ESSENTIAL READING: Beard on Eastwood

Beard breakdowns Gran Torino and its implications and those of the evolution of the Eastwood persona.  For someone who is not-so familiar with or even interested in Eastwood, it was still a fascinating read of this larger-than-life character/real person as well as American culture.

Excerpts:

But Walt's honourable military service to his country, whose flag hangs in front of his house and all around town, is not something he can be proud of. Patriotic pride keeps turning to acid in his mouth because his glorious wartime violence keeps presenting itself to him as a crime against humanity.

The symbolism of Walt's bequest of the Gran Torino to Thao, and the film's last shot of Thao behind its wheel driving away to the (truly regrettable) musical accompaniment of the director singing a sentimental song of his own composition, could hardly be clearer. Clint Eastwood has passed the best values of America to the Asian Other who embodies its best ideals. White America will just have to get over itself, although there remains the fact that its multicultural inheritors will take possession not through their own endeavours, but at the hands of Clint Eastwood, WASP Number One.

The nostalgia for a more stable and comforting time that's inscribed all over the incidentals of Walt Kowalski's life, habits, and environment is a nostalgia for something that never existed--a mythology cobbled together from shards and airbrushed stereotypes. Only in the ageing of his body has Walt's life experienced a real decline. His life always was fractured, conflicted and haunted. All of the supposed bellwethers of his existence--service in Korea, family, work, community--have transformed under examination into something bad. It's not so much that everything has turned to shit, it's that so much of everything was shit all along.

(Eastwood's evolution from Dirty Harry to Walt Kowalski)

This is what victory has come to in Eastwood's cinema. He still saves the community, but the film has traced his passage from the violent hero to the sacrificial one, from Achilles to Jesus Christ. The last image we see of Walt is an overhead crane shot of him stretched out dead on the ground, and his pose is unmistakeably that of a crucified man.

Full article, 'Clint Eastwood as Fallen Saviour' by William Beard, available in Issue 85 of CineAction