Ripped from the black, the viewer is greeted with a seemingly endless field of flowers flowing freely in the summer’s wind. Homes like slices of cake sit squat in the middle of white fence barriers protecting them from the outside world. An American flag valiantly flows as migrant workers tend diligently to a tulip garden. These are the images that open Clint Eastwood’s 2018 film The Mule, their bucolic nature directly juxtaposed by a piece of sickly white text informing the viewer that they’re in Peoria, Illinois, though this specificity doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things. To Clint, we are viewing a still America, not projected as it was or as it should be, but as it is – a haze of iconography whose significance is only truly known to those who exist within the fleeting window of the filmic image he’s presenting. The people who live here yearn and breathe and ache, their deceptively simple lives otherwise ignored by the pulpit of the film camera. To Clint, America and, by extension, its cinema aren’t complete without an examination within the interior life of its midsection. This observation of the American Midwest is what defined the prototypical Early Career Eastwood Film, following what he perceived as “real Americans” going through the minutiae of their daily lives. However, around the turn of the new century, Eastwood’s aesthetic and thematic preoccupations began to change drastically. Having worked for nearly five decades, Eastwood had been given the unique opportunity to not only observe the gestation of the American Identity during its most tumultuous period but has had the platform to interrogate and ruminate on them as they develop. Though he’d lived and worked through the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, no single event changed Eastwood’s thematic approach greater than the events that took place on and after September 11th, 2001.
After the attack on the World Trade Center, America had become a blister on the world map, finally being shown as a state whose constant political upheaval left a vulnerable interior just beyond its jingoistic shell. To Clint, there was no American morality, only the whimper of a nation wounded, going on the attack for reasons that seemed transparently flimsy at best and morally dubious at worst. If America had become a country whose central preoccupation was wiping Iraqi civilians – civilians whose lives aren’t dissimilar from the ones Eastwood portrayed in his early directorial efforts – off the face of the planet, then what was the American Identity? Does it still exist? Can it be saved? These are the questions plaguing an artist caught in the death throngs of his own reactionary pathology, an artist whose late-period work explores a nation whose jingoistic id has led to its subsequent moral degradation. Can America represent its supposed ideals when viewed as a collective state? To Clint, the answer is no, though any moral turpitude exhibited by the United States collectively can be counteracted by the actions and ideologies of the individual. This, on the surface, is the thesis that permeates much of Eastwood’s late-period work, a thesis whose ultimate conclusion is diametrically opposed to the late-period work of one of Clint Eastwood’s closest thematic analogues: Samuel Fuller.
Deacon of pulp Samuel Fuller had hit a low point near the end of his filmmaking career. He had just fled to Paris, the name Fuller becoming synonymous with the flop of his truncated 1980 World War II epic The Big Red One and the controversy behind his 1982 parable on the ingrained racism of the United States, White Dog, a film that was ultimately shelved by Paramount Pictures for a decade due to its taboo subject matter. He had lost his creative drive, his confidence shattered with each successive artistic failure. Although the genesis of this confusion stems from a very different place, the sense of personal and artistic disillusion that Fuller was experiencing at that time mirrors that of a late-stage Eastwood. Both were artists who’d been working on the fringes of taste for decades, exploring what it meant to embody the masculine in America. This interest in what it meant to be a man blossomed in both due to them both experiencing masculinity pushed to its most extreme conclusion in their respective military service – with Eastwood fighting in the Korean War and Fuller fighting in World War II, respectively. Though they were military men, the ways in which being exposed to prolonged fits of violence affected their art in radically different ways. Fuller was a staunch leftist, believing that the individual could not thrive in a system that was corrupt, and would ultimately succumb to the pressures exerted onto them by an inherently broken society. This theme would be tangentially addressed in Fuller’s early work through characters like Captain Griff in The Naked Kiss and James Reavis in The Barron of Arizona, though it would eventually become the focus of late-period work like White Dog, a film that posits that, despite the efforts of well-meaning people, racism cannot be exterminated from the individual, and can only be solved when current social structures are completely dismantled. As mentioned previously, the deceptively Libertarian thesis of the majority of Eastwood’s late-period work wouldn’t be quite as pessimistic as Fuller’s when viewed on its surface, seemingly suggesting that individual acts of heroism could persevere despite the overwhelming influence of morally vacant social structures. Though many film critics would and could write this assertion off as pandering to an audience of right-wing cinema-goers at first glance, Eastwood’s work seeks to deconstruct the interiority of the individuals at the center of his stories, much in the way that Fuller sought to with his late-period work. Though their styles aren’t aesthetically compatible – Eastwood isn’t as interested as Fuller seems to be in using the element of shock to make his point – the synchronous nature of their thematic intents cannot be denied, even if it inevitably leads them to form different conclusions. With this in mind, the ways in which Eastwood explores the characters becomes of particular interest here, specifically the ways in which he uses these characters to explore the American identity, and whether or not it can still possibly be preserved.
