Clint Eastwood (96 page)

T
hese things we now know about Clint Eastwood: That his movie heroes have taken the American male deeper into the country of disaffection than he has ever ridden before on-screen, reversing the great theme of our adventure movies, which has been male bonding, and insisting upon the opposite, the difficulty men have in making connections—not just with other men, but with communities, with women, with conventional morality, with their own best selves. Clint’s screen character represents an isolation more radically withdrawn than anyone has ever offered in movies intended for, and embraced by, a popular audience.

That in many of his best films he has explored the various ways that a man can fail to do what a man’s got to do, showing how through sexual arrogance, self-absorption, self-destructiveness, pride, perversity and even stupidity, he can fail, or come perilously close to failing, this primary obligation of the screen hero.

That in the presentation of that figure he has brought a self-consciousness—not so much in the playing, but in the life that goes on behind his eyes—that is the very hallmark of what we now routinely refer to as “post-modernist,” though almost never when we are thinking about moviemaking of the kind he practices.

That when he inserts this character into an action film he places it in a context radically changed from the one traditionally inhabited by the screen hero. Action movies, we have observed, resemble action painting in that their pleasures have always been found on their surfaces, in the tension arising from the arrangement of abstract elements (the good, the bad, the ugly, as it were). When, starting sometime in the sixties, movies began to acknowledge that fact openly, a cultural crisis—otherwise known as the sex-and-violence controversy—that persists to this day was initiated. It grew largely out of the dawning realization among filmmakers that the audience really doesn’t care a rap about who
shoots whom or why, so long as the matter is handled with—yes—a certain “panache.”

That this revised context to some degree revises the nature of screen heroism, encouraging us to root for our guy on the basis of his superior style, not his heavier moral weight. In this new universe, Dirty Harry’s wisecracks cease to be idle verbal decor and become something like the heart of the matter. Talk about “daunting ideas”! What could be more daunting than the notion that there are no reliable guides to masculine assertion, that we succeed or fail in this matter by the degree of wit we bring to the matter? What could be more subversive to our traditional codes of heroism than the idea that its largest imperative is to style, to cool improvisation in the heat of the deadly moment?

There is something else we know, too, not only about Clint Eastwood, but about all of us: that there comes a time in life when we need to take stock, of where we have been and where we may be going, of who we have been and who we might yet become, of what we have meant to others and how we might further clarify that relationship.

It is obvious that the movies Clint has made in his sixties, so different in tenor from most of those that he had previously done, are part of the process of reconciling his accounts. It is equally clear—to me, at least—that his patient involvement with this book, as well as his pleased participation in those celebrations of his life’s achievements that have preoccupied so much of his public life since winning his Academy Awards, is also part of that process.

We may take pride, some of us, in the fact that we have improvised our way through the chance universe with a certain grace. But we need to know, too, that we have not arrived entirely by chance at our present condition, need to think, too, that some general principles, conceivably of value to others, may be gleaned from that experience. We may take pride, as well, in our independence, in our ability to function without the sanction of the social and cultural arbiters, but in some secret chamber of our hearts we covet their endorsements, if only as a sign that in quixotically choosing the more isolated path we did not preclude the summit.

My book and his apotheosis having coincided, I attended most of the large tributes that have been paid Clint in recent years. They stirred in me no desire to recant what I wrote in the prologue: I still think the desire to recast him as icon, legend, national treasure, is a way of evading his singularity, or at least to tame and domesticate it. Our desire to press celebratory hardware on figures like Clint does not reflect a desire to grapple honestly with the past, but a need to nostalgize it, and by so
doing soften its conflicts, resolve its ambiguities. Our national disease, one sometimes thinks, is long-term memory loss, and though our standing ovations signal authentic affection for their recipients, they also testify that the human capacity for forgetfulness is as large as its capacity for remembrance.

I cannot say if, on these grand occasions, stray thoughts of the old criticism, criticism couched as calumny, crossed Clint’s mind. But they surely crossed mine. For in researching this book, my largest astonishment was at the breadth, persistence and vitriolic misunderstanding of the early attacks on him. It is hard to credit now, informed opinion having shifted so decisively in his favor in recent years, but it is true nevertheless: No actor in the history of the medium has attained the kind of stature Clint now enjoys in the face of such large critical contempt exercised for so long a period. One time in the midst of his recent acclaim he asked me if I’d happened to see an interview in which Pauline Kael said that one of her regrets about retirement was that she no longer had a forum in which to criticize Clint Eastwood. “Can you imagine that kind of bigotry?” He sighed. The answer was that at that moment, with the chorus of past disapprovals ringing loud in my ears, I could—perhaps better than he, who has willfully deafened himself to it.

It was only in the slightly wondering air that he wore to these gala occasions that I thought I detected an awareness of the contrast between the checkered shade in which he once danced and the bright light of acclaim in which he is now caught. But that might well have been an illusion. If, as we have observed, he has a desire to convert heroism into antiheroism, he has a similar desire to convert formality into informality. Movies are, as Joseph Campbell once remarked, but “the genial imaging of enormous ideas,” and Clint wanted all of us, himself included, to be aware of something like that usefully deflating thought.

So he addressed the thousand or two assembled in their stiff banquet finery as if they were a half dozen gathered comfortably in his living room for postprandial inconsequences, or as if they were his biographer. It is usually incongruity in the behavior of someone we know well that grasps our attention. What riveted mine at these tributes was the congruity I perceived between this honoree of theirs and this interviewee of mine. I had grown used to seeing him in quite a different light, a late-afternoon light, as a rule, but always a dim one. In life, as in his movies, Clint prefers to underlight—the famous squint is less a product of temperament than of an unusual sensitivity to glare—and there were times when the room would grow almost completely dark before he switched on a lamp.

