Clint Eastwood has been acknowledged as one of this country’s most original and provocative directors, but this classification fails to recognize the real depth of Eastwood’s complex trajectory as a director. He grapples with all of the most significant ethical issues of our time: war, vengeance, the role of law, relations between the sexes, the meaning of friendship, and indeed with what it means to lead an ethical life as a good man in late modernity. Most of Eastwood’s movies do focus on men—on a certain brand of manliness—but from the beginning of his directorial journey he has been more complicated than he has appeared, working with some of the most sophisticated literature that addresses the meaning of straight white maleness throughout the history of the United States.
Eastwood became famous for the Dirty Harry movies. Indeed, his famous phrase in the first film of the series—“Make my day,” which is spoken as he stares down a suspect over the barrel of a .44 Magnum—has saturated the everyday vernacular of the English language, even appearing in American politics. Ronald Reagan famously used that phrase as a slogan in his election campaign. The projection of the image of magnum force is explicitly phallic in its identification of man with gun. We see the gun from the side, initially, in what seems like a frozen image; this goes on for a seemingly unbearable span of time, as we wait for the gun to be cocked and aimed. It is cocked, it’s pointed, and we hear Clint Eastwood’s voice before we even see his face: “But being this is a forty-four Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’”1 It’s not surprising, given these powerful images from the Dirty Harry movies, that Eastwood as an actor is identified by some of his critics as representing the perfect image of remorseless masculinity and the phallic power of the outlaw-hero who must never be drawn into the domestic world of women.
Eastwood may spend large portions of a film pursuing a woman, and he may ride off with a woman at a film’s conclusion, but if an Eastwood character is ever married in a film’s “back story,” he is inevitably estranged, divorced, or widowed. Because Eastwood’s masculine presentation is incompatible with the daily frustrations and accommodations of conventional family life, a stable loving relationship becomes for his characters an unrepresentable element in an impossible past.2
The very power of these images, however, has taken even the most sophisticated authors down a wrong path when it comes to viewing Eastwood’s complex engagement with violence and masculinity in his directorial trajectory. Indeed, in his first film as director, Eastwood begins to examine what it means for men to experience remorse—often through their own investment in the saving power of phallic fantasy—and even when that fantasy is most mundanely played out in an actual sexual relationship.
Consider Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971),3 a movie that has been identified as an originator of a particular genre of thriller in which obsessive femininity is shown as being the ultimate danger to masculine survival. But unlike some of the films to follow, such as Fatal Attraction, Eastwood breaks open the psychical fantasy of the women on whom these films are based. We do not have the traditional elements of the paradigm, in which a basically innocent man is lured by carnal temptations to a woman who is often portrayed as having phallic power—the “evil woman” in Fatal Attraction is a lawyer—and out-of-control female sexuality. In these movies, of course, the “good man” is restored to home and family while the “evil woman” is brutally killed. This brutality is seemingly necessary given her fantasized sexual potency, which incredibly withstands bullets and multiple knifings as in Fatal Attraction. In Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me, however, the stereotype of masculine innocence is reworked and questioned, and there is no glorying in the death of the female antagonist. Although it is his first directed film, Play Misty for Me already highlights Eastwood’s penchant for spinning the themes of a genre into a sort of commentary on the genre itself. Dave (Eastwood) explicitly plays out the perspective of a man’s blindness to a woman’s view of what goes on in a sexual relationship. The main character is, of course, a deeply troubled—in fact, psychotic—woman. However, unlike other later films in this genre, Eastwood plays this narrative not only for the thrill of suspense, but rather for the tragedy of Dave’s failure to read the signs of her anguish, of her growing desperation—a failure premised on his inability to understand what it might mean for a woman to take on a sexual relationship with a man.
