During an August interview with Esquire, Clint Eastwood presented his views of young Americans the only way he knows how: through clenched teeth. “That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a [weak] generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells… [Donald Trump] has said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody — the press and everybody’s going, “Oh, well, that’s racist,” and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just [expletive] get over it. It’s a sad time in history.”
Eastwood’s old-school slam of millennials left me with the same feeling I have after watching one of his movies — like he is examining something significant, but often charging like a bull through old-Hollywood scripts while clutching his Dirty Harry persona. Upon closer examination, however, I begin to see that he exposes a perspective worth paying attention to.
“Not because every film [of Eastwood’s] is great, although many are,” says New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, “but because even the misfires show an engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life.”
Take 2008’s “Gran Torino,” which Eastwood directs and stars as Walt Kowalski.
Walt is this tough Korean War vet living a holed-up, widowed life in Detroitap Highland Park. Once populated by working class white families, the area has become dominated by poor Asian immigrants. To Walt these “gooks” and “swamp rats” are still enemies, and the onslaught of his foul prejudices also befalls Jews, blacks, Mexicans and his “27-year old virgin” Catholic priest.
One night his neighbor, a Hmong boy, is pressured by a local gang to steal Waltap prized Ford Torino. While creeping across his front lawn, the group is met by Walt, emerging from the shadows with his M1 service rifle from the war pointed squarely at them.
“We used to stack [expletive] like you five feet high in Korea,” he growls. “Use ya for sandbags.”
They retreat, as expected in an Eastwood film. The next day, the boy’s mother marches him across their yard and strikes a work-for-penance deal with Walt. The old man and boy develop a begrudging friendship, and fate begins to push Walt toward redemption of his racist past. At the end of the movie, he has learned to embrace the cultural differences and humanity of the boy’s Laotian family. Although still Dirty Harry in his demeanor, he now seems to understand the complex, painful issue of race at a deeper level.
To discover the meaning of Eastwood’s Esquire comments, particularly his suggestion that we “get over” racism, we must further examine who Eastwood really is; first as an artist. In the ’90s he began to shift away from a fixation on Westerns and cops toward movies that examined more nuanced social issues, often racism.
From 1993 to 2015 his movies collected 42 Oscar nominations and 12 wins. He told the story of a hillbilly female boxer escaping the trailer parks of Missouri, which won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor. Other movies during this time examined crime in south Boston, the bravery of American and Japanese soldiers at the Battle of Iwo Jima, endemic corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department, apartheid in South Africa, and the psychological consequences of American soldiers at war.
Today, Hollywood views him not as an icon of masculinity, but as an intelligent filmmaker — a transition that seems natural when you look at his long history of political involvement, which is best described as independent and moderate.
“I am too individualistic,” he once said, “to be either right-wing or left-wing.” Since 1973 he has publicly endorsed increased gun control. When he served as mayor of a small California town in the ’80s, he supported both small business and the protection of state parks. He now advocates for women’s rights and gay rights, fiscal conservativism, and criticizes America’s wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps Eastwood is not what we too easily make him out to be — the old dog stuck in his ways. Perhaps a man that has practiced transcendental meditation for 40 years is not simply Dirty Harry calling us a bunch of [you guess it].
Get over it.
I think he’s urging us to look at racism stripped of the fluff and pretense that are confounding today’s conversation, that maybe our hypersensitivity to “racist” remarks or “racist” acts dilutes the argument against true racism: cops shooting unarmed black teenagers in American cities, a growing Islamophobia fed by terrorism worldwide and anti-Muslim rhetoric from American politicians.
The consequences of this ambiguity of racial understanding come in different forms.
In 2002, reeling from disappointing sales of his latest album, Michael Jackson accused his longtime recording partner Sony Music of a “racist conspiracy.” Jackson showed up at a protest at Sony’s headquarters, and from the open top of a double-decker bus he raised his fists and joined the crowd in chanting, “Down with Tommy Mottola.”
Tommy Mottola was the head of Sony Music and had long championed Jackson’s career. To avoid public humiliation, Sony gave Mottola the slip six months after the controversy ignited, ending a 14-year tenure at the company — during which he is widely credited with orchestrating the careers of Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez, and the successful comebacks for Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
The mounting confusion toward race has also crept into our universities. In the fall of 2015, Yale sent an e-mail to its students advising them to avoid “culturally unaware or insensitive choices” with their Halloween costumes, in response to students wearing blackface in 2007.
Yale professor Erika Christakis sent out her own e-mail, asking if the university should insist upon certain norms rather than allowing students the freedom to shape their own. As an expert in childhood education, she long held the view that parents deprive children of learning experiences by over-policing their behavior.
Her husband, Nicholas Christakis, was also a professor at the school. In 2009 he was named to Time’s list of the world’s most influential people, and held an esteemed position as faculty-in-residence at Silliman College.
The couple had a history of fighting for free expression. While at Harvard, they both came to the defense of minority students who were using satire to criticize all-male “final” clubs at the school. In her e-mail to Yale students, Erika Christakis urged students to “talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Her comments set off protests at the school, often captured on video, and mushroomed into a bona fide national debate. Months of public shaming led to Erika Christakis’ resignation from Yale in December, and in May of this year, because he supported his wife’s views, Nicholas stepped down from his position at Silliman.
The Christakises suffered these consequences because of an intellectual position directly tied to Erika’s expertise — surely a loss not only for the them, but for educators who wish to expound their own positions without worrying about triggering similar explosions.
Are today’s conflicted arguments surrounding racism shouted too impulsively down the virtual public square?
Stanford law professor Richard Ford, an expert on civil rights and antidiscrimination law — and an African American — argues in his book, “The Race Card,” that the social and legal meaning of racism is in a state of crisis: “the term now has no single clear and agreed upon meaning.
“As a result, it is available to describe an increasingly wide range of disparate policies, attitudes, decisions, and social phenomena. This leads to disagreement and confusion.”
Real debate is hard. It takes effort.
Sure, Eastwood’s lambasting of millennials was offensive to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons, but that was Eastwood making a point on his own terms. When you look beneath his gruff exterior, you may see that he is illuminating an issue that America would do well to pay attention to.
Mark Darrough is a photojournalist. He lives in Fort Collins.
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