This blogger has never seen a bad Clint Eastwood film, even though some are better than others, especially Eastwood's first film — Play Misty For Me (1971). His forgettable slapstick films — Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980) — fall into the lesser ranks of Eastwood films. However, the Eastwood body of work is impressive by any measure and Gil Favor would be proud of Rowdy Yates for movin' 'em up and headin' 'em out. If this is (fair & balanced) artistry, so be it.
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Frankie Laine — "Rawhide" Theme Song (1959)
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Clint Eastwood’s Theological Vision
By Sara Anson Vaux
Tag Cloud of the following article
These days it is hard to avoid Clint Eastwood. The British Film Institute in London hosted a retrospective of his movies this past summer; New York City’s Museum of Modern Art included The Gauntlet (1977) in its April to September 2008 Jazz Score festival; and Spain recently celebrated the spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars; For A Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), the movies directed by Sergio Leone that, beginning with Fistful in 1964, launched Eastwood’s international career. MGM recently released restored versions of that trilogy. Meanwhile, Eastwood had the foresight to cast Angelina Jolie as the star of his newest movie, The Changeling, which has ensured its thorough and constant coverage along with photos of Brangelina’s blessed offspring.
Eastwood is not simply Eastwood, of course. He evokes a wide range of associations, some of them hard to shake—“Dirty Harry” Callahan with his Magnum .44; the Man with No Name in the spaghetti trilogy; and the Stranger in High Plains Drifter, for instance. Other attachments, however, seem to belong to a film director far removed from Hollywood’s tidy plots and easy answers. Eastwood has directed small, idiosyncratic films, such as Honkytonk Man and Bronco Billy, and unlikely romances, including Blood Work and The Bridges of Madison County. There is more: the acute social and emotional analysis of Bird, Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby. And, of course, westerns—including the superbly crafted The Outlaw Josey Wales, to be taken up shortly in this essay—that fit all of these categories.
To confound matters further, in 2006 Eastwood—long a master at capturing the look, sounds, and feel of American spaces—directed two politically charged movies that are not so much antiwar as deeply humanistic and compassionate testaments to the tragic waste of young lives in wartime. Could this be Clint Eastwood, former mayor of Carmel, California, directing Flags of Our Fathers, an exposé of racism and government propaganda during World War II? Is this the hard-bitten patriot of Heartbreak Ridge directing Letters from Iwo Jima—a war movie in Japanese that stars Japanese actors portraying Japanese soldiers sympathetically?
Indeed it is. From the beginning of his career as a movie director, Eastwood has addressed fundamental questions that films such as these raise, placing his iconic identity of ruthless masculinity in tension with a broader vision of individual and social wholeness. How should we live together? How do we define the good? What is family? What does it mean to be human? And who belongs to the human family? It must be said that when Eastwood exerts full control over a film, he fully engages with issues of justice, violence, and war memory, dimensions of human experience that such critical questions raise. Through disciplined use of genres such as the western and war movie, ritual structures such as call-and-response in The Gauntlet and Bird, and innovative use of traditional American music and his own compositions as heard in Unforgiven, Eastwood displays emotional and artistic empathy with the people he portrays—outcasts and pariahs, all the marginalized men, women, and children who have been left outside the gates of paradise they had so passionately longed to enter.
Eastwood unspools tales of endless journeys across America’s magnificent landscape in the South and the Far West, undertaken by pioneers and slaves or their descendants seeking a better place after the Civil War or by those who migrated to the cities in a quest for identity or peace. Movies like The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County, and Million Dollar Baby present different but equally poignant and palpable tales of those forgotten men and women. In 2006, he brought that empathy with outsiders, unusual in a Hollywood director, to its logical extreme with Letters from Iwo Jima.
• • • • •
How are we to explain this radical disjunction? On the one hand, Eastwood embodies maybe more than any other actor the iconic force of the vengeful American killer, machismo at its most remorseless and violent. On the other hand, we have Eastwood’s cinematic direction with its focus on forgotten lives, storytelling marked by eloquence and compassion. That split naturally invites the question of how the man used his early experiences not only to populate his artistic worlds, as novelists John Steinbeck in Cannery Row (1945) or Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) had done, for instance, but also to shape works with a distinctly ethical, even theological, edge.
