In a comment below, the participant known as That Fuzzy Bastard says of my review of J. Edgar for MSN Movies, “I rather appreciate that your good review has all the material for a bad review of, well, just about any Eastwood movie—I don’t think you’re in the tank, just unbothered by exactly the things that make my skin crawl. ‘Stiffly solemn all the way down to its desaturated color palette…, too much of the time the dialogue is a little bit on the button.’ It’s all that respectable, white-elephant, reaching for authority that bugs me, and I’m always a little surprised to see such a fan of the disreputable okay with the blatant respectable-liberal-Oscar-bait that infests Eastwood’s movies…”
I found these points sufficiently interesting that I think they deserve the platform of their own post. They got me thinking about a bunch of things, among them being the fact that what I really do enjoy in the latter films directed by Eastwood is the way the ostensibly white-elephant material exists side by side with what I consider the real meat of the movies, the termite stuff, if you want to extend the Manny Farber terminology. There’s a very messy dread at the heart of the film that is evoked at some of the most seemingly offhand moments. They reach a crescendo in the crucial mother-and-son confrontation of the film, a scene so utterly fraught and pathetic that it could have been plucked out of a great Fassbinder picture. And also that while my evocation of a stiff solemnity may have evoked for TFB a “reaching for authority,” or respectability, the way it played for me on screen was rather different, that is, not so much Richard Attenburough’s Gandhi as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud. That’s not an analogy that can stand up to formal analysis, and it’s not meant to, I just bring it up relative to the predominant tone I got from the picture. The atmosphere is, I think, very much deliberately kind-of-suffocating, rather than actively elevating. A fancy way of saying, I suppose, that the movie is a bit of a bummer, and all the better for it.
As to whether or not it’s actively Oscar-bait, it might be a losing game to actively argue otherwise. Just as Martin Scorsese is highly unlikely to throw a RED camera on his shoulder and take to the streets to revisit the San Gennaro festival, so too ought we not entertain expectations that Eastwood will ever make something that’s NOT an “event picture” for the balance of his career. For many reasons, some of them relatively obvious. For me the most germane (or at least personally intriguing)is the fact that he is a businessman as well as an artist. But I thought the artist—the termite—found pretty profitable engagement for himself with J. Edgar.
I wonder whether termite/elephant distinctions are somewhat complicated by what we tend to call datedness. Not having seen this one yet, but being relatively predisposed to recent Eastwood, it seems that that stiffness of tone and on-the-nose dialogue evokes a fairly archaic mode of storytelling. There’s something unfashionably square about Eastwood these days, so his prestige pictures feel like artifacts, which first of all inspires a nagging feeling of subtext, and also seems to go productively against the Oscarbait grain in spite of studio positioning.
When people talk about late Eastwood, I always think back to what my friend Paul Lovelace (a talented filmmaker in his own right) wrote about Eastwood at the end of the ’00s:
“Pound for pound I would put Clint Eastwood’s output over the past decade up against anyone’s. While I don’t think Changeling is his best film of this century, I believe it is a solid representation of what makes Eastwood great. It’s engrossing, intense, gorgeous, goofy and occasionally sloppy. Overall it’s the work of a supremely confident filmmaker. Eastwood doesn’t dillydally while making his films, shooting few takes with minimal fuss. This method sometimes backfires, and even in his most sublime movies there are uneven moments. In Changeling, for example, the mental hospital scenes border on parody. The film is overlong, certain stretches drag and there are too many endings. But that’s OK. Rarely is a Clint Eastwood film without flaws. And it’s the peaks and valleys that are part of the fun. On top of that, his movies possess a visceral gravitas. It’s the same reason why I like punk rock.”
Fassbinder is a useful anaology in this context. Judi Dench as Edgar’s Mom is a lot like Fassbinder’s Mm – who appeared in a great number of his films under her maiden name, Lilo Pempeit.
As for Clint resolving to make “impotant” films, I’m not so sure. When he started directing he stuck to genre items – westerns and policiers. Slowly he began to expand to take in almost anything that interested him. He’s pretty much done it all – save for a musical.
I’d love for Clint to take a crack at Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”
Fassbinder and Eastwood were born on the same day (May 31st), and share even more than that in terms of filmmaking practice.
Let me state that I haven’t seen the film yet, but a lot of the initial wave of criticism seems familiar enough, the kind of resistance I often hear regarding Eastwood. I see it as a resistance to thinking of Eastwood as a serious artist, one with ideas in addition to sentiment. I think that’s why the accusation of “Oscar-bait,” whether or not it’s well-founded, is so appealing for some: it supplies a motivation not only to explain why Eastwood continues making films but, more importantly, why he makes the various choices he makes. Because, of course, the real motivation can’t be purely aesthetic or, God forbid, intellectual! It seems strange to me that some of the subtext for criticisms of Eastwood suggest that he still, after decades of directing films (not to mention studying under great filmmakers), doesn’t really know what he’s doing–not really, not in a manner different from any other Oscar-bait filmmaker.
But what I really can’t fathom about TFB’s comment is the word “authority.” I’m a big fan of Eastwood, and I like to think I’ve seen enough of his films such that what I see in them is not just a fiction I’m imagining. And what I see, perhaps above all, is Eastwood as a critic of authority beyond anything else. I’m very intrigued by your mention of Fassbinder, who was another politically slippery figure and critic of authority. Fassbinder has proven difficult for many to get a handle on him politically, because he surely rejects the left’s party line, so there has been a temptation for some to view him as either too pessimistic to be political or just a bad, failed leftist (who should have known better). Eastwood’s kind of coming from the opposite side of the spectrum, but they have a lot in common. Just as Fassbinder wiggled out of being merely a voice for the left, Eastwood has consistently rejected being exploited by the right. You could call him a libertarian, maybe, but I think he would reject being labeled altogether. And what really matters are his films, which are wonderful critiques of political power and authority. To cite one example, think of his solidarity with the solitary mother Christine in Changeling and how he carefully guides her past all the forces that would exploit or subdue her. In the end, Eastwood affirms the faith of a single individual’s belief that her son is alive, despite everyone’s skepticism. In an essay I wrote on the film (http://www.journeybyframe.com/2010/11/15/changeling-clint-eastwood-2008/), I said it reminded me somewhat of Dreyer’s Ordet, which makes me doubly fascinated that you invoke Dreyer above.
Lastly, I think it’s important to remember that Jean-Marie Straub once referred to John Ford as “the most Brechtian of filmmakers.” I think we tend to see Eastwood as a figure somewhat like Ford. To some, they are both a little sentimental and stodgy, neither really a “thinking man’s” filmmaker, but I don’t believe this is right at all. I think many people would be confused and surprised by Straub’s point about Ford, but I also think that there’s more than a little of what he was talking about in Eastwood as well.
Glenn, this is a very patient post; me, I have long been fed up with the “Oscar bait” insult. “Oscar bait” presumes that the one making the accusation knows precisely what motivates someone to make a movie, and that the accuser’s magic 8 ball offers definitive evidence that awards-grubbing was the primary motive. In Eastwood’s case, “Oscar bait” says that his greed for an Oscar (because two aren’t enough) was as or more important than his ambition to say something about a huge figure in American history (history hardly being a submerged motif in Eastwood’s films); his desire to tell a thwarted love story (no shortage of those in Eastwood either); or even just a vague notion from Eastwood that no one ever made a great movie about Hoover and maybe he should give it a go.
