Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood by William Beard (review)

HUMANITIES 353 of the history of her times. This volume successfully underscores the fact that Ginzburg=s works seek always to give voice to a class of Italians whom history silenced, recording events and relations to which history remains oblivious. The articulate contributions reflecting recent critical theories, the attentive consideration given to style and its implications, the reframing of the significance of Ginzburg=s literary corpus in light of Italy=s political and cultural history render this monographic study an indispensable work for anyone interested in Ginzburg, in cultural, Italian, or feminist studies. (VERA F. GOLINI) William Beard. Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood University of Alberta Press. xvi, 194. $24.95 In Persistence of Double Vision, William Beard sets out to establish Clint Eastwood as an auteur, in films in which he has played a determining part as actor and/or director, with a continuing preoccupation with problematizing his own iconic status as an emblem of heroic masculinity. From the Man with No Name of Leone=s spaghetti westerns, through the Dirty Harry figure of the 1970s and 1980s, to William Munny in the Academy Award winning Unforgiven (1992) and several parts since then, Eastwood=s roles, Beard argues, have provided us with a hero with a dark side, a shadow which has persistently grown until, most notably in Unforgiven and A Perfect World, it overwhelms any remaining positive qualities of the icon. Beard focuses above all on two typical, recurring roles of Eastwood the actor: the violent action hero and the >father= figure (with the artist/performer figure also noted). He selects from the Eastwood canon of over forty films those most appropriate for such foci, though some others also receive passing mention. Most significantly he places the Eastwood films he examines into the broader context of changing American society, politics, and culture from the 1960s to the present. The result is an illuminating look not only at Eastwood=s development through some of his major films but also, as a by-product, at Hollywood=s broad reflection ( for example, in the Bronson vigilante films of the 1970s and 1980s and the Stallone and Schwarzenegger action films of the 1980s) of American values over a forty-year period. Also especially interesting in this context are Beard=s comments on a number of Eastwood films as darker versions of earlier cinematic texts: for example, High Plains Drifter of High Noon, and Pale Rider of Shane. Arguably the most valuable sections of the book are those on Eastwood films not often the centre of critical attention, such as A Perfect World and Bronco Billy, and perhaps those defending The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me against critical charges of misogyny. The latter two films, however, would 354 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 seem especially to illustrate an important aspect of Eastwood=s >doubleness= mentioned earlier by Beard but not here: the openness of his films (as Hollywood products B and I use the term non-pejoratively) to differing interpretations depending on the differing ideological values of their viewers. Eastwood=s major films could be argued to highlight, because of the controversial issues (such as violent justice and gender roles) with which they are concerned, Hollywood=s deliberate, ongoing attempts to accommodate conflicting points of view. Eastwood=s films, as Beard remarks about Pale Rider, seem to emphasize such conflicts rather than attempt to conceal them. Beard defines his book as a >collection= of thoughts and readings rather than as a systematic survey, and at times the sections overlap, while a few films seem nevertheless treated perfunctorily simply for the sake of partial inclusiveness. The non-chronological approach also lessens the impact of some of the chapters, given the book=s opening placement of Eastwood=s films within the context of changing American values over time. Almost everything, however, is intellectually stimulating, even when provoking (at least from this reader) an emphatic protest (for example: at the characterizing of what Beard calls films of >virtual classicism= as presenting an impossibly >simple and innocent= world; at the lament that Hollywood today has style without content; at the book=s own final conflicted view of Eastwood as simultaneously deliberate artist and non...