Clint Eastwood's America

The history and the identity of Clint Eastwood are indicative of the changes that have taken place in America over the past 50 years. In the 1960s, American's held onto a collective fantasy of cowboys and Indians, cheering for the Lone Ranger to defeat the clearly delineated "bad guys". Those certainties fell by the wayside on a road paved by moral, legal and military conflict in America. After OJ and Rodney King, our sense of good vs. bad has been challenged, to put it mildly.

As a mature person and a mature artist, Clint Eastwood is uniquely equipped to explore the psychological and emotional challenges of our age. Can we afford to trust in days like these? What happens to the individual when awareness of personal clinical deficiency seems inevitable; when families are broken, when loneliness is our diet and society only an indigestible plastic plate on which we gorge, an unsatisfying habit?

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Actor, director, pianist, documentarian, Oscar winner, icon, former mayor: These terms all apply to Clint Eastwood, a Hollywood mogul who has managed to get things done his way.

Eastwood's rose to popularity on the wings of violence. His role in the western of Sergio Leone and his subsequent parts in American westerns helped to define the actor as the quintessential loner, the quietly lethal man who fought because he could fight.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the Eastwood gunslinger character was just this: he did not fight for honor.

He didn't fight in defense of an unyielding warrior's code. He didn't even feel the need to fight fair.

Eastwood's cowboy fought because he was good at it, because he possessed no code of conduct.

In the 1970s, Eastwood parlayed his fame as the loner-cowboy-killer into even greater fame as Dirty Harry.

The spate of cop films of the '70s was a result of the cultural upheaval in America at the time. Violence and crack cocaine were rampant in cities from San Francisco to New York. Crime rates were up across the country. Free sex and disco music coupled with early stage collapses of racial and gender barriers created a scene of chaos and disorder.

People wanted the strong armed, tough-headed cops to battle the free radicals that were blighting the city streets. They wanted cops that would fight tooth and nail and not be hemmed in by the "rules" of the job and the "legal" constraints that put the criminals at an advantage.

People wanted Dirty Harry and Popeye Doyle.

The lines, "Do you feel lucky, Punk?" and "Go ahead. Make my day," were expressions of the kind of bravado that the average citizen over the age of thirty believed only belonged to the "scum", as criminals were called in those days.

Films of this period were hugely successful in the minds of the country. Regardless of ticket sales, the "Make my day" line was repeated thousands and thousands of times around the water cooler, on television, and on school playgrounds.

Clint Eastwood had put himself in the thick of the cultural battle and it made him famous.

It was at this time that he began to direct, making films that did not leave a huge mark on the history of the cinema. The 1980s came and went. Eastwood played the mature, emotionally uncertain man, growing sentimental, unwilling to deny the world his affections any longer. Think Bridges Over Madison County.

The career of an icon seemed to be wrapping up. This notion was reinforced by Eastwood's Oscar-winning performance in Unforgiven.

A western in a time when the genre had been remade into a political vehicle and polemical mode of film-making (Posse, Tombstone), Unforgiven revived the popular sense that men with guns in a world without law could do a lot more to hurt one another than prove a political point. The film garnered numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture and would seem to cap Eastwood's career.

But, in a very real way, this film marked a new beginning for Clint Eastwood. He began to direct very emotional, cutting films. These movies of the 2000's will go down as some of the best cinema of the decade and will probably skew Eastwood's reputation toward a legacy of directing instead of actor.

Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby top his list of films of the 2000s and will be remembered as engaging, unconventional stories of imperfect people living in a cruel world - one made cruel by imperfect people.

The bonds of friendship and family can surprise us when rendered in Eastwood's films. Affection can be dangerous if given too easily. And it can be potent if given, in the end, out of an inability to do otherwise.

In these films we have a vision of America as a desperate emotional landscape where success is possible, but with costs. The streets are no longer burning, but behind the walls of our suburban homes we pine away, dying for lack of love, suffering the abuses of our childhoods, afraid to admit to the world that crave tenderness.

From a gruff old man like Eastwood, tenderness is not the first thing we'd expect. And this is the reason his tenderness is so potent.

The achievement of honesty and emotionality from the lone gunman brings us to ask ourselves questions about our feelings, and our fate.

Will we, like Eastwood, evolve into beings capable of admitting to our needs?

Or will we stare down the proverbial barrel with every relationship and ask ourselves, "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"