I haven’t seen J. Edgar, and I haven’t wholeheartedly loved an Eastwood picture since Unforgiven. But given that the man can pretty much make what he wants now, I don’t see why dialing for Oscars is a more likely explanation than Eastwood’s being drawn to big stories about big moral quandaries. Still less do I see how accusing him of this kind of bad faith says anything worthwhile about his films; and least of all do I understand what is contributed by using “liberal” as a perjorative.
Manny Farber was a great, great critic; but I wonder if he intended his white elephant/termite distinction to be engraved on stone tablets and hurled down on filmmakers from Mount Sinai for decades afterward. With due and loving respect for Farber, the hell with that.
Seems I messed up the HTML. Here’s the link if anyone’s interested: http://www.journeybyframe.com/2010/11/15/changeling-clint-eastwood-2008/
“Oscar bait” became somewhere along the line the go-to epithet of lazy critics, along with “Sundance quirk.” Lazy, murky stabs at what motivates an artist–and an updating of the old “Important Work” knock by certain Farber-Fuller-Genre-is-King acolytes on anything that has, gasp, an interest in larger meanings. I mean, god forbid an American director flex a little fucking ambition.
Perhaps Eastwood is content with his statuette haul now, but it was pretty sad to see him appearing in ads for Mystic River, wih footage from the film intercut with talking head shots of Clint saying that in his film, “people were the special effects”. You’d think he’d have the integrity to avoid this kind of shameless hucksterism, let alone having to take a jab at Lord of the Rings in the process.
And after that failed to bring home Oscar gold save for Penn and Robbins’ wins (the former a ridiculous validation of the actor’s OTT histrionics when he was much more deserving for his subtle work in 21 Grams), he sure looked like he was rushing to get Million Dollar Baby out in time to qualify for the next year’s beauty pageant, robbing Scorsese out of an award he earned a lot more than Clint with his underrated direction of a meh script on The Aviator.
Yeah, I’m still bitter about that. But my points about Clint’s intentions and not being above the pettiness of the awards season stand. If everything post‑M$B is a legitimate extended victory lap with no eye on the prize, then fair enough.
Glenn, what I enjoy about your writing is that you can live with the termite and white elephant components of a work of art in a comfortable postmodern/queer way. Your writing seems free of the modernist insistence on internal consistency. Both Eastwood and Fassbinder mix and match in a wonderfully queer and freeing way.
I also want to add that another way to understand the termite/white elephant dichotomy is as one between the heteronormative and the queer/fabulous. Farber’s “just-us-guys” approach – kicking the aesthetic tires and looking under the hood – leaving no trace – “Just the fact, Ma’am” – rises out of the 1950’s aura of sex panic and pink terror. Farber’s criticism has a strain of sex panic running through it – his response to the shot of a male character’s bathrobe-clad rear-end in Cukor’s THE MARRYING KIND is hysterical. And I still have no idea what to make of his take on Brando in STREETCAR when he bemoans/panics over the “lush physicality and a show-off’s flamboyance to the character of Stanley [that] makes him seem like a muscular version of a petulant, crazily egotistical homosexual.” Huh? He is equally confused about Montgomery Clift. This division expresses itself today in the manly “go-with-my-gut” approach versus the élite-designated approach (elitism being historically associated with the fey and the queer – pinot noir instead of a manly can of Bud).
First, a correction: because I am not a big Oscar-ologist (at least not for the modern era) I wasn’t counting Eastwood’s producing statuettes, which bring his grand total to four; or five counting the Thalberg.
I don’t see anything sad or extraordinarily venal about an ad campaign that uses a movie’s superstar director talking about the movie. Would you say the same of Hitchcock? And wait, we’re pinning the entire responsibility for a release date on Eastwood? As well as the Academy voters “robbing” Scorsese?
As someone else noted above, Eastwood is a supremely confident filmmaker, and that’s part of the problem for me. I wish he’d doubt a little more, take a little more time with all of his creative decisions, not the least of which is the question of which story is worth telling, which script is ready to go. I’ve heard interviews with some of his recent screenwriters, where, to a one, they all recount the collaboration as being the quickest and easiest (though for exactly these reasons not necessarily the best) of their careers. They finish the script, he shoots it – even sometimes against their objections that it needs more work – end of story. Yet Eastwood’s best film, THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, was born of the what’s probably most serious disagreement he’s ever had with a writer.
“Just as Martin Scorsese is highly unlikely to throw a RED camera on his shoulder and take to the streets to revisit the San Gennaro festival,”
This is so off-topic (and odd), but I think Scorsese would be perfect for a documentary on Allen Klein. Beatles, Stones, Jodorowsky, on and on… he’d be the guy to do it. Someone should.
That’s my career advice for the day.
Warren: that is what is great about Eastwood – he does not miter all the corners of his films – just as he breaks free of coherent conceptions of masculinity in his films, he also ignores the need for absolute conherence in terms of form – in fact, I would argue that the fissures and breaks he introduces are what allow his films to breathe as capaciously as they do. Like Fassbinder, there is an immediacy in his work – neither artist second-guesses himself or strives for a clotted, over-determined mise en scene.
Trevor: By “reaching for authority”, I don’t mean Eastwood has a reflex trust of authority figures. I mean reaching for authority as an artist in a way I find maddening. The angles, the lighting, and most especially the music (oh christ, the music!) all seem to me utterly bludgeoning in demanding that I think as the director does. Considering their similar roots in Westerns, I always think of Eastwood as the anti-Altman—shots composed like trimmed hedges, precisely marked lighting, and moment after moment where the director is pathologically unwilling to let me form my own conclusions, or even make a decision about what to look at. It’s not the wild expressionism of Scorsese, which embraces its own unstable subjectivity, but rather the glum authority of a filmmaker who is going to tell you exactly what’s what.
Certainly when I say Oscar bait, or liberal, I don’t mean that I can perceive Eastwood’s motives in making or doing anything (much less that being liberal is a bad thing). Just that his movies always seem to me clenched with terror that any viewer anywhere might just possibly get The Wrong Idea. Gran Torino, for example, has lots of fun with its irascible racist lead, but keeps looking over its shoulder to make absolutely, positively sure you don’t ever think he’s anything less than totally wrong, or worse yet that you ever have a moment of sympathy for his no-goodnik kids (whose contempt for their father struck me as pretty justified). Changeling, Mystic River, and oh that fucking Million Dollar Baby—however offhand their creation might have been, they have not a single moment where I feel like the viewer is allowed to look around, or breathe, or think.
The only Eastwood movie I like, actually, is Bridges of Madison County, which is a genuinely enjoyable romance. Perhaps because Eastwood has little interest or respect for the book, and no Big Message to present, he can just make a movie about people doing things, and I can watch it without the director growling in my ear “Y’got it? Y’got it!” That, to me, is the white elephantitis at work in Eastwood. Not that he wants to make movies about big subjects—Last Year At Marienbad has no shortage of ambition!—but that it presents its big subjects as dioramas of virtue and vice, where even the blocking is drained of any potential to surprise, much less shake up, anything an middle-of-the-road Academy-voter brings into the theater. I can understand liking both Coffin Joe and Clint, but when people insist that Invictus is better than Paul Haggis’ Crash, that’s what I don’t get at all.
Have to agree with Oates re: Josey Wales, if not THE best then certainly up there.
And Siren, there’s a difference between Hitchcock’s (or Preminger’s) tongue-in-cheek brand of showmanship and what Eastwood was doing in those commercials. For one, those were trailers conceived by those directors and used as lead trailers. The Mystic River spots were follow-up ads that were released in the heat of awards season as some kind of defense against the Return of the King juggernaut. Whether you find it sad or desperate or not, the only other ones I remember using the same approach were Ron Howard and Darabont (and/or Jim Carrey) for The Majestic. Great company. And those guys didn’t feel the need to whine about some fantasy film stepping on their prestige territory, something I’d love to hear you explain away or rationalize.
