Porky's Place

Man- Hater of the Month – Clint Eastwood

As a teenager Clint Eastwood was probably my biggest idol, even more so than Bruce Lee and Jean Claude van Damme, and throughout the last twenty years i have remained an admirer of both his work as a director and a screen presence, so it’s not without great consideration and a certain amount of personal discomfort that i have awarded the doyen of action movies this rather insulting honor. Let me make it clear from the start that this is not an attack on machismo – i love my weights and my speed bag more than most, and have been in several punch ups as an adult, most in self defense i should add, so i don’t want anyone thinking i’m an alfalfa-eating man-rabbit who doesn’t realize that there are times when going Dirty Harry is the appropriate thing to do. Neither is this a matter of left vs right – both Eastwood and myself supported McCain.

Now here’s how this all came to pass.

Recently i watched Gran Torino, and it struck me as all too typical of Eastwood’s work since he became a director. As a movie it’s very good work, but as a carrier of messages about men and boys, as a tool of socialization, it’s a fucking atrocity. The first of the problems i have with this film is is that Eastwood’s character Walt Kowalski’s worth depends on how useful he is to everyone else, be it as a soldier, a worker, a father or the cranky old guy next door who is willing to die for people he barely knows. You may notice also that this is not only the case with Kowalski but also with the Asian boy – the problem with him is not so much that he can’t protect himself from the gang, but that he is a wimp who can’t protect the womenfolk, and indeed, it is the rape of the boy’s sister that serves as the primary catalyst for Walt’s suicidal revenge.The second problem is the same i have with most action movies – they are part of a lifelong process that tells men to solve their problems with violence. In the case of Eastwood’s work, men are given this message quite literally from the cradle to the grave – here’s old man Eastwood a few years away from becoming worm meat, and he’s still pointing shotguns and punching people! Now this is all fine and well in a  movie, but we all know there are plenty of men especially young ones who take this crap to heart, so as much as i like Eastwood as a screen presence i have to give this piece of chivalric propaganda a big thumbs down.

Watching Gran Torino then got me thinking about the entire Eastwood ouvre and how anti-male it became once he took control of his movies. From “Sudden Impact”, in which he allows a woman who kills her rapists to get away scot free, to Unforgiven, in which we learn that the scarring of a woman’s face is more important than the lives of several men, old Clint has made a career of  making  movies with anti-male results while at the same time setting himself up as one of men’s favorite icons, which seems to me the height of hypocrisy. Consider also the class element here – who is buying this propaganda? Rich men like Eastwood? Of course not, it’s the poor and working class men who buy this swill about a man’s raison d’etre being to kill and die and sacrifice for others.  So for Gran Torino and so many other sins, old man Eastwood gets the Silver Pomegranate for  June. Bet you werent expecting that, huh?

Tags: Man-Hater Of The Month, Movies
Posted in Popular Culture | 1 Comment »

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