The last great gunslinger

I didn’t see the trailer for the new Eastwood film Gran Torino. I didn’t need to. The poster was enough to shake my hood. In it, Eastwood is colossus. His firm septuagenarian treetunk body takes up the entire length of the poster. His face is obscured by dark shadows but you can feel his burning, ever-notice-how-sometimes-you-fuck-with-the-wrong-person glare. His once splendid cowboy hair is now just wheatish tufts of silver but age has not softened Eastwood into some docile rambling grandpa. On the contrary, it has hardened his skin to a pelt - impenetrable leather armor, creased to protect the edges of a deeply etched snarl. Clint Eastwood is old. Clint Eastwood is going to die soon. Clint Eastwood no longer has anything to loose. Do not fuck with Clint Eastwood. A shot gun is slung through his sinewy tradesman grip. His watch indicates the time: time for carnage. In the background the film’s namesake is slick and wet looking, she glistens, you can almost hear her rumble, panting in the half light, waiting for her master’s smoky call.

I can be forgiven for assuming that Gran Torino was gonna be a car chase and ultra violence binge. Eastwood personifies violence, even when he is still. In fact it’s his stillness in The Unforgiven’s unforgettable saloon massacre scene that make him the baddest mother fucker in the west. You barely see him move, the rifle is an extension of his arm, it doesn’t even wobble. Perhaps the bullets are coming straight from his deep set eyes. And what posture! Like his spine is molded from blackened gun metal.

“You just shot an unarmed man” yells the sheriff in shocked dismay.
But Eastwood the gunslinger, bounty hunter and assassin is beyond oversimplified moral codes. “Well he shoulda armed himself.” He says. “…That’s right. I’ve killed women and children, killed just about anything that walked or crawled at one time or another. And now I’m here to kill you li’ll Bill.” Blam! Bodies erupt and crumple to the floor. Blam! Men fall like stuffed clown dolls. Blam! Eastwood remains rigid, stoic, in control.

He pours a shot of whisky.

Eastwood is famous for his portrayals of the anti-hero. Dark and troubled. Haunted by ghosts that won’t die no matter how many bullets you pump into the room. Unsurprisingly, this is the man he plays in Gran Torino. What is surprising is that instead of being a splattering high impact Dirty Harry style show down, Gran Torino is the most sensitive analysis of racism, diaspora and ‘American’ masculinity I have ever seen.

It’s funny how an iconic face like Clint Eastwood’s becomes its own signifier. Before he has so much as uttered a grumble or cuss, a close up of Eastwood’s gnarled grimace sends the audience into peels of joyous laughter. Eastwood’s shtick has become kitsch. One shot of his mug conjures our collective memory of every snarl, spit and sneer stretched celluloid since the fifties. For a lesser man, a lesser actor, this could mean big screen bye bye, but Eastwood turns it to his advantage. He knows how to laugh at himself. He knows how to use himself strategically.

In ‘68 Sergio Leone said that he liked Clint Eastwood because he only has two facial expressions “One with the hat and one without.” Since then all hats have been doffed as he has proved himself to be a compelling director and producer in his own right as well as one of the most dependable performers around. In Gran Torino Eastwood, sans hat, plays Walt Kowalski. Polak, war vet and widower (as in Dirty Harry, widowhood takes the light from the man of action, leaves him with nothing to subdue the soul in aid of). Kowalski is watching ‘the old neighbourhood’ change. In a hilarious porch-rocking-chair stand off an old Hmong immigrant rocks back and forth and curses her neighbour Kowalski, the idiot, the last remaining ‘American’ in an immigrant area. Matching and raising her contempt and hatred Eastwood spits as he rocks, locking his smoldering eyes onto her. A quick draw from the east, she projects an unbelievable spray of beedle nut from her own wisened lips. Stale mate.

