A few film stars, males mostly, seem to escape the way of all flesh, actually gathering luster as they age. Fonda, Stewart, and Wayne all enjoyed an Indian summer of acclaim, although we may question whether those last years contained their best roles and work. What is sure is that none matched the steady ascent in esteem and influence achieved by Clint Eastwood, who has now entered his eighth decade and is going stronger than ever. The silent nameless gunman of Sergio Leone's offbeat westerns now sits atop the Hollywood heap, an actor-director of fame and repute. The rise was capped in 1993 when Eastwood's Unforgiven won Academy Awards for best director and best picture (and probably should have gotten best actor as well).

By any standard, this is an impressive career. But more than that, like very few screen figures before or behind the camera, Eastwood has created a folk legend, a lasting and powerful cinematic presence that rivals any in Hollywood history, including the legacy of John Wayne, whose cultural import is the subject of a new study by Garry Wills. In embracing the Eastwood persona, Americans have honored a new kind of hero, starkly different from Wayne's signature roles. The Eastwood myth not only celebrates bloodthirst and retribution but sacralizes the same with sundry trappings of the supernatural. All told, this is a daunting cultural shift, and in interpreting it and Eastwood we could use some help.

For starters we might turn to Richard Schickel, for long the esteemed film critic of Time, who has just produced a 500-page account of Eastwood's life and work. Schickel's slow take on Eastwood is dignified, genial, and leisurely, often too much so as he labors to wrest significance from some eminently forgettable films. And often this geniality goes so far as to slide into old-boy chumminess, since Schickel and Eastwood have been friends for many years. Once in a while Schickel even indulges a starstruck naïveté as he describes what sweet times he and Clint enjoyed during interviews for the book. While not sycophantic or hagiographic, the biography is nonetheless persistently and quietly uncritical.

This is especially troublesome in reckoning with what Schickel calls Eastwood's "revisionism" in his portrayal over three decades of a highly popular assemblage of gun-toting vigilantes: Leone's Man with No Name (three films, 1964-66), Josey Wales (1976), Dirty Harry Callahan (four films, 1971-88), William Munny (1992), or other high-plains drifting pale riders (1972, 1985). Remarkably, we never get an inkling of what Eastwood or Schickel really thinks of those "heroes." The best Schickel can suggest is that many of the portraitures had within them some measure of "irony"--the violence played to the unwashed herd and the irony to the cognoscenti.

The easiest part of Eastwood the person to capture also composes the biography's strongest suit. Schickel convinces the reader that Eastwood and the violent characters he usually portrays are not one and the same, even though the tabloids have tried to suggest otherwise. Clint is not Dirty Harry, a mean and nasty fellow who relishes the pleasure of getting even. Eastwood the man seems to be distinguished chiefly by a quiet but determined streak of independence in just about everything he does, one element that links him to his infamous cop character. During the Depression his family moved up and down the West Coast as his father sought steady employment, settling finally in the Bay Area, and it was from his father that Eastwood gathered both his work ethic and his stiff-lip independence.

As a teenager the lanky Eastwood was academically uninterested, but he loved cars and, privately and passionately, jazz, himself playing flugelhorn and piano. He haunted the clubs and venues featuring the new hot jazz of the late forties and fifties (30 years later he would produce and direct Bird [1988], a film on the short, self-destructive life of Charlie Parker). Schickel argues that Eastwood's absorption of the distinctly "post-modern" posture of these greats shaped Eastwood's own trademark "cool."

After high school Eastwood drifted, even working for a time as a lumberjack. Finally he resolved to attend Seattle University to study music, and jazz in particular. The Korean War intervened, and Eastwood instead found himself conscripted for two years as a lifeguard at Fort Ord, an experience that instilled a deep distaste for regimentation and bureaucratic inefficiency. Also formative, according to Schickel, was Eastwood's near-death in a plane crash in the Pacific north of San Francisco. The long, hard swim to shore said something about the puniness of the individual amid the indifferent titanic forces of nature, a sense of the tragic that informs the stark realism of some of his films.

Possessed of good looks and charm, and encouraged by friends, Eastwood drifted to Hollywood, took acting classes, and was eventually signed as a $75-a-week "contract" player by Universal. The break came when, roaming the halls of cbs, Eastwood was "discovered" and cast as a major supporting player in the network's new cowboy series, Rawhide, which ran for six years. When the series expired, and with no bright prospects and nothing to lose, Eastwood agreed to star in a western by unknown Italian director Sergio Leone, and the rest is history.

On the matter of Eastwood's proximity to his mean gunfighters and always-seething cop, Schickel does concede that Eastwood has a towering temper but contends that it is well-controlled and erupts only when provoked by injustice or incompetence, neither of which Eastwood abides in life or movie-making. Schickel offers up as well the evidence of Eastwood's love for--and, since he got power, insistence on--efficient, harmonious ensemble movie-making.

