In this chapter we will discuss the nature of evil and its relationship to eroticism, the issue of doubling, and the questions Eastwood poses about the relationship between retribution and mercy. Only two of the films in this chapter, Blood Work and Sudden Impact, were directed by Eastwood. He produced Tightrope, while In the Line of Fire merely features Eastwood as the male protagonist; even so, his performances in both films clearly reflect his ongoing engagement with the issues of masculinity and its relationship to violence and eroticism, which we will explore in this chapter.
The doppelgänger is a familiar device in many literary and aesthetic works; and indeed, there are many formulaic representations of the double that often end in a narrative line in which the double must die in order for the dark side of the protagonist to be put to death. Therefore, the good man arises out of the ashes of the bad man, who must be pushed under. But in Eastwood, the engagement between the good man and the bad man becomes infinitely more complex, because the so-called evildoer is not simply reduced to a part of ourselves that can be undone by literally killing it off but instead keeps us on a tightrope where the struggle to be a good man cannot be achieved once and for all. The heart of darkness is in ourselves, and remains something with which we must constantly struggle. Meanwhile, the so-called “bad man” is also more complex because, in the example of Mitch Leary from In the Line of Fire, he deeply aspired at one time to be a good man. Therefore, this is no simple portrait of the evildoer, but rather it is a man who is traumatized by his own loss of goodness. He reaches out to Frank, a Secret Service agent who has been in disgrace over his failure to react effectively during the assassination of John F. Kennedy. From Mitch Leary’s point of view, both he and Frank have been betrayed by the U.S. government, and their bond is that they have both been set up to be disgraced in a manner that is unfair and emasculating in their own eyes. Leary reaches out to Frank to get the recognition that even though he has done terrible things, he is—as he says in his last message—a good man.
Tightrope1 opens to a friendly, warm scene: a group of women, obviously friends but of no clear background or profession, throwing a birthday party. The party ends at an early hour, yet one young woman becomes increasingly anxious on her way home, walking down a lonely New Orleans street. The camera focuses on a pair of tennis shoes that persistently pace her steps, pulling the viewer into her fear and suspense, confirming implicitly that she is right to be afraid. Trembling, she drops one of her packages, but she is instantly relieved to see that the man who picks it up is an officer, in uniform. However, as the camera turns to his shoes, we see that they are not an officer’s formal shoes at all but the very shoes that stalked her. She was, after all, right to be afraid.
Cut to another pair of tennis shoes, in the first symbolic foreshadowing of the doubling relationship that sustains the tension of the film. These are the shoes of Captain Wes Block (Eastwood), a police detective, who, off-duty, is playing with his children in the street outside their home.
Shortly thereafter Block is called to a crime scene where the young woman—a prostitute, as it turns out—lies dead, the second murder in what will quickly become a serial chain. Meanwhile, we discover that Captain Block has been associating with prostitutes for some time, long before the beginning of the current investigation. Frustrated and alone after his wife left him, Block has resorted to paying for sex as his only erotic release. Block is desperate to maintain a wall of separation between his two lives: as a cop who pursues the prostitutes’ murderer and as a civilian who is caught up in the same erotics of violence that lead his antagonist to actually murder the prostitutes with whom he has sex. These lives are now destined to collide, undermining the stereotypic division between the good man as protector and the dangerous man from whom women and the weak must be protected. Indeed, increasingly eaten up by alcoholic anxiety, Block briefly entertains the terrible fear that he might be the killer himself, perhaps losing control in the midst of a drinking binge.
These dual roles bleed directly into each other as Block goes directly from questioning a prostitute as part of his investigation to paying for her services. All the while his guilt deepens as he begins to suspect that, though he may not have killed anyone himself, the murders may be linked to him; the killer seems to target the very prostitutes that Block himself employs. Indeed, the killer proves eager to engage Block directly: following clues to a gay bar, Block is approached by a male prostitute who indicates that a mysterious third party has offered to pay for his services as a gift for Block. He refuses the offer, but interestingly he also admits to some ambiguity in his own sexuality, challenging the prostitute’s assumption that he’s never been with a man: “Maybe I have.” In fact, Block is more interested in questioning the man, already suspecting that he was hired by the killer. Telling the man to proceed to the rendezvous where he expects to be paid, Block follows him into a warehouse full of giant Mardi Gras sculptures: pretend knights, cupids, clowns, and generals—an ominous charade of “let’s pretend.” But when one of the figures drops its pretend ax, the prostitute is hanging from it, dead. Block chases the murderer through the warehouse, but his target eludes him.
Block and the killer are locked in a dance, each pursuing the other in turn. As a criminal psychologist2 explains to Block, “Once you started going after him, you became closer to him than anyone else.” Significantly, she concludes, “There’s a darkness in all of us. You, me, and the man down the street. Some of us have it under control, some act it out. The rest of us try to walk a tightrope between the two.” Increasingly, Block can sense just how narrow that tightrope is, how near he comes to being consumed by his own darkness. Sex dreams turn to nightmares; fantasy bleeds into murder.
Meanwhile, the activist and rape counselor Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold) has surprisingly become Block’s love interest. Initially rebuffed in her attempts to involve herself in the case, Thibodeaux ultimately leads Block to make a public warning suggesting that women should be on their guard. As Block becomes increasingly worried about the safety of other women, he visits Thibodeaux at work, where she teaches self-defense to women, and seeks her advice. Eastwood’s portrayal of a rape self-defense class is realistic and respectful. And soon after when Block meets Thibodeaux working out at the gym, he unabashedly admires her physical strength and discipline. Later, at dinner, he tells her frankly, “When I saw you working out in the gym, I wondered what you were like. I was wondering what it would be like to lick the sweat off your body.” While she is not at all shocked by this, she is unimpressed, challenging him to say it “like you don’t say it to some woman every night.” Still, he clearly interests her, despite his warning, “Maybe you wouldn’t like what you find out.” Her cool response is a challenge: “Maybe I would.”
I find it curious that Dennis Bingham concludes Thibodeaux understands Eastwood immediately through the stereotype of “women’s intuition.” He reads her almost as an earth mother in her acceptance of and placidity about his cavorting with prostitutes—ignoring, in the first place, the fact that she finds out about it only on their second date. By that time, there is no magic to her understanding of Block’s front: she has had three meetings with him, and she has played the earth mother in none of them. Indeed, she has met his erotic interest with a straightforward erotic interest of her own. This is not, as Bingham sees it, the receptive sexuality of traditional femininity. It is an erotic challenge, and it is precisely her strength and her ability to speak her mind that deepens his attraction toward her. Finally, it hardly takes “feminine intuition” to see through the bravado bluff underlying his discussion of licking sweat off her body on a first date.
It is one of the boldest statements of the film that Block’s sincere attraction to Thibodeaux is premised on her strength, her feminism, and her willingness to be true to herself. As she explains her own difficulties in finding a romantic partner, she speculates that either she hasn’t met the right man or she has a tendency to scare the right men away. Block responds, immediately, “definitely not the right man.” She says her mother blames her job for intimidating men, but for her, “It doesn’t matter. I like what I do. Helping women, and men, too.” Block’s only question is, “What makes you so sure they need it?” She responds, significantly, “We all need it.” She is echoing, in a sense, the sentiment that there is darkness in the world; there is darkness in all of us.
But there is a specificity to how she confronts violence, particularly from men, that is related to one of the film’s profound inversions. For Block, his biggest failure, indeed one that he recognizes and that leads him to alcoholic despair, is that he cannot represent himself as the male protector of stereotype because he is caught up in the nightmare world of violent sexuality himself. Thibodeaux, on the other hand, directly faces male violence and, in a profound sense, brings it into the light of day as someone who teaches women to defend themselves. She undoes the pretense that women can rely on men as protectors in this thoroughly unsafe world. Indeed, the cynicism about the police that leads her to pursue Block in the first place derives from the way the rape and murder of women are trivialized precisely because of their ubiquity. That from the beginning Thibodeaux sees there could be a serial killer murdering the prostitutes indicates her clarity in understanding that this kind of violence is part of day-to-day life and therefore one should always expect the worst even if no specific evidence has emerged to prove it. Thus, as Block struggles desperately to hide his erotic violence, Thibodeaux faces it directly on a regular basis; she teaches other women that they must defend themselves, because they cannot expect men, who are themselves implicated in the eroticized violation of women, to defend them.
Here again I disagree with Bingham, who argues that Thibodeaux is not central to the narrative, because her character first allows us to see the pervasiveness of masculine violence, which none of us can ever truly hide from. Within the action of the film, the doubling of Eastwood and the murderer is brought about by Thibodeaux’s confrontation with eroticized violence, suggesting that there are no men that are completely free from the struggle against this darker aspect of sexuality. When she finds handcuffs in Block’s bedroom and guesses that he uses them for more than police work, she does not withdraw from him. Her ability to squarely face the darkness of violence gives Block a glimmer of hope that she will not run from the truth about his sexual struggle. Questioning him frankly about his motives in using the handcuffs, she links him directly with the killer, who also uses handcuffs to bind his victims.
When Thibodeaux offers herself to be handcuffed, Eastwood is using her actions to create suspense. At best she seems to be naïve, at worst submissive. But the fear traditionally associated with a woman’s surrender in a conventional horror movie is interrupted by Thibodeaux’s analysis and her retaining her own voice when she offers up her wrists herself. Again, she chooses not to flee from male violence, because she believes there is simply no way to evade it. Her risk, then, is not a naïve submission but is instead rooted in her conviction that the only way Block can climb out of despair is by admitting his own violent tendencies. Block agrees that the murderer’s use of handcuffs indicates his craving to be in control, and Thibodeaux presses him to admit he feels the same way: she suggests he uses handcuffs when he feels threatened, because “nobody can get to you in these.” “Stops just about anyone,” he concedes.
