Violence Hurts

The genius of Clint Eastwood’s career is that he has figured out how to have it every which way but loose when it comes to the depiction of violence on the screen, as his new film, Gran Torino, demonstrates brilliantly. We thrill as Eastwood, almost an octogenarian, deservedly whales the tar out of a vicious teenage boy even as we are made to furrow our brow and share in the deep pain of his character, so haunted by his combat experience in Korea that he long ago hid away the Silver Star he won for the hand-to-hand killing of an enemy soldier.

This hypocritical two-facedness about cinematic violence was very much a feature of the cultural and historical moment when Eastwood first became a star–a time in the late 1960s during which the fashionable pacifism spawned by the Vietnam war existed side by side with the new visceral excitement provided by movies no longer bound to the restrictions of a Production Code and thereby free to portray sex and violence with an entirely novel graphic realism. So, on the one hand, you had protestations about the evils of violence and on the other you had audiences flocking to see Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway turned into Swiss cheese at the end of Bonnie and Clyde.

One classic line of dialogue from the amazingly weird Billy Jack, the enormous box-office hit of 1971 about an alliance between a bunch of hippies and a saintly Native American zen master just back from Vietnam who must deal with a bunch of land-grabbing rednecks, summed up the New Hollywood perspective. “He was a war hero who hated the war,” someone says about Billy Jack–a pacifist, but one who knew how to kick five yahoos in the teeth for disrespecting the flower children. And so is Walt Kowalski of Gran Torino. The only difference is that he fought in his war 56 years ago.

Eastwood has spent his career playing the Billy Jack card. And what an astonishing career it has been–a movie star for five decades, a director for four decades, winner of a Best Director Oscar at the age of 62 for a movie that also won best picture (Unforgiven), repeating that same double feat at the age of 74 (Million Dollar Baby). In the 1970s, his great rival was Burt Reynolds; now, Burt Reynolds is God knows where while Eastwood has become the most respected elder statesman in Hollywood history. And not only that: Gran Torino is well on its way to becoming one of the decade’s surprise blockbusters. It is the most financially successful film of his career as actor and director. He is 79.

Violence made Clint Eastwood a star and violence kept him a star. He was the harbinger of the new era in the bloody Italian-made “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s that turned him into an international sensation. Essaying the part of a vigilante cop in 1971’s Dirty Harry made him an icon. Choosing a script about a psychotic female stalker called Play Misty for Me in 1971 turned him into a director. Playing a bare-knuckled street fighter for laughs in 1978’s Every Which Way But Loose turned him into the heir to John Wayne, who alternated between westerns and lighter fare late in his career. Unforgiven was by far the bloodiest movie ever to win Best Picture until The Departed superseded it a couple of years ago. Million Dollar Baby featured women boxers punching each other’s lights out in close up.

So why didn’t Eastwood become the bête noire of the influential crowd that claims pop culture violence has degraded our culture and contributed to a deadening of our moral sense? Because, time and again, he has paid that crowd obeisance. In his films, he is careful to tut-tut while he rat-a-tat-tats. If the disastrous national housing market were rewarded a nickel for every review written of an Eastwood movie since the mid-1970s that claimed the film under review was, in fact, a meditation on the dangers of violence and an implicit self-criticism on Eastwood’s part, the credit crunch would end instantly.

It was said of The Outlaw Josey Wales, the first Western he directed himself. It was said of Sudden Impact, the Dirty Harry sequel with the famous “go ahead, make my day” scene. It was said of Tightrope, a thriller in which he, “a cop on the edge,” went after a serial killer. Unforgiven features a scene in which Eastwood’s character talks about how awful it is to kill a man before he goes and kills several–but in the process spares a younger man from following in his path, a subplot duplicated almost identically in Gran Torino. His war movie Flags of Our Fathers played off the patriotism of the heroic triumph at Iwo Jima while, in effect, saying that there is no such thing as heroism in war.

Though Eastwood is famously not a Hollywood liberal, he has, wittingly or unwittingly, figured out the perfect way to become the ultimate Hollywood hero: Shoot first, preferably with a machine gun, and ask supposedly probing moral questions later. As a director, he’s very uneven. As an actor, he can best be described as the Olivier of squinting. But as a cinematic spin doctor, no one has ever come close.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.