Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity

Preface

Preface As for so many of my generation, Clint Eastwood was simply a part of the social landscape in which I grew up. My ex-husband met him on the set of Rawhide, and my mother campaigned for him when he ran for mayor of Carmel, California. My father, like so many of his Republican cohorts, simply idolized Eastwood—he was ‘‘their man.’’ Still, I never really paid much attention to him, because he was part of a landscape that I thought I had long outgrown as a feminist. Indeed, my first opportunity for serious engagement with Eastwood’s work as a director came only a few years ago during a visit with my father in Laguna Beach, where the small movie theatre was playing only two films, one of which was Eastwood’s Mystic River. My father surprised me by warning me to avoid the film, commenting that something bad must have happened to Eastwood—he claimed Mystic River was the worst film he had seen since Closely Watched Trains, a film that I had dragged him to see when I was nineteen. He said that Eastwood seemed to be making some point about men, but dismissively he confessed that he had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Naturally, I immediately went off to see the film—and I agreed wholeheartedly that Eastwood was, indeed, addressing some of the most profound questions of American masculinity . But unlike my father, I thought I got the point. The very man who seemed to be such a disappointment to my father had become to my mind one of those rare men who actually struggle with what it means to be a good man at a time when all the props that held up ideals of masculine goodness had fallen into disarray. Eastwood vii viii Preface seemed to have changed and grown in his work both as an actor and as a director. Let me emphasize, however, that this is a book that engages almost entirely with Eastwood as a director. Indeed, the film scholar Dennis Bingham has commented that Eastwood provides us with something like a twelve-step program away from the mistakes of traditional masculinity.1 This book, I want to stress, is not focused on Eastwood’s personal journey as a man, nor as he was produced as a cultural icon nor on the specificity of his acting style. I have a different project, which is to study Eastwood as a director as he is relevant to certain major philosophical and ethical themes that I have personally articulated throughout my life’s work. The particular tenure of this project compels me to take up all of what I consider to be the pressing issues of masculinity as it is caught up in the very definition of ideas of revenge, violence, moral repair, and justice. Eastwood grapples with this involvement of masculinity in and through many of the great symbols of American life, including cowboys, boxing, police dramas, and ultimately war—perhaps the single greatest symbol of what it means (or is supposed to mean) to be a man. Thus, I still have hope that my father may actually read this book and that it may take him to a deeper appreciation of Eastwood’s work as a director as well as the dilemmas facing any aspiration to ethical manhood. Indeed, I am hoping that this book will be widely read by men, perhaps more widely read than some of my other feminist work. Masculinity has recently become a very popular and important topic for social critics, and I have long wanted to address some of these issues myself. But when I tried to think about writing on masculinity in general, I felt lost in a project too large for myself—and so, having written with Roger Berkowitz on Mystic River, I decided to undertake a smaller project that nevertheless provides me with the space for at least preliminary reflection on almost all of the great symbols of American masculinity. If I could not write about all men, maybe I could handle just one. This book, then, is not a traditional book of film criticism or a cinematographic biography; neither is it Eastwood’s unauthorized biography . As a work of social commentary and ethical philosophy, it is inspired in large part by the work of my late colleague Wilson Carey McWilliams, who turned his brilliant analysis of American political thought primarily toward the world of literature...