Thibodeaux picks up the handcuffs and closes them around one wrist suggestively, providing an opportunity that Block, in turn, declines. Her gesture is considered controversial by many critics, precisely because it seems to mimic a classic portrayal of female submission. Bingham concludes that Eastwood the director is out of touch with his character, because it is inconsistent for this sort of character to turn down sex with a handcuffed woman:
Is her offer a test to see if he will shut out intimacy with her? Does Block refuse because, as his partner in a socially sanctioned dating relationship (one with whom you could have a hard-on any time you want, as the younger daughter innocently puts it) Thibodeaux is in the wrong category for handcuffs? The film posits . . . a feminist as Eastwood’s character’s redemption, while also saying uncertainly that redemption must come by way of Block’s recognition of his condition and his elimination—in the death of the double—of the darkness inside of him. Thus, as a Clint Eastwood film Tightrope switches uncertainly from a subject’s monolithic independence to his use of a woman for validation. Something a woman really tries to live out her feminism would probably not consent to.3
But perhaps it is Bingham’s imagination that is faltering here; it might well require a feminist to understand the pervasiveness of male violence and know that Block’s only way out is to engage the violence. He can neither run from it nor pretend that it is a problem only for the bad guys. After all, the significance of pornography and sadomasochistic heterosexuality has been hotly debated; indeed, both issues have been sources of great contention within the feminist movement in the United States and elsewhere. But I want to reread this scene through Jessica Benjamin’s brilliant article on the complexity of pornography and what it means to engage someone who is consumed by deep dread of his sadistic desires. Thibodeaux’s offer turns Block’s deeply internalized nightmare, which leads him to act out in a sadistic way that he feels he cannot share, into an intersubjective space of shared fantasy where they can play together with his need to cuff women in order to feel safe. There they can begin to distinguish what is actually fantasy, from the profound fear associated with a yearning to destroy the other in an omnipotent fantasy of control that thwarts the desire for the other, a desire which demands that the other remain.
As Benjamin suggests, we must not slam the door on the question that Tightrope raises regarding the relationship between sexuality and violence.
This assessment of sexuality actually slams the door on the provocative question as to how sex can be violence and violence can be sex. What exactly allows sexuality to carry or transmit relations of power, violence, and destruction? What is this “thing” called sex? The collaboration between sexuality and power might somehow be related to the fact that a violation that would be abominable in reality can be pleasurable in fantasy. The disjunction between fantasy and reality must be taken seriously if we are to begin to understand the complexity of sexuality and its inveterate association with violence and revulsion.4
This is the significance of the handcuffing scene: Thibodeaux refuses to slam the door on Block’s violent sexuality. It is worthwhile to quote Benjamin at length:
For the idea of an object that can survive destruction also provides that destruction must have its say, that fantasy must endeavor to devour reality in order for the subject to taste the difference between them. And reality must survive the devouring of the unconscious in order to be more than mere repression, and thus to truly include the discovery of an other.5
The inner tension of aggression may be modified through a shift in the outer relationship back to mutual understanding, which includes communication of fantasy contents. Rather than bouncing back in retaliation (as in the child’s rejoinder to name-calling, “I’m rubber, you’re glue; everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you”), the other’s persistence in receiving communication gives meaning to the expressive act and so transforms the self’s inner state. The transformation is in the direction that permits the self, once again, to tolerate the outside, the different. The shift back to mutual understanding, or out of the fantasy of destruction into the reality of survival, re-establishes the tension between two individuals even as it dissipates the tension of aggression within the individual. But when the shift back to intersubjective reality fails, internalization remains the only way to deal with aggression; the turning inward of aggression forms the basis of the fantasy of doer and done to, and inner world of persecutors and victims.6
Benjamin’s argument, then, is not that sexuality must always be tied to aggression—far from it. Rather, fantasy can help to metabolize aggression, but only once the basis for the fantasy—the desire for destruction—is recognized by someone who can contain it without running, who can withstand the onslaught of psychic destructiveness and remain whole, ultimately surviving the aggressive aspect of the fantasy. This is the role that Thibodeaux plays for Block. Block is clearly caught in that deadly repetition of doer and done-to, persecutor and victim, and so is his double, whose murders taunt Block by reminding him of his sexual history with prostitutes, as if to say, “I know who you are. You are a bad man, too.” At one point, the murderer even hangs Block’s forgotten tie on a statue near the body of the fourth victim, implicating him in the crime. This “you are like me” identification is what Block most profoundly dreads. It pulls him into a psychic abyss in which he becomes one with the murderer, in which he is unworthy of love precisely because he cannot live up to the masculine ideals represented by his career as a police officer, one who protects victims. His despair at his own unworthiness is indicated in a powerful scene after Block’s eldest daughter informs him, tearfully, that his ex-wife is getting married. Later that night he drinks himself to unconsciousness, and his daughter finds him sprawled awkwardly on the sofa still clutching his wedding picture. Unable to move him, she lovingly embraces him, but her small frame against his larger body emphasizes the fact that, for all her caring, she cannot offer him the equal position that is necessary to break open his deadly fantasies into the shared space of mutuality.
Block needs something more, and what makes the cuffing scene so powerful is that Thibodeaux’s courage before male violence is what allows her to stand up to him. In Benjamin’s sense, she accepts the challenge of moving into his fantasy, of embracing his darkness within—not to give in to it masochistically, but rather, to embrace the darkness in order to make it something they can share, and therefore something different that can be played with and explored together. Does it take a strong woman to make that kind of gesture? Does it take a feminist? As a director, Eastwood certainly seems to indicate that it does—and that, frankly, gladdens my heart.
Bingham also worries that Tightrope portrays sex and violence as so tightly bound up together. Indeed, it is true that they are intrinsically linked in the film since Block and his double are consumed by the same sadistic fantasy, though neither of them can keep it as a fantasy. Each man feels compelled to act it out in his own way. There is a connection, however, as Benjamin has brilliantly written in The Bonds of Love, between aggression, violence, and sexuality, one that psychoanalysis must certainly confront.7 But it also has to be addressed in actual lived relationships as we struggle to loosen the bonds that deeply connect us to traditional gender roles, roles that lead men and women to have difficulty developing fluid relationships with adults of the opposite sex. Indeed, part of Tightrope’s provocation comes precisely from its tying sex to violence and its unraveling the stereotypic way of separating the father protector from the erotic villain. Here again we return to the Thibodeaux character; it is precisely her suggesting that the answer for women is not in male protectors but in self-defense and an honest confrontation with a violent world that leads to only one way out for Block, a mutual confrontation of violence within a heterosexual relationship.
Otto Rank has written more than anyone else about the double in psychological literature. Often the image appears as one’s own guardian spirit conjured in the form of a torturing conscience. The double, in Rank’s analysis, must be killed off in order for what is good in the pursuer to redeem itself.8 Often, there is no recognition that the double is indeed a side of one’s self, but for Block the figure of the double inspires a sense of self-disgust, truly the guardian spirit of the tortured conscience. As Bingham rightly points out, the film is true to the Hegelian insight that the need for change often begins with self-disgust. Thus, as the double in Tightrope is granted his full identificatory status, Block does not disavow the killer’s deliberate taunting, but his recognition does plunge him into the deepest chasm of self-disgust.
Yet, self-disgust alone cannot save a man from the violent fantasy of doer and done-to, persecutor and victim, without the help of someone who is willing to dance or play with the very act of doubling. Indeed, Wes Block is far from the stereotypical masculine character who is unassailable and self-sufficient. Struggling to raise two daughters on his own, Block cannot even fulfill his role as fatherly protector: the murderer, sharpening his identification with Block, invades his home and murders the girls’ nanny as well as most of the dogs, but ultimately leaves one of the daughters tied to a bed, relatively unharmed. Block struggles with the intruder, but he lives only because the one surviving dog grabs the murderer’s leg at a critical moment, allowing Block to escape from a deadly stranglehold. Alone, Block would have been killed.
And now Block is truly terrified (another uncommon feeling in macho Hollywood), and we see him as a loving father whose failure to protect his daughters eats him up inside. He cannot fathom how to make it up to them. His ex-wife, at the hospital, never speaks: she merely glares at him with disapproving eyes. Aware now that the murderer wants to dance in his footsteps, to share the same fantasy, Block becomes concerned for Thibodeaux. When he cannot reach the police assigned to protect her, he drives desperately to her home, where he finds Thibodeaux engaged in deadly combat with the murderer, using the skills she has taught to other women so many times before. Again, Bingham worries that she was not ultimately strong enough to defeat her attacker, but very few people, women or men, could successfully fend off a frenzied attack and Thibodeaux certainly holds her own. Indeed, she fares better than her police guards! Ultimately, it is her ability to stave off the attack long enough for Block to arrive that both saves her life and offers Block the opportunity to pursue the perpetrator one last time. As he bursts onto the scene, the attacker runs away. Thibodeaux quickly signals that she will be fine alone. She can take care of herself, and he should do what needs to be done. Again she is not the stereotypic attacked woman, who throws her arms around her rescuer. Instead she makes it very clear that she is all right and he should continue pursuing the murderer, which is after all his job.
The tense final scenes follow the two men, the murderer and his pursuer, through a darkened graveyard, a police helicopter providing scattered light from above. Significantly, the film does not end here; the graveyard is a turning point, signaling the life-and-death battle that is reaching its climax, signaling that someone will die here tonight. That the men pass through the graveyard suggests, however, an escape from death as well: Block has the chance, here, to escape both from bodily death and from the psychic death that he had all too nearly embraced. The men end up, at last, in an active train yard—another clear symbol of life paths intersecting and diverging. They fight to the very end, doubles entwined in each other’s arms, and it is unclear until the final second who will actually roll out from under the weight of the approaching train. At last, Eastwood tears off the murderer’s mask and sees his face, confirming what he has suspected: the killer is a man he had arrested for rape years ago. Block was responsible for sending him to prison. The face-to-face moment is an important resolution for Block, facilitating his victory over his own fearful identification with the man. Here is a man with a face, a man with an identity, a man truly other and different from himself.
For a critic like Bingham nothing has been recuperated here; he claims that the film is too rife with contradictions. These contradictions, supposedly, play against the necessary resolution found in the double’s death, the customary end of the doppelgänger film. Indeed, Block does not walk away with any kind of strong assertion that the story is finished, that his work is complete. Instead he remains in total disarray and disorientation. Left clutching the murderer’s severed arm, Block stands up shakily after the battle’s bloody end, walking away as if he were drunk or concussed, barely able to stand. By this time, Thibodeaux has arrived at the scene. Despite her own struggle and confrontation with death, she is not hysterical. She seeks no immediate treatment in the hospital, but she remains strong enough to find Block, not her hero, but her partner in an equal relationship, which is clearly presented when they walk off supporting one another.