Dress and manner were, naturally, different too. Clint on these occasions was dressed in his usual day wear—T-shirt, wash pants, sneakers. His long legs propped on a coffee table, a brew sometimes in hand, he spoke softly, sometimes too softly for the tape recorder to pick up, often pausing to grope for a memory or the right words to express it. If I fumbled the flip from the A side to the B side of the tape he would reach for the recorder and do it for me: “Like we used to say in aircraft maintenance, if all else fails, force it.”

But we forced nothing else. These were actually more conversations than interviews, rambling and leisurely, full of asides and digressions, tending to encircle a point rather than to overwhelm it by frontal assault. If there was a significant difference between the man responding to questions in his living room and the man responding to adulation in public, it was one of forbearance. We often talked on after the tape ran out; he was always quick to make his escape from the panegyric podium. Other than that, however, the continuity between the man bending earnestly to the task of recollection, seeking the proper balance between disclosure and discretion, and the figure bowing awkwardly on stage, seeking the proper balance between pride and modesty, was seamless.

I have wondered, sometimes, if as they left the hall the celebrants of this life’s achievement have felt deprived of closure by the inconclusive conclusions he supplied these evenings. Finally I have guessed not. The way he plays them suits their needs as well as the Man with No Name or Dirty Harry or Josey Wales suited them in earlier times; closure is exactly what they do not want from him.

By accepting their prizes and their accolades with a sort of genial fatalism he conveys an idea that they are part of the natural order of things, to be dealt with not as some grand culmination, but as a pleasant interruption in a life still unpredictably unfolding, something like, say, a round of golf: diverting, absorbing, a matter to be taken seriously for the moment, but not dwelt upon for very long.

Clint likes to refer to the passage he is now traversing as “the back nine of life,” adding that he often finds it to be golf’s better half, a time when one starts playing the shots rather than the score, begins to enjoy the day, the stroll, the company. Ambling toward the clubhouse, as it were, an ironic smile on his face, the double bogey on eight all but forgotten, the birdie on fourteen happily recalled, the possibility of closing out the round with a par or two still lively, he is most of the time now a man visibly content within his chosen metaphor.

And as we see him looking great and working well we happily accept from him the final gift it is within fame’s power to confer, a hopeful,
even inspiring, example of grace under the pressure of the years. He hints to us the possibility of edging slowly toward the exit unflustered, steady on our feet, all our buttons firmly attached.

Doubtless we are indulging another of the fantasies with which we habitually surround celebrity, ignoring the fact that stardom nearly always begins with a lucky genetic accident, and that the older we get the luck of the DNA draw more and more determines how we will be permitted to play life out. Still, it is a pretty thing to think otherwise, and, in my opinion, a useful thing.

There are those, made of sterner stuff, who disagree. David Thomson thinks slightly ill of Clint’s late-life achievements. A more forthright acknowledgment of the growing shadow of death, he believes, would become Clint. “
Gary Cooper had seen doom ahead some time in the mid-1940s, and it gave him grandeur. Eastwood wants to suffer in his recent films—but it’s still a reach, just a little bit beyond his experience or imagination.”

There is some truth in that. But some untruth also. There was much discomfiting pathos in Cooper’s slo-mo decline, some unspoken plea for pity that is as we know antithetical to Clint’s nature. Something Andrew Sarris said about Charles Chaplin, imagining his own demise in
Limelight
, also applies. To do so, especially if you are an actor with a singularly and sharply outlined screen persona, is to imagine, he wrote, the death of the world, “a conception of sublime egoism.” Such conceptions, sublime or otherwise, are truly beyond the range of Clint’s experience and imagination.

His need is the opposite—to render death an anticlimax. It is why he so often ends his films with a sudden disappearance, why, perhaps, he has so often toyed with the idea of reincarnation. Each implies that the end is, comparatively speaking, nothing; not, certainly, when the comparison is to life.

We have to agree that this thought lacks doomy grandeur. But it is not without a certain gallantry and, in this case, a certain honesty and instructive power. This is who Clint Eastwood is now, what he has come to be at this stage in his long career. The business of movie stars is not to impersonate others. It has never been interesting to say of them that they only play themselves. Of course they do. The only worthwhile question is, with what honesty and subtlety do they do so?

That is why we often come to our deepest affection for them—and our deepest alienation from them—later in life, when we see how they have played out the challenge of the years. Suppose, for the moment, that Clint Eastwood had played his Sergio Leone characters as the director originally wanted him to—with openness and articulateness that
did not at that age suit the actor. Suppose, by contrast, he had gone on playing that silently disdainful figure decades later, when he had, in fact, become in life a man capable of expressing himself much more fully. In either case, we would have sensed the lie—or, worse, the arrested development—and likely turned away from him. Or suppose he had stopped his evolution at the next stage, with the more openly, but still brutally expressed, outrage of
Dirty Harry
. It was appropriate to that season of Clint’s life, but not to its subsequent ones.

The point is that we like to see, need to see, in male movie stars—not in female ones, wherein lies their terrible problem—what we need to see, hope to see, in ourselves: the capacity not so much to grow, but to find and project the best of themselves in the context of the encroaching years. It is what the great ones—Tracy, Grant, even John Wayne in his blunter way—contrived to do. It is what Clint is now doing, as he plays characters searching for the kind of reconciliations we are all ideally obliged to seek in our seventh decade. In so doing he guarantees the truth of his previous incarnations. He has always done what he honorably could with what he had at the particular moment—no duplicity, very little in the way of artifice or artfulness.

Younger, smoldering with anger, but struggling to control it, he confronted the chaos attendant upon our culture’s redefinitions of manhood with the willed application of a sometimes-violent irony. Confronting age—that universally redefining force—irony, slightly sadder in its expression, more gently wielded, remains his weapon of choice.