No exploration of Eastwood’s late-period work would be complete without some sort of examination of his biographical dramas. Though admittedly vague in its political intentions, 2014’s American Sniper offers a nonetheless illuminating portrait of the artist’s view of the American machine at work. The film presents Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) as the ideal American: a family man whose singular obsession with upholding the American Identity ultimately leads him to martyr himself in order to protect the values he holds dear. Whether intentional or not, Eastwood complicates this portrait of a patriot by showing him as he was: drunkenly lashing out at women, letting his temper get the better of him, not allowing himself to be vulnerable and admit his own psychiatric problems to the detriment of himself, a man whose repeated tours of duty in the Middle East represent something deeply unwell within his constitution. Eastwood paints Kyle not as heroic, but as a deeply broken man whose jingoistic obsession with his country acted as a guise to commit acts of wanton violence to fulfill some deep-seated urges. A man whose suppression of his own vulnerabilities through his engagement in traditional masculine archetypes leads to his mutually assured destruction. 2011’s J. Edgar and 2018’s The 15:17 to Paris expand on this idea of personal destruction for the sake of preserving what their characters perceive as their national identity. The former sees a paranoid J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) allowing himself to be corrupted by the forces of bureaucracy in order to uphold his “real America,” even if that means suppressing his own urges and destroying socially progressive movements in the process. The 15:17 to Paris, on the other hand, uses an act of heroism by a group of American soccer players as a means to examine the innate militarism of American culture. The film opens with Spencer Stone (playing himself) and Alek Skarlatos (playing himself) attending their private Christian middle school, bonding over their mutual interest in guns and the culture surrounding them. The discussion of weapons within this context seeks to address the intersectional nature of the religious right and the indoctrination of the youth with the iconography of militarism. They are raised to view their country as they view their God, prove themselves through military action, and inevitably die for this cause, where they are then honored like gods themselves before being forgotten as a casualty of American supremacy. Though the actions of these men have the façade of morality, their heroism is an ultimately hollow act of self-immolation for a machine that doesn’t ultimately care about them. This pessimism is echoed in his 2018 film The Mule. The film, which follows Earl Stone’s (Clint Eastwood) attempt to rectify his failures as a father through the accumulation of wealth, positions the American Dream as transparently dishonest. Earl, a veteran of the Korean War, ultimately resorting to drug running to make ends meet puts the film in conversation with the aforementioned 15:17 to Paris, both films portraying a sort of ego death as their respective characters pursue their ingrained ideals. It’s this level of pessimism inherent to the work that makes Eastwood’s late-period more nuanced than his detractors portray, aligning his work more with that of Samuel Fuller than that of someone like King Vidor or S. Craig Zahler.
Circling back to the thesis proposed in this piece’s opening, it does not appear as if Eastwood truly believes in the strength of the individual, instead proposing that any heroic act in the name of the American Identity will be rendered ultimately meaningless in the face of insurmountable bureaucracy. This assertion would place the cinema of Eastwood in diametric opposition to the ideologies espoused by the audience he’s consistently accused of pandering to. Though an examination of his films could lead one to draw this conclusion, the true political intentions of Eastwood’s work can never be fully ascertained, save for the unlikely event where he decides to divulge them to the movie-going public. This raises the question as to whether or not this author ultimately agrees with the conclusions Eastwood comes to in his work. In short, no. Though Eastwood’s ambivalence as a filmmaker precludes him from fully leaning into the right-wing jingoism that his detractors accuse him of engaging with, it simultaneously prevents him from truly engaging with the politics of any of his film’s subjects. This isn’t to say that Eastwood’s films are apolitical – in the realm of art, nothing is apolitical. Any conclusion that one draws from his films does not stem from the artist’s political inclinations but is merely a byproduct of Eastwood’s use of the filmic image as a sociological tool. In an art form whose main preoccupation is to transport an audience to a world they never made, Eastwood is one of the only American filmmakers who seeks to engage with the world that the audience has made, observing American life as it exists rather than how the artist perceives it to be. Though the ideology of the artist and the art they produce are ultimately inseparable, any political leanings one can glean from Eastwood’s work are a result of a viewer’s own political biases combined with the American landscape as it has been observed. This leads to one final question: Does Eastwood ever fully come to terms with whether or not the American Identity can exist in its current state? The answer to that question, as Eastwood proposes, lies not within the art he produces, but within the ideologies of the people who ultimately consume it. It’s this conclusion that positions Clint Eastwood not as the best American filmmaker working today, but as the most important American filmmaker working today, for he embodies the American Identity, whether he wants to admit it or not.
