Clint Eastwood (54 page)

There is a desperately rationalizing note here, a need to maintain consistent support for a director to whom the critic was deeply committed. Moreover, like a lot of people, Kael could tolerate prodigies of violence when it was aestheticized (and somewhat distanced) in the Peckinpah manner. There are slo-mo hails of bullets in such Kael favorites as
Bonnie and Clyde
and
The Godfather
that were not approached in
Dirty Harry
. These scenes are perfectly defensible, but one can also argue that in the intricately interconnected modern world violence is visited on us suddenly, inexplicably, that it is often a matter of finding oneself by chance in a deranged person’s line of fire. That being so it is as feckless (and misleading) to salvage the absurd and terrifying moment by prettifying it as it is to look for its sociopsychological explanations. One resists it as best one can, with an assertion of outraged personal morality. It’s not much, but it’s what Dirty Harry Callahan has.

In the end, the argument over this movie centers on two related questions: With what degree of darkness does one view contemporary life? And how does one judge the intent of the filmmakers?

On the first point twenty-five years of history have served
Dirty Harry
well. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, over the last couple of decades a tendency in our culture has developed “
which unites our lumpen proles with our post-modern ironists to celebrate transgression for its own sake.” This was something no one would have predicted in 1971. One might perhaps more easily have perceived a point David Thomson has since made: “
Those saved by the social revolutions of the 1960s were only ever a few. Eastwood guessed, or knew in his bones, that Harry’s ‘dirtiness’ was a refreshing reclaiming of common sense and direct action as far as middle America was concerned.” Or the one comedian Dennis Miller later made in one of his monologues: “
Somewhere along the line society took the wrong fork in the blame road and decided to give criminals the benefit of the doubt. How did they become the victims? C’mon, everybody knows that’s a buncha shit, and that’s why
Dirty Harry
made Clint a big star.” Both remarks reflect the way we live and think now.

No serious commentator today would advance a description of
criminal motives as naive as Kael’s. In fact, serious general discussion of crime’s causes and cures has been largely silenced. Few care to think much about the former, and few believe any of the latter, however hopefully they are advanced, are likely to have a large effect on the problem. Whether or not crime has become an epidemic may be statistically debatable, but fear of crime is unquestionably epidemic. We may still retain a residual capacity for outrage over “dirty” cops like Detective Mark Fuhrman, who surfaced in the O. J. Simpson trial, but even liberals no longer wish to “understand” criminals; we simply want them to be punished. This is not entirely because we have all succumbed to reactionary rhetoric. Unrealistic and ineffectual sentimentalism of the kind Kael indulged in played its role in bringing us to this pass. Like it or not, we live in a
Dirty Harry
kind of world, and, if anything, the movie seems more prescient—more “realistic” if you will—than alarming.

This leaves the question of intent. Had this movie been released in a less polarized political climate, this question would never have arisen. But these were not normal times. The war in Vietnam was still on, the college campuses were still rife with protest (the killings at Kent State had occurred only a year previously), and a parallel between taking a hard line on crime and taking a hard line on the war was often drawn in those days. The class issues implicit in the film were similarly potent. Harry’s working-class roots and attitudes were the source of his appeal to the mass audience. It is obvious that by subjecting his activities, his moral decisions, if you will, to second-guessing by a temporizing bureaucracy, the film placed him under pressures every working stiff, for that matter every middle-management drone, in America understood. Maybe they couldn’t talk back to their superiors or take action on their own recognizance, but when Dirty Harry Callahan did, they knew exactly where he was coming from—a place in their own hearts—which was something they no longer knew about a lot of movie heroes. Elsewhere in those days, in all the better circles, blue-collar males were the objects of scorn and fear. When they were not actually members of the police force, “pigs” like Harry, and their hard-hatted brethren formed the hard core of the hated Silent Majority, often not so silently mounted muscular counterdemonstrations against war protests.

No matter that Harry Callahan never said a word about any of these issues. No matter that the film carefully particularized his anger. It was easy enough to extrapolate from his bluntly expressed attitude about criminal rights a whole range of unspoken opinions, make him into a generalized symbol of much that was hatefully illiberal in American life at that time. The failure to anticipate this response was, frankly, not very smart of the moviemakers. The possibility that they duplicitously entended
Harry as a metaphoric endorsement of a whole range of reactionary attitudes cannot therefore be definitively disproved—except, perhaps, by resort to the films Clint made after this one, and to the authentic anger this line of criticism elicted from him and from Siegel.

The latter’s response was simple: “
I don’t make political movies,” he said truthfully enough (and in one variation or another on the theme, often enough). “I was telling the story of a hard-nosed cop and a dangerous killer.” When he claims in his autobiography that “
Not once throughout
Dirty Harry
did Clint and I have a political discussion,” it is entirely plausible. When he adds, “We were only interested in making the film a successful one, both as entertainment and at the box office,” that rings true as well.

