from the Cynics, that human beings belong to the “cosmic city,” plays a key role (see, for example, Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], 75).
11. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1964), 46 (2.5).
12. Epictetus, Handbook, section 17.
13. See Epictetus, Handbook, section 1; J. M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 126–132.
14. We find out as the film unfolds that Texas Ranger Red Garnett (Eastwood), who is leading the manhunt for Haynes, played a critical role in Haynes’s assignment to the penal farm.
15. Haynes is hypersensitive about mistreatment of children, and committed to promoting what he takes to be their welfare. He decides to kill his fellow prison escapee, Terry Pugh (Keith Szarabajka), only in response to Pugh’s threats toward Phillip. He is friendly and appreciative of the hospitality of Mack and his wife, and does not resort to violence even when Mack accidentally discovers his identity, until Mack’s frightened lashing out at his grandson causes something in Haynes to break. At the end of the film, as Haynes is bleeding profusely from a gunshot to the gut, and is surrounded by dozens of armed officers, he bizarrely negotiates with Phillip’s mother to ensure that as a condition of his surrender of Phillip, Phillip will be allowed to trick-or-treat and enjoy visits to the fair.
16. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 127.
17. Ibid., 126–127; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 45–46 (2.3).
18. Percy, The Moviegoer, 13; see also Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 2000), 158; Jan Nordby Gretlund, “On the Porch with Marcus Aurelius: Walker Percy’s Stoicism,” in Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1991), 74–84.
19. Stoicism and existentialism represent the twin legacies of Percy’s intellectual formation; see Jan Nordby Gretlund interview with Walker Percy, “Difficult Times,” in Walker Percy, Lewis A. Lawson, and Victor A. Kramer, More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1993), 105–106.
20. Eastwood’s continuing preoccupation with the “perfect world” is a key feature of the analysis of Sara Anson Vaux, The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012), xiv–xv, 123.
21. Numerous story elements of Pale Rider echo episodes in Shane. For example, the scene in which Shane (Alan Ladd) establishes his willingness to work for and with the homesteaders by chopping away at a stump with Joe Starett (Van Heflin) is replicated in Pale Rider with the Preacher (Eastwood) and miner Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty) alternating sledgehammer blows on a large stone. For links between Shane, Pale Rider, and other Eastwood films, see “Subverting Shane: Ambiguities in Eastwood’s Politics in Fistful of Dollars, High Plains Drifter, and Pale Rider,” in Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives, ed. Leonard Engel (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 2007), 129–156.
22. The opening sequence of Shane is visually similar to For a Few Dollars More, with a wide scenery shot marked by a lone rider. However, Shane’s swelling orchestral score creates a very different atmosphere than that of Dollars—one of anticipation and promise.
23. While Megan’s prayer quotes the King James Version of Psalm 23 with minor variants, the final line uses wording closer to the Book of Common Prayer (Psalm 23:6).
24. The quote from Revelation 6:7–8 in the screenplay does not precisely match any standard English translation of the Bible, but its rhythms echo those of the King James Version.
25. The murder of Spider in town by Stockburn and his deputies copies the murder of Torrey (Elisha Cook Jr.) by gunslinger Wilson (Jack Palance) in Shane, just as the argument by Hull and the Preacher for the miners to stay replicates the Cemetery Hill speeches of Starett and Shane for the homesteaders to remain resolute.
26. Strictly speaking, Daggett charges the cowboys to compensate saloon owner Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) for the damage to his “property,” namely, Delilah. One cowboy offers to give Delilah a horse, but Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) refuses to allow her to accept it and drives him away. Thus one act of unforgiveness begins the chain of events that brings William Munny to Big Whiskey (see Carl Plantinga, “Spectacles of Death,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 [1998]: 68).
27. Plantinga, “Spectacles of Death,” 69.
28. Claims made in Unforgiven, both by characters and the text-crawl narrator at the beginning and the end of the film, must all be taken cautiously. After all, the entire subplot with English Bob and his erstwhile chronicler, W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), dramatically illustrates the imagination, invention, and outright fabrication of traditional Western narratives. Further, the Schofield Kid can’t resist embroidering his tale of killing Quick Mike (David Mucci), initially claiming that he went for his gun, when he actually was helplessly sitting in the outhouse (on Western mythmaking, see Plantinga, “Spectacles of Death,” 70, 75–76). However, the undeniable contrast of Munny’s domesticity and frustrated pig-farming on the one hand and his coldness and gunfighting prowess on the other shows that some very dramatic transformation happened to him at some point. Even if the stories the Schofield Kid heard about William Munny were wildly embellished exaggerations, surely he was, at one time, a very violent and unpleasant man.
29. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption, 155. One might regard Munny’s dead wife as an imagined ideal that is punctured by reality. This is of course a possibility. Whether one reads her this way or not has to do with whether one sees Munny’s redemption as ultimately illusory.
30. Mario Sesti admires the “wonderment and wisdom” of Munny’s comments in this sequence, and finds them a voice for Eastwood’s own outlook, which he says sketches “an impossible notion of something like a contemporary theology” (“Unforgiven,” in The Hidden God: Film and Faith, ed. Mary Lea Bandy and Antonio Monda [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003], 205). As I see it, however, the “theology” of Unforgiven is not found in the austere Stoicism of Munny’s comments to the Schofield Kid in this admittedly transcendent scene, but in the intimations of grace and forgiveness that are mediated by the absent presence of Munny’s dead wife, who is herself something of an absent incarnation of God (see Paul Wallace, “Love, Fear, and Insincerity in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven,” http://psnt.net/blog/essays/love-fear-and-insincerity-in-clint-eastwoods-unforgiven/ [accessed August 8, 2012]).