(and when I mentioned Ron Howard I was referring to ads for Cinderella Man, IIRC)
Wow, you guys have long memories, and hold a grudge.I wasd not aware that Clint had committed an award-begging infraction of Chill Willsean proportions! I’ll have to do some rethinking, of something or other.
Lazarus: Never saw the Mystic River trailer that so offended you. I was pointing out that using a name director in a trailer did not, and does not, strike me as ironclad evidence of much of anything beyond the desire to sell tickets. Your investment here seems much stronger than mine, so I’ll go do something else now, I think.
My mother-in-law hates the Rolling Stones because they jammed her up in the revolving door in the lobby of a St. Louis hotel for something like ten seconds in the early ’70s.
Siren, you did notice that they’re not talking about a trailer designed to sell tickets for the movie, right? They’re talking about an ad aimed at Academy voters, trying to convince them that they should vote for Clint because his movie is virtuously “about people”, rather than more of that dumb kid fantasy stuff that the unwashed masses were seeing. It’s as though he was trying to convince Academy voters to be dragged towards him, like they were on a hook. That had been baited. With gruel-tasting Oscar bait. Nothing in particular against Clint taking to the airwaves to insist that voters give him an Oscar to prove their moral virtue—if we held directors’ self-regard against them, we’d have nobody left—but it does remind us that it’s not just paranoid fantasy to suggest that Clint really, really wants more Oscars.
Y’know, I remember rather a few ‘prestige’ pictures using the Cast ‘n’ Director Explain It All For You model of TV ad. Can’t name ’em all but it wasn’t just Clint & Ron, I know that. In any case, they vex the hell out of me.
As to Eastwood’s post UNFORGIVEN output, I liked some more than others but they’re all interesting in my book. And I gotta say, as a military history geek, I was stunned to find FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS the movie far more nuanced and uninterested in playing the Greatest Generation card than the book, which I felt (with all due respect to the author and his father) was one long “My dad was the best dad and I’m sorry we didn’t always see eye-to-eye and he was right to hate the J*ps ’cause LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO HIS BUDDY” screed.
Forget it guys, she’s gone. She’s past even the point of caring about the names of the members of U2, if you know what I’m saying and I think you do. Like Kangaroo Jack, she’s got the money, and she’s not giving it back.
Disagreeing with the Siren always makes me unhappy, but I use “Oscar bait” as a category all the time. It’s useful shorthand for a kind of movie that’s self-important but anodyne. Then again, the only Eastwood movie I think fits the shoe is Invictus, and I definitely don’t think J. Edgar does. GK and I are more or less on the same page on Clint’s latest, which I gather means we’re Old.
“The oputlaw Josie Wales” it shoudl be noted was begun by Phil Kaufman. But Clint, who was producing as wel as starritng fired Kaufman and took over the project.
They may be bonr on the same day but Clint and Rainer have nohting in common otherwise. Clint has had a fairly settled life – the only real distubance to it being Sandra Locke. RWF was manipulative drig-addicted bisexual wwho used to order Irm Herman to work the street to get enough money to finish the film they were making. (He enevr did this to Hanna Schygulla who he treated like a star even before she became one.
It’s pretty clear Clint learned a ton about masculinity from The Lady Chablis. His direction of her (and everyone else) in his grievously underrated adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is a wonder. And what wit to cast Jude Law as a troublesome white trash hustler. La Spacey, needless to say, played himself.
Chill Wills should have won for best supporting actor.
David: it is the movies of Fassbinder and Eastwood which I find to have commonalities and intersections – their lives are their own affair. Both men are concerned with queering cinematic text and form, and creating spaces of aesthetic engagement that extend laterally, eschewing the more traditional vertical/hierarchical approach. They make their first feature-length films within two years of each other, and while Fassbinder explores 1970’s West Germany, Clint does the same for America. Both also use their own bodies in their films as locations of desire, defilement, and defeat.
I’d say firing counts as a serious disagreement?
So much love above for UNFORGIVEN, which is not so much Oscar bait as the Western for people who don’t really like Westerns. The most overrated of all Eastwood’s pictures. Suffers from an overcooked script in the way that too many of his others are half-baked. Seems to have mistaken monologues for action in the push/pull of dramatic showing and expositional telling. Definitely ignores the lessons of better de-mythologizing predecessors like THE GUNFIGHTER, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE and, duh, THE WILD BUNCH and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID. I get that critics with intelligence and taste like Glenn and filmmaking peers like Johnnie To dig Eastwoods’ movies. I just don’t get what they get. For me, it’s the underrated HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, the masterpiece JOSEY WALES and the nearly great IWO JIMA and that’s it.
There are few things I love in movies as much as a good monologue. UNFORGIVEN is by far my favorite Eastwood pic, and probably the only one I can say I actually love, though admittedly I haven’t seen JOSEY WALES. Peoples’s script, to these eyes/ears, is cooked more or less just right…
I share The Siren’s antipathy for the term “Oscar-bait”, not just for the reasons she described (and as far as those ads are concerned, Eastwood was declaring his antipathy for special-effects driven pictures and wanting to make more “adult”, character driven films way back in the 80’s. Are you going to tar PALE RIDER with the same brush you’re tagging MYSTIC RIVER and MILLION DOLLAR BABY with?), and I have along the lines, I have a question I’ve asked in other places but which no one has given me a satisfactory answer to; why are pictures that apparently scream “Oscar-bait” to be mocked and/or looked on as lower than pond scum, while pictures that give off the attitude of “we’re only in this for the money” either get a pass or an “eh, what can you do?” shrug?
I have no idea what Eastwood thinks about the Oscar game, but it’s not hard to imagine that he might consider such awards as one way to help his films get attention and make a buck, since they are often not as overtly commercial as most multiplex fare. I doubt that he made J. EDGAR with Oscar in mind, but I’m sure he’d welcome some Academy attention because it could help at the box office.
I agree with most everything the Eastwood partisans here are saying, especially the quote from cmasonwells’ friend upthread. I still haven’t seen the WWII diptych or INVICTUS, but I loved CHANGELING and even liked HEREAFTER quite a bit when I finally caught up with it last month.
“Both men are concerned with queering cinematic text and form, and creating spaces of aesthetic engagement that extend laterally, eschewing the more traditional vertical/hierarchical approach.”
That’s an interesting notion, Brian, but I don’t see it in Clint. He’s a four-square solid socially-conscious filmmkaer. And beleieve me that’s not a criticism in any way shape or form. An Eastwood movie, whether it be as solid as “J. Edgar” or as wobbly as “Afterlife” is ALWAYS a deserving of respect and concentrated critical attention. That’s more than enough for me.
Fassbinder is first and foremost a man of his time, making films about both his era and the one that preceded it – whcih made his era possible. “The Marriage of Maria BrauN,” “Lola,” and “Veronika Voss” form a trilogy on this very subject. Clint has made several historically situated films but his relationship to the U.S. is not the same as RWF’s to Germany.
@ lipranzer: I think because pictures that are only in it for the money at least want to give me 90 minutes of low pleasure, while the standard Oscar-bait picture offers only the dubious satisfaction of feeling virtuous for having suffered through it. A cruddy heist comedy is what it is and doesn’t claim to be anything else, and it succeeds or fails based on whether I laughed, gasped, and had fun. A serious drama might not make me laugh, but it will give me an intense emotional experience which is, obviously, very much part of the satisfaction of art. An Oscar-bait picture doesn’t promise—or offer—much of that enjoyment. Instead it demands the audience experience an intensity of catharsis that it fails to earn with believable characters, a world that obeys its own rules, and a distinctive technique. Oscar-bait demands respect that it fails to earn. That’s the difference between, say, Crash and Do The Right Thing, or between Mystic River and The Sweet Hereafter—the latter earns the sense of tragedy by creating people with depth and surprise, while the former just jams down on emotional buttons with no regard with plot logic or character coherence, exposing its weaknesses by its own histrionics.