As already indicated, Bingham argues that Thibodeaux is actually peripheral to the plot and the audience finds out very little about her. In one sense, that is true; we never do learn much about Thibodeaux’s past, but dramas show rather than tell. In truth, we know a great deal about Thibodeaux as a person through her ethical commitments to other human beings and her erotically charged relationship with Block, which she pursues fearlessly, maintaining an equal footing with him. As Bingham writes, Thibodeaux’s function “is to provide Block with his salvation. . . . [H]is case is too serious to be solved by true love, the constitution of which this film doesn’t pretend to know. It takes a feminist.”9
I am not sure whether Bingham means it takes a feminist to save Block, or that it takes a feminist to know about the constitution of true love. At any rate, we cannot be too hard on Eastwood for failing to capture the essence of true heterosexual love; I think few of us can claim to have a clear idea about it. If Eastwood puts his confusion or uncertainty about true love on view for the audience, then we are in his debt for such a honest portrayal. Indeed, what is interesting about his acting in this film is that he captures, in a profound sense, the persona of the hard-edged macho hero; Eastwood shows that it is only a front, a defense against a deeply fearful rejection of women caused by a fear of being rejected by them.
On a deeper level, the film’s endless engagement with performance and masking points both to Block’s confusion about his own fantasies and to the fact that real men and women are, like Block, perpetually trapped in such performances. These gender roles are based on ideals that are nothing but empty stereotypes when we actually try to put them on. Indeed, Benjamin has argued in The Bonds of Love that it may well take a feminist to understand how such gender roles are performed and why they arise in profound relationships with our first caretakers and love interests. Such gender performances are deeply connected to the process by which a human being comes to define her or himself in relationships with others, separate yet inevitably connected. As the prostitutes play, in an overdrawn manner marking the difference between the good girl and the bad girl, they emphasize just how difficult it may be to find oneself as a whole person, underscoring the broader difficulty that Block experiences in relating to women as whole individuals who can meet him face-to-face.
Benjamin’s entire argument in The Bonds of Love is that we cannot get out of the violent fantasy of persecutor and victim unless we are truly willing to confront our own destructive impulses—what Eastwood’s criminal psychologist calls “the darkness within.” The struggle for what Benjamin calls recognition begins as an internal within the psyche, which is not created by a particular action but rather conditioning the interpersonal. The question for her is can we ultimately recognize the other person as more than just the sum of our projections or an object of our own need for recognition? Indeed, to feel recognized by an Other is crucial to bolstering intersubjectivity. It is precisely because we are bonded to others from birth that we must struggle to achieve any individuation, and this struggle to find what Benjamin, following Hegel, calls recognition cannot help but go through destructiveness. Benjamin defines mutual recognition as, “a relation in which each person experiences the other as ‘like subject,’ as another mind that can be ‘felt with’ yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception.”10 By finding her way to Block in the train yard, by surviving his own destructive fantasies—literally by remaining alive and psychically by exposing his fantasy as fantasy in her courage to enter that space with him—Thibodeaux has shown that she is, in Benjamin’s sense, the other whom Block can truly desire.
Far from peripheral, Thibodeaux’s story is, in my interpretation, a second track for Block—and that is the significance that I give to the final scene in the train yard. Block can, indeed, go either way; he is walking on a tightrope. Perhaps, at one time, the murderer could have gone a different way as well. In a sense, Thibodeaux draws out the contrast between two different kinds of identification. There is the double, which is always an active identification that can only result in individuation through mutual destruction. On the other hand, there is the act of recognition that struggles through our destructiveness to identify another self, an identity that can share our dreams and our nightmares in such a way that maybe, just maybe, we can reach through it all to touch each other. There is no simple salvation at the end of this film. There is, however, a glimmer of hope, and we can only understand that glimmer if we understand the difference between the identification at the heart of doubling—which tries to assert a oneness that denies difference—and a countervailing act of recognition, in which the other remains on her own track, offering an intersubjective space in which nightmares can be shared and, to that extent, relieved. It takes a strong person to offer this lifeline, a person secure in her own self, in her sameness and her difference. It takes someone who can withstand the nightmare.
It takes a feminist.
Even though In the Line of Fire11 was neither directed nor produced by Eastwood, I am including it in this book because of its powerful portrayal of the doubling relationship, which Eastwood will return to again and again when directing his own movies. Frank Horrigan (Eastwood) is a Secret Service agent, who was disgraced after he failed to save the life of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. When the film opens, Al D’Andrea (Dylan McDermott), one of Horrigan’s new agents, arrives late to work because he had to drop off one of his children at school. But Horrigan will hear no excuses and chides the agent, setting the tone of the mentor relationship between the two, a common Eastwood theme. As they immediately set out on an undercover mission to break up a drug deal, it quickly becomes clear that D’Andrea may not be cut out for the constant trauma that this kind of work entails. Indeed, the torturous adaptations of the soul required to serve our national security agencies are one of the critical themes in this film.
The tension mounts as Horrigan investigates a landowner’s tip about one of her tenants, who has pinned an ominous scrapbook of presidential assassinations to his wall. Horrigan discovers a second room in the apartment that contains only one picture: Horrigan standing next to Kennedy’s car on that fateful day in Dallas. Uncannily, a doubling relationship is suggested already: Horrigan investigates a suspect who has clearly done his homework on him. Indeed, as Horrigan leaves the scene perplexed and concerned by this development, we catch our first glimpse of the suspect, Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), watching Horrigan as he walks home. As we will see, there is an irony in Leary’s obsession: he both protects and menaces at the same time. He tracks Horrigan as a tactical piece in the game he is playing, but he also sees himself as a friend who watches Horrigan’s back.
Horrigan returns to his apartment and Leary calls him, saying, “I’m dying to talk to you. I feel like I know you.” Why? Horrigan asks. “You being intimately involved in the assassinations of two presidents,” says Leary, giving Horrigan the kind of threat he needs to call a meeting of his Secret Service staff. At the meeting we meet Horrigan’s strong female alter ego, Agent Lilly Raines (Rene Russo), who has just joined the team. Horrigan does not initially greet her with the most respectful attitude, remarking, “Secretaries get prettier and prettier around here.” She fires right back, “And the field agents get older and older.” In a theme that will recur in Eastwood films, it is Raines who will press her superiors to keep the aging, disgraced agent on as an integral part of the investigation and to assign him to the team responsible for protecting the president.
Running alongside the motorcade, Horrigan is barely able to keep up, his age obvious. Leary is in the crowd, of course, watching Horrigan gasp and double over in his efforts to keep up with the president’s car. Later, he calls to say, “I was worried about you today. I thought you were going to pass out. What did happen to you?” Here he refers not to Horrigan’s struggle on the road that day but to his challenge that fatal day in Dallas. Leary continues:
What did happen to you that day? Only one agent reacted to the gunfire, and you were closer to Kennedy than he was. You must have looked up at the window of the Texas Book Depository, but you didn’t react. Late at night, when the demons come, do you see the riffle coming out of that window, or do you see Kennedy’s head being blown apart? If you’d reacted to that first shot, could you have gotten there in time to stop the big bullet? And if you had—that could’ve been your head being blown apart. Do you wish you’d succeeded, Frank? Or is life too precious?
Leary draws Horrigan deeper into a relationship that Horrigan cannot resist because he connects to Leary through his taunts, comments like “The world can be a cruel place to an honest man. It’s nice to have a friend.” Humiliated by Leary, who calls himself “Booth,” and his references to Frank’s tragic failure, Horrigan nevertheless needs to keep him on the line. “What about you, Booth? What’s your story?” Horrigan asks. Leary tells him, “It’s an epic saga,” before terminating the call to prevent the agents from tracing him.
Meanwhile, Horrigan’s increasing respect for Raines keeps pace with his growing affection for her. As in the other Eastwood movies we have examined, the Eastwood character does not ally with his female counterpart because she is a weak woman who needs his protection. Equally significant, Horrigan’s friendship with D’Andrea also deepens as the young agent proves his ability by offering creative new ideas about how to track Leary, who continually eludes their attempts to pin him down.
Horrigan’s developing friendships with Raines and D’Andrea highlight the need for connection that allows Leary to draw parallels with Horrigan during their conversations. While the new relationships do help to pull Horrigan out of his isolation, they do not stop Leary’s identification with him, which draws Horrigan into an emotional abyss. “We’ve got so much in common,” Leary says. “We are both honest and capable men who were betrayed by people we trusted.” Horrigan doesn’t thinks he was betrayed; he believes there is truth in the report that claimed he should have reacted to save Kennedy. It is Leary who insists that, like him, Horrigan got a raw deal. But Horrigan has a question of his own for Leary: “Who betrayed you?” “Some of the same people,” Leary replies cryptically. “But I’m going to get even. I’ll have my day in the sun. The question is, will you have yours? I think you’re in for a lot more pain.”
Indeed, Horrigan has suffered his fair share of pain. We have learned that his wife left him, taking their daughters with her, because she could not handle his moody behavior, which was a direct result of his dealing with a dangerous, stressful job. In some ways, his job has lost meaning for him. Indeed, he suggests that he may be willing to give up his position, which has now become work, to find happiness with a woman. When Raines tells him that she ended a very serious relationship because her lover did not approve of what she did for a living, Frank asks her, “What would happen if I gave up my job for you? Maybe I’ve vowed never to let my career come between me and a woman.” But Raines does not accept his romantic gesture. Some of Eastwood’s critics have suggested that the line would have more impact if Rene Russo were not thirty some years younger than Eastwood and if his character were not already on the brink of retirement. But indeed Russo is not quite as young as some of these critics suggest; she made this film during her career renaissance, which came in her mid-to-late forties after a long absence from Hollywood. And although Horrigan at times seems exhausted by his job, he also shows unflagging commitment to tracking down Leary. Thus, Horrigan’s willingness to put a relationship before his career stands as a challenge to a certain kind of masculinity, which presupposes that women are the ones who give up their jobs for men, not vice-versa.
