In the course of his seven-decade career, Clint Eastwood has come to be identified with a single striking proposition. Appearing as a hard-bitten detective, a nondescript pilot, or an aging boxing coach, he advances the claim that upholding a system—legal, mechanical, moral—will occasionally require operating outside its normal bounds. His paradigmatic heroes are sometimes righteous and pitiless, sometimes tragic and conflicted, but always they believe that irregular, sometimes scandalous measures must be taken when, inevitably, law fails.
This belief has led to Eastwood’s being denounced by both liberal critics and Christian lobbies. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael decried the “fascist medievalism” of Dirty Harry (1971), in which Eastwood plays a cop who, in a mad rush to save a kidnapped girl, tortures a suspect rather than reading him his rights. Some three decades later, Ted Baehr, the head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, called Million Dollar Baby (2004), in which Eastwood’s character reluctantly decides to euthanize a quadriplegic friend, a “neo-Nazi movie.”
At age ninety-four, Eastwood is the most revered man in Hollywood, the consummate éminence grise, whose forthcoming film (Juror No. 2) is expected by many to be his last. As he has aged, treatments of his work have become steadily more respectful. Critics who might once have dismissed him have become more alert to his virtues, perhaps realizing that we will never again see a figure so consummately American as this cowboy director who became mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and who introduced himself to the 2012 Republican National Convention as a “movie tradesman” when he was in fact one of the world’s biggest movie stars.
Eastwood’s long-running success is a testament to the enduring power of a classically American pattern of belief. This outlook celebrates independent judgment, impatient of dogmatic claims and institutional authorities. It is what makes his work so American—and occasionally so unsettling.
Clint Eastwood was born in San Francisco in 1930, to a Scots-English father and a Dutch-Irish mother. The family moved frequently, and Clint accompanied his mother to whatever Protestant church happened to be near their current home. His father never joined. When Clint asked one Sunday why his father never came to church, the elder Eastwood replied, “It’s my only day off.” When Clint observed that it was his only day off, too, his father said, “Well, don’t go.”
During and after high school, Eastwood worked a range of blue-collar jobs: baling hay, cutting timber, fighting forest fires, tending the blast furnaces at a steel mill. These experiences made him, as he told his biographer Richard Schickel, “very sensitive toward people who work at jobs like that.” He would go on to play a series of working-class heroes who prize competence over expertise, decision over dithering.
Eastwood’s most iconic hero, Dirty Harry Callahan, is the embodiment of these pragmatic values. He fights not only the criminal elements on the city streets but also the weak, evasive professionals who occupy its high offices, denizens of what Eastwood has called “a world of bureaucratic corruption and ineffectiveness.”
In the first Dirty Harry film, the hero’s investigative methods are denounced by an appellate judge who teaches at Berkeley Law. The judge accuses Callahan of violating a suspect’s rights “under the Fourth and Fifth and probably the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.” Callahan regards these constitutional niceties as disastrously out of touch with reality: “What about Ann Mary Deacon’s rights? She was raped and put into a box to die—who speaks for her?”
It is a crucial moment, an expression of Eastwood’s belief that large institutions are often indifferent to the people they ostensibly protect, that the regular operation of law may be insufficient in moments of crisis, and that a decisive individual, present on the scene, is more to be trusted than the theories of professors or the deliberations of committees.
The same values informed the making of the film. Dirty Harry was directed by Don Siegel, the journeyman director who made five films with Eastwood, including the taut Escape from Alcatraz (1979). Director and star bonded over their common view that moviemaking should be done in a no-nonsense way, a job like any other. When a visitor to the set asked why Siegel had done only one take of a shot, Eastwood replied, “’Cause he knows what he likes when he sees it.”
Eastwood has followed a similar method in directing his own films, frequently contenting himself with a single take. This procedure accords with his preference for unpolished spontaneity over the carefully considered line reading. It has also helped to keep budgets down—an essential consideration, given that in 1967 Eastwood formed his own production company, Malpaso. This vehicle has allowed him to enjoy the independence his characters prize. He has acted in, directed, and produced his own pictures without interference from studio brass.
Eastwood’s rejection of liberal sentimentalism and hatred of bureaucracy have led conservatives to celebrate his work and to overestimate his agreements with them. In an essay on Eastwood published in Commentary in 1984, the film critic Richard Grenier connected “the extraordinary reluctance of many on the Left to use U.S. military power anywhere in the world, even in self-defense,” with liberal opposition to “harsh penalties” for criminals. Eastwood’s films, he went on to say, suggested that the star “has never had the slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the service of justice.”