Ah, mr. oates, bless your heart and +1 already about the overrated UNFORGIVEN, which I watched with a good friend when it came out and with whom I shared disbelief over its gaseous portentousness, wedded to a narrative both manipulative and dramatically inert. Gimme the termite of WHITE HUNTER over UNFORGIVEN any day, indeed over much if not all the followed it. Accordingly, hard for me to get very exercised about the Eastwood Perplex, though I doubt he approached J. EDGAR with any less care or commitment than GRAN TORINO. Or, good gosh, SPACE COWBOYS. Which is to say, “Oscar-bait” has more to do with the ribbons and bows – historical sweep, celebrity casting, amber “unavailable” light, &c., &c. – than the actual gifts they adorn. And whatever else we might feel about Eastwood’s films, do you expect he gives a shit, regardless?
Count me as another lover of UNFORGIVEN, then – Mr. Oates, I believe, has it exactly wrong. Easily the strongest script of any Eastwood movie, and one of the strongest scripts of the 90s, hands down. There hasn’t really been a better Western since then, unless you count DEADWOOD, which I do, and which is also marked by excellent writing, albeit of a strikingly different style (man, if you think UNFORGIVEN has monologues, don’t even go near DEADWOOD, of you’ll have a stroke.)
Actually, I take that back – THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES is as good as UNFORGIVEN, maybe better.
I say all of this as a semi-reformed (it’s a work in progress) Eastwood-basher. I actually have a great deal of catching up to do, but something about GRAN TORINO (of all films) got me thinking that ol’ Clint has some pretty special cards up his sleeve when it comes to storytelling. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but anyone who can make a movie from such a shoebox diorama of a script (not to mention and deeply, deeply inconsistent cast), and actually make that movie work, somehow, has got to have some chops.
Does he give a shit about what? If anyone goes to see his films, or if they’re given the proper amount of respect and “consideration”?
He’s certainly not just content to let the work speak for itself, at least as recently as 2003-04. Sitting down for a faux interview to be used in a commercial and chastising the viewer about CGI–who is that directed at? Kids who don’t know or card who Eastwood is? Old people who wouldn’t see LOTR films and don’t need convincing to stagger to a screening of Mystic River? No, it’s directed at Academy members, imploring them not to forget about good ol’ fashioned…Oscar Bait, as That Cuzzy Bastard accurately described above. That a TV ad for Mystic River could be as bluntly manipulative and shameless as the movie itself shouldn’t be much of a stretch.
WHATS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE WHY DONT YOU HATE CLINT EASTWOOD DIDNT YOU SEE WHAT HE DID
No.
(I have been an avid reader of this blog for quite some time, but this is actually my first time commenting here):
I don’t mind the term “oscar-bait” as I don’t interpret it literally. It’s a term which describes (maybe a bit crudely) narrative-driven films that aren’t aiming at perplexing or challenging the spectator: it is usually generic and harmlessly neutral to its topics while portraying itself as serious and respectable. One example is last years “The King’s Speech”, a hollow film dressed up in a robe of dignity(also called the emperor’s clothes) designed to entertain and nothing more.
The fact that Eastwood apparently made some Academy awards-commercials is irrelevant as I see it. Any big-budget movie director would probably be pressed by producers and financial backers to do these kinds of things; it doesn’t mean much more than that. Hitchcock was shamelessly occupied with both making audience hits and getting awards, but that doesn’t make his films “oscar-baits” (although To Catch A Thief comes pretty close).
I can see how some would characterize Eastwood’s latest output as such, though. His movies are almost painfully simplistic and melodramatic, although I think comparing him with R.W. Fassbinder is utterly insane.
I just have to add (I can’t help myself) that “Hereafter” is maybe the worst movie I have seen for quite some time, but curiously I haven’t come across many with the same opinion as me. Is really the afterlife like a cheap smoking lounge? I really can’t believe Eastwood’s lack of cinematic creativity in this regard. I quite like “Mystic River”, though.
@ Frenzy: Actually, if Oscar-bait pictures were just trying to entertain, I’d feel much more positively towards them! What drives me nuts about these prestige pics is that they insist they’re doing something much, much nobler than entertaining, which actually doing nothing at all.
laz – I wondered whether Mr. Clint gave a shit about baiting Oscar in any way, though I expect the answer’s also “no” where your queries are concerned, perhaps moreso. I mean, he IS human and surely would be inclined to vouch for his relevance in the 21st – perhaps a statuette might indeed be preferable to him for a few reasons to giving self-serving interviews where he demands you kids and your CGI get off his lawn, as it were. But a figure with Eastwood’s long CV decrying what he considers to be lame standards/practices in Hollywood filmmaking scarcely seems like an instance of not letting the work speak for itself, whether or not there was a promotional use put to such decrying.
(Incidentally: MYSTIC RIVER = not bad. The Oscar winners actors therefrom = pretty awful, esp. Mr. Robbins. Kevin Bacon = should’a been nominated/won.)
I definitely think promotional materials are as legitimate a subject for discussion as any other cultural material, but I really am struggling to understand the citation of one ad from 2003 to continually indict Eastwood. If that’s Exhibit A that he’s an Oscar-grubbing hack, color me unconvinced. Seems more like someone not simply playing the Hollywood game to promote his work, which I don’t think is necessarily the same thing.
Correction: That should have read “someone *simply* playing the Hollywood game.”
David: For me, I experience that extra gear in Eastwood’s work. Last summer, they did a complete retrospective at the Walter Reade Theatre, and I was amazed at how one film informed the other, and, especially, the visual intelligence revealed by seeing his films back-to-back-to-back. Along with the “four-square solid socially-conscious” aspect – which you rightly point out is central to his aesthetic – I discovered a concomitant sense of void and instability that resonated in ways similar to what I experience with Fassbinder. As I watched PLAY MISTY FOR ME, I was thinking – “Okay, nice film, start of career” and then there was the last shot with that ominous black space into which the leads retreat and I thought: ”Wow, there it is – that void/darkness that people comment on in his later films is front and center in his first film.” Progressing through the retrospective, I was struck by the sense of instability and treachery that undergirds even what seem to be lighter films.
Also, films such as THE GAUNTLET, FIREFOX, and BRONCO BILLY seem to me to be as much about America as Fassbinder’s movies were about West Germany. There is the difference, of course, that Eastwood concentrates more on the social construction of masculinities while Fassbinder stresses the variety of femininities, but I see this as two artist coming at the same problematic from differing directions. Eastwood is the insider revealing the hollowness he has discovered there, while Fassbinder is the outsider, tearing at and smashing through social constructions to reveal the hollow center that Eastwood was placed into as a result of his becoming a movie star.
Lastly, there are the Brechtian aspects of both men’s work. Both are highly self-aware artists who celebrate artifice and surfaces in their work. Fassbinder self-reflexively uses the modes and genres of Classical Hollywood to interrogate West Germany, its culture, and its inhabitants. Eastwood is a genre filmmaker as well, but, as I pointed out above, he works from inside a genre to destabilize its conventions, while Fassbinder works from the exterior. PALE RIDER announces itself as a Western all over the place just FOX AND HIS FRIENDS declares itself a melodrama in scene after scene and shot after shot. These artists do not make movies a spectator can lose herself in – a viewer is confronted with a cool sense of distancing and aggressive incoherence that pushes back against a spectator’s desire for immersion.