No doubt Eastwood built on his own memories of living on the edges of mainstream American society to construct these various communities and give their inhabitants distinctive personalities, quirks, and backstories. On the surface, Eastwood’s personal narrative follows an archetypal rags-to-riches script. Richard Schickel’s Clint Eastwood: A Biography (1996) and Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz’s Clint Eastwood Interviews (1999) describe how during the grim years of the Depression, a young man and his wife, with a son and daughter tucked into the backseat of their Pontiac, roamed the Pacific Coast searching for work to feed the family and keep moving. After his father found a job in 1940, the family settled in Piedmont, near Oakland, California, where over the next eight years the young boy began to develop as an athlete and to play piano at the Omar, a local jazz club. Fleeing Piedmont High School for the more diverse economic and ethnic atmosphere of Oakland Technical High School, where he felt more at home, Eastwood lived off and on with his grandmother in the mountains but usually stayed on the move. The draft disrupted his planned musical career, and he nearly drowned during those army years. He held down odd jobs, and urged by his army buddy David Janssen, he rattled around Hollywood for years in the minor roles accessible to an actor who was too tall or too quiet, with teeth too jagged to be a star.
Christopher Frayling, in his Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (2006), describes how Eastwood, cast as second-string lead in the long-running television show "Rawhide" (1958–1965) as the lovable, lady-loving, hotheaded cowboy Rowdy Yates, had the good fortune to be spotted by the Italian director Sergio Leone. Leone, who would become one of Eastwood’s mentors in the craft of directing, cast him in the magnificently operatic For a Fistful of Dollars (1964) and its equally lavish sequels For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). The spaghettis turned the young actor into an international star. When the director Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry appeared in 1971, Eastwood also became America’s leading box-office draw.
The Eastwood character of the spaghettis showed the trademark poncho, cheroot, six-gun, and unflappable cool. This foundational image fused in most moviegoers’ minds with the considerably more tortured Dirty Harry, a detective at war with the punks as well as his own police department, and anticipated the “meaner than hell, cold-blooded, damn killer” we find deconstructed at the end of Unforgiven (1992). Yet despite the popularity of films like Rambo, The Terminator, and Superman, it seems obvious that American men bear more resemblance to the down-and-out dreamer Red Stovall in Honkytonk Man or the muddy pig-farmer side of Will Munny, the retired gunslinger in Unforgiven, more than they do to the cool of the fast-draw invincible one in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. They are far more likely to intone for hours about college football rankings over beer and sausage than to walk coolly into the middle of the street with a big gun and their hot dog half eaten to shoot bank robbers, like Dirty Harry.
Eastwood the director, I would contend, loves the outsiders and schmucks more than he loves the clever men he portrays in the spaghettis and the Dirty Harry series. A lesser man with the same magnificent gifts would have turned his wandering years into a hunger for power and obsession with belonging, letting fame, fortune, and cinematically enhanced invincibility infect his inner being. Many Hollywood stars, after all, have chosen those things. But Eastwood had a different idea. He decided instead to celebrate those journeys and the losers, immigrants, and vagrants who made them, those whose poverty or race or country of origin on the face of things excluded them from a successful American life. These were the men and women among whom he had lived and worked with from childhood.
Furthermore, early on in his film career he began to identify not simply with poor vagabonds or African Americans but also with Americans of Indian, Chinese, or Mexican heritage, women, persons with disabilities, prostitutes, children, people past their prime, and accused criminals. Breezy’s hippie, Bronco Billy’s vanload of misfits, and A Perfect World’s escaped criminal travel the same dusty road. Despite the almost continual rumors that he has another Dirty Harry installment in the works, his newest movie, Gran Torino, stars Eastwood as a cynical Korean War veteran who becomes enmeshed with a family of Hmong immigrants—barely visible Americans ripe for corruption or for rescue and redemption.
