New Essays on Clint Eastwood

327 Pages·2012·2.35 MB·English

by  Leonard Engel

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.