Clint, because he has been so frequently questioned on this matter, has offered a wider variety of responses over the years. He has accused his critics of leftist extremism. He has invoked the Nuremberg argument, holding that a man has a duty to oppose laws he feels to be unjust and that failure to do so constitutes a punishable crime. He has likened Harry to the Peter Finch character in
Network
, urging his listeners to declare themselves mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.

Most of these statements betray his singular lack of talent for abstract argument. He has been most effective when he has followed a line similar to Siegel’s. Discussing Harry’s character, he has insisted that “I’m, as an actor, not out to play my political feelings. I mean, that would be boring as hell, to preach some statement I have about where I thought the country was going, what was wrong with it.” Conceding on one occasion that Harry was an “authoritarian” figure, he nevertheless insisted the authority he stood for was that of the autonomous individual forced to function “
in a world of bureaucratic corruption and ineffectiveness.” Or as he has also put it, “
Harry is a terribly honest character, and I like that. He’s not a political animal, and he doesn’t understand political intrigue.”

Discussing the film in general he has said: “
It’s just the story of one frustrated police officer in a frustrating situation on one particular case.” As early as 1974 he told his first serious biographer, Stuart Kaminsky: “The general public isn’t worried about the rights of the killer, they’re just saying get him off the streets, don’t let him kidnap my child, don’t let him kill my daughter. There’s a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it’s very important and one of the things that makes our system great. But there’s also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley.” Twenty years later he put it even more simply: “The real romance of the film [is] the audience is
sitting there going, ‘Yeah, if I was stuck down there for five hours, I wouldn’t want some guy talking about the
Miranda
decision. I’d want somebody out there trying to get my ass out of there.’ That’s just kind of basic. I didn’t see anything political about that.”

He is not—and Siegel was not—a literary-political intellectual. He is not accustomed to, is in fact flummoxed by, close ideological examination of his motives and works, because quite literally he can’t see anything that grand and abstract in them. Clint obviously had no trouble understanding, believing in, accepting the consequences for, the very limited didactic aim he perceived in this movie. But that was not the only, or even the main, reason he made it.

He did it because of all the roles he had been offered up to this point in his career, this one, in his opinion, stated the frustrations of the typical American male, in relation to his work, in relation to whatever system he served, most accurately, while at the same time portraying his impotent rage, his growing sense of isolation in a rapidly changing world.

Then there were the kinetics of the matter. All movies, as Clint likes to say, are “what-if deals.” They take a real guy like Harry, thrust him into an improbably melodramatic situation and then show us what happens, and here the what-ifs, their rush and excitement—their kinetics—were terrific.

Finally, no matter what other claims their creators may make for movies like
Dirty Harry
, or we may make on their behalf, all action movies are finally about—yes—action. As we have occasion to observe almost every week in the theaters, movies of this type routinely subvert their own plausibility, along with such ambitions toward fine moral distinction and high moral instruction as their makers may harbor, on behalf of sustained and exciting movement. In that sense, action movies are like action painting; their primary interest is in (and on) their surfaces. A critic is, naturally, free to regard that as juvenile, as socially and culturally irresponsible, as a self-indulgent affront to cultivated taste. But it is as a rule absurd, and utterly unrealistic, to see ideological motives, let alone ideological malevolence, as their prime cause.

The
Dirty Harry
controversy had almost no concrete effect on Clint’s career. The film’s popular success could not have been stemmed or even slowed by a single review, especially one that appeared somewhat belatedly in a magazine with a limited, upmarket circulation. Indeed, elitist dubiety about Harry never afflicted the mass public—he was their guy,
and their pleasure in his kick-ass ways was entirely untinged by guilt. The film, after all, generated four sequels, all of which turned out to be hugely profitable, as did other films that profitably cross-referred to it.

One might even argue, perversely, that Kael’s attack had a number of positive short-term consequences for Clint. Aside from granting the film a significance its makers had not expected, it furthered Clint’s emergence as an important new cultural figure. The critic’s feverish imaginings about a man who was, as we know, being portrayed in the press in those days as a rather opaque figure imparted to him a dark glamour he had not previously enjoyed. She made people wonder: Did this guarded and enigmatic character have a devious political agenda, more threatening than, say, John Wayne’s, who had at least always been forthright about his reactionary views? Was he something more than an actor who specialized in playing dangerous characters? Was he, in himself, a dangerous character? Unwittingly, Kael made him into a subject for speculation in circles where scarcely a serious thought had been spared for him previously.

The long-term effects of her piece were slightly more ambivalent. It is true that as the most fashionable voice in her field, Kael had a view of Clint (which never softened) that would exert a continuing influence on younger critics, with this piece setting the basic terms of discussion about him for at least a decade and a half. Interviewers kept asking him about it, and anyone attempting a critical overview of his career was obliged to conjure with it. Even now, when he is the beneficiary of one of the most astonishing reversals of critical fortune in movie history, a minority continues to hold with Kael.