Of course, a spectator can take the position TFB does and demand that a film provide catharsis and be distinguished by “plot logic, “character coherence,” and “people with depth and surprise,” but these expectations, along with TFB’s definition of the aesthetic experience as including “an intense emotional experience which is, obviously, very much part of the satisfaction of art,” are culturally constructed and not universal. Joel Pfister’s wonderful “Staging Depth” chronicles the emergence of the bourgeois audience/consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century and its expectation that a work of art contain just what TFB is looking for. Bourgeois audiences sought these elements in artworks so that their discovery of and discussion of them would confirm their status as being superior to the working class who were satisfied with vaudeville, burlesque, and other popular entertainments which did not place such an emphasis on coherence, emotion, and logic as did the plays of O’Neill, Ibsen, Strindberg, etc. That this audience a) sought out such works; and b) could “get” these playwrights was validation of their intelligence and social status.
What is thrilling about Eastwood and Fassbinder is their disruption of this system of cultural validation. They play with these expectations, daring not to fulfill them, while providing pleasures of a different kind. They queer their texts so that a spectator who comes to their work with normative bourgeois expectations will leave highly disappointed. But this disappointment does not signify that they make bad films any more than a Mexican restaurant not having sushi on its menu means it is a bad eating establishment.
I’m really enjoying Brian, David E., jbryant, and some others’ contributions here, not just because I’m an Eastwood partisan, but because the “eh, overrated” camp aren’t addressing issues with the films that I find interesting. Nothing more to add from that, I tried to manage some aspects of J EDGAR as a queer text in my Slant review (http://slantmagazine.com/film/review/j‑edgar/5899), but also its theme of body degradation, which for Eastwood goes WAAAY back.
Not long after writing this review I caught THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP at Film Forum, the first time I’ve seen it projected. Needless to say, if you’re going to do a double-feature this weekend, and you’re in New York, J EDGAR and COLONEL BLIMP would make a very apt pair. Very very very very very apt.
This is Jaime Christley by the way, I’m signed in under WordPress, seeing how that’ll work out. I don’t much care for internet anonymity so I kind of feel like a schlub if I don’t say who I am, so I’m saying’ it.
I’m baffled by the spell Manny Farber casts over presentday American film critics and cinephiles.
These Farber categories – ‘termite’ vs ‘white elephant’ – seem so loose and subjective that it’s hard for me to understand how they can serve as a template for any real analysis, as Glenn Kenny proffers them here (bravely deconstructing categories whose boundaries can’t clearly be drawn in the first place).
I get Farber’s vernacular singularity as a writer of American English; I don’t get the translation of his virtuoso style into virtuoso thinking, much less a kind of analytical/evaluative program (so apparently loosely-goosey it can deny its programmatic status: lookin’ at you, Kent Jones).
Jeezus, I hate to say it (because despite everything, I do love the USA): this kind of thing, combined with all of the recent hoo-hah over the significance of Pauline Kael – utterly and properly unknown outside of the anglophone world, thank you very much – makes me think you’re all a bunch of provincial dimwits.
(Yes, yes, I know that I’m advancing an old-school Euro vs America cultural cliché, but so be it: more often than not, you Americans are just embarrassingly house-bound.)
@That Fuzzy Bastard:
“I think because pictures that are only in it for the money at least want to give me 90 minutes of low pleasure”
My point is, what if they don’t? Are you really going to tell me, for example, you find the idea of JACK AND JILL (which Glenn eviscerated in a just-posted review) more pleasurable than the idea of J. EDGAR (which, whatever its flaws may be – and I’m not seeing it till tomorrow – at least is trying for something, even if you may call it fake profundity)? It’s been said there’s three type of movies: those that try to be quality and succeed, movies that aspire to quality and don’t succeed, and movies that were never meant to be any good at all. Whatever your opinion of “quality” is, I think movies like J. EDGAR are going to be in either the first or second categories, while, from the looks of it, JACK AND JILL is going to be in the third category. And yet, again, movies in the second category are considered movies to avoid or shit on, and I’m sorry, but that saddens me.
Hey, Jiminholland, many thanks for “dimwits” and “house-bound.” I don’t suppose while you’re at it you have any alternative suggestions for a more usefully programmatic analytic/evaluative vocabulary than that which we’re proferring. Ah’d be much obliged to grab hold of anything that might in the future spare me from your Euro-scorn.
@lipranzer–Do you really find it sad that many critics and cinephiles look upon films like AMERICAN BEAUTY, Paul Haggis’ CRASH and THE HELP with scorn? Fake or failed seriousness is the enemy of true ambition, a quality I really do value. I don’t think anyone would argue that there’s something honorable about JACK AND JILL. However, unpretentious genre films like, say, SPLICE or the Harold and Kumar series can be a lot more enjoyable and say more about gender, sexuality or race than the Sam Mendes and Paul Haggis oeuvres.
Yes, of course, you’re right Glenn,
Americans aren’t house-bound dimwits.
If you read the NYTimes or WashPost – or for that matter, watch CNN (Euro version!) – the biggest problem in the world right now is the college football program at Penn State University. While I deplore a head coach – and a university president! – who institutionally furthered the violent assault of children by a sexual predator, there are more consequential doings in the rest of the world that also happen to be relevant to Americans – could be that Berlusconi is a much more significant Italian name right now than Paterno.
But God bless those kids taking to the State College streets – and tearing the shit out of them – in support of saintly old JoePa: here’s noble American protest, testifying to the deep, indigenous wisdom of the heartland.
By the way, I lived for over ten years in the great yawning stinkhole that is the American south – Virginia and Kentucky (the second officially midwest, but – you know) – and if the last sentence in your response to my post was supposed to approximate southern shit-kicker dialect, it really didn’t. At all.
But please go on negotiating the relationship between Farber, Sarris, and Kael, so that you can find that American film-critical sweet-spot – you know, the one the rest of the world doesn’t recognize as relevant.
Yeah, this is why the internet is such a gas; one minute you’re futzing around on your foofy movie blog, the next minute you’re being called to account for media hype of child-abuse insensitive college football fans.
OK, fine, jimfromholland; my critical vocabulary is imprecise, my approximation of Southern dialect stinks (but Jim, I ask you—are you sure that what I was going for wasn’t actually PASTICHE? Also, would you like me to try Jersey dialect on you? Because I’m from there, so maybe that’d be more “authentic”), and I and the country I live in are completely irrelevant. Now can I go have my fucking dinner? Thanks.
I was born and raised in “the great yawning stinkhole” of Kentucky, but somehow managed to get book learnin’ and develop a taste for quality movin’ pictures (even ones by furriners like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir – I’ve even seen some Bresson and Dreyer and didn’t need to have them explained to me!).
Not saying I’m representative of the average Kentuckian, but if jiminholland only met shitkickers in those areas, maybe he wasn’t getting out much.
Steve:
I happen to like SPLICE (there was a period at the store I work at where I was recommending it to anyone I didn’t think would get squicked out by it), as well as the first HAROLD & KUMAR movie (though I think it’s uneven as hell). And while I happen to still like AMERICAN BEAUTY (the only one of Mendes’ movies I do like), and I haven’t seen THE HELP yet, I did have problems with CRASH, as with most of Haggis’ movies (except, surprisingly, for THE NEXT THREE DAYS), and I am one of those who was very bitter about it losing Best Picture to BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Still, I’d rather watch that again than sit through a second again of something like DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? (which we had to test at the store one time when a customer complained it wasn’t working, and it was agonizing to sit through), which is clearly a Cash Register job, and I don’t see what’s wrong with that. And I agree with the larger point made by others here about how I don’t think Farber’s standards should be the be-all and end-all either.