• • • • •
It will not be lost on seekers of spiritual wisdom that this journey of turning fellow feeling for outcasts and pariahs, the disposition to wrest power from the mighty and elevate the weak, comes from the Bible—the Magnificat of Mary, the Beatitudes, and Paul’s references to the wisdom of folly: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Luke 1:52–53). In interviews with Michael Henry Wilson, Eastwood has commented on his fascination with “the biblical stories and their correspondence with the mythology of the Western.” Yet while critics talk about the Christ figure in George Stevens’s 1953 western Shane, Eastwood never attempts to construct the hero as a savior. He distinctly challenges that time-honored though now-formulaic cliché. Choosing instead to create the sights and sounds of men and women huddled around a sputtering campfire, telling one another their dreams, as in Pale Rider, A Perfect World, or Unforgiven, or dancing to tunes they remember from happier days, as we see in Josey Wales and Bird.
Eastwood focuses an attentive eye on Maggie Fitzgerald, trailer trash turned boxer, and Frankie Dunn, a poetic Irishman down on his luck. He remembers Delilah the innocent prostitute and the simple Davey in Unforgiven, the failed country singer Red Stovall in Honkytonk Man, the escaped convict Butch and his surrogate son in A Perfect World, and the powerless miners in Pale Rider. Yet if he has a soft spot for ordinary folks, he is no sentimentalist. American aspirations for land, wealth, and recognition prove illusions that must be stripped away to make way for new life. Eastwood’s vagabonds have been deceived by the mythology of the conquest of the West, which required ethnic cleansing, by the romantic aura that surrounded the southern “lost cause” stories that masked the profound moral horror of slavery, and by the propaganda that extols victory at any price over the real life cost of broken bodies in wartime.
In Unforgiven, Eastwood’s images open our hearts to sorrow and hope, to a brilliant winter sky and hope for a new birth when Will Munny awakens from his death stupor. Will’s shocking relapse into the world of myth and murder is framed and shot like a horror film, and his sad ride through the darkness and rain at the movie’s end reveals the aging man’s profound sadness. In Mystic River, we grieve with Jimmy (Sean Penn) as he tries to break through the police line to see his daughter’s broken body, a sacrificial circle visually mirrored later in the film as Jimmy and his gang surround their childhood friend Dave (Tim Robbins) in the darkness before they kill him. Million Dollar Baby gives us Maggie (Hilary Swank), the girl boxer, lovingly silhouetted against the gray-green walls of the Hit-Pit gym or driving through the darkness with tough old Frankie (Eastwood), her trainer, their faces merely points of light. We shudder in Flags of Our Fathers as Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), one of the flag raisers in the famous Iwo Jima photograph, is served an ice-cream-sculpture sundae covered with strawberry syrup at a state dinner. He sees not a mound of confection but rather a hill covered with blood—rivers of blood spilled over the ragingly hot island, which for Japan symbolized its mystical essence as a nation, a people, and a divine power in the world. To the young Japanese boys trapped in the island’s hewn thermal caves or to the young American boys rushing up those rocky beaches and cliffs, neither the divine sheen of Japan as an imperial idea nor the concept of a just war waged by a divinely blessed America are sufficient to save their arms, eyes, or sanity.
The deeply humanistic and spiritually compelling themes of repentance and new life thread through all the scripts Eastwood has chosen to direct. This is startlingly so in High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Indeed, these two films reveal far more about Eastwood’s ethical and spiritual concerns than we would ever uncover by checking his church attendance or a marked catechism book. Neither movie glorifies violence, despite the catharsis of Drifter’s refining fire. Rather, each reflects on the fragility of the social order and the resilience of goodness despite violent human nature. Both films anticipate Eastwood’s continued dissection of nationalism, fratricide, and greed. They honor generosity of heart, preparing us for the rich reflections that flourish in Unforgiven and reach into his recent antiwar films. Both movies begin with John Locke’s tabula rasa, a clean slate and a pure heart, and then offer their characters a chance to construct an ethical system from scratch.