By now it is well known that the film spectator is supposed to identify with the camera’s gaze. In In the Line of Fire, the camera creates an uneasy identification with Leary, the man planning an assassination, as we are frequently left gazing at Horrigan through Leary’s eyes. We are pulled into Leary’s own ambivalence toward Horrigan, as we simultaneously identify with Leary and worry for Horrigan, thereby participating in Leary’s conflicted concern. He watches Horrigan, seemingly as his tormentor, yet at the same time he protects him as a military man guards a fellow soldier. While some would argue that Leary puts Horrigan in the masochistic position—objectified and weakened, even feminized in his vulnerability and uneasiness—these critics overlook the deep ambivalence within Leary: his look is both threatening and caring at the same time. He wants Horrigan to remain his equal, if only because he simply wants to continue with the game, but perhaps also because if he can save Horrigan then he can redeem himself as well.
Horrigan is increasingly on edge, because he too recognizes that Leary’s game is a chance for salvation, a chance to replay his protection of a president, hopefully with a different outcome this time. But he is so tense with anticipation that he jumps, literally, at the sound of balloons popping, raising a false alarm that publicly embarrasses the president. Raines, gently informing him that he is being removed from the case because his superiors consider him paranoid, reminds him that it is part of his job to protect the president’s dignity. She recalls the time when, as part of Kennedy’s entourage, he pretended to be the lover of one of the president’s girlfriends to save Kennedy from being discovered by his wife. But Horrigan explains that he has hardened since then: “I was different. The whole damn country was different. Everything would be different if I was half as paranoid then as I am today. Fuck!” Leary may be taunting Horrigan as he threatens to reenact his biggest failure, but Horrigan cannot help but see those taunts as a promise, a possibility. Despite Horrigan’s resistance, it is that possibility that draws him ever closer to Leary.
Motivated by watching Horrigan play his piano alone, Leary calls Horrigan again because he cannot bear the thought of his utter loneliness—which mirrors, of course, his own. He says that Horrigan does not have enough in his life, and Horrigan can only lamely point out that he has the piano. So just what is Leary offering him? “There’s no cause worth fighting for,” he tells Horrigan. “All we have is the game. It doesn’t work, Frank. God doesn’t punish the wicked and reward the righteous. Everyone dies. Some die because they deserve to, others die simply because they come from Minneapolis. It’s random. And it’s meaningless.” Despite himself, Horrigan is drawn into this conversation. He retorts, “If none of this means anything, then why kill the president?” Leary has already remarked that this president is not worth either man’s time; he is almost beside the point. Now he replies, “To punctuate away the dreariness,” and concludes the conversation, affirming his profound identification with Frank: “You are the same as me.”
Horrigan soon realizes just how similar their lives have been, learning that Leary too has been a government agent. During a search of Leary’s former home, Horrigan and D’Andrea nearly have a shootout with other intruders, who turn out to be CIA agents looking for one of their own—Leary, a former wetboy assassin, gone rogue. But even as Horrigan believes they are closing in on Leary, D’Andrea announces he has had enough: he’s quitting the Secret Service because he is not up to the job. We do not pity D’Andrea; we identify with his fear. Still, D’Andrea has come to count on him as a friend and an ally. He almost pleads with him to stay at his side: “Come on, pal. I need you.”
In their next conversation Horrigan is eager to press Leary with his new information. “I know who you are, Leary.” At first, Leary is relieved. “I’m glad, Frank” he replies. “Friends should be able to call each other by name.” But Horrigan presses further, “I’ve seen what you do to friends,” referring to what he learned from the CIA about the fate of the man sent to help Leary readjust to civilian life. “You slit your friend’s throat.” Leary is straining now, becoming defensive. “You talked to Coppinger, Frank? Did you delouse? The man is a professional liar.” By now Horrigan clearly has the edge: “I saw a picture of your friend lying on the floor with his throat cut.” Leary becomes furious, breaking down under what he takes to be Horrigan’s contempt. “What you didn’t see, Frank,” he screams, “what you couldn’t possibly know, is that they sent my best friend—my comrade-at-arms—to my home to kill me!”
Horrigan responds coolly, “Your voice is shaking.” Leary is desperate now for him to understand. “Frank, you of all people, I want you to understand because we both used to think that this country was a very special place.” Horrigan protests, trying to distance himself, but Leary does not relent: “Do you have any idea what I’ve done for God and country? Some pretty FUCKING HORRIBLE things! I don’t even remember who I was before they sunk their claws into me. I don’t even remember who I was before they sunk their claws into me.” On some level, Horrigan does understand—or perhaps he’s merely trying to provoke Leary further when he remarks, “They made you a real monster, right?” Leary agrees, concluding, “That’s right and now they want to destroy me because we can’t have monsters roaming the quiet countryside now, can we.”
Leary almost pleads with Horrigan: “Do you know how easily I could killed you, Frank? Do you know how many times I’ve watched you go in and out of that apartment? You’re alive because I have allowed you to live. So show me some goddamn respect!” Angry, Leary answers the question he posed earlier about what Horrigan sees when the demons come: “I see you, Frank, standing over the grave of another dead president.”
If Horrigan’s provocations are a tactic, then the tactic finally works. Investigators trace the call, leading to a death-defying chase across rooftops in which Horrigan, aging and out of shape, finally misses a jump and barely catches a ledge, where he hangs, helpless, as Leary stands over him. Indeed, it is only because Leary offers Horrigan his hand that Horrigan lives to continue the game, standing face-to-face with his quarry at last, with every opportunity to shoot him and put an end to it all. Leary taunts him, placing Horrigan’s gun in his own mouth and reminding Horrigan that if he shoots now the president will be saved. Hesitating to kill a man who has just saved his life, Horrigan affirms that this president is only incidental to the game between them. Yet when D’Andrea arrives on the scene Leary does not hesitate: he pushes Horrigan away and shoots D’Andrea twice, killing him immediately. Leary then gets away as Horrigan runs to his murdered friend.
Of course, now Frank is eaten up by a double guilt over his failure to kill Leary, because he risked the president’s life and ended his partner’s life at the same time. But he has also been drawn into a more complete identification with Leary: his betrayal at the hands of the Secret Service is complete, as his superiors think he is too close to the case. Against his protests, his superiors have him transferred to San Diego. He could never admit what Leary so persistently reminds him, that the report blaming his failure to protect Kennedy from assassination had been a betrayal, that he had been a scapegoat for broader failures of security. Now, like Leary, he has been completely rejected by the authorities to whom he dedicated his life in service. Perhaps for this reason alone, he cannot let go.
In San Diego he continues his investigation, breaking a code revealing bank deposits that Leary had used to get powerful Republicans to invite him to a fundraiser where he planned to assassinate the president. Defying his orders, Horrigan arrives just in time to take the bullet meant for the president—his only cheat, as Leary puts it, is wearing a bulletproof vest. After a brief pursuit, Leary gains the advantage and takes Horrigan hostage in an elevator with him. Implying that, one way or another, his death is imminent, he says that he is glad to have Horrigan there: “I don’t want to leave the miserable world alone.” Horrigan disavows any friendship, but Leary insists that Horrigan owes him a debt of gratitude. “Without me,” he argues, “you’d still just be another sad-eyed, piano-playing drunk. I brought you into this game. I let you keep up with me. I made you a goddamn hero today. I redeemed your pathetic shitty life today.” Leary wants Horrigan to acknowledge that he has been honest with him, unlike the government that manipulated and betrayed them both. He wants Horrigan to recognize him as a man of honor, even if he has twisted his sense of honor into a bizarre parody of itself.
In the final scuffle, Horrigan ultimately gains the upper hand. Leary hangs out of the elevator, and in an echo of the earlier rooftop scene Horrigan offers Leary his hand. “Do you want to save me, Frank?” “To be honest and fair with you,” Horrigan replies, “no. But it’s just my job.”
Horrigan is a hero, and indeed his career is redeemed. Unfortunately, he is too old to run with the president’s entourage and after all of the publicity surrounding the assassination attempt, he can no longer do undercover work, so he is effectively forced to retire. Yet when he returns home, he finds a chilling message from Leary on his answering machine, revealing that he never intended to win the game. Leary had hoped Horrigan would outlive him all along. Leary’s last words to Horrigan, spoken into the machine:
By the time you hear this, it will be over. The President is most likely dead, and so am I. I wonder, Frank, did you kill me? Who won our game? Not that it matters. For among friends like you and me, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. Now the game is done and it’s time to get on with your life. But I worry that you have no life to get on with. You’re a good man. And good men like you and me are destined to travel the lonely road. Goodbye. And good luck.
These men have an ongoing conversation throughout the film, making this form of doubling very different from what we saw in Tightrope. While the impetus for their relationship is Leary’s projecting identification onto Horrigan, Horrigan has been so traumatized that he now shares Leary’s pain: he does not know who he was before the government sunk its claws into him. As Sue Grand writes, trauma imposes loneliness, and indeed, throughout this film Leary often appears on camera alone—and we often see Horrigan alone with Leary as his only, silent witness. Leary entangles Horrigan in a bond created by his reminding Frank about his own past trauma, dangling it in front of him seductively, in order to draw him closer to the friendship that Leary desires. And, after all, Leary knows that only he can offer Horrigan what he really needs, the chance to redeem himself by playing the heroic role that he was previously denied. Their relationship leads them to engage in conversations that are truly man-to-man, not just hunter and hunted. Indeed, they recognize in one another a sense of honor lost on most government agents—agents who could be sent to kill their best friends. Because of this honor code between the two men, Horrigan is positive that Leary will, indeed, attend the fundraising dinner, and he passes this information on to Raines. Leary said he would attend, and Horrigan is sure he would never lie to him.
For government agents such as Horrigan and Leary, the ideals of masculinity that they share have become twisted through the government’s betrayal of them. Leary knows Horrigan will identify with this betrayal, and it is through this identification that Horrigan will understand him. He is only asking for understanding; we should note that at no time does Leary seek any kind of mercy from Horrigan. For Leary, there is only one way out of this traumatic nightmare, in which he no longer knows who he is. He only knows the distorted life of a wetboy, a corrupted “not-him” image that he can never escape because it is all he has. Still, he retains a desire to be treated as a man, not merely a psychological case file. In fact, both men agree that, as Horrigan puts it, “A man’s actions do not equal the sum of his psychological parts.” Therefore, Leary does not want from Horrigan any pity that is premised on the life he has endured, on the causal factors that contribute to his apparent psychosis. He wants, as he puts it, respect and gratitude. He wants to find his way again, somehow, to being with a friend—and friendship has nothing at all to do with pity.