There is no good terminology to describe what has “content” at what has not. I think the best approach would be Roland Barthes “Writerly” and “Readerly” text: works which opens up for interpretation or works which closes it down. Eastwood is, I think, in the latter category, because his movies aren’t ambiguous and mainly follow conventions of narrative. His strength is in telling the Story (with a big s), not in creating meaning out of mise-en-scene, editing and camera movements (of course there are _some_ meaning). The Adam Sandler movie would also be a readerly text, so this categorical way of thinking creates maybe an unfortunate dichotomy, but can be useful when talking about a director such as Eastwood. With that said, I don’t think Eastwood is a horrible director or filmmaker; he’s just not a great one.
This is doomed to be fairly abstract as I am talking about Eastwood in a generalized manner, and not very scholarly. But they are still feelings I have that frequently occurs when watching his films. But not everyone needs movies to be like this, it’s just my personal taste.
For a “great yawning stinkhole”, Kentucky had enough sense to recently vote against David L. Williams by a suitably Santorumesque margin. But I digress…
Pulling back a little, was there any time in cinema history when critics did not scorn/maul filmmakers in the last stages of their career?
No-one seems exempt- Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Preminger and elsewhere, Kurosawa and now Godard and Eastwood (and Scorsese, of course). Whether you agree that there was a decline or not, the reaction is like something that greets last year’s guest, who is unwilling to leave the house.
As Renoir is supposed to have said (I’m paraphrasing), people started being more friendly to him once they learned he had stopped making films.
While there may have been in my posts the semblance of a valid point about an American tendency toward insularity, I was terribly, stupidly rude in them and for that I apologize.
Glenn, I read your blog because I think you’re a wonderful writer and a very smart guy.
A view I suspect might not have been apparent in those earlier posts…
Anyways, I hope your dinner was swell.
Thanks Jim, and accepted.And for the record I think that almost everything about this whole Penn State thing is utterly mortifying.
Dinner DID turn out well. Seared some halibut with that James Beard olive oil-lemon juice-basil-garlic marinade.
Fair warning: There IS one more Kael-related post in the works. But after that we’ll be leying off the subject for a while.
“Was there any time in cinema history when critics did not scorn/maul filmmakers in the last stages of their career?”
Altman and Ozu, from ‘The Player’ and ‘Equinox Flower’ onwards respectively, didn’t fare at all badly. Hayao Miyazaki and Charles Crichton also come to mind (though admittedly ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ only provides a single data point).
Also Ingmar Bergman (Fanny & Alexander), Kubrick (although Eyes Wide Shut is maybe not uniformly loved, it still has a lot of critical respect), Luis Bunuel, Sergio Leone, Cassavetes, Jean-Pierre Melville , Fassbinder etc. Actually there are lots of directors which didn’t get scorned late in their career. I don’t think this has anything to do with Eastwood who has been a grumpy old man since the age of 35.
Bergman wasn’t entirely immune from the syndrome Renoir implicitly described; “Sarabande” got unfairly smacked around a bit, I thought. And we should recall too that poor Sergio Leone was only 60 when he died; same for Cassavetes. Melville was 55, only three years older than myself right now. For heaven’s sake. Oh, and Fassbinder WASN’T EVEN 40. I can only hope that when/if our society reaches its “Logan’s Run” phase, the commenter known as Frenzy isn’t put in charge.
(Also, when Eastwood was 35 he was starring in “For A Few Dollars More.”)
Also Murnau or Mizoguchi- like the others mentioned they died early; but Ozu attained an international audience quite late in his life so it isn’t quite the same thing, Altman was not exactly universally loved, ever, and I always thought that Eyes Wide Shut was something of a film maudit: people only bring it up to snigger about Kidman and Cruise.
Possibly at present Resnais has managed to circumvent this state- now he gets lukewarm praise for anything he does. And also, so help me God, Polanski. But he has other problems.
And Oliveira.
Jaime’s insightful review has a phrase that captures an important aspect of Eastwood’s approach in J. EDAGR and other films: “These observations of body (the fat, the diminished statures, the cataracts) go toward Eastwood’s long view of Hoover as a mere organism, his motives and psychology less important than his destination…”
Eastwood does not make psychological dramas that attempt to explain behavior. He documents behaviors – especially contradictory ones – and allows a viewer to work out the psychology (if she wants/needs to). That is why I disagree with Frenzy about Eastwood following narrative conventions. By stripping the psychological motivation most artists provide their characters with, Eastwood upends narrative practice. Following Hoover to his end is akin to watching Ben Shockley run the gauntlet or Thomas Highway invade Grenada (and HEARTBREAK RIDGE is a great film to use for an investigation into Eastwood’s artistry: the invasion is satirized while at the same time the human cost of conflict is not obscured. And there, at the end of the last skirmish, is the Eastwoodian black space – a huge hole in the side of a building. Eastwood then finishes the film with a celebration of return that dissipates beneath the credits as they roll).
Thanks Brian, and yes, there does seem to be some explicit separation from Eastwood’s direction and the more conventional dramatic arcs in the scripts he hires. Not that he “doesn’t care” about the scripts, but his investment in them is shrewdly measured, to a point that some might call indifference.
Someone once observed that he is content to choose the scripts based on the emotional spaces he wants to create, while things like rugby, catching a killer, mentoring a young boxer, flying to the moon, etc., are the chosen vehicles, rather than ends in and of themselves.
BTW I misspoke before when I said that COLONEL BLIMP starts today in New York, it starts next Friday.
I agree Jaime. (Admitted total speculation follows): I think he sees/senses something in a script – no matter what the stage of polish/completion – and wants to use that one since, as you point out, the script is the vehicle for the emotional spaces he wants to explore, and he may be afraid that script revisions will collapse/destroy the entry points to those spaces (end of total speculation). As a result, Eastwood can be effective with both a polished script such as UNFORGIVEN and a draft as with CHANGELING. In some ways, he is an auteurist/cinephile ideal – using the script merely as a jumping off point for his mise en scene. Strange then when he is faulted for the qualities of his scripts rather than for his direction of them.
I am reminded of Minnelli’s HOME FROM THE HILL, a film that I deeply love. Minnelli said it was one of the best scripts he ever had, and I would argue that what he meant was that it was the perfect script for someone if they happened to be Vincente Minnelli and wanted to make a definitive melodrama. For example: I am not sure that the transition from Wade Hunnicutt 1) tenderly trying to reconcile with his wife; to 2) being rebuffed; and finally c) stalking back to the barbecue and cutting 2‑lb slabs of beef for his guests is an example of great scripting, but it certainly gave Minnelli the opporunity to craft one of the great moments of melodrama in all of cinema.
>Strange then when he is faulted for the qualities of his scripts rather than for his direction of them.
I’m not sure it’s strange at all, especially when you consider the vast number of directors who hold off on yelling “Action!” until they’re sure they’ve got a story that’s actually worth filming. ALL good directors want to create an emotional space, for crying out loud, but they don’t just glom onto the first draft and go “Hey, this’ll do! Assemble me some cast peoples and lets us create some emotional spaces!” It *is* possible to write a second–or a hundredth–draft of a script that not only doesn’t “collapse/destroy the entry points to those spaces”, but actually creates even *more* such spaces. In fact, this happens all the time! It’s called “rewriting”, and it’s exactly why people engage in the practice. Ignoring your text is NOT the same thing as queering a normative mode, or however Brian put it; it’s just being lazy and blowing off a step which people as different as Sturges, Pialat, and Wes Anderson view as a necessary (and often delightful) part of the movie-making process–and one for which there’s rarely *enough* time.