It’s not just his Hmong neighbours who want Kwalski to move on. His salesman son wants to ship him off to a retirement community where he can golf “And buy new shoes!” enthuses a dipshit daughter in law. This is such a great scene, because it’s not just Walt Kowalski they are trying to retire, it’s Eastwood himself, everything that Eastwood represents. Now that manliness is defined and measured by the acquisition of consumables, by paychecks and sports utility vehicles, it’s time to put the figurehead of American masculinity out to pasture. Frankly he’s become an embarrassment. His ideas are outdated. These days we are more complex, we need more neurotic heroes.

So here’s 78 year old Clint Eastwood, the man who, along with John Wayne and (maybe) Gary Cooper, defined the whole idea of the strong silent American Man. The simple man who fights for his country, stands by his brother and isn’t afraid to die protecting what’s his. And he’s playing Walt Kowalski, a character who based his whole life on those ideals. Kowalski is American-man-as-used-figure. America used his body in the Korean war and then again on the assembly lines of Michigan Ford factories in the floundering seventies economic malaise. Of course in 2008, labor is farmed off shore to South East Asia. The very countries that used to require fightn’ in order to protect the American way of life now ARE the American way of life. They supply it, keep the impossible dream alive. Now the ‘Gooks’ are moving into the old neighbourhood and fat cappo son’s are trying to retire the last American hero, pulling up outside his house in their Toyotas and shrugging while he grumbles “Would it kill ya to buy american?”

Early capitalism exploited the Buster-from-Animal-Farm figure of the American Man. Late capitalism, which would rather dispose of a product than fix it, wants to chuck him. It’s in his unappreciated twighlight that Walt Kowalski finds he has more in common with his ‘gook’ neighbours than with his own spoilt family. Overcoming the philosophical motto captured best in the chorus Rawhide, (the TV show on which Clint got his fist big break) “don’t try to understand em, just rope, roll and brand em”, Kowalski forges a real friendship with a strong willed, intelligent Hmong teenager. She fills him in on what it’s like for the boys of the old neighbourhood these days. Girls do better now. The girls go to college, the boys go to jail. She worries about her quiet, gentle little brother, trying to get by in a gang culture based on pride, bling and gats. Should he have to appropriate a destructive masculinity as means for survival?

In a humorous nod to the sidekick character of numerous westerns, Kowalski takes on the mission of ‘manning up’ his fragile adolescent neighbour. He teaches the boy how to talk about cars, swear and fix things. He gives him gaffotape, a shifter and a can of WD40. Though ironized and impossible seeming, Eastwood plays it straight. It’s clever. His authenticity, his real role in creating the myth he is satirizing makes it even funnier. But the Kowalski character surprises us, putting a twist on what we have come to expect from Eastwood’s characters - motivated more often than not by a desire for revenge. Kowalski settles the score on the question of settling the score, so that the young American man might have balance and choice.

Clint Eastwood has said that Gran Torino will be his last acting role, and if this is true then it is a eulogy to the American anti hero. He dies as a martre and he dies like heroes should: triumphantly and for the cause. And while we sit in the cinema, cheeks tearstained and hearts wide open, we realize that if he didn’t know what he was doing the whole time, he sure as hell knows now. You only need two facial expressions to contain the truth. Just like the Gran Torino, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

I wanna see that movie again, but I wanna see it at the drive-in. That’s the place to pay tribute to the death of a hero. I wanna sit in the back of my Ford and pay my respects. The sad thing is that I’ll never truly get it. Not like Clint does, the icon who once asked for a 25 dollar a week pay rise and got fired from Universal Studios. I cringe when I watch the scene where Walt’s granddaughter finds his ‘78 fastback in the garage. Walt Kowalski built that Gran Torino with his own hands, but to his granddaughter it’s just more capital.
“Cool vintage car.” She says, lusting after an impossible inheritance.
It echoes what the cute candy bar guy said when we told him what we needed the choc tops for.
“Cool. Vintage Clint.”