Indeed, remorse runs throughout the film. Eastwood devotes considerable time to Dave’s attempt to make good on a relationship that he had, in his own mind, already failed. Here we see Eastwood grappling (as he will later in The Bridges of Madison County) with how to portray on film a scene of lovemaking rather than sex. In Play Misty for Me Dave seeks to win back the heart of his lost love, believing that she has rightly condemned him for his failures of attentiveness, sensitivity, and fidelity. Whatever one makes of the sentimentality of filming the two lovers in the forest with Roberta Flack’s “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in the background, the opening of that scene is Dave’s explicit sorrow at his betrayal of their relationship. Ironically, it is this remorseful focus that distracts him from what is going on in the other woman—for whom a one-night stand has turned into obsessive attachment. Even as the movie ends in his stalker’s inevitable death, after her psychosis has run completely out of control, the last scene projects more than just her plummet into the ocean. It is not simply that he can finally be done with her. Instead, the film closes by acknowledging the horror of what has happened not only to Dave as the one who was stalked but also to Evelyn, as the tragic consequence of Dave’s misreading her understanding of the meaning of sex.
By Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood’s concern with remorse and repentance has become an obsession, which is expressed through a father’s daily letters to a daughter who refuses even to open them and sends them back. But then as we have seen remorse, repentance, and moral repair are present in Eastwood’s representations of masculinity from the very beginning of his career as a director. For now I would like to draw attention to another early film, Tightrope (1984), which was produced but not directed by Eastwood. In this film the Eastwood character is a man deserted by his wife and abandoned as to be a single parent to his children. We will return to this film in more depth in Chapter 2, and will also explore my reasons for examining it in this book even though Eastwood did not direct the film, but for now I want to emphasize that Tightrope contradicts the critical implication that Eastwood characters are never portrayed in stereotypical domestic situations or in sustained romantic involvements with women. Tightrope opens with Wes Block (Eastwood) playing ball with his two girls, who convince him to adopt yet another stray dog to add to their nearly uncontainable menagerie. The chaos of Block’s life as a single parent would seem to underscore the need for a mother or caretaker to care for the children while their father is away at work—but the woman who actually enters Block’s life is far from the milk-toast good woman you would expect to save him. Beryl Thibodeaux is a fearless woman, even when facing Block’s own terror at the perverted “dark side” of his own sexuality. She provides one of the most positive and affirmative images in film of a strong-willed feminist activist viewed as a potential lover. Rarely does Hollywood portray a sexy, witty feminist, who runs women’s self-defense classes, as a desirable sex object expressly because of her strength and because of her feminism. Block does not need to “save” her; indeed, he ultimately catches the murderer only because she has effectively stalemated the murderer’s attack.4
Eastwood maintains a focus on the vulnerability of men’s phallic pretentions throughout his films. This focus runs through the various themes that he engages, including the so-called “masculine” responsibility to save others or to prevent them from being ensnared by a boyhood or manhood gone wrong. In A Perfect World (1993), Red Garnett (Eastwood) attempts to intervene in the fate of a young boy, but the ultimate failure of his effort underscores the hubris of control that lies at the heart of phallic fantasy.5 Once again in this film we see a strong feminist character; this time it is Sally Gerber, who earns Garnett’s respect during the manhunt that provides the film’s dramatic tension, despite his initial sexist dismissal of her. As we come to fully understand the implications of Garnett’s relationship with the escaped prisoner Butch, we see why he is so haunted by this case. At the end of the film, with Butch slowly dying in a field, the criminologist Sally Gerber attempts to comfort Garnett, telling him, “You know you did everything you could. Don’t you?” Garnett responds, “I don’t know nothin’. Not a damn thing.” The echoes of these lines find us a long way from pretentions of a cocky, assertive masculinity.
What I am suggesting is that by reading Eastwood’s involvement in these films against the grain of even his best critics, we can grapple with some of the most searing issues of masculinity that confront us in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America. Yes, Eastwood rides off into the sunset at the end of some of his films, a solitary figure with no need or promise for the complexity of a lasting connection, but he also struggles visibly with the contradictions of masculinity in relationships with both men and women.