• • • • •
What would you do if you could start all over—choose your friends and a spot of natural beauty to create a perfect world in which you would become happy and wealthy? The millions of people who poured out of Europe into the New World between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries literally banked on such a vision of a new life. The land companies sold to those who had money. Those individuals without sold themselves or a child into servitude. Land grants made during the Revolutionary War ironically enabled communities to stake out territory where they could live together in harmony, free from war. The great uncharted West beckoned with its promise of wide-open lands. The U.S. government periodically opened up its purchases to summon restless and hopeful men and women to stake out their bit of paradise—a perfect, or at least a better, life than they had known back across the ocean.
Clint Eastwood’s high-plains drifter rides down from the mountaintops into such an oddly static town freshly built alongside a vast body of water, all fluid motion set against the townspeople’s icy stares. The camera cuts across the horizon and exposes the eerie newness of a small settlement along the edge of a vast lake scooped out of endless desert and settles on the immobile face of the rider in a series of complex shots that cement the viewer into the unfolding action. By 1973, when Drifter was released, Eastwood already was an international star, Dirty Harry was in the air, and serial westerns such as "Gunsmoke" still played almost nonstop on television. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed. American troops were pulling out of Vietnam, and U.S. citizens could begin to fantasize once more about peace, equality, and justice.
High Plains Drifter offers a reflection on justice that reimagines Shane, High Noon, and other classic westerns. However, in Eastwood’s version, the sheriff is dead; the dead man is resurrected and mad as hell; the prosperous new town is burned down; and redemption is scarcely whispered. In several interviews, Eastwood notes that this is a what-if film: What might have happened if the Gary Cooper character in High Noon, who single-handedly stood up against corruption, had been killed? (Eastwood offered this proposition in a number of interviews, including one with Kapsis and Coblentz.) The high-plains drifter rides into such a town, now plagued by evil and its own guilt.
What if? hardly conveys the horror of the film’s two flashback sequences in which we watch an excruciating and drawn-out close-up of a young man’s whipping murder. Make no mistake: These interpolated sections function the same way Raskolnikov’s dream of the little nag function in Crime and Punishment: as the torture death of an innocent, even to the whip lashes across the victim’s eyes. As Dostoevsky described Raskolnikov’s dream, the animal serves as a displaced human sacrifice: He runs past the horse, runs ahead of her, sees how they are lashing her on the eyes, right on the eyes! He is crying. His heart is in his throat, the tears are flowing. One of the whips grazes his face, he does not feel it. . . . But the poor boy is beside himself. With a shout he tears through the crowd to the gray horse, throws his arms around her dead, bleeding muzzle, and kisses her eyes and mouth.
The bystanders in Raskolnikov’s dream—the few who shout that the murderer is “no Christian”—are replaced in Drifter by the innkeeper’s wife and by Mordecai, the town dwarf. The young child who runs up to the nag to kiss her bleeding eyes and lips has no counterpart in the movie’s flashback, however. In the film, this function belongs to Eastwood himself and to a version of himself as symbol of protest, the Stranger.
With no establishing shot and no backstory to tell us otherwise, the first flashback belongs firmly to the memory bank of the Stranger, who has stretched out on his hotel room bed and has locked us in with him and his memories. He winces as the sequence unfolds: The shots of a brutal whipping are juxtaposed against his sleeping face, his jerks visually echoing his sharp reaction to the sound of a whip in the movie’s second sequence. When he awakes, the Stranger checks his own face in the mirror as if to look for scars. He is surprised to see none; we are surprised to see any reflection at all, because as early as this sequence he reeks of the netherworld, although the tight shots and brutality of the flashback murder encourage us to identify with his suffering.
The movie’s allegory throws a distinctively theological punch, as might be guessed with its allusions to Dostoevsky. Mordecai, an abused holy fool crowned king (sheriff) when the Stranger is appointed town rescuer, serves a god, as his name implies. The Stranger operates in a distinctly apocalyptic zone where he wields supernatural powers: The whore’s gunshots don’t wound him; he appears and disappears at will—and yet he satisfies his human appetites for sex, food, fine wine, and pretty boots.