When Eastwood’s name comes up, I usually roll my eyes and think pretty thoughts because to me his movies look like Aesop’s fables would if Aesop was a shallow, humorless hack, but to valorize his refusal to work from better scripts as some kind of Ginsbergian first-thought-best-thought artistry really hits me as just the most nebulous kind of excuse-making. When Kellow said to Glenn “[Kael] thought [her immediate response] was the truest response”, it sounds awfully close to what you guys are describing. It’s just not true, though: your response to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or “Dead Ringers” isn’t one bit truer when you’re watching it than the one is that you form while walking around the block, smoking a cigarette, and thinking the damn thing over without having it right in your face. And stylistically? Whoo… When I think of the Coens’ recent work, or Scorsese (when he’s not dicking around), or Varda, or any one of a dozen others, and then I picture a scene from “Unforgiven” or (the completely wretched) “Mystic River”, it’s just no contest. It’s like watching a primate trying to find the handle on his paintbrush.
Tom: I guess I consider it strange that so many critics go to great lengths to dissociate film from theater, but when they want to bash a film/filmmaker, they attack the element that is the most obvious holdover from theatre – the script. I also disagree with your universalizing statement that “ALL good directors want to create an emotional space, for crying out loud, but they don’t just glom onto the first draft and go ‘Hey, this’ll do! Assemble me some cast peoples and lets us create some emotional spaces!’” How do you know this? Evoking emotion is not a universal intent in all artists, nor is the obsessive re-working of scripts. What is necessary to Sturges, Pialat, and Anderson cannot be extrapolated to other artists; Anderson, in fact, is an example of a filmmaker who re-writes his scripts to the point that his films become over-determined and congeal as they are projected. All that can be stated is that Eastwood believes a script as written is suitable to his purposes. You may find the script inadequate to your tastes, but I believe the more important question is whether or not the script is adequate to the film which uses it.
You may prefer films whose scripts have been worked over many times to achieve a critical mass of psychological nuance, but that is a particular modernist concern, and as I stated earlier, I believe Eastwood is a postmodern artist, and to complain that he does not conform to modernist demands makes as little sense as complaining that Faulkner’s sentences are not as easily diagrammable as Hemingway’s. Looking at your blog, I noticed your praise for Jacques Prevert’s script for THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE where he “filled out this simple story with a host of characters, all of whom have their own feelings and concerns.” I am assuming that a script following modernist tenets and offering characters fully-equipped with “their own feelings and concerns” would be one that you would characterize as being “better” ( I just want to make sure I understand your argument). But I would argue that there is no Platonic Ideal of “better” or “best” script, and that instead, a film should be critiqued on the dynamic/dialectic between its script and its mise en scene.
As for Eastwood queering a text, what I mean here is that he is queering the textual practice of providing characters that possess psychological complexity. His narrative architecture is often blunt, but I would argue that such an approach serves the postmodern concern with making the skeleton visible, much as Edward Albee does in his plays. I realize that a modernist approach is less amenable to this queering, but that does not render it sloppy or lazy, just different.
Brian – or I guess anyone else who has used or understands the phrase – could you explain what you mean by “queering a text?” It’s come up in a few recent threads around here and I confess I have no idea what it means.
Brian, psychologically nuanced characters go back to the Greeks–it’s hardly a tenet peculiar to the 20th Century movement which gave us “Nude Descending a Staircase”, the Dadaists and Marinetti. And there’s a lot more evidence–like the movies themselves, one after another after another of them–suggesting that Eastwood is *trying* to create rounded, coherently detailed characters, and just failing, than there is that he’s some kind of brilliant, forward-thinking artist who’s out-thought those hoary old nags Faulkner and Renoir and their inexplicable clinging to those funny little things they liked to call their “characters”. If you can’t look at that kid gunfighter in “Unforgiven” and see he’s just a misshapen, badly acted mess derived from a million earlier Westerns, well…then we’re just at an impasse.
It’s comments like Dauth’s the leave me really feeling like my retinas are just differently adjusted from everyone else’s. I mean, yes, there’s lots of great art that deliberately eschews psychological complexity or easy mimesis. If I want to see a cleverly queered text, Derek Jarman made plenty of clever genre-aware pastiches that top the underside of classical culture. When it comes to bouncing deliberately flat creations off each other to generate sparks, Velvet Goldmine, the collected works of Spike Lee, and hell, Serial Mom do a great job of it. Clint Eastwood is just Norman Jewison, a solid maker of socially-conscious films which try to use psychology and narrative for catharsis (what *else* is there to Mystic River?) and do it terribly badly. He’s really good if you like films that spell out every emotion the audience is supposed to feel and tell you every thought you’re supposed to have, but put him next to even a mid-level creator of mis-en-scene like Sidney Lumet, and he looks just a half-step above a Happy Madison production, just with the “desaturate” knob turned way up.
Raymond: here is a quick, vulgar answer: I will try to work on something more detailed. One way to think about what it means to queer something is to say that it signifies an attempt to demonstrate that an idea, practice, or approach, rather than being universal and essentialist, is socially constructed. An obvious example would be the effort to queer the notion of marriage to include same-sex spouses. A queer understanding stands in opposition to ahistorical, totalizing approaches to art and other aspects of existence.
As I am using it in the context of this thread, an Eastwood film queers the understanding of what is understood as a sufficient/normative script. I am saying that the idea that nuanced, psychologically deep characters as being the “natural” goal of any script is actually a socially constructed normative that grew out of a specific cultural moment and need. This norm has been around for so long and been so widely adopted, it begins to appear as if were a “natural”; “normal”; or “best” way to write a script (just as a “normal” marriage is a union between a man and a woman). Queering this understanding is an effort a) to reveal its socially constructed root; and b) to offer alternatives to this particular practice.
Tom: I just do not follow your lead. You appear to be posting from a modernist perspective, and then invoke the Greeks whose culture and understanding of art and psychology was anything but modern. My argument is not with your embrace of modernism (everyone has their personal approach), but I do disagree when you try to ahistorically throw it backwards and assign it to the Greeks. I make no claim that Eastwood has abandoned character (except as delimited by modernist ideology), and would argue that his emphasis on instability shares some resemblance with Faulkner who introduced postmodernism into the American novel in Chapter 8 of “Absalom, Absalom!”
TFB: I cannot speak about retinae, but it seems certain that we employ different lens in front of them – yours modernist and mine queer.
A naïve question, or two: how can we tell the difference between a film that’s deliberately queering the practice of providing characters that possess psychological complexity, and a film that’s simply simpleminded? I trust most of us would say that CRASH is an example of the latter; why are some so convinced that Eastwood’s films are examples of the former? Second, if we accept that Eastwood’s films are examples of the former, surely there must be some evaluative space left to talk about interesting or good “queerings” of psychological complexity and uninteresting ones, no? It can’t be the case that any time a director “queers” linear storytelling or psychological complexity, he’s produced an important or good film. Suppose I concede that Eastwood deliberately flattens his characters – to what end? Flattening for flattening’s sake, or is something gained by this flattening? Whether the latter’s the case is what interests me; simply asserting that some convention has been queered doesn’t seem to take us very far.
Eastwood creates spaces between personality (his direction of the flow of images) and the concept (the script/premise). Therein lies the interest. Detractors tend to focus on the latter (here and elsewhere, regarding Eastwood or other auteurs) because they feel there’s an absence of pleasure that’s nigh impossible to get past. Only human that this should be the case, but it makes conversation hard sometimes.