This concern with the right relations between men and women (and, in the later Eastwood, between the generations) is a touchstone leading us to many of the dramatic high points in Eastwood’s directed films. Eastwood comes into his own artistic position in the America after the closing of the frontiers, where the drama of the cowboy has an even more powerful hold on the imagination as American life transforms historical reality into pure fantasy. As Lee Clark Mitchell has pointed out in his classic study, the Western genre itself was an elegy to what was never actually there except as a set of ideals for masculinity—and, indeed, for a kind of cultural and moral horizon that reminds the audience of what it means to be a man. As Mitchell writes,
More generally, the central terms “West” and “Western,” which have forged American cultural identity, are less self-evident than initial impressions might lead one to believe. Actual landscapes are everywhere recast in the Western, which conceives of setting not as authentic locale but as escapist fantasy. The West in the Western matters less as verifiable topography than as space removed from cultural coercion, lying beyond ideology (and therefore, of course, the most ideological of terrains).
The one aspect of the landscape celebrated consistently in the Western is the opportunity for renewal, for self-transformation, for release from constraints associated with an urbanized East. Whatever else the West may be, in whatever form it is represented, it always signals freedom to achieve some truer state of humanity.6
But Eastwood appears not only in the waning shadow of the cowboy mythos. He also comes to a generation traumatized in the aftermath of two world wars who has lost faith in the idea of progressive historical movement toward a better, more peaceful world—indeed, who has lost faith in the possibility of a world where shared meanings are essential to the aspiration for an ideal democracy founded on the rule of law.
In Bronco Billy (1980), Eastwood plays a cowboy who is past his time, one who is left only with the dreams of what it might have been to be a man in the “true West.” He must actually live on as a performer of great deeds only in vaudeville acts.7 Here, Eastwood clearly presents the cowboy (or at least one who still has the dream of living as a cowboy) anachronistically. Indeed, Bronco Billy poignantly struggles to live up to ideals of masculinity that are available to him only in his own parody of his fantasy of the West, his fantasy of himself as a cowboy. It is a story of a man out of sorts with his time.
Of course, Eastwood also has a more playful (and, indeed, ironic) relationship to the ideal of the cowboy, and as we shall see he understands it as both a fantasy and an allegory. In his later film Space Cowboys (2000), we see Eastwood explicitly and enjoyably featuring a friendship that has run a difficult life.8 Four young men form lasting friendships as participants in an early military forerunner to NASA’s space program. As Hawk Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) tells Frank Corvin (Eastwood) in an opening flashback (a device that Eastwood will develop and use more creatively in his later work as the black and white of memory and dream), someday—someday—the two of them will fly to the Moon. Unfortunately, Hawkins eventually plays too dangerously with his plane, destroying the expensive machine and leaving the men blacklisted by a government bureaucracy that wants men who conform and obey orders rather than those who cherish a desire to “shoot the moon.”
Yet as fate has it, many years later the NASA program that did them in needs Corvin to unravel the outdated computer program of a Soviet satellite that has lost its orbit and is falling steadily to Earth. Corvin agrees to help, but only if he and his three comrades get to go into space, fulfilling the dreams of their youth. The film toys playfully with the various ideals of masculinity: Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland) is the proudly strutting (if aging) stud, while Tank Sullivan (James Garner) finds it more than a little difficult to keep the stiff upper lip of a man who has made his way, as a preacher, to God. While at times this movie seems to feature men in a “boys-will-be-boys” fashion, always fighting and keeping their eyes out for young women, its spoofing and self-irony also underscores some of the deeper virtues, such as loyalty, trust, and courage, that make the film much more than simply a light, enjoyable comedy with four great actors making fun of themselves.
The four discover that the Soviet “communications satellite” actually houses an arsenal of nuclear weapons—and, tragically, no simple feat of engineering can avert the pull of gravity that is bringing the spacecraft down. Instead, Hawkins must sacrifice himself to pilot the rockets into space, out of range of the Earth’s gravitational pull. As it happens, Hawkins has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer—and he has made it clear that he does not want to go down slowly, in the same painful manner that his wife did. Hawkins’s current love interest, Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden), is one of Eastwood’s feminist heroines—feminist, that is, in the sense that she is an engineer working in a predominantly male world. She is also a heroine for these men in that she actively supports their dream to shoot themselves to the Moon by travelling, at last, into space.