Writing in the same magazine ten years later, Grenier concluded that somewhere along the line, Eastwood had succumbed to political correctness. One of his complaints was that Eastwood’s character in In the Line of Fire (1993) had spoken to a CIA agent insultingly: “What are you up to now? Running coke for the Contras? Running arms for Iran?”
But Eastwood had not changed. His suspicion of large institutions had always been directed not only against those staffed by liberal lawyers, but also against the police, the military, and the intelligence agencies. Police malfeasance was a prominent theme in Magnum Force (1973) and The Gauntlet (1977). The Eiger Sanction (1975), a cynical espionage thriller, presented the U.S. as no better than its unnamed opponent. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), one of Eastwood’s finest films, presents men in uniform as villains, except insofar as they disregard orders.
Conservatives were not alone in thinking that Eastwood had changed. Mainstream film reviewers came to credit Eastwood with dismantling his own myth, critiquing the vigilantism of Dirty Harry in mature works like Unforgiven (1992).
Here, too, a mistake had been made. Though Unforgiven presents the vigilante type as a tragic figure, it does not disavow his methods or suggest they are unnecessary. Far from repenting, Eastwood’s character, the lethal Will Munny, vows at the film’s end to wreak further vengeance on the town if they do not respect the despised: “You better not cut up nor otherwise harm no whores. Or I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches.”
The basic argument of Dirty Harry is repeated in one of Eastwood’s most celebrated late films, Million Dollar Baby (2004). Frankie Dunn, an aging boxing trainer played by Eastwood, is alienated from his daughter and finds a surrogate in the aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). After Maggie suffers a terrible injury that leaves her paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on a ventilator, she begs him to help her commit suicide.
Dunn, a Catholic who attends daily Mass, discusses the matter with a priest. He feels selfish for wanting to keep his friend alive in the midst of her agony: “I just wanna keep her with me. And I swear to God, Father, it’s . . . it’s committing a sin by doing it. By keeping her alive, I’m killing her.” The priest urges him to leave Maggie in God’s hands, but Dunn declines. “She’s not asking for God’s help,” he replies. “She’s asking for mine.” There is nothing triumphant in the decision Eastwood’s character makes. After euthanizing his friend, he does not remain on the scene, living out his life contentedly. He suddenly departs—just like the vigilantes Eastwood has long played. Having acted outside the moral order, he can no longer remain within it.
Eastwood’s film was justly criticized for its tendentious depiction of disability. Maggie is portrayed as contracting terrible bed sores that necessitate amputation, an extremely unlikely outcome with even minimally competent nursing. Though she is shown suffering from the blackest depressions, she is never offered psychiatric care.
Has Eastwood at times overstated the unworkability of systems—legal, moral, mechanical? An interesting answer to that question comes in the form of Sully (2016), Eastwood’s film about the so-called Miracle on the Hudson, when Captain Chesley Sullenberger performed a spectacular water landing of an Airbus A320 that had struck a flock of birds. Eastwood’s film presents the landing as a product of Sullenberger’s individual genius and willingness to ignore established protocol. “If he had followed the damn rules, we’d all be dead.”
What this view, along with much contemporary coverage of the event, overlooked was the role played by the airplane’s digital “fly-by-wire” system, in tandem with Sullenberger’s masterful piloting. The A320 had long been controversial among pilots because of its advanced control system, which reduces pilot autonomy. In his book on the landing, the journalist William Langewiesche describes the A320 as “the world’s first semi-robotic airliner.” As Langewiesche reports, during the final seconds of the Hudson landing, the A320’s computer intervened and “gently lowered the nose to keep the wings flying.”
Contrary to the picture Eastwood paints in Sully, the Miracle on the Hudson was the product of a successful coordination between man and machine, individual and system. Though it might seem stultifyingly impersonal, the A320’s guidance system was itself a product of ingenious individuals. Bernard Ziegler, the French engineer and pilot responsible for its creation, had titled his memoir Les Cow-boys d’Airbus.
One of the limits of Eastwood’s films—and of the cultural instincts they express—is their inability to see how individual agency might be expressed in and through larger systems. He is an honest enough artist to show how destructive it can be to act against these systems. He recognizes the limits of his own grim belief that acting humanely will sooner or later mean violating some norm. But he cannot envision a world in which obedience to even the highest law is fully consistent with human freedom. That is the tragedy of Clint Eastwood.
Matthew Schmitz is a founder and editor of Compact.
Image provided by flickr, public domain. Image cropped.