In this context we might interpret Leary’s thoughtless killing of D’Andrea as a kind of jealousy. What is the basis of the erotic attachment? Leary sees in Horrigan a projected image of himself. In a certain sense, as in all classic cases of projected identification, they are one. Horrigan should have no independent identity on which he could reject him. Projective identification creates a twisted erotic bond because it is a love that obliterates otherness. Given the passion and the erotic connection that Leary feels to Horrigan, the realization of his plan only has room for the two of them; it would be disrupted by D’Andrea’s constant presence at Horrigan’s side. This rationale for D’Andrea’s murder heightens Horrigan’s profound guilt over the death of his friend, because he is not only complicit in the murder through his own inaction but is also drawn even more tightly into a friendlike relationship with the killer. Horrigan’s opinion of Leary is never easily compartmentalized into categories of good or evil, highlighting his understanding that Leary is right about one thing: the ideals of our country have lost something important, and we only deceive ourselves by pretending that we can stand without contradiction against a flat moral conception of “evil.”
The pathos of the film is that Horrigan is redeemed in his own self-image, because he does finally take the bullet, which stands in for the one he should have taken in Dallas. What does it mean, then, that Leary never meant to win the game, that winning for him was really all about saving Horrigan from himself? The game, in one sense, gave him his only way out of the catastrophic loneliness associated with trauma. His voice shakes when he feels that Horrigan does not understand him, when it seems that he has bought into the psychological reductionism that portrays him as a monster. To use Hannah Arendt’s word, “evil” in this film is anything but banal.12 At one point in his life, Leary was a loyal soldier who followed orders, but he never denies that what he did was terrible; he is forthright about the fact that he did “some pretty fucking horrible things for God and country.” But where does remorse get you when at the end of the day your sins are protected secrets of state that cannot be admitted? Indeed, when a government that contradicts the wrongness of your sins will not prosecute them as crimes, but sets out to murder you, the one whom they hired to commit them in the first place? The contradictions of government-sanctioned violence piled up on this man as torments for which there could be no satisfactory relief.
The banality of evil, for Arendt, was that Adolf Eichmann, after being arrested in Buenos Aires for his crimes against humanity during World War II, was incapable of thinking from the position of the Other. It is Eichmann’s thoughtlessness that makes his actions banal; he did the deeds, that’s all, and any remorse seems shallow and untrue to his duty. Leary, on the other hand, is eaten up by the failure of the ideals that he thought he had been upholding on behalf of the government. He is obsessed by his own thoughts of how the country is failing. And in a very twisted way, Leary is only too careful to dig his claws into Horrigan’s heart by getting at his traumatic past. Thus, Leary’s final attack on a president who never played a significant role in his past is actually an attempt, in Sue Grand’s meaning, to impress himself on Horrigan as a man whose masculinity is evidenced by his always playing fair and straight with Horrigan. Does he die with a smile, knowing that Horrigan has been redeemed? Does his identification with Horrigan allow him to believe that through Horrigan’s vindication he has held on to the only part of himself that would be worth saving? Leary knows that death is coming to him for what he has done, but in losing the game he escapes the death of a monster and finds the death of a man. Honoring him by offering his hand, Horrigan treats Leary as a human being, if only as part of his job—an apt reversal of Leary’s close friend who tried to kill him, though in that case it was also part of the job.
Both Leary and Horrigan resist psychological reductionism, and as a result both accept the principle of retribution. Leary accepts that he must die for what he has done, but he refuses to allow the government, which hired him only to betray him, to finally get away with his execution. Instead, he reinvests Frank with the ideals that they had both once believed the government stood for, until the government proved them wrong: it is not the job of a government agent to commit murder. The principles of justice that are betrayed in the very job description of a wet boy were themselves redeemed, insofar as Frank refuses revenge in favor of retribution, a legal concept. As Leary drops voluntarily to his death, he does so knowing that Horrigan—his “friend”—has succeeded where he failed. The last scene is a reenactment for both of them: Leary leads Horrigan in a carefully choreographed dance to redeem Horrigan’s “pathetic little life,” even as Leary accepts the death appropriate to the crimes he has committed.
It is the attachment with Leary, the passion for their shared ideals—and therefore for the relationship rather than the game—that takes us into the entanglement of the trauma and redemption of Horrigan, a redemption that demands the kind of tragic sacrifice of which Leary was clearly capable. Whatever remains of the Leary that existed before his life as a wet boy is invoked and redeemed in his death as a man. He leaves Horrigan behind to have a chance at the kind of life he could never have. By sacrificing himself willingly, he has pulled the darkness into himself so that it does not eat away at Horrigan anymore. This is a significant twist on the traditional end of the doppelganger film, in which the hero is freed by destroying the symbol of his own darkness. Here Leary takes responsibility for his own death, freeing Horrigan not by an act of vengeance but by accepting the retribution due him, which is death. By treating him as a man still within the law whose life he must save, Horrigan symbolically recognizes that Leary is not a monster.
Blood Work,13 once again a film directed by Eastwood, opens with the renowned FBI agent Terry McCaleb (Eastwood) in pursuit of a serial killer who is clearly engaged with him and leaves him notes at the scene of each murder. Indeed, one of McCaleb’s fellow agents jokes, “Another love note? The two of you should get a room.” McCaleb is hot on the killer’s trail, so hot that he has a heart attack while trying to climb the fence that the killer has successfully jumped. The incident effectively ends his career, because even though he is fortunate enough to get a heart transplant, his superiors do not think him fit to return to his duties.
But McCaleb’s quiet retirement is very quickly interrupted. He has hardly recovered from his operation when Graciella Rivers (Wanda De Jesus), a young Chicana asks him to look into the murder of her sister, Gloria, who, as Rivers explains to his surprise and horror, was the donor of his new heart. Because her sister’s heart saved McCaleb’s life, Rivers believes he is obligated to at least look into the case, which the police have dropped with no leads. McCaleb cannot help but see some reason in her argument.
Because most police officers are reluctant to invite a high-profile FBI agent onto their turf, McCaleb seeks the help of Detective Jaye Winston (Tina Lifford), a young African American woman officer whom he helped to gain a promotion. Here we see, again, the Eastwood character relying on a woman, in this instance a black woman, whom he treats as an equal, as one who is worthy of sincere respect. He was, as Winston puts it, her “membership into this goddamn boys’ club,” and she agrees to reciprocate with whatever help she can in acquiring records on this murder. While she finds at least one other murder that may involve the same killer, McCaleb is unable to identify the relationship between the two murders, and he is in no position physically to pursue the investigation alone. Thus, he winds up soliciting his neighbor, Jasper “Buddy” Noone (Jeff Daniels), to act as his assistant and driver. Thrilled to be McCaleb’s sidekick, Buddy eagerly accepts the opportunity.
Indeed, McCaleb needs all the help he can get. They follow a number of false leads, but even the fruitless search has such a great toll on McCaleb that his doctor threatens to stop treating him if he does not start looking after his health. But by this time he feels a deep ethical obligation to the woman whose heart he bears, and guilt over the reality that he wouldn’t have received the heart if someone hadn’t done this “evil hateful thing.” Despite an unpromising absence of leads, he begins to believe that the heart inside him wants so badly to find the killer that he cannot stop. He relies on Rivers’s advice: “You have Gloria’s heart. She will guide you.”
Gradually, McCaleb begins to realize that there are connections between his previous work and the murders under investigation now—including Gloria’s, which he begins to believe was committed to provide him with the heart he needed to survive. In a related murder, the killer intentionally mouths “Happy Valentine’s Day” into an ATM security camera, confirming McCaleb’s theory about the rationale for the murders—but the man in that case died too quickly for doctors to harvest his organs, and the murderer had to try again. It becomes clear later on that he stayed by Gloria’s side after killing her, tending to her until an ambulance could arrive and billing himself as a Good Samaritan who had discovered the scene. To McCaleb’s horror, he realizes that both victims are dead because the love-note killer is back—and this time he has killed purely to put McCaleb back in the game. Indeed, McCaleb cannot back out now; he remarks, “I am alive because she is dead, and that cuts me into this in a big way.” As he tells Winston, “He missed the action. Me and him. To get it back I needed a new heart. So Happy Valentine’s Day.” But now that McCaleb is back, the killer goes on a new killing spree, begging to be pursued, perhaps to be caught.
Meanwhile, McCaleb is drawn further into his relationship with Rivers, but as they move toward their first sexual encounter, he does not exhibit the self-assured, conquering attitude common in Hollywood men. Before they sleep together, we see McCaleb examining his deeply scarred body in the mirror, doubting his own attractiveness and desirability. This kind of self-critical gaze is usually associated more with women than with men. Nothing here resonates with the perfect, phallic male body—and McCaleb’s body is not wholly masculine any longer, because it now contains a woman’s heart.
As McCaleb continues to struggle with the realization that Gloria’s death was a gift for him, he becomes even more terrified to discover that Rivers and Gloria’s son have gone missing. Reflecting frantically on his investigation, he finally begins to piece things together, realizing at last that “Buddy”—who renamed himself Jasper Noone—was the serial killer all along. Rushing to Buddy’s boat, he asks him to lift his shirt. Buddy does, revealing a bullet wound verifying that he is the man McCaleb shot the night he had the heart attack. Buddy, of course, wants McCaleb to be as excited as he is that they are now back in the game. They begin to struggle, but Buddy pulls a gun and tells McCaleb that if he ever wants to see Rivers and her nephew alive, he had better let him go, leaving them as they were and perpetuating the game of the chase. He tells McCaleb, “I’ve been a watchdog for you, getting you back to where you need to be. What did you say in the car the other day? You felt connected again? I almost came when you said that.” He also reminds him, “I could have killed you if I wanted to, Terry (. . .). I gave you life.”