Hawkins is successful in his final mission, safely directing the missiles out of Earth’s pull, and the badly damaged space shuttle returns to Earth without him. Facing a seemingly doomed final descent, the younger astronauts—and there has been much play between older and younger generations—throw open the hatch and parachute to safety. But in his final memorial to Hawkins, Corvin rejects all procedure and pilots the plane to what the “experts” and their manuals would call an impossible landing, because he knows that this would have been the move of his cocky, death-defying friend. Likewise, O’Neill and Sullivan refuse to bail out on the landing, confirming a profound fraternal loyalty that transcends considerations of safety or procedure. There is no question for them that Hawkins was the greatest pilot they had ever known; Hawkins would have landed the shuttle, and for this reason they know what they must do. They pay tribute to Hawkins’s memory by living up to his unorthodox thinking about the relationship between a man and his machine.
For all of what may seem like a surface romantic sentimentality in this film, Eastwood is playing with all of the ironies inherent in masculinity, and the dramatic tension is not reducible to the outward play between four talented male actors. Indeed, Eastwood highlights in his own directorial fashion the fact that we can never just step out of that play because ideals of masculinity are embedded in it. When a writer or critic reviews such a rich body of work, she inevitably takes a perspective on it; and indeed, I am well aware that what I am offering my readers is very much my own take on Clint Eastwood as a director. I am, indeed, “shooting” Eastwood in that I intentionally capture and frame his work through four main themes.
The first is the horrifying impact of trauma on our shared ethical life. The second, related to the first, is Eastwood’s struggle with evil as a possibility for each of us. The third is the powers of moral repair and repentance as well as the dangers implicit in them—dangers both to one’s self and to others one may seek to save, whether from the abusive world that surrounds them or even from themselves. My fourth theme is the relationship between a masculine narcissism enforced through the terrifying threat of castration and the violence that inevitably inheres in the hubris of an exaggerated sense of control over one’s self—and in the case of a nation-state, control over other nations and ethnicities.
All of these themes relate to the struggle for ethical meaning, which is oftentimes cast in the complex relation between ethics and law in that moral repair as a possible redemption from the hell of trauma and abuse, and this struggle will inevitably take us to the possibility or impossibility of a shared world of meanings and symbols. These symbols may be created by the victim as he or she seeks a more perfect world, a world that holds out hope for a “beyond” that is not inscribed with the endless repetition of anguish that is written upon a human being who has survived horrific trauma. A commonly expressed fear is that these shared ideals and allegories may so completely collapse that the ideals associated with masculinity, and indeed with ethical personhood, become so utterly vacated that they live on only as parody, as stylized performances without any cause for action. Such parodies were the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone—no doubt a great influence on Eastwood’s own Westerns, but an influence, as we shall see, that he has clearly surpassed. Leone presents us with the living dead, fighters left with style but no standards, faces without souls. Yet Eastwood in his Westerns restores humanity to the face of the cowboy, implicitly stressing that even this face is not immune to the force and impact of trauma. His heroes, often enough, still have no name—but Eastwood reinterprets their namelessness as an identity lost in trauma rather than an absence of identity at all. Even if it were the case that wrong life could not be lived rightly (as Theodor Adorno once wrote) we are inevitably fated to make judgments of right and wrong. In Eastwood’s directorial trajectory, the struggle to make judgments to hold onto ideals of right and justice—which in turn imply a complex relationship to law and the good man who supposedly upholds it—brings into vivid relief the drama of what we lose if we give up the struggle for ethical life and meaningful relationships, thinking it has already been lost.
It is these themes—as the schemata through which to analyze Eastwood’s directorial trajectory—that connect the seemingly diverse genres we will address in this book. Having a certain coherence, these themes underscore how the great ideals of justice, love, and friendship are integrally defined in and through masculinity, the definition of which can and must pass through the ordeal of a foundational questioning of not only their phallic underpinnings but also of masculinity’s seeming ability to pull us down the tracks into the horrors of violence, war, and vengeance that undermine ethical life. We turn now to examine Eastwood’s cowboy movies in more detail as these movies in turn force us to address all of these themes.