I don’t think it’s a naïve question, either – although Brian D’s answer may be better than mine. I don’t always agree with his approach, but have thought it thought-provoking since those old days on a_film_by. My idea of queering is a lot closer to Dan Sallitt’s concept of “two-ness” (will find link later), even though my mind has, of course, developed its own custom, mutated version. Well, maybe that’s in line with Brian D’s approach after all! But I’m neither queer nor (I believe) modernist.
Here’s Sallitt:
http://sallitt-archive.blogspot.com/2008/04/dramaturgy-and-two-ness.html
This isn’t gospel for me, necessarily (I don’t like all of his favorite directors, nor he mine), but it’s stuck with me ever since I read it.
@Glenn Kenny:
Haha, fair enough. Fassbinder was a bit of a stretch (still Shamus did say “last stages of their career”). Still, 60 is not an unreasonable age to retire as a film director; not everyone is able to keep it up till their 70’s. I think the “they just dismiss him because of his age” or that somehow Eastwood is out of touch with his audience are diversions and simply lazy argumentation. Eastwood is a major and popular filmmaker, and he has enjoyed a lot of critical praise these last ten years.
I still think Eastwood makes “readerly films” that are closed off for the spectator to bring in his own interpretation. Think of (an shudder) the swelling of violins at the end of Hereafter; there is no doubt that the spectator should view it as romantic (even though Eastwood does a horrible job at portraying it as such just by the images and narration). The filmmaker is hermetically sealing off the work to interpretation.
My point of Eastwood being a grumpy old man since 35 still stands.
Well, considering what seem to be the prevailing/available alternatives, grumpy-old-mandom doesn’t look as bad as all of that…
Asher: Not a naïve question at all, but an essential one. If queering is going to be of any use as a concept, it must have definition and boundaries to distinguish it from just sloppy/inept craftsmanship. Jaime’s answer is quite close to my own – especially in its emphasis on “space” (have I really been going on about “queering” since a_f_b? I recently had to look back at an early post I made there and cringed at its ham-handedness. I have been fortunate to have had it, davkehr.com, and here to get at least a little better when writing about films).
Quick personal bio (it will tie in, I promise): I always knew I was gay – never dated girls – never wanted to. Came out in college in the late 70’s when fledgling campus groups for gay people started popping up. I am not sure I was so much of an activist back then, as just not willing to live a lie. Looking back, I recognize that early on I understood the concept of “social normative” before I was aware that such a term existed –thinking in a postmodern/queer fashion before I knew there was such a way of thinking.
Concomitant with coming out (and actually a little earlier), I emerged as a total film geek. The late 70’s and early 80’s was a great time to be in NYC, and I spent all available hours in revival houses and at MoMA and went to the NY Film Festival for the first time when I was a junior in high school. What I realize now is that my film aesthetic and my queerness sprang to life at the same time and one informed the other. If my early posts on a_f_b tilted heavily in considering content over form, it was (in part) because of how my queerness and my film love merged in my life.
As a gay teen and early 20-something, I realized that my family and the world presented scripts for me to perform which were never going to work for me, and that I needed to resist/subvert/queer them just as a matter of survival (trying, of course, to be fabulous as I did it). At the same time, I was being drawn to films which did not follow storytelling normatives – movies where women made decisions; controlled voice overs; and did not submit to male expectations. Hence my love for Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Was all set to go to film school and then AIDS struck – friends getting sick and dying; me becoming a care giver and activist; and when I came out the other side of AIDS activism several years later, film school was not a possibility and I had a career in the field of youth development. I kept watching movies and reading on film and queer culture – all in the hope of writing someday – but not until I joined a_f_b did I discover a place to try out my voice. I learned quickly that I had to increase my understanding of form if I was to grow into a decent critic, and started reading a great deal in terms of aesthetic philosophy – and along the way figured out I was a postmodernist without knowing it. I also had the crucial encouragement of David Ehrenstein, Bill Krohn, Richard Modiano and Blake Lucas – even when we disagreed – to keep developing my voice despite its difference. My early approach was AIDS-activist-turned-critic which, hopefully, I have modulated, but I realized that I experienced films differently.
I have spent years discovering/carving out space where I (and my voice) can exist/thrive in society and the critical community, and Clint Eastwood’s films offer me spaces as both a gay man and a queer theorist to engage them without having to follow predetermined, socially-constructed paths. I am in a different place than Dan Sallitt (whom I know and whose writing I love and learn from), and not as interested in films that succeed in “harmonizing character developments with story developments” because I often experience such attempts at harmonization as suffocation. Two important life lessons I learned were a) I was never going to cohere the way my family and society wanted me to; and b) society’s psychological explanations of queerness were nonsense. In such a place, I had (crudely speaking) two choices: learn to harmonize or act up and resist. I chose the latter and prefer films that do the same in terms of form and content.
So when Dan writes: “Even the most elementary narratives generally strive to create a wedding between the issues of the characters and the workings of the plot… Complicated art can complicate this procedure a great deal, but the tendency to bring together action and character development is ancient and persistent,” I want to add that the tendency is also socially-determined and not intrinsic to human nature. A film may develop character with a Freudian understanding of human psychology, but what happens if a viewer disagrees with that understanding?
I am with Jaime on what Eastwood does: “Eastwood creates spaces between personality (his direction of the flow of images) and the concept (the script/premise).” And it is in this space I can reside as a spectator. With the harmonizing approach (brought to perfection by late Romanticism/modernism), a work of art offers two options: either go along with the work’s universe (and its psychology) or resist it – what I cannot do is move around and play with it (in the postmodern sense of play). Much more congenial is Eastwood’s approach (again quoting Jaime): “… to view all of it with a kind of contemplative, non-filtering neutrality.”
I watched J. EDGAR a second time today in preparation for writing this post (which I hope also serves to amplify my earlier response to Raymond), and loved it more the second time. Does Eastwood present an over-bearing mom and a mama’s boy? He sure does. Does he harmonize the presentation so that we understand that what contributed to Hoover behaving the way he did was his having such a mother? No – and that for me is what makes Eastwood great. The pieces are there, but unless a viewer brings to the screening the “psychological” glue that will make them cohere, it remains a possibility within the world of the film and not a certainty (which creative practice can be experienced as “flat” characterization by a viewer). Eastwood creates a space where the spectator can choose to make a connection or refuse it, and it works either way (as in Julio Cortazar’s novel “Hopscotch” where the chapters can be read in more than one order). In this way, he queers the modernist expectation that a narrative work of art “harmoniz[e] character developments with story developments.” His films are vaudeville rather than Eugene O’Neill – all these possibilities following one after another and only cohering into a psychology if the spectator choses to go down that path. J. EDGAR does not explain Hoover so much as present his behaviors.
Now to Asher’s question: how to tell the difference between the successful creation of such a space and bad craftsmanship. I would say if you feel the emergence of this space – a place where you as a spectator can go one way or another – a sense of a space deliberately built into the film where possibilities rather than harmonies/certainties are presented – then you are in the presence of intended queering. Just as Dan talks about “both the internal and the external views giv[ing] some elementary pleasure when they cohere, and … classical dramaturgy creat[ing] both coherences at the same time with the same act,“ I am also talking of a coherence, but this is a coherence of space within a work of art where a spectator can choose among possibilities/explanations. Modernism privileges ambiguity; postmodernism privileges multivocality. The one can be mistaken for the other, but they are different.
Again, I want to be clear that I in no way think Dan is wrong – he just values classical dramaturgy more than I do and derives more pleasure from it. But as Jaime pointed out, the difficulty is that the postmodern spaