As I have mentioned throughout the book, many of Eastwood’s most important meanings are captured in the dramatic details—in how he tells his story as much as what he tells. In Million Dollar Baby, for instance, the central narrative is told entirely from the perspective of a black man, whose voice we hear from almost the very beginning to the end when he closes the film with his own conclusions. It is almost unheard of for a Hollywood film to tell a white man’s story from the perspective of a black man who interprets the action for the viewer.1 We have also seen how Eastwood has profoundly redone the “colored” sidekick of the traditional Western, making him more of an equal of the white protagonist of Unforgiven. In this chapter we will discuss three films—White Hunter Black Heart, True Crime, and Bird—from very different genres and with very different narrative lines, but with one key feature in common: they all explore the issue of race. At least two of them also connect white racism to the hubris of masculine narcissism, which does not recognize limits and therefore tends to confuse fantasy with reality.
Before we turn to these films, however, I want to speak somewhat generally to the issue of race as it appears in the Dirty Harry films, though Eastwood directed only the last film in the series. As Dennis Bingham has correctly noted, the popularity of Dirty Harry among both white audiences and audiences of color has much to do with Callahan’s ambivalent relationship to authority.2 Even though Callahan has a badge, he clearly does not represent the establishment; he is rather a white working-class hero, who often aligns himself intentionally with society’s outsiders. As Bingham points out, in The Enforcer he even cooperates with a group of black revolutionaries.3 I agree with Bingham’s point that throughout the series, Callahan’s identification with minorities, outsiders, and even revolutionary groups is closer to white paternalism than to the kind of equality granted to Morgan Freeman’s characters in Unforgiven and in Million Dollar Baby. However, I would like to emphasize that whether Callahan’s associations with people of color reflect his own ambivalent antiestablishment attitudes or something deeper, they have clearly set him up in a position that is strikingly different from the stereotypical role of the white do-gooder. It would, of course, be somewhat ridiculous to claim that Harry Callahan or the Dirty Harry films are genuinely antiracist. Still, by the time he directs Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood has challenged in a variety of ways the cinematic conventions that dictate that white people tell the stories and black people are merely the minor characters the white people meet along the way.
In White Hunter Black Heart4 Eastwood plays director John Wilson, who is shooting a film on location in Africa, and the character Eastwood has created delivers a striking example of the hubris that is so integral to the white male narcissism, which we have discussed throughout this book. Wilson, it seems, has become so obsessed with the idea of shooting an elephant that he neglects the duties required to produce his own film; he puts them off time and time again while he indulges in his fantasy conquest. Pete Verrill (Jeff Fahey), a white screenwriter, becomes increasingly impatient with the constant delays in the making of the film; he is outraged as well about the director’s perverse fantasies of conquest and inhumane treatment of the Africans whom he drags along as guides. Ultimately, Verrill proclaims that the elephants Wilson wants to kill are possessed of far more dignity than he is.
The outcome of Wilson’s hunt is truly tragic. Finally within range of an elephant, Wilson tries to shoot it but fails, sending it on a violent rampage. His African guide bravely leaps in front of him to protect him from the attack, and the guide is brutally mauled as the elephant tosses him into the air. The elephant and Wilson survive; the black guide does not. The villagers are absolutely horrified and grief-stricken as they carry the body away for a burial ceremony, while Wilson finally returns to shoot his film. He slowly climbs into the director’s chair and gives the order to roll cameras at last.
Eastwood uses the role of director as a metaphor; it is just like white male narcissists to think that they can direct the world and its animals as if they are directing a film. Eastwood is, of course, a known critic of big-game hunting, but what he emphasizes in this film is the carelessness arising from the fantasy that the world can be owned and controlled, that everything that exists appears only as an object to be manipulated and used. Wilson confuses a job with an identity, and as he climbs back into the director’s chair, it is not at all clear whether he has learned anything at all. Business will go on as usual, though a man has suffered an unnecessary death in the service of Wilson’s aggressive ambition. His unconscious assumption of privilege both as a white man and as an individual who is crucial to the making of the film—at least in the eyes of his colleagues, who could not see how to go on without him—reflects a profound hubris, because he refuses to recognize the suffering it imposes on others.
The film is particularly interesting because it draws these parallels without portraying Wilson as an overt bigot or racist. Indeed, Wilson considers himself a liberal individual who treats people fairly. However, he clearly cannot see the African villagers as anything other than tools for his use, much as he considers it the duty of his actors and actresses to perform on his whim and therefore tolerate his endless delays. Eastwood shows us that racism and masculinity, as rooted in phallic fantasy, are in a sense two sides of the same coin; whiteness becomes a taken-for-granted sign of privilege, which comes with a fantasized authority.
True Crime5 explores a very different kind of masculine hubris. Steve Everett (Eastwood) is a womanizing reporter and recovering alcoholic with little remaining credibility after he stubbornly insisted on the innocence of a rapist who turned out to be undeniably guilty of the crime. Like John Wilson of White Hunter Black Heart, Everett has been careless in his treatment of others—including women, his employers, and the people who are affected by his writing—who unwillingly get caught up in his narcissistic fantasies: others seem to exist for him either incidentally or purely to satisfy his own purposes. Now that he has been relegated to human interest stories, he is assigned to interview Frank Louis Beechum (Isaiah Washington), a young black man who is awaiting execution for murdering a pregnant teenager years before.
Eastwood draws a clear contrast between Everett and Beechum by portraying each man in the context of his relationships with others. Beechum is doing everything he can to hold his family together. On the day before his execution, he comforts his daughter and tries to give his wife, Bonnie (Lisa Gay Hamilton), as much strength and love as possible. He is a good family man and a faithful Christian. The contrast to Everett’s womanizing and indifference to the feelings of those around him is striking indeed, but Everett is also committed at this point to righting some wrongs—including, if he can, the mistake he made in the rape case, which he attributes to his drinking. He quickly suspects that something has gone terribly wrong in Beechum’s case. He does not believe the man is guilty of murder, and this time he thinks he can prove it. His initial interest in cracking the case has nothing to do with freeing Beechum; he is thinking mainly about salvaging his own sagging career.
Only one eyewitness identified Beechum as the killer. When he interviews the witness, Everett realizes that the accountant could not possibly have seen a gun in Beechum’s hand, because there was a grocery stand that stood between the two men at the time of the incident. As we flash back to see the story unfold from the accountant’s point of view, we understand that he made a connection—black man and gun—without actually seeing what happened; and we understand that Everett can clearly see through the racist assumption, if only because he is desperately interested in a story that might salvage his career.
Everett, who quickly abandons the human-interest angle of the story, commits himself to a full investigation of the crime but endeavors to do it quickly, because Beechum does not have long to live unless Everett can prove his innocence in one day. Though Everett’s professional drive and instincts have been restored by the challenge, Eastwood continues to contrast his Everett’s carelessness in his personal relationships with Beechum’s unswerving devotion to his family. Everett tries to seduce a much younger reporter, against her objections, even as he continues an affair with his editor’s wife that increasingly strains his professional relationships. For all the impact on his work life, the affair apparently means nothing to him. It is a diversion, not a romance. In many of his relationships he seems to barely go through the motions of actual commitment or concern: while he agrees to take his young daughter to the zoo, she is treated to a whirlwind tour as he literally sprints past the exhibits, pushing her in a rented stroller into which she does not fit. She later falls out of the stroller and hurts herself. He rushed her through their day together, because he is so eager to question the accountant that he cannot brook any delays. Of course, we know that time is of the essence as Beechum’s execution approaches, and if Everett’s motive were really the pursuit of justice we could hardly be unsympathetic. But for now at least his only motive is to save his reputation as a journalist, so his impatience only bespeaks selfishness and narcissism.
When Everett learns that a third party was interviewed at the murder scene but supposedly saw nothing of the crime, he becomes convinced that it must have been the real killer. Desperately needing information but lacking the time to track it down himself, Everett hopes to learn more by raiding the files of the reporter who had worked on the case before him—the young woman he attempted to seduce, who has since been killed in a tragic accident. Breaking into her home, he is surprised to find her grieving father but in a classic display of indifference to others, he barely pauses to comfort the man, who goes on and on about the daughter he loved while Everett rifles unapologetically through her things. It is the father, however, who finds what Everett needs—the address of the other person who was present at the time of the murder.
Driving immediately to confront the mysterious witness, he is confronted by a group of rowdy black teenagers whose disruptive behavior is abruptly stopped by the middle-aged black woman living at the address. Everett remarks that he is relieved to find her still living there, to which she sarcastically responds, “Thought I might have moved to the suburbs?” He explains that he is looking for a boy, Warren, who turns out to be her grandson—and stresses that Warren may be able to save a man’s life. But the woman becomes angrier still—she says when a “nice white girl” is murdered, the police and the reporters all come around looking for the black man who did it, but when her neighbors die, no one comes at all. She retorts, “Well I seen a lot of innocent folk get killed in this part of town. But it’s funny, I ain’t never seen you ’round here before.” At last she tells Everett that her grandson Warren was also killed. Defensively, Everett tries to explain that he is just trying to get the facts—hoping that she might reveal some useful detail. But again she berates him: “I don’t remember you coming looking for the facts when he was killed. No one came around looking for the facts then.”
Everett heads home, defeated—without Warren he can think of no way to prove his case. His wife greets him and announces that she is leaving him. His casual mistress, the editor’s wife, finally turned on him. He tries to convince his wife that he has changed—that he will change—but she has heard all this before and she wants nothing more to do with him. Setting her wedding ring on the table, she tells him frankly, “If that were a bullet, you would be dead.” Taking the ring, he leaves in despair. At a dead end in his investigation and thrown out of his house, he falls back on alcohol and simply sits at a bar drinking and sulking. As he drinks, however, he is suddenly struck by part of Beechum’s story in which he recalled the murder victim fingering a necklace—a necklace identical to one Everett saw Warren’s grandmother wearing. At last he reconstructs the story as it must have actually taken place.
Warren, as his grandmother admits, was a junkie. In Everett’s reconstructed flashback, Warren confronted the victim at the store register, demanding the little money she has and her necklace as well. But she was reluctant to part with the jewelry, a cherished gift, so in agitation Warren fired his weapon, grabbed the necklace, and fled. But this was all after Beechum had arrived: he had spoken to the girl, to whom he had lent a small sum of money, but he had graciously agreed to wait to be repaid. The murder took place while he was in the bathroom, and he only ran out after he heard the shot. He actually did everything he could to save the girl’s life, but it was already too late—and at the worst possible moment the accountant walked in to find the black man, bloody and excited, stooped over the body of a dead white girl. He assumed the worst, though as Everett has already determined he could not have seen a weapon in Beechum’s hand. Of course, Beechum fled—but why wouldn’t he? A black man stooped over a dead white woman—in his mind, what chance did he have?
Having uncovered the truth, Everett must risk driving even though he has had a few drinks to fetch Warren’s grandmother and take her to the governor’s office in the desperate hope that Beechum can be saved. Fortunately, at this point Warren’s grandmother is more than happy to cooperate with Everett because she realizes that an innocent black man’s life is at stake, and she admits that she knew Warren had done something terrible without ever knowing what it had been. Frantically they drive to the governor’s mansion—and meanwhile, we watch in horrific suspense as Beechum is strapped into the lethal injection apparatus, as the first call comes in confirming that all appeals have been denied, and as the first vial of poison empties into his system. Indeed, the second tube begins to drain as the red phone finally rings—Everett made it, certainly with no time to spare.
The guard answers the phone, and his first words are “It’s too late.” The warden, Luther Plunkitt (Bernard Hill), however, who has clearly had doubts about Beechum’s guilt from the beginning, rushes to the table and rips the IV from Beechum’s arm. Bonnie Beechum pounds desperately on the glass outside the chamber, screaming for her husband to stay awake. Eastwood’s camera focuses on her wedding ring, reminding us, in these last moments, of the stark contrast between the Beechum and Everett families.
But we see no more. As the screen fades to black, we do not know whether Beechum lives or dies. Eastwood holds us in suspense, perhaps forcing us to consider the many moral implications of the similarities and differences between Beechum and Everett.
We fade back in to find Everett Christmas shopping, trying to find his daughter some toys but also trying to pick up the young female sales clerk. A few minutes later, he stands outside the store conversing with the African American Santa Claus who is about to end his shift—throughout the film Eastwood has worked with the belief in Santa Claus as a metaphor for rational faith and what it means to believe in miracles. At that moment we see Beechum at last, with his family—and we know that Everett succeeded in saving him. Of course, he never seemed to have much interest in whether justice was done. He was happy enough to restore his credibility and his career, to discover that he hadn’t lost his “nose” for the truth. In the end, did he care about saving Beechum? Or was he only trying to save himself? Has he learned anything about himself and his own masculine hubris, or is he still as caught up in his own narcissism as when the film began?
Eastwood gives us mixed signals pointing in both directions: Everett flirts with the clerk and loses his wife, but his faith in the truth has turned out to mean something and he has redeemed one of his earlier mistakes. The film ends with a shot of Everett walking away to the tune of a song titled “Why Should We Care?” If Eastwood provides the glimmer of an answer, perhaps it is that by caring about others, or even just caring about the truth, men like Everett may stand the chance of breaking through an almost stereotypical masculine indifference to others to discover some-thing—anything—bigger or better than themselves.
Is True Crime explicitly anti-racist? Certainly, as we have stressed throughout, the careless white man is contrasted intentionally with a devoted black family man—a blatant reversal of the all-too-common portrayal of black families as hopelessly dysfunctional. We should note a physical contrast between Everett and Beechum as well: while the critic Paul Smith complains that Eastwood’s Bird contrasts almost perfect white bodies with Charlie Parker’s declining physique6—a discussion to which we shall return shortly—in True Crime Beechum’s healthy body stands out against the white protagonist’s flabby waist and deeply lined features. More importantly, issues of race are subtly but consistently outlined throughout the film in a variety of themes and subtexts. The white accountant, of course, assumes that Beechum held the murder weapon because he is a black man who was found at the scene; and Warren’s grandmother underlines the white authorities’ indifference to murder when it happens in the black community—a regular, tragic affair. In the United States, at least, the death penalty is itself a highly racial issue, since the vast majority of the people we execute are black men.
Indeed, there is a certain hubris to the death penalty: we presume that we can so totally judge a man as to end his life. To disavow any possibility of identifying with him, along with any possibility of discovering that he is not guilty after all, is to deny our own flaws—even our own humanity. As we watch the vials of poison slowly drain into the body of Frank Beechum—killing him, as far as we know—he bravely locks eyes with his loving wife, and the full force of his death seems to condemn us all, as spectators, for tolerating a racist society in which we condemn so many young black men to die.
Eastwood’s love for jazz has never been a secret, so it was no surprise when he decided to honor one of the greatest saxophonists of all time, Charlie “Bird” Parker, with Bird,7 a film about Parker’s life and work. Eastwood covers his early life rather briefly, showing him first as a child and then as a young man playing every musical instrument he could find. Fading out, we flash forward to find Charlie “Bird” Parker (Forest Whitaker) nearing the end of his tragically short life; he comes home from a gig, drunk and despairing over the death of one of his children. His despair is so intense that he tries unsuccessfully to kill himself with iodine. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all that Parker himself may never have appreciated the talents that his admirers recognize so clearly.
A terrible fragility seems to accompany Parker’s kind of talent. Perhaps it is even a kind of symptom or side effect of intellectual or artistic distance from the world of convention, or the conventions of jazz as understood by others. Even the players who perform with Parker often find it too difficult to follow his original flights. In one of his early auditions, Parker takes off on his improvisational arc, only to be brought down by a drummer who is so frustrated by his inability to follow Parker that he tosses a cymbal at him to bring the young saxophonist back to earth. Throughout the film, Eastwood will come back to this moment to symbolize Parker’s interrupted originality and, indeed, his aloneness; he often substitutes another thrown object for the tossed cymbal, but he consistently reminds us that Parker pays a price for his originality.
Some critics (notably Paul Smith and Spike Lee)8 have accused Eastwood of overemphasizing Parker’s addiction to drugs and alcohol, undermining the depiction of his extraordinary musical genius. I think that this criticism is unfair, missing the significance of the thrown cymbal and the film’s engagement with what it means to struggle to survive as a musician; on the one hand Parker is recognized by clubs that are named in his honor but on the other hand he constantly struggles to find work. As Parker’s wife, Chan (Diane Venora), relates to his doctors after his suicide attempt, Parker is frustrated that he cannot find a wider audience to appreciate his music: bebop, as it was called, was still extremely controversial in the mainstream, and scary to many white people who rightly associated the music with black assertions of self, of independence. Throughout the film, Chan insists that her husband cannot be medicated or hospitalized, because he relies on his creativity and his passion for music—anything that interferes with his ability to fly, however well-intentioned, will become the ruin of him. Her appreciation and concern for him emphasizes the constant push and pull of drugs and creativity in Parker’s life: it would be difficult indeed to tell an authentic version of his story without speaking to his addictions and their complex relationship to his musical talents.
Hooking up with the young Red Rodney (Michael Zelniker), Parker tours the south with Rodney’s quintet. Here Eastwood has been accused of failing to emphasize the horrifying racism of the era. But of course Rodney must pass himself off as an albino—a white black—because the clubs would not allow an integrated band on stage, and Eastwood accurately presents the segregation of the clubs themselves: whites upstairs, black below. Elsewhere, the black men conceal themselves while Rodney buys groceries because the store has posted WHITES ONLY signs at the entrance. Still, the quintet’s musical tour is a huge success in the south, where African Americans eagerly respond to the innovative new forms that have their roots in the African musical traditions that were passed down through hundreds of years of slavery—and indeed these musical traditions expressed the heart and soul of the black struggle for freedom in the South.
Returning to New York, the black men struggle for an audience despite their talents, and Parker must play weddings and bar mitzvahs—the only gigs that Rodney can arrange for him, and the only way he can make a steady living. Meanwhile Parker and Rodney are hounded by crooked police who blackmail them for money and constantly harass them for names of junkies and drug dealers—more to collect on additional sources of dirty money than to get them off the streets. These and other problems associated with drugs are very much a part of Parker’s story. He endlessly grapples with his addiction as a demon he would like to tame, unsuccessfully attempting several times to overcome his chemical dependencies. Parker also does everything he can to scare Red Rodney away from drugs, just as Dizzy Gillespie (Samuel E. Wright) fights hard to help Parker in his own struggles. As Gillespie tells his friend in the film, speaking of white racists and racist society in general: “Deep down they like it if a nigger turns out unreliable. I won’t give them the satisfaction of being right. I’m a leader, a reformer, you are a martyr. They always remember the martyrs longer—but my secret is that if they kill me, it won’t be because I helped them.” But Parker’s “unreliability” is as much due to his isolated artistic originality as to his struggles with addiction: a perfectionist constantly obsessed with his own ideas, he seeks restlessly to find ever more original musical concepts and surprising new ways in which to express them. Flying as a bird above the world, he loses sight of the worldly obligations that would tie him down or clip his wings.
In her brilliant novel Jazz, Toni Morrison shows us that jazz is more than just a musical form: It is also an allegory for the very blackness and wildness that whites simultaneously seek out and reject in themselves. They project all that jazz onto the black Other.9 The music is both seductive and terrifying, and historically that meant that the most challenging aspects of jazz needed to be tamed before it could become acceptable in the white mainstream. But Parker desperately seeks out such acceptance, finding it for a time in Paris’s more experimental artistic climate—and to some degree even later on his more successful tours in the United States. As his biographer explains, a jazz musician is only as good as his last performance, but each performance fades too quickly from memory:
Bird may be the greatest, only he has to prove it. Over and over again. In clubs and in unheated dance halls, reeking of cheap perfume and sour sweating bodies, where the admission is $1.25 for studs and chicks are 50 cents. In cabarets and jazz clubs and places to jam, night after night, every night of the year, as he has been doing ever since he was fifteen years of age and stopped going to high school and became a full-time professional musician in Kansas City. Bird is like a heavyweight champion who cannot afford to lose a single bout. He cannot afford not to work, not to play, not to show. He can goof, fail to make the scene, but the only thing he cannot afford to do ever is lose.10
Indeed, Eastwood shows us the extraordinary effort it takes to be a jazz musician as talented and original as Charlie Parker—one solo at a time. Though some critics have charged that Eastwood does not foreground Parker’s music successfully enough, the fact is that Eastwood worked closely with Parker’s friends and survivors to ensure that almost all of the music we hear in the film is either Parker’s own rendition of the piece or an interpretation played by artists such as Red Rodney who knew him well enough to carry out his legacy as well as any musician can. Spike Lee’s criticism was particularly harsh, asserting that too much time was spent on the drugs and not enough on the music—but we rarely see Parker’s drug use at all. His continuing addiction is suggested by shots of paraphernalia at his bedside; there are no gratuitous depictions of the artist shooting up. Indeed, we might also note that Eastwood in no way associates substance abuse exclusively or even primarily with black men. As we have just seen in True Crime, many of his white characters have struggled with alcoholism, and theirs has not been the struggle of the frustrated artistic genius but rather the despair of white men who cannot handle the trauma of their own inevitable failure to live up to the absurd fantasies of white masculinity. Parker, however, deals with the paradoxical humiliation of a man whose talents outstrip the understanding of his audience and his colleagues alike—and he is regularly humiliated, as when he becomes so lost in his own world of music that a cymbal lands at his feet to awaken him to the fact that he is being laughed off the stage. Kenny Clark, a drummer, describes Parker’s brilliant innovations:
Bird was playing stuff we never heard before. He was into figures I thought I’d invented for the drums. He was twice as fast as Lester Young, and into harmony Lester hadn’t even touched. Bird was running the same way we were, but he was way out ahead of us. I don’t think he was aware of the changes he had created. It was his way of playing jazz, part of his own experience.
Parker himself discusses how he pushed himself, working for years to develop his own theories of jazz improvisation on the saxophone:
I’d been bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time. I kept thinking, there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night I was working over Cherokee, and as I did I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.11
Parker cared very deeply about the development and progression of jazz as an exciting, living art form. One of the saddest moments of the film is when Parker returns to one of his New York City haunts and listens in dismay as a younger jazz musician forsakes the edgy improvisational greatness of bebop for a catchy and repetitive style well-suited to the dancing of his primarily white audience.
Much has been written about how the early precursors of rock-and-roll were really “tamed jazz”—and Eastwood draws out the depth of Parker’s disappointment with these developments. Along with the death of his daughter, this shift in the music he loved—the music he helped to create—seems to press him into his final tragic decline. Feeling that he has lost touch with the world or that the world has lost touch with him, Parker succumbs to his addictions and his health deteriorates. As I have already written, Parker’s struggles as a musician and his struggle against drugs are, in a way, one and the same, though this should in no way be taken to mean that drug abuse is required in order to be a great jazz musician. Indeed, Dizzy Gillespie is among the few musicians rightly considered Parker’s peer, and he considered himself a lifelong reformer who refused drugs himself and educated others about what drugs do to the black community. While I have strongly disagreed with Spike Lee’s reading of Eastwood’s film, I profoundly respect Lee’s own work on jazz in which he effectively demonstrates the power of jazz independent from the personal trials of many of its greatest musicians. But to simply try to take drugs out of the life of Parker and some of the other great jazz musicians may be to create a kind of fantasy land in which the profound struggles of black jazz musicians are in a certain sense disregarded.