Buddy continues, “I want you to live. I want me to live. I want all that battle again—me and you, Cain and Abel, Kennedy and Oswald. We’re shit on the bottom of each other’s shoes. I hope you think of me as often as I’ll think of you.” He intends these to be his parting words, but the two men struggle again and McCaleb gets off a shot into Buddy’s leg. He demands that Buddy take him to Rivers and the boy. Buddy taunts him with his relationship to Rivers: “You think Gloria ever thought that her heart would be pumping blood in some guy who’s banging her sister?” But he also reassures him that the hostages are safe, if only because the boy has the same blood type as McCaleb. It turns out that they are prisoners on the same boat, and when McCaleb finds them, he sends them away on a boat, hoping to protect them from his final battle with Buddy. Indeed, Buddy soon meets his end, falling into the water after struggling with McCaleb because he is in no shape to flee. McCaleb actually pushes him under, and Buddy’s last words to him are, “I saved you.” McCaleb’s ironic response, as he pushes him under, is “Thanks, pal.”
McCaleb has now inherited not just a relationship, but also a family. Indeed, when Winston, who has been so respectful of his avowed responsibility to Gloria, asks him how he will cope with the obligation to his newfound family, he says sincerely: “I have Gloria Rivers’s heart. I’ll probably just let that guide me.”
Clearly this conclusion is a more traditional ending to a doubling film than we saw in In the Line of Fire; McCaleb kills Buddy in an all-too-familiar act of baptismal redemption and the double dies so that he can free him from a game rooted in projected identification. But as in Tightrope, the Eastwood character’s relationship with his female counterpart forms an entirely different track or subplot to the film. It is that different track—not the death of the double—that completely disrupts any pretense of phallic wholeness restored after the death of the double. McCaleb’s new family gives him a glimmer of hope for redemption. But before we return to his relationship to this new family, as well as to his own new heart, we need to look more closely at the erotic relationship between McCaleb and Buddy.
The eroticism we saw between Leary and Horrigan was much more understated in the form of Leary’s passionate obsession with Horrigan’s life and Frank’s implicit hope that he can redeem himself by meeting Leary’s challenge. But in Blood Work the erotic charge is perfectly explicit: Buddy’s sexuality is entirely and consciously caught up in his relationship to McCaleb. His love of the game is not enough, because he cannot accept that anybody less / equal can play with him, not only McCaleb; that is why he takes extreme measures to ensure McCaleb’s survival. Buddy has chosen him as his one true partner—and of course he expects McCaleb to embrace him, in his own way, in turn. Thus, although the double dies in that sentimental, baptismal way, the doubling relationship between the two men is as perverse as the one we saw in the last film. Buddy can only hang on to something of his own manhood through the clichés of good and evil played out as a crime drama. In this way he is a much more banal character than Leary and much more inclined to speak in cliché. Also, though we know details from Leary’s past, we do not know anything about Buddy’s past trauma, which in an important sense makes him a much less compelling antagonist. It is not surprising, therefore, that Eastwood never has us see the world through Buddy’s eyes as we see the world through Leary’s, except for a few brief moments when Buddy gazes lovingly at McCaleb. Although his story remains more ambiguous, Buddy’s reaching out for McCaleb reminds us again that even the most shattered man seeks to salvage some of his masculinity through a projected identification with another man.
Of course, by arguing that both of these films portray strong erotic relationships between men, I do not intend to say that the subplot of these films implies some association between homosexuality and criminality. That would be far too simplistic. In In the Line of Fire, the traumatic subtext is made much more explicit; Leary’s distorted friendship with Horrigan is his only way out of the trauma he endured as a wet boy. And in Blood Work, the eroticism of the game still upholds, if only as shattered remnants, the ideals of friendship in which men bolster the ideals of masculinity. Here a fractured masculinity has literally turned into fetishism as the Buddy claims a trophy to signify his conquest over each of his murder victims.
As in Tightrope, there is another track to Blood Work, in which McCaleb actually seeks a new life or a psychic rebirth after the trauma of his heart transplant. Shown in all his vulnerability when he examines his scarred body in the mirror, McCaleb dubiously tries to understand why Rivers could possibly still desire him. Again, these are not the actions of the macho Hollywood man. McCaleb behaves in a manner that is typically associated with female stereotypes as he attempts to reconstruct himself both psychically and physically. There is no simple assumption of phallic wholeness here. We are very far from the relationship between the masculine body and a projected ego ideal that purportedly gives us the image of a man absent of any form of vulnerability. To quote Anthony Easthope:
The most important meanings that can attach to the idea of the masculine body are unity and permanence. . . . [T]he self finds its identity in its bodily image. Very clear in outline and firm in definition, the masculine image of the body appears to give a stronger sense of identity. From David to Tarzan and on to Superman, Captain Marvel, He-Man, Action Man, and Conan the Barbarian, the young male body is used to present not just the self as it is but as it would like to be. Not just the ego, but the ego ideal. The pleasure of the usual representation of the masculine body usually appeals to a narcissism in which images of the hard-trained body purportedly live up to the ego-ideal of a man who is dependent on no others, firm and whole in himself. These bodies, in other words, return to the male gaze a narcissistic fantasy of how the viewer would like to see himself.14
But McCaleb has to accept his vulnerability because of the reality that he is no longer whole. The physical condition of his body undermines any easy conflation of the ego-ideal. When we witness McCaleb in front of the mirror, we understand the integral connection between McCaleb’s vulnerability and his metaphorical and literal embrace of the feminine other, which, now that McCaleb has a woman’s heart, is literally a part of him.
Much has been written about how what human beings commonly understand as masculinity and femininity are in fact constructed roles that we play, roles that always fall apart when they come against the inarticulable ideals of who and what we are supposed to be.15 But here Eastwood the director suggests that once a man’s heart has been replaced by a woman’s, the man’s masculinity is by definition no longer whole, and the feminine other has been integrally woven into whatever wholeness the man can hope to reclaim. If we want to employ the popular belief that recognizes we are never completely male or female but are in fact transgendered, then McCaleb is no longer simply masculine in the fantasized sense of a body undergirded by an ego-ideal. He refers again and again to the idea that Gloria’s heart will guide him—explicitly embracing the feminine within him.
The initial shock and guilt McCaleb experienced when he learned that his heart belonged to a murdered woman created in him the forceful obligation to pursue her murderer. He understands that, in a way, he was responsible for her murder. She died for him. But when he awakens to the possibility of new life and psychic rebirth by moving beyond the defensive belief that masculinity is everything that is not woman, his identity is radically shattered. In almost all schools of psychoanalysis, it is now commonplace to argue that masculinity forms in young children as an ideal inseparable from the refrain “I am not a woman”—so that everything feminine must be rejected and externalized in order to project a fully masculine presence. This reality underscores the significance of McCaleb’s achievement in constructing a more wholesome masculinity, one that develops out of the integration, not the rejection, of the feminine other.
In one of his most provocative pieces of work, the thinker Jacques Derrida speaks of lovance as the opening up of one human being to the heartbeat of another.16 Blood Work takes this metaphor to its highest degree of symbolic realization, implanting the heartbeat of a feminine other into a living male chest. That heart changes how McCaleb sees the world, how he feels about himself, and indeed how he feels about women. He can no longer see women as the mysterious abjected other, because he sees that a women has given him life—literally, as well as the possibility of love for another.
Sudden Impact17 is the only Dirty Harry movie that Eastwood directed, and in many ways it follows the series formula. In spite of the film’s formulaic aspects, it is different because, again, Eastwood explores the profound impact that a woman’s trauma has on the male protagonist, shaking off, in the process, his easy convictions about the relationship between justice and retribution. As is often the case in Dirty Harry movies, Harry Callahan (Eastwood) has alienated his superiors by not following the exacting procedures of the legal system, taking it to the point where they send him to São Paulo for a while—a break from the hard streets of San Francisco. True to form, however, Dirty Harry has barely arrived in São Paulo when fate sends the criminal element his way: Callahan has to take down a robber by hijacking a bus full of senior citizens, ultimately saving a cop who will later help him with the case that drives the action of the film.
Indeed, something seems to chase Harry all the way to São Paulo, as he quickly discovers a murder very much like one that occurred in San Francisco just before he left. The police find a man shot twice, first in the genitals and then in the head; it seems all too obvious that this is the second in a chain of serial murders. Callahan cannot help but get involved. Meanwhile, the audience already knows the secret: an artist, Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), is responsible for both murders and she will continue killing. She plans to track down each of the men who, years before, brutally raped her and her sister in São Paulo. She whispers her plan to her sister, Beth, who has been in a silent, vegetative state since the day of the rape. “It was like I was outside of myself,” Jennifer says over her, “above me looking down. Then he touched me. And I killed him. Beth? I love you.” Beth is unable to respond to her sister’s dramatic revelation, but her speech serves to complicate the audience’s straightforward moral understanding about right and wrong, good and evil.
Spencer’s job in São Paulo has great symbolic significance. She paints old, decrepit hobbyhorses from a run-down fairground, refurbishing them for the carousel. The amusement park for which they are destined, moreover, was, years ago, the site of her rape. It was dilapidated and abandoned, but now she is participating in its restoration. The woman who hired her remarks, “It must give you great of satisfaction to make old, ugly things right again.”
Furthermore, traditionally in English literature, the hobbyhorse is a symbol for the penis, suggesting even more symbolic irony: Spencer creatively reworks the penises of the men whose organs she destroys. Her own paintings, however, are more deeply colored with the trauma and anguish of her experience; she does not attend the opening of her own art show, because, though she can paint graphic representations of her trauma, she cannot face it directly. At this point, she can only take that anguish and turn it on its head, throwing it in the faces of those who caused it without giving them a moment’s pity or remorse. When one rapist begs for his life, stressing he has moved on to a respectable life as a businessman since those events took place so long ago—making a thousand excuses about his drunkenness, his age, and peer pressure—she simply ignores his pleas. She shoots him, coldly, first in the genitals and then in the head.
Callahan first meets Spencer when, in an apparent coincidence, his dog knocks her off of her bicycle. Of course, he has no idea about her involvement in the murders, but as he explores São Paulo he begins to put together important pieces of the puzzle. He learns something about the gang rape that is the real beginning of the story, and he begins to suspect that important members of the town are involved in aa complex cover-up hiding the truth about what happened and who was involved. Moreover, it quickly becomes personal. When Callahan’s friend Horace King (Albert Popwell), a black cop with whom he has worked many times, comes to visit, King is brutally murdered—but not, it would seem, by the serial killer. We later find out that he was killed by one of the rapists, and some of his criminal sidekicks, all related in one way or another to the group of men who committed the rape.