Even Schickel must acknowledge that there is some similarity between the icy stand-offishness of many of Eastwood's screen characters and his seeming inability to establish lasting romantic attachments. The stony half-mad distance of Dirty Harry, Josey Wales, and others perhaps mirrors Eastwood's reflex to cut and run the minute relationships look monogamous or lasting. He recently married for the second time, but along the way there have been countless women and many children, all of whom--by Schickel's account--have received Eastwood's generous support.

But such questions about the real Eastwood and his private exploits finally matter only because of what he has done in the movies, and there Schickel either fumbles or ignores the hard questions. The biggest example of this avoidance is his steady insistence that Eastwood deserves the celebrated label of auteur: a director possessed of a unique filmic sensibility whose distinctiveness appears not only in the selection of material (like Hitchcock or Bergman) but especially in film style--how a story looks, moves, and feels.

For auteurhood, however, Schickel offers no case, not even a concise one, other than to recite the awards and honors bestowed on Eastwood by fancy film organizations like the Cannes Film Festival and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Undoubtedly, there is some satisfaction in seeing the early naysayers on Eastwood, most notably long-time skeptic Pauline Kael, get their comeuppance. Still, a list is a list, not an explanation, and Schickel's ample critical skills could do better than the infrequent hints of what accounts for Eastwood's directorial accomplishment, which is indeed very considerable, especially in recent films like Unforgiven, a masterpiece of cinema and of moral insight.

A bigger problem still is Schickel's fumbling run at Eastwood as icon, which is the source of the star's enormous significance in contemporary American culture. Real film icons don't happen often; while we have a lot of stars, with their faddish moment or two in the sun, few ever approach iconicity. Those who do exude, for reasons not entirely explainable, a quasi-numinous state of compelling moral and spiritual authority. In full bloom, icons offer packed and potent, even transfixing, visual distillations of whole constellations of meaning, attitude, and value. They're essentially deep-down mysterious: why one works when another does not, well, who can tell, really. The look, the face, the gaze, the walk, the talk, and even garb collaborate and conjure within the strange alchemy that makes an icon. Cooper, Stewart, and Wayne have it; Tracy, Stallone, and Redford don't, nor does anyone else now in the star game--except, that is, for Eastwood.

This question of what constitutes Eastwood's allure looms large, because the roles for which he is most remembered--Joe, Harry, Pale Rider, and Will Munny--all of these exalt, and exult in, retribution as moral necessity and thoroughgoing pleasure. Beginning with the spaghetti westerns of the sixties, the cumulative effect of Eastwood's films, many of which he produced, directed, and starred in, has been to displace, as in evict, the old western code that heroes employ violence minimally, and then only in defense of the defenseless. To be sure, strains of the old code are not absent from Eastwood, but the dominant note over the years has been the joy of "make my day," and Eastwood more than anyone else is responsible for the new regimen of macho vengeance. As Josey Wales counsels in The Outlaw Josey Wales, when the enemy comes close, just get "plain mad-dog mean," and that puts the case pretty well for the retributive posture in many of Eastwood's films. From his first westerns, the tilt of Eastwood's aquiline jaw, thrust slightly forward, and the squint of his eyes have signaled the onset of a hard fury of blood vengeance that litters the earth with more bodies than are usually found in small cemeteries. Such a posture has more to do with Cain than John Wayne.

The fullness and glee of retribution do not make for a humane social fabric, and it does not take much imagination to wonder how much this sort of ethic, reiterated powerfully by Eastwood and his imitators in film after film, has fostered our latter-day plague of in-your-face make-my-day incivility. Part of the reason Eastwood's vengeful heroes work so potently--and making them more problematic still--is that he labors to bathe them with the nimbus of the divine. Indeed, Eastwood's most popular heroes are, at the very least, angels of vengeance, mysterious figures, arriving out of nowhere, vanishing and reappearing, swirling about in dust and cloud, seemingly miraculous, relentless and sure in the doom they bring to the ordinary quislings of everyday life.

Even in Eastwood's almost perfect anti-western, Unforgiven (1992), a film that seems brilliantly calculated to overturn the very myth of retribution his films have promulgated over the decades, the story ends in still another surfeit of murder, a rampage of pointless executions, and the surviving townspeople all but kneel and genuflect as Will Munny rides from town, pale-rider style, in a driving thunderstorm.

Ultimately, the significance of Clint Eastwood, artful movie-maker that he is, lies in the fact that his lasting films have occupied an empty space at the heart of our culture. In the Eastwood meta-drama, the bad guys are all wasted by an avenger who enjoys his work and whose very mysteriousness, aura, skill, rage, and power betoken divine sanction, if not straight-on presence. Audiences, devoid of any sense of a Justice anywhere, take heart and comfort for at least as long as the picture lasts. Macho guy that he is, God shows up and does his thing, and we little people can briefly share the glee of getting even, exhilarated by a glimpse of a sacred world where wrong is deftly set right by a superhuman someone.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 10

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