Perhaps on some level Spike Lee fails to understand Eastwood’s film as a true homage not just to an art form but to a personal hero, one whom Eastwood dutifully portrays in all of his brilliance and complexity. Of course, to some extent Lee’s unease seems to arise from concerns about the very concept of a white man making a movie about black music or, for that matter, about a black man whose life was marked in every way by his race as much as by his talent. We should take this concern seriously, as it strikes more to the heart of the issue than whether or not drugs should be omitted from the story of Parker’s life: had the same film been produced by a black director, we might be more at ease with the idea that he or she would be true to the historical realities of drugs in the black community without painting the picture with the paternalistic brush of white superiority. Still, our unease raises a question without answering it: does Eastwood, in fact, portray Parker’s addiction with the right combination of sensitivity and candor to make his engagement with drugs in the life of a black man historically and socially authentic?
I would argue that he does. Eastwood’s film depiction of Parker’s drug use is appropriate and authentic, I think, in a double sense: First, drug use was an integral part of Parker’s story as it was for so many jazz musicians (though Eastwood is careful to make it very clear that many others militantly refused drugs and alcohol). Second, it speaks truthfully about the present dilemmas of drugs in America’s urban black communities. Presenting the ethical and physical consequences of drug use candidly and honestly, Eastwood nevertheless refrains from adopting the stereotypes of white ideologues: Parker and his friends are not simply thuggish criminals who either do not know any better or do not care. On the contrary, they are intelligent men who understand their own addictions but cannot find any way to end them. Moreover, their drug use is connected not only to their complex relationship with their music but also very explicitly to the traumas of living under the heel of white racism. Indeed, the most despicable characters of the film are the white authorities who take advantage of these black men in their powerlessness rather than extending a hand to assist them. Thus, while we are correct to subject a white man’s film about a black man’s life to particularly careful scrutiny, I think that Eastwood’s homage to Charlie Parker ultimately passes muster.
Indeed, would it not have been the height of hubris to simply “whiten” the problem of drugs in Parker’s life, rather than attempting to understand his struggle within the subtle human context that connects his personal fragility to the very creativity that often puts him beyond comprehension? In this period, many jazz musicians like Parker felt that they were talking past the conventions of mainstream society—and if their music resembled a kind of madness to many offended ears, then the isolation imposed by this reception tended toward the kind of breakdowns that Charlie Parker and others endured. That thrown cymbal returns again and again to shatter his inspired rapture, ripping him violently back to earth, only to experience the taunts of those who did not appreciate him.
None of these films is explicitly anti-racist in the sense that it takes the fight against racism as its principal aim and motivation. Yet each illuminates Eastwood’s own engagement with race and the various issues facing white men (and women) as they confront it as an issue in their lives. In True Crime Eastwood contrasts the carelessness of a womanizing white alcoholic reporter’s relationships to the deep devotedness of a black family man’s relationship, challenging many of our stereotypes in his very profound portrayal of the decency and humanity of a black man who has been condemned by society to die for a crime he never committed. Some critics have accused Eastwood of using lighting and shadows in Bird to turn the features of Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker into a kind of monster. Rather, I think the lighting effects in Bird are better explained as Eastwood attempting to visually capture the extraordinary burdens of a man who felt, as his biographer explained, compelled to perform at the peak of his ability night after night, proving himself still a better and more original artist than he was the day before.
In White Hunter Black Heart Eastwood makes the integral connection between fantasized phallic masculinity in Wilson’s disregard for the lives and concerns of the people around him. The most tragic example of this is the African guide who dies to help Wilson fulfill his fantasy of shooting an elephant, but we also see Wilson’s lack of concern for others in the many technicians and actors who wait on his whim to do their jobs. He shows us that a white man’s racism is bound up in his narcissistic fantasies of himself as the omnipotent phallic hero; Wilson is so wrapped up in himself that he hardly bothers to notice the African people around him.
Eastwood never explicitly questions the realities of race, racialized thinking and categorization. He does not deconstruct the concept of race as a mere fiction, as some contemporary critics have done. He never calls on us to become “color blind” in the sense that this phrase has come to represent a mythic objective perspective outside the issues of race. And color blindness is undoubtedly a myth, because in the world as we know it considering oneself blind to color entails a special kind of hubris indeed. Moreover, as we know too well, only a white person can afford the luxury of pretending not to know what color means. But given the realities of race, in these three films Eastwood explores the complexity of how fantasies associated with white masculinity and the easy privilege that comes with it are integrally connected to the operations of racism.