The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood

Desperate Times Call for Existential Heroes

229 desPerate tImes Call For exIstentIal heroes Eastwood’s Gran Torino and Camus’s The Plague Jennifer L. McMahon Albert Camus’s novel The Plague (1947) depicts a town under siege. It describes the Algerian city of Oran as its inhabitants confront a devastating outbreak of the bubonic plague. Though their scourge is different, the occupants of Highland Park, Michigan, the setting of Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), are likewise under assault. Whereas the citizens of Oran face death at the hands of an impersonal microbe, the residents of Highland Park confront the more palpable threat of gang violence. Though different in many respects, The Plague and Gran Torino invite comparison by virtue of the fact that both works depict communities in desperate times, communities whose salvation depends on the action of extraordinary individuals, individuals who can be classified as existential heroes. Anyone familiar with Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino knows that the character Eastwood plays in the film, Walt Kowalski, is its hero. Though aging, ill, and grappling with the recent loss of Dorothy, his wife, Kowalski overcomes his own racial prejudice as well as the anger and self-absorption associated with his grief in order to aid his community , a community threatened by gang violence. Indeed, at the end of the film Kowalski heroically gives his life to eliminate the threat to his community , particularly to his neighbors. What may not be clear, however, is why Kowalski should be classified as an existential hero. In order to understand that, one must familiarize oneself with some of the tenets of existential philosophy, and more specifically, the characteristics of Camus’s rebel, or man of revolt. 230 Jennifer L. McMahon Rebel with a Cause Existential philosophy finds its roots in the works of a number of philosophers , among others, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), and Albert Camus (1913–1960). Though Camus is known for denying his classification as an existentialist, his theory of the absurd nonetheless articulates one of the main tenets (if not the central premise) of atheistic existentialism —namely, the meaninglessness of the world.1 Though this theory is articulated throughout Camus’s corpus, it is conveyed succinctly in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays in an essay titled “An Absurd Reasoning,” where he boldly asserts, “the world is absurd,” then corrects himself by stating, “I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.”2 As Camus explains, while frequently regarded as such, absurdity is not a state of affairs but a “feeling,” namely, the feeling that emerges when an individual apprehends the “impossibility of reducing the world to a rational . . . principle” and the “absence of any profound reason for living.” Ultimately, the absurd results from a “divorce” between “the mind that desires and the world that disappoints.” As such, the absurd depends as much on humans as on the world. It stems, quite simply, from the tension that emerges when the individual’s “wild longing for [reason and] clarity” confronts the seemingly “unreasonable” nature of the world.3 According to Camus, the feeling of absurdity can strike anyone at any moment; it can do so because it represents the normal affective response to reason’s lucid recognition of the human condition. As Cecil Eubanks and Peter Petrakis state in their essay “Reconstructing the World: Albert Camus and the Symbolization of Experience,” virtually every “human being comes into conflict with the absurd at one time or another . . . [and] most [people] turn away.”4 Most people turn away from absurdity because its impact is so unsettling.5 Camus describes the encounter with the absurd not merely as “dizzying,” but also “crushing,” and sometimes so psychologically debilitating that it inspires a “longing for death.” Indeed, Camus asserts there are but three responses to the absurd: “plain suicide,” “philosophical suicide,” and “revolt.”6 According to Camus, whereas actual and philosophical suicide represent evasions of absurdity, revolt alone preserves lucid recognition of the absurd, and as such, while rare, is the response he recommends. It is the response taken by the individual he elevates to the status of an existential hero: the rebel or man of revolt. Desperate Times Call for Existential Heroes 231 Camus’s rebel represents the individual who refuses to succumb to the feeling of absurdity and instead makes meaning in the...