The Stranger’s quarry exceeds the elimination of the men who murdered him or the humiliation of the bystanders who passively observed his drawn-out death as shown in the movie’s flashbacks. He is no savior of embattled townsfolk. Rather he is the avenging angel whose words of judgment recall the Jesus who overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple or seared the consciences of men who stoned women for adultery despite their own sexual sins, as we read in chapters 2 and 8 of the Gospel of John. The Stranger claims the right of reversals: He literally elevates the despised Mordecai and distributes riches to the dispossessed, the Native Americans who mysteriously appear in this white town of the invisible poor. The angel asserts equitable distribution of goods, regard for the weak, hospitality for the homeless, and freedom from fear. (Some of the early episodes of Rawhide highlighted these virtues). Eastwood’s strange angel destroys this town built on fraud and fueled through murder. The town of Hell burns to the ground.
The Stranger attacks even larger targets: the lynching of so-called rustlers. The frontier justice of Owen Wister’s The Virginian earns critique as a desecration of the rule of law and human decency. Both the 1903 novel and its 1929 film adaptation with a young Gary Cooper glamorized lynching, or at least exposed its perverted logic: Until the rule of law arrives in this godforsaken territory, just string ’em up, guilty or not. (This idea would reappear in Ted Post’s 1968 film Hang ’Em High, the first production of Eastwood’s Malpaso Studios and a star vehicle for Eastwood himself following the spaghettis.)
As a director, Eastwood suggests that herdlike public behavior dominates political discourse, because the desire for wealth and power shapes the enactment of the law—and what its sterile words become when people are free to design their own rules from scratch and go about practicing physical cruelty in the name of theoretical justice. Eastwood thus addresses not only an American and biblical past but also his America in the mid-twentieth century. “Help me,” which we see and hear the victim utter in the second flashback in Drifter, recalls the highly publicized death of Kitty Genovese outside her Queens, New York, apartment in 1964. As many as thirty-eight people may have heard the attack, which took place over a thirty-minute period, but none intervened. The flashback also recalls Shirley Jackson’s notorious 1948 short story “The Lottery,” which recounts an ancient annual rite of human sacrifice in a small New England village, again punctuated by the bystander effect.
In High Plains Drifter, it is never very much in doubt how appeals to humanity to do the right thing will stand up in the face of money’s corrosive influence. The balance of power is stacked from the outset. The wealth that generates the mine owners’ power derives from a morally reprehensible violation in which land was stolen from its original inhabitants, the Native American tribes, its acquisition justified by Manifest Destiny. Businesspeople have gained control of federal lands. The wealth generated from government mines that might benefit all the citizens of the republic—the federal land’s owners—in the form of railways, postal and telegraph services, and roadways instead funnels directly into the pockets of a few moguls. It is a subtle but perceptive touch in this film that neither railways nor telegraph wires appear in any shot of this town.
High Plains Drifter also confronts the lynching of African Americans across the South. Eastwood would have remembered the savage murders in June 1964 of three Mississippi civil rights workers who had been registering blacks to vote. Twenty-two years after Drifter, Eastwood connected whipping with race hatred in Unforgiven, when Ned (Morgan Freeman) dies at the hands of Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett (Gene Hackman). Like the white supremacists in 1964, “Little Bill” is a man determined to bring “justice” to his little town. Ned’s death visually resembles the death of the marshal in Drifter, as the camera alternates between close-ups of the sufferer’s face and the torturers’ distorted faces.
• • • • •
Will the survivors of the Stranger’s refining fire now live blamelessly by the side of their lake, their sins washed clean? Will the Union heal its wounds and shape its rule of law according to the architecture of the founding fathers? Or will the shadow narrative of the American experience, the conquest of the West, assert its glorification of power? How can the divided people of our land live together in peace? Eastwood reflects on these questions from new angles in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).
As a companion piece to High Plains Drifter, Josey Wales references the love affair between an audience and its christened heroes. For international spectators, the tall, athletic Eastwood of the spaghetti westerns incarnated the ultimate warrior—and they cheered him on. Yet while that heroic warrior reappears in Josey Wales, Eastwood the director has a different and larger agenda: the dissection of the myths that perpetuate egoism and greed. To replace national protectionism, racism, and class hierarchy, he models generous, tolerant, border-free communities in which all can live in peace. Such a human family is created in Josey Wales, but not without addressing the deadly heritage of revenge.
