New essays oN CliNt eastwood Clint New Essays on Eastwood edited by leoNard eNgel Foreword by druCilla CorNell The University of Utah Press Salt Lake City Copyright © 2012 by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved. The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of the University of Utah Press. It is based on a four-foot-tall Ancient Puebloan pictograph (late PIII) near Glen Canyon, Utah. 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New essays on Clint Eastwood/edited by Leonard Engel ; foreword by Drucilla Cornell. p. cm. A companion to Engel’s previous work, Clint Eastwood, actor and director: new perspectives, this volume includes some of the films produced after the first volume was published. Includes filmography and index. eISBN 978-1-60781-223-4 (eBook) 1. Eastwood, Clint, 1930—Criticism and interpretation. I. Engel, Leonard, 1936– pn2287.e37n49 2012 791.4302’8092—dc23 2012017530 Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dedicated to the memory of my son Tobias Rafael Engel (1993–2012) Contents Foreword: Why Do We Turn to Eastwood Now? ■ ix Drucilla Cornell Acknowledgments ■ xi Introduction: What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come ■ 1 John M. Gourlie and Leonard Engel Chapter 1 “Landscape as Moral Destiny”: Mythic Reinvention from Rowdy Yates to The Stranger ■ 18 Robert Smart Chapter 2 Thoroughly Modern Eastwood: Male/Female Power Relations in The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me ■ 36 Brett Westbrook Chapter 3 Clintus and Siegelini: “We’ve Got a System. Not Much, but We’re Fond of It” ■ 53 Mike Smrtic and Matt Wanat Chapter 4 Rawhide to Pale Rider: The Maturation of Clint Eastwood ■ 76 Edward Rielly Chapter 5 Eastwood’s Treatment of the Life of Creativity and Performance in Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, White Hunter Black Heart, and Bird ■ 90 Dennis Rothermel Chapter 6 “You Can’t Hunt Alone”: White Hunter Black Heart ■ 121 Richard Hutson viii contents Chapter 7 The End of History and America First: How the 1990s Revitalized Clint Eastwood ■ 130 Craig Rinne Chapter 8 “A Man of Notoriously Vicious and Intemperate Disposition”: Western Noir and the Tenderfoot’s Revenge in Unforgiven ■ 148 Stanley Orr Chapter 9 A Good Vintage or Damaged Goods? Clint Eastwood and Aging in Hollywood Film ■ 168 Philippa Gates Chapter 10 Space, Pace, and Southern Gentility in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ■ 190 Brad Klypchak Chapter 11 Mystic River as a Tragic Action ■ 204 Robert Merrill and John L. Simons Chapter 12 Lies of Our Fathers: Mythology and Artifice in Eastwood’s Cinema ■ 224 William Beard Chapter 13 Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima: The Silence of Heroes and the Voice of History ■ 249 John M. Gourlie Chapter 14 Gran Torino: Showdown in Detroit, Shrimp Cowboys, and a New Mythology ■ 266 John M. Gourlie and Leonard Engel Chapter 15 Invictus: The Master Craftsman as Hagiographer ■ 277 Raymond Foery Chapter 16 Hereafter: Dreaming beyond Our Philosophies ■ 286 John M. Gourlie Chapter 17 Citizen Hoover: Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar ■ 290 Kathleen Moran and Richard Hutson Filmography ■ 295 Contributors ■ 299 Index ■ 303 Foreword: why do we turn to eastwood now? Drucilla Cornell Few directors born and raised in the United States have focused as intensively and extensively on the burning issues of our times, such as revenge, war, justice, the possibility of love, virtue, and nationalism, as has Clint Eastwood. But it is not the breadth of his work that makes him so important. It is, rather, the unique way in which he has addressed these questions by connecting them to the question of what it means to be a good man in such difficult times as in the “America” of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries.1 Eastwood takes us to some of the great images and symbols of the deepest fantasies of American life, through the classic genres of cow- boy movies, police thrillers, and boxing heroics. What makes Eastwood so unique is that he reworks these Hollywood genres to a certain extent, by focusing on a fundamental question: What does it mean to live life as a good man in a complex and violent world? I am more than aware of the literature that has criticized the idea of the director as auteur, the origina- tor and sole author of the narrative lines of his or her films. To engage in these classic Hollywood genres does impose real limits. But in Eastwood’s case, his implicit return to the question of masculinity, and, particularly, to what it means to be a good man, breaks through those limits to some extent. This may seem like a strange conclusion, because has not so much of Hollywood presented us with the height of virtue, particularly mascu- line virtue? The answer is: Of course; but what Eastwood does is give us surprising perspectives on so-called heroic virtue. Indeed, in his classic film Flags of Our Fathers, the very ideal of the hero is called into ques- tion, and that questioning of heroism is underscored at the end of the film. Just when men think that they have it right, and are convinced that they are doing the right thing, they find the hubris of their self-righteousness turned against them.