The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood

The Mortal Hero

191 the mortal hero Two Inductions on the Meaning of Loss Richard T. McClelland The Buddha is reputed to have said that “all life is suffering,” or perhaps that “the meaning of life is suffering.” And there is little doubt that he was largely correct, for it is difficult to even imagine a realistic form of human life that does not entail some degree and kind of suffering. And, of course, for many of us, life has been or is likely to be filled with suffering.1 The vast majority of humans who have ever lived have probably suffered more or less continuously throughout their lives in one form or another: hunger, cold, anxiety, disease, pain, loss. To be well-fed, securely housed, meaningfully employed, financially viable, socially well-supported, psychologically intact, and free of major diseases, while all highly desirable states and often considered the birthright of the affluent West, are the reliable possessions of only a fortunate few, at least from the point of view of our whole global species and its whole history. Most humans currently alive on the planet live in poverty, with high incidence of disease, shortened life spans (relative to the affluent industrial and postindustrial societies), and often with blighted prospects as regards education, employment, and the rest. Historically, human life for most of us has been lived on the margin, with average life expectancies exceeding forty years only in very modern times and in a limited range of modern cultures. Thus, for us humans a fundamental developmental task is to come to terms with our suffering. And the longer we survive the more urgent this task becomes, for the more evident it also becomes that suffering is our lot and cannot finally be avoided altogether, no matter how affluent we become individually or socially. One of the durable attractions of religion is its provision of transcendental varieties of meaning for suffering (an issue that will concern me further in the final section of this essay). It is a rare adult who has not suffered substantially and who does not feel the need for 192 Richard T. McClelland such meaning. Indeed, it is a rare child over the age of five years who is not similarly situated. For many adults, these issues are especially pressing after midlife. For by then we often know perfectly well that our bodies are failing us and that their dissolution is our ultimate fate (whatever, if anything, might come afterward). It seems to me that Eastwood meditates on this problem of the meaning of suffering in a variety of his films, especially those in which he has acted or which he has directed after he himself turned forty. Moreover , as he has passed through his forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies the meditation has grown more profound and perhaps more urgent. However, the results of this meditation are surprising, as I hope to show. The Pessimistic Induction: Loss (and Death) Is Finally Irremediable As early as The Eiger Sanction (1975), Eastwood plays a character (Dr. Jonathan Hemlock) who is starting to feel the ravages of age. Having laid off from mountain climbing for some time, Hemlock knows that his new undercover assignment to the team planning to climb the North Face of the Eiger (which has defeated him twice in the past) cannot succeed without a good deal of training and preparation. He has indeed “lost a step” or two, and so partners with his old climbing buddy Ben Bowman (George Kennedy) for that training. Eastwood himself, in real life, was just past his forty-fourth birthday when the filming was done and is reputed to have performed his own stunts. It is a rare adult male, even one as fit and athletic as Eastwood, who is not feeling his body starting to fail him by the time he reaches the mid-forties, so the dramatic situation of the character is curiously appropriate to the real-life situation of the actor. The figure of the man of action in retirement reappears in Firefox (1982), a film directed by Eastwood. Major Mitchell Gant (USAF, retired) was a fighter pilot in Vietnam, where he was captured and where he witnessed the immolation of an entirely innocent young girl, images of which reoccur in his later flashbacks. Coerced by the government into a highrisk operation to steal a high-tech Russian fighter (a MiG-31, known as the Firefox), Gant undergoes appropriate retraining to fit him for his new role as spy and...