Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity

Notes

Notes Preface 1. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 163–245. 2. For an excellent definition that is particularly relevant to Eastwood’s films and his working through stereotypic masculine ideals and genres, see Judith Butler , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990), p. 147. 3. For a longer discussion of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the phantasmagoria , see Drucilla Cornell, Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), pp. 11–37. 4. Drucilla Cornell, ‘‘What Is Ethical Feminism?’’ in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 76–106. I put ethical feminist in quotation marks because I have called myself an ethical feminist. Introduction: Shooting Eastwood 1. Dirty Harry. DVD, dir. Don Siegel, perf. Clint Eastwood (Warner Bros. Studios, 1971). 2. Krin Gabbard, ‘‘‘Someone Is Going to Pay’—Resurgent White Masculinity in Ransom,’’ in Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, ed. Peter Lehman (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 9. 3. Play Misty for Me, DVD, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter (Universal Studios, 1971). 191 192 Notes 4. Tightrope, DVD, dir. Richard Tuttle, perf. Clint Eastwood, Geneviève Bujold, prod. Clint Eastwood and Fritz Manes (Warner Bros. Studios, 1984). 5. A Perfect World, DVD, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Laura Dern (Warner Bros. Studios, 1993). 6. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 4–5. 7. Bronco Billy, DVD, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke (Warner Bros. Studios, 1980). 8. Space Cowboys, DVD, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner, Marcia Gay Harden (Warner Bros. Studios, 2000). 1. Writing the Showdown: What’s Left Behind When the Sun Goes Down 1. High Plains Drifter, DVD, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood (Universal Studios, 1973). 2. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 3. See Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical & Cultural Perspective (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 2000). 4. Mitchell, Westerns. 5. See especially the ‘‘Dollars Trilogy’’ featuring Clint Eastwood: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). 6. Grand, The Reproduction of Evil, p. 8. 7. Ibid, p. 6. Italics in original. 8. Ibid., p. 5. 9. Ibid., p. 4–5. 10. Ibid., p. 6. 11. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso Press, 1998). 12. Grand, The Reproduction of Evil, p. 11. 13. Pale Rider, DVD, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood (Warner Bros. Studios, 1985). 14. See preface in Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15. In Culture of Masculinity Kimmel refers to three ideal types of American men, particularly in the sense that they engage the ideals of manhood for white men; they are the genteel patriarch, the heroic artisan, and the self-made man. 16. Shane, DVD, dir. George Stevens, perf. Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Jack Palance (Paramount Pictures, 1953). 17. Unforgiven, dir. Clint Eastwood, perf. Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman (Warner Bros. Studios, 1992). Notes 193 18. Kimmel, Manhood in America, p. 213. 19. Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 219. 20. Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil, p. 159; Krin Gabbard, ‘‘‘Someone Is Going to Pay’—Resurgent White Masculinity in Ransom,’’ in Masculinity: Bodies , Movies, Culture, ed. Peter Lehman (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 7–23, p. 9. 21. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ in Collected Papers, vol. 4, Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Basic Books, 1954), p. 153. 22. Eastwood has used and transformed the all-too-familiar black sidekick that often mars the Western. As Michael Kimmel rightly notes, ‘‘By the midnineteenth century this new American male hero began to encounter another man, usually a man of color, as a sort of spirit guide to this world without women. . . . Literary critic Leslie Fiedler attributes this tradition on cross-race male bonding to a search for redemption for white guilt, but I believe it is also a way to present...