31. Eliot, American Rebel, 263.
32. “The very narrative structure of the film—in which not one character refrains from committing ruthless abuses when pushed toward them by his or her nature or idea of justice—points to a higher form of consciousness, both tragic and calm, inexorable and perfect” (Sesti, “Unforgiven,” 200).
33. The screenplay for Unforgiven gives no direction for a view of Delilah as Munny leaves Big Whiskey. By contrast, it does specify that as he rides out of town “there are tears running down Munny’s cheeks” (see David Webb Peoples, The William Munny Killings: Original Screenplay, production draft, April 23, 1984, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Unforgiven.html [accessed October 6, 2010]). Such a scene would establish repentance on the part of Munny, but Eastwood omits it from the film.
34. Earlier titles were Whore’s Gold, The Cut-Whore Killings, and The William Munny Killings (see Eastwood’s introduction to the film at the AFI’s 40th Anniversary Night at the Movies, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WzeAz1nPE [accessed October 6, 2010]; Eliot, American Rebel, 263–264).
35. The original screenplay includes a scene with Munny and his children at home after his return from Big Whiskey that provides further evidence for Munny’s genuine affection for and commitment to his children. He is depicted as genuinely happy to see his children, and proud that they carried on the work of the farm while he was away. He conceals the events that occurred in Big Whiskey from them, assuring his son that thanks to the loving redemption of his wife, “I ain’t like I was no more” (Peoples, The William Munny Killings). This could be viewed as a self-protecting lie, or it could be understood as a deception to protect his children, given the fact that he has in fact become something different from what he was before he met his wife, despite the temporary resurrection of that self in Big Whiskey.
36. See Raymond Foery, “Narrative Pacing and the Eye of the Other,” in Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives, ed. Leonard Engel (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 2007), 196.
37. See Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 114–159.
38. A romantic vision of the film might have left the wistful lovers with their last fleeting view of one another in the rain (see Foery, “Narrative Pacing and the Eye of the Other,” 202). However, this would miss what I take to be the central suggestion of the film, that the ecstasies of romance must take their proper place in the overall context of a well-lived life.
39. Meryl Streep noted that a significant element of the power of this scene in the film is the fact that in the midst of a movie focused on verbal content, this scene is almost entirely visual (Bridges of Madison County DVD release Special Features, “An Old-Fashioned Love Story: Making The Bridges of Madison County”). The sparseness of the film score also contributes to the scene’s emotional affect. (For a further discussion of Eastwood’s use of silence in his films, see Richard McClelland’s first essay in this volume.)
40. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 32–33.
41. The thematic decentering of the self is mirrored by the architecture of the film: while Francesca is the hero and main character of Bridges, viewers of the film discover her story vicariously as her children discover it. The multiple perspectives of the story reflect the way that one’s story is woven with the stories of others in a family.
42. Walter Metz notes that Maggie’s family ranks as “the worst poor-white-trash stereotyping in any recent Hollywood film” (“The Old Man and the C: Masculinity and Age in the Films of Clint Eastwood,” in Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives, ed. Leonard Engel [Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 2007], 215).
43. See John M. Gourlie, “Million Dollar Baby: The Deep Heart’s Core,” in Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives, ed. Leonard Engel (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 2007), 249. For a Stoic account of the dynamic of individual virtue and affection for another, see Cicero, On Friendship, in Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship, ed. Michael Pakaluk (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1991), 79–116.
44. Another facile—and in my view false—reading is the claim that “Frankie sacrifices his [effectively adopted] daughter [Maggie] to the heavenly father (unless she is indeed damned), in the process possibly sacrificing his immortal soul” (Tania Modleski, “Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 [2009]: 139). Frankie’s conflicted Catholicism plays a role in his dilemma, but he does not see his action in any way as serving the demands of God, or promoting his own redemption.
45. Some critics have attacked the movie on this count, precisely because Maggie, who is such a fighter, gives up so easily, and because Frankie, who supposedly loves Maggie so deeply, has ensconced her in a facility that does little to provide rehabilitative care. See Tim Gilmer, “Frankie’s Lemon Meringue Afterlife,” New Mobility (July 2005), http://www.newmobility.com/articleView.cfm?id=1039 (accessed August 25, 2012).
46. See Gourlie, “Million Dollar Baby: The Deep Heart’s Core,” 247–248.
47. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), esp. 54–67.
48. The physical setting of Gran Torino in this way parallels the narrative environment of another of Walker Percy’s novels, Love in the Ruins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971).
49. The casting of Carley as Father Janovich is a great example of how a director can shape the effect of a script. While Carley was thirty years old at the time Gran Torino was filmed, he looked much younger, perhaps early twenties. That casting choice emphasized Walt’s view of the juvenile irrelevance of the church.
50. The possibility of genuine and compelling messages amid the static of popular culture is a Kierkegaardian theme brilliantly taken up by Walker Percy, perhaps most notably exemplified by his “The Last Donahue Show” (Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 45–56).
51. Walt should have done all of these things for his own sons. Perhaps he did, but for some reason—perhaps because of the guilt Walt feels over killing the surrendering Korean—he finds it easier to relate to Thao than to his biological family.
52. It is difficult not to notice the contrast between Pale Rider and Gran Torino on this score. Pale Rider places the use of violence into a moral-theological context, while Gran Torino ultimately rejects it altogether. (Karen Hoffman reaches a similar conclusion in her essay in this volume.)
53. It is easy to read Walt’s development in the movie as a move from being brusquely self-centered to becoming “completely selfless” (Ed Gonzales, “Eastwood Critics Roundtable Pt. 2: Gran Torino,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWun9zSQYvg [accessed 28 August 2012]). But this misunderstands goodness as a move away from the self, rather than the self’s choice to affirm what is good and right no matter where it is found (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1999], 9.8.1168b1–1169a34).
54. The Moviegoer, 13.