Josey, a young Missouri farmer at peace with himself, his family, and the land, turns over the sod on a late spring afternoon in the early 1860s, his smiling face turned toward his little son. The setting sun filters through the trees and over the stream, laid out in hues of soft brown. After the scorching inferno of High Plains Drifter, we are soothed by the stream’s soft ripple; the image of' mother, father, and child; and Jerry Fielding’s comforting soundtrack. The father wears a hat of soft brown felt: the gear of a farmer, not a warrior. This is the paradise any young family might have hoped for at the beginning of that terrible decade: a place of lush fertility and spiritual tranquility far from the din of the Civil War engulfing the country further east.
The astute watcher of westerns naturally anticipates abrupt change—the sound of hoofbeats, an arrow in the shoulder. However, even seasoned viewers could not predict the cinematic cataclysm about to engulf them: the sudden shift of color and sound, as mother, child, and homestead are ravaged in breathtakingly economical strokes by pro-Union Kansas jayhawkers. A wisp of smoke, the flash of horse hooves glimpsed through the brush, blonde hair streaming over a woman’s partially stripped body, bright flames devouring a sturdy farmhouse. In a series of shots that recall the warriors’ rush into action in Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), we follow the young man’s panicked dash as he cuts through the saplings toward his home. The camera immediately plunges the spectator into the unfolding death scene, as we experience the horror through the young man’s eyes.
The cartoonlike torching of the corrupt town in Drifter takes on hellish urgency here, for Josey Wales is anchored in the earthy substance of real lives, not in parable or myth. The homage to Kurosawa’s masterpiece signals that Eastwood plans to depart from the terrain of the B-western to capture the desperation and beauty of ordinary, not mythically or heroically glamorous, lives. In the film’s second sequence, the camera hovers near a mounting pile of earth in ghastly replay of the earlier pastoral shots. As Josey drags a body bag toward the fresh grave, a little hand pops out of the seam and the father tenderly replaces it inside its burlap winding sheet.
In Drifter, Eastwood’s scriptural knowledge, theological wisdom, and ethical mandate sizzled with apocalyptic fury. Josey Wales begins rather at the point of grief and sorrow, where the young father marks the grave of wife and child with a cross and a fir tree. He ends the graveside blessing, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” not with “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” and with long anguished sobs. Eastwood cements the reference to Job’s despair with multiple shots of Josey sitting on the freshly turned earth with his hat pulled down, bathed in the dying light, back to the camera. Whatever happens next in the movie’s plot will resonate with the human desire to rage at heaven for committing the unthinkable: the murder of innocents.
When the Missouri bushwackers, sympathetic to the Confederacy, appear over the horizon, they offer Josey a tempting appeal: Revenge on the Union slayers is the only answer, and it’s time to go inflict a Kansas bloodbath. As spectators, we ask: Will Josey become another figure not simply of legend (Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Will Munny) but also of American literature—the American soul that D. H. Lawrence defined as “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”? Well, to paraphrase Dirty Harry, will he?
Credits roll over images of thousands of corpses. Lest the fetching fife and drum music that runs under the shots seduce the spectator, the images are shot in muted and distancing blue tones like the early glass photographs of the period, blood and beheadings obscured by the fog of war. Two years before Josey Wales, the celebrated French director Robert Bresson opened his movie Lancelot du Lac with a similar montage: knights riding in quest of the Holy Grail who burn, torch, lynch, and behead, whose lances sweep across holy altars in desecration of the spiritual symbols the men seek to validate. Eastwood need not have known that movie to portray the supposedly purifying quest of the bushwackers as a descent into hell. The Outlaw Josey Wales becomes a theological meditation on justice and revenge the moment Josey’s wife and little boy are killed.
Betrayal of a friend, the oldest of human vices according to Eastwood in a 1984 interview with Wilson, wipes out the remaining bushwackers, and following the end of the Civil War, Josey finds himself to be an outlaw pursued by Union law enforcement. He has no choice but to turn his now-legendary killing skills toward survival.