As anybody who has seen a Dirty Harry movie will know, Harry Callahan never has an easy relationship with justice as represented by most police departments and public prosecutors. Relating his endless troubles with his superiors to Spencer, he describes them as “questions of methods. Everybody wants results, but nobody wants to do what they have to do to get them done. I do what I have to do.” Spencer replies sincerely, “I’m glad, Callahan. You are an endangered species. This is an age of lapsed responsibility and defeated justice. An eye for an eye means only if you get caught, and even then it’s indefinite postponement—let’s settle out of court. Does that sound profound, or just boring?” Callahan is clearly on her side, at least when it comes to a belief in lapsed responsibility and defeated justice. As he unknowingly relates his theory about the connection between the murders and the rape, Jennifer presses him about his understanding of revenge. “You don’t approve?” she asks. Callahan responds simply, “Until it breaks the law.”
Gradually unraveling the mysteries hidden by the town, Callahan finds a group photo that includes, he believes, the rapists and others connected to the rape. (The photograph belongs to the Chief Lester Jannings (Pat Hingle), the chief of police, confirming Callahan’s suspicions of corruption in the channels of local justice.) Tracking down the people in the photo, he comes to suspect that the next victim may be a woman named Ray Parkins (Audrie J. Neenan), who is possibly a lesbian but also clearly interested in Mick (Paul Drake), one of the leaders of the gang rape. Parkins taunts Callahan and calls him names, leading to a rather physical altercation with him; she also suggests tangentially that Spencer may somehow be implicated in the story. Indeed, Spencer murders Parkins not long after Harry leaves, and then she heads to the beach where she stares at the ocean, struggling with what she is doing.
Callahan finds Spencer at the beach and takes her home, where they begin a sexual relationship and he becomes more intimate with her distraught, pained artwork. He notices one of her paintings, a face in total anguish, and he also spots a shattered mirror, which was destroyed when Spencer attempted to paint her own anguished self-portrait. She quickly covers the work, remarking that she doesn’t drink with her critics. But as Callahan examines the shattered mirror, his face exhibits a growing recognition that Jennifer Spencer is deeply troubled. The inability to see one’s self after surviving a horrible trauma, such as gang rape, has been discussed time and time again. The familiar face in the mirror and the apparent wholeness of the body belie the psychic destruction that makes the victim feel like she has been torn to pieces inside. The seemingly normal face, the same face of the victim who was assaulted and damaged, seems to betray her because it refuses to reflect the horror that eats her up every minute. That face, ironically, prevents her healing because it will not admit that any damage has been done, hence Spencer’s attempt to paint a self-portrait that speaks the truth about her inner torture. Callahan begins to confirm his suspicions about Spencer, checking the plate on her car as he leaves. He recognizes it as a vehicle he spotted outside Ray Parkins’s place the night before. It must be clear to him now that Spencer is the murderer, but he does not immediately attempt to arrest her.
That same day, Spencer seeks out her next target, the police chief’s son, and now we see how and why the rape was so effectively covered-up and ignored. She finds the son in a vegetative state, which is strikingly similar to the state in which her sister lives. At this moment, the Chief Jannings discovers her but does not move to capture her. Instead, he explains that his son could never live with what happened, that guilt over the rape had eaten him up inside, until one night he had deliberately crashed his car in a failed attempt at suicide. Jannings admits that he had done something terribly wrong when he tried to protect his son from the consequences of his crime let the other rapists go free. He is profoundly repentant for his wrongdoing, explaining that he had hoped to shield his son because the boy was all he had after his wife had died giving birth. Tragically, the chief’s loving impulse had backfired against so many of those involved, perhaps most poignantly against his son, who had desperately wanted to pay the appropriate price for a crime that had no moral rationale. Spencer’s exhaustion and the chief’s sincere outpouring of grief and remorse seem to open her heart a little bit, to the point where she seems almost willing to walk away and end it all.
But at that moment Mick and his gang break in to violently drag Spencer away. Jannings tries to redeem himself by doing the right thing, pulling a gun on Mick in an attempt to save Spencer, but he is too slow and Mick kills him instead. The gang drags Spencer away to the amusement park that was the scene of her original trauma. Here, it is all too clear, she will be raped again; and this time Mick will surely kill her, finishing the job. Earlier that evening Mick and his sidekicks had attacked Callahan directly, beating him to unconsciousness and throwing him into the ocean where they left him for dead. Naturally, of course, Dirty Harry will not go down so easily: pulling himself to safety, he knows now that Mick will go for Spencer next; and he also understands the criminal mind of a man like Mick well enough to know that there is only one place he would take his victim for their final reckoning.
At the amusement park, Spencer struggles against her attackers, but Mick seems to be overtaking her just as Callahan shows up to save the day. This is, of course, one of those fantasy rescuer scenes that have made Dirty Harry movies notorious. The fog clears, and we see Harry’s powerful form striding slowly out of the fog, aiming his mighty Magnum .44 at Spencer’s assailants. Mick attempts to escape onto the roller coaster, holding Spencer as a hostage, but Callahan successfully gets him in his sights and—in a stereotypically mythic shot—takes him down. Mick meets an ironic ending, falling off the coaster to be impaled on the shaft of a carousel horse. Perhaps there is no more fitting end for a man who thought, stupidly, that his penis was invested with the phallic power that could make him invincible, beyond the reach of the law and morality alike.
Callahan has called in backup, and the police arrive on the scene to clean up and continue the investigation. Spencer challenges Callahan: “What happens now?” He begins, “I guess now I have to”—but she interrupts him with a furious tirade.
Read me my rights? And what exactly are my rights? Where was all this concern for my rights when I was being beaten and mauled? And what about my sister’s rights, when she was brutalized? There is this thing called justice—and was it justice when they all just walked away? You’d never understand, Callahan.
But perhaps he does understand. Harry’s young cop friend walks over with Spencer’s gun, which Mick stole and which the police found in his hand when he died. Callahan is faced with an existential decision, and he tells the officer that if he checks out the gun, he will find that it was used in all of the serial killings; Callahan makes Mick culpable for the murders that really happened because of him. “So it’s over?” the officer asks. Callahan replies, “Yeah. It’s over.”
As Callahan leads Spencer away by the elbow, she is obviously stunned by what he has done. Her shock is significant; it emphasizes that the Callahan did not make the decision based on his personal affection for her. Indeed, the real contrast of this scene is between an ethic of retribution and an ethic of mercy. Spencer has systematically carried out her own brand of retribution, while as a character, Dirty Harry has always stood for the value of retributive justice against a system that is lenient and caught up in procedural snags—though up until now, it has not been portrayed as decidedly corrupt or backward. The outcome of this film, however, puts a deeply philosophical slant on our understanding of justice; According to Eastwood, retribution is necessarily based on a respect for a person’s ability to do the right thing, even against difficult circumstances and profoundly traumatic events. Even more importantly, true mercy is based on the same kind of respect.
As we have seen, the police chief’s son had genuinely desired that retribution be exacted against him for his crimes. He knows that he has committed a terrible crime, and he can only accept his father’s protection from justice by denying his own dignity as a moral human being. He can no longer live with himself, and he can no longer live with his father because the man refuses to offer him the respect of allowing him to willingly accept the blame for his crime. For this reason, his son can only exist in a sort of living death. Indeed, by denying his son the respect he desires—a kind of recognition, in Benjamin’s sense—Jannings deprives him of the sense that he is a moral subject who can decide his own way in the world. He traps his son in a moral riddle that transforms his assertions of agency into a self-hating masochism that can only lead to suicide.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant has written eloquently on retribution,18 and his ideas might explain the reasons why someone like Jannings’s son would actually desire retribution as an expression of his self-respect mediated through the respect he expects from others. For Kant, our dignity hinges on the possibility that we can imagine ourselves capable of doing the next right thing, no matter how tragic our circumstances and no matter how profound our trauma. Leary demands this same sort of dignity, as we saw in In the Line of Fire; in that he does not want to be reduced to a psychological profile, to a sum of psychological parts. Corrigan’s respect for Leary means that Corrigan can understand that his complex assassination plot is an attempt to bring the punishment he deserves down upon himself. The same respect makes it impossible to understand Leary’s fall into the elevator shaft as a pitiable act of suicide. Leary does not want anyone’s pity, least of all Corrigan’s, even though he is very forthright about how traumatized and damaged he has become as a result of his life as a wet boy.
It is important to note that Kant does not believe we can theoretically or empirically prove that we have free will. Indeed, quite the opposite is true: we cannot know with any certainty that we are free, and, just as significantly, we can never know ourselves as wholly determined. Free will, for Kant, remains a choice that we must decide whether to act on, a choice left open to each of us because we can never be reduced to any particular theory about ourselves. We can always decide what to do next, and we can always take ourselves as free in making that decision. Thus, to reduce someone to a causal explanation, even an explanation that purports to “understand” that person—as Chief Jannings restricts his son’s response to his crime—is for Kant deeply disrespectful, because it denies that person the sense of agency that we ascribe to ourselves and expect others to respect. In Kant’s view, we all possess a propensity for evil, because it is integrally tied to the possible freedom of moral action. Each one of us, then, because we can act as if we were free—and the as if here is crucial—can also imagine what it would mean not to do the next right thing.
Of course, Kant also recognizes human frailty, which is one of the reasons why, as phenomenal creatures, we do not always do the right thing, even when we know very clearly what it is. Chief Jannings’s frailty in Sudden Impact is actualized through his love for his son. He knows that retribution demands that he turn his son over to the courts for judgment, but he cannot bring himself to go through with it. Tragically, his effort to save his son from retribution is turned on its head when his son punish himself on his own—and the punishment he chooses is in all likelihood far worse than what a jury would have mandated.
Mercy, according to Kant, is often associated with our common understanding that we are all vulnerable to evil, but if we do not allow mercy to devolve into pity, then it too must be grounded in our respect for the person’s capacity to do right.19 But even though we know ourselves as creatures who are free to obey the moral law, we fail to do the right thing because we are frail and because, according to Kant, our perversity of heart leads us to sometimes deliberately defy the moral law. Directed by these impulses, In the Line of Fire’s Leary knows exactly what he is doing and wants Corrigan to recognize that he does it freely, out of perversity of heart rather than out of a determined psychology, because, paradoxically, his deliberate violation of moral law allows him to reclaim a fragment of his self-respect against the various medical analyses that turn him into nothing more than a subject of psychological analysis. In this sense, Leary defies the possibility of a mercy based in pity or understanding by insisting throughout that he wants to do wrong, he wants to defy the very ideals that have betrayed him.
Leary resists the common understanding of mercy, which supposes that the more we understand about a person, the more we know about his life history and the trauma he has experienced, the more we can understand his transgressions as a natural outgrowth of his past. We can put ourselves in his shoes, adopting what Martha Nussbaum has called “the equitable attitude,” in which we come to see ourselves in his position and are compelled to admit that in similar circumstances we might have reacted the same way. Nussbaum writes:
Mercy also involves identification. If I see Oedipus as one whom I might be, I will be concerned to understand how and why his predicament came about; I will focus on all those features of motive and agency, those aspects of the unfortunate operations of chance that I would judge important were I in a similar plight myself. I would ask how and why all this came about—and ask not from a vantage point of lofty superiority, but seeing his tragedy as something such as might happen in human life, in my own life. Tragedy is thus a school of equity, and therefore of mercy.20
By point of comparison, others have argued that retributive justice is mitigated by understanding because certain objective circumstances undermine the exercise of free will, seeing it as a naturalized concept, as an agency contingent upon circumstances favorable to its development and actualization.21 Although a full discussion of this argument is beyond the scope of this chapter, I have consistently rejected a naturalized conception of free will, arguing instead that Kant’s position should be read as an interpretation of the limits of theoretical knowledge about human beings. We simply cannot believe that a person’s actions are reducible to the result of causal chains that can effectively predict whether or not he will, in fact, do the next right thing, even when those chains are rooted in trauma. In other words, we can always see ourselves as capable of making a decision, or else we must see ourselves as incapable of any decision at all, and it is the latter perspective that Kant rejects as inherently disrespectful for ethical reasons.22
Interestingly enough, if we follow Kant’s concept of understanding, in Sudden Impact Callahan never attempts to “understand” Spencer. He does not create his own psychological explanation to deny her ferocious insistence that she freely acted to exact vengeance for a crime never punished by the official channels of the law. Indeed, her challenge to Callahan both recreates and inverts Leary’s assertion of agency from In the Line of Fire—where Leary intentionally assaulted the ideals he had at one time upheld, where he does wrong because he cannot meaningfully do right. Spencer invests her murders with a moral rightness that flies in the face of justice gone wrong. But Callahan’s merciful silence about her actions arises not out of understanding, but rather out of a respect for her assertion of rightness in the context of what he cannot understand. Moreover, because Spencer takes responsibility for her actions, and because they have a moral rather than a natural cause, he can regard her as a human being who is not simply “prone,” in some psychological sense, to violence. What he “understands” is that she has taken responsibility for her trauma and she has seen it through to a resolution. Therefore, he need not fear that she will kill again.
In a sense, then, Callahan’s proclaiming “It’s over” both recognizes the fact that Spencer has achieved closure and asserts his own moral claim, which he holds against Spencer as the single condition for his mercy. She must continue to take responsibility for what she has done, and she must live her life in a way that makes her retributive killing spree meaningful. As a consequence, she must also close off her claim to independence from the law. As Callahan told her earlier, revenge that breaks the law is morally unacceptable; but he has also listened carefully to her angry tirade against “justice” and “rights” as they are commonly understood—and he has perhaps realized that the very system of justice that he upholds retains a profound masculine bias. To quote Paul Smith,
Although this may seem like another traditional Hollywood move to find a higher law that goes against the written law, it is irreducible precisely because of Callahan’s understanding that her rights have indeed not been recognized. Rather, I want to point out how the alliance with the woman necessitates a particular kind of recognition, that the law that Callahan has been enforcing is indeed a matter amongst men and that it normally excludes women and their interests. . . . This is of course a critical moment and a radical one in that it marks a kind of problematic disjuncture between, on the one hand, the law; and the man’s heroic service-man relationship to it; and on the other hand a femininity that demands a satisfaction that cannot be given legally.23
The radicalism here lies in Callahan’s recognition that the law does not have the moral authority to exact retribution against a woman, precisely because it is too closely related to a masculine imaginary—what Smith calls the “amongst men”—that tragically trivializes rape. Thus, Callahan and Spencer meet at the limits of a theoretical system of law, a point to which the law simply does not reach; here they meet as two moral individuals who respect that they are both independent agents of a moral law that we all participate in creating.
Callahan does not trivialize Spencer as a woman who was raped and has played out the inevitable consequence of that event, and he does not have the hubris to claim that he can identify with her, as if he could, as a man, understand what it means for a woman to be brutally raped. Instead, his act of mercy has the character of humility, but a humility strikingly different from the one Nussbaum described, for this is not the humility of a man who claims to understand but rather the humility of a man who knows he can never understand. His humility comes out of his critical recognition that the law commonly functions as a matter amongst men, so it falters systematically when it attempts to encompass the rights and agency of women.
In each of these films, Eastwood recognizes of the problems that derive from a man’s alliance with femininity and feminism against the limits of law. In The Gauntlet (1977), an earlier film about a failed cop who escorts a prostitute to testify against a mafia boss, Eastwood first began exploring this theme in a much more indirect way than in Tightrope, Blood Work or Sudden Impact. The female protagonist, Gus Mally (Sandra Locke), who chooses to go by a masculine nickname, takes up her own tirade against the complete corruption of the police, including the police officer who is driving her and Ben Shockley (Eastwood) into a setup. She suggests that most cops are a lot like prostitutes, but less honest because they sell themselves to the Man while pretending to have integrity. She attacks the driver’s sexuality, railing against what she sees as a generalizable masculine imaginary—and in every way Mally’s tirade breaks up the fantasized phallic male point of view by disrupting it from a woman’s perspective, through a woman’s voice. In Sudden Impact Spencer’s abrupt interruption of Callahan when he begins to read her Miranda rights has a similar but much more profound effect; it shatters his fantasized masculine point of view from the perspective of authority and undermines the idealized self-image of the upstanding serviceman of the law.24
In all of these films, masculine sexual violence is pervasive, transcending even boundaries of class. In Tightrope, as well, sexual aggression and sadistic sexual behavior are profoundly related to the masculine unconscious. The struggle to realign this masculinity so that it is not a threat to women haunts all of these films, but especially Tightrope. Still, Paul Smith in his study of the production work of Clint Eastwood is frustrated by the ending of Tightrope, because it seems to suggest an all-too-easy narrative out from what has otherwise been portrayed as a deep dilemma surrounding how masculinity becomes integrated with sexual violence. I disagree with his reading of the final scene, however, because it is not the kind of happy ending that Smith sees in it; instead, it offers only the barest glimmer of hope in the form of a newly available, shared symbolic space in which Block might reconfigure his relationship to his own sexuality. As I have applied Benjamin’s point, the only way to break up an imaginary that leads men to defend against their feminine side by ruthlessly pushing it out and brutalizing its reflection in others—particularly women—is to offer to share that psychic conflict in a mutual symbolic space. Therefore, it is neither a coincidence nor a cinematic distraction that Thibodeaux is an active feminist, because it is only through her feminism that she can help Block to free himself from frozen gender stereotypes by giving him the chance to safely play with his own sexuality. While there are many kinds of feminisms, Thibodeaux’s feminism—and certainly my own—is as much about freeing men as it is about freeing women.25
But we have also seen in these films a profound exploration of the erotic, if twisted, bond between fellow men who are desperately holding on to the ruins of masculine ideals. This eroticism is most profoundly depicted in Leary’s relationship to Corrigan, a relationship in which he not only demands respect and recognition but also the confirmation from Corrigan that Leary actually cares about him, because the two have shared the ideals that should have underscored their friendship—ideals that have, instead, led them to become enemies, at least in name. But, of course, Leary is at no time Frank’s enemy in a conventional sense, because we know that the restoration of Frank’s own masculine self-assurance is Leary’s central goal, even though he knows no restoration or redemption is possible for his own shattered life. It is an act of profound identification that makes him go after a president that he considers worthless, a crime he undertakes only so that Corrigan can have the chance to redeem himself. This gives back to Leary the only semblance of meaning in manhood that he can possibly find.
Although Buddy is not a strong character and we do not find an elaboration of his traumatic past—which would give him an opportunity to speak in the clichés that Hannah Arendt has associated with the banality of evil—he too has a profound identification with his antagonist, Terry McCaleb. Indeed, he cannot find meaning in his life without McCaleb and “the game,” as McCaleb calls it. So for the game to go on, Buddy must find McCaleb a heart. The real surprise, of course, is that the heart changes McCaleb in ways that Buddy cannot possibly imagine: the feminine, for McCaleb, ceases to appear as a projected other, becoming internalized both literally and metaphorically. By embracing his heart, McCaleb accepts his own feminine side, thereby posing a challenge to the simplified masculine ideals for which Buddy has admired him—and perhaps this is the reason why Buddy must finally escalate their game toward its inevitable conclusion. He knows he will not have any fun with an adversary who has become a family man, a nurturer rather than a fighter.
In these films, simplified phallic notions of masculinity are challenged in at least two categories: First, we have seen the ideals of masculinity that have been utterly corrupted by a government that holds them up only to abuse and degrade them. It is not, of course, that the ideals themselves are corrupt, but when they are left in ruins, they can only be revived through erotic connections doomed to devolve into violence. Second, masculinity is examined as an imaginary ideal that turns to violence when it leads men to defensively reject everything associated with the feminine. To take in the heart of a woman, as a metaphor, undermines the very notion of masculine wholeness, and it exposes an illusion that is dangerously associated with the trivialization of crimes that are as violent and psychically destructive as rape. Perhaps Eastwood’s struggle as a director to critically engage the very masculine personas with which he has been popularly associated—particularly from his early days as a cowboy—that has led him so profoundly to envision another kind of masculinity. Even so, he seems to have been dissatisfied with the apparent one-sidedness of his vision, pushing himself to take an even more surprising step by shooting an entire movie, Bridges over Madison County, from the perspective of a female protagonist. We turn in the next chapter to examine this new directorial turn.