The centerpieces of the second part of the film defy description. Josey Wales breaks all the rules for classic westerns, making its frequent labeling as a revisionist western almost euphemistic. As David W. Bright puts forward in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Eastwood refuses to glorify the Civil War period, refuses to submerge the race and class conflicts of these years (almost always ignored in sanitized accounts of that conflict), and won’t let his audience forget the acres of rotting corpses and postwar resurgence of racial hatreds that engulfed the country.
Josey falls in love again, not with a kindhearted prostitute or a schoolteacher as in the classic western High Noon, but with Laura Lee, a fellow sojourner given to otherworldly flights of fancy. His ragtag family comprises other outcasts—an old woman and her granddaughter, two Mexican Americans, a displaced old Cherokee, a young Navajo woman, a stray dog. We detect hints that “come spring,” his sweetheart might add a baby to the little family of outcasts. No cowboy celibacy for Josey! Add in the prostitute Rose, a saloonkeeper, and a fiddler, and Josey’s world is now complete. The Man with No Name finally has a name and a home—even if at the end of the film, when he rides out of town, the spectator is not sure whether he will return home to his band of fools or ride off to die. Even more outrageously, this film dares to model peace, bane of the traditional western and enemy of American imperialism. In a magnificent set piece framed against a glorious blue sky, Josey offers the chief of the Comanche, Ten Bears, life rather than death. They cement their bond in blood. Josey’s promise to supply food for the Comanche journeys recalls the biblical meals of fellowship in Genesis 18 and the Gospels, where strangers are welcomed and food is provided for all, rich and poor.
The Outlaw Josey Wales provides a powerful example of Eastwood’s willingness not only to tamper with the formulas of the western, even to outrightly subvert them, but also to offer playful correctives to his Hollywood macho killer persona. Far more boldly, though, through this movie the director ennobles men and women whose narratives of suffering now are heard, seen, and known. This signals a rejection of the culture of death in favor of new life. It may seem a stretch, but this choice puts him solidly in a religious tradition that would have to include the book of Micah, Boethius, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, and the beloved community celebrated by Eastwood’s contemporary Martin Luther King Jr. The theological company Eastwood keeps offers a distinct way to help to better understand his cinematic vision.
• • • • •
What needs to be emphasized again and again is that throughout his career, not just lately, Clint Eastwood has worked hard to temper justice with mercy. In Unforgiven, building on the insights of High Plains Drifter, Josey Wales, and Pale Rider, he further reveals the profound sadness of a post–Civil War world in which the men and women he understands, values, and loves seek a new start but become trapped in an endless cycle of vengeance.
In Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, and Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s leanings toward peace, reciprocity, and clear-eyed social analysis have become even more intense and his movies less commercial. This is a move unusual among American directors. Who else would underscore the dawning love of an alcoholic washed-out cop and a hard-nosed prostitute—the dregs of American society—with the jazz classic “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and set this redemption tale against a barren, urban, concrete cityscape, as in The Gauntlet? Who else would dare to show competitive sports as licensed human sacrifice or show the ending of a cherished life as undertaken with anguish and unqualified love, as he does in Million Dollar Baby?
Who else has told the sorrowful stories of one immigrant neighborhood with such unvarnished clarity as Eastwood does those of the Boston Irish in Mystic River? That dark movie is strangely devoid of the unconditional forgiveness Eastwood offers his characters in other films such as Josey Wales or Unforgiven. Yet Jimmy, Sean, Dave, Celeste, and Annabeth, the characters in that film, are dearly loved—and forgiven—despite their messy and tragic lives. And what other filmmaker would dare to enter the daily lives and sorrows of an historical enemy as Eastwood did with the young Japanese soldiers in Letters from Iwo Jima? This is Eastwood the director, ethicist, and theologian. This is a man on fire. ♥
[Sara Anson Vaux is a Lecturer in the Department of Religion at Northwestern University. Vaux has a B.A. from Allegheny College, studied at University of Edinburgh, and received the Ph.D. from Rice University. She has done post-doctoral study at McCormick Theological Seminary and has taught courses on religion, literature and film at the University of Chicago, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, North Park Seminary, and Northwestern University (since 1998). Vaux teaches both general and specific topics on Religion and Film.]
Copyright © 2009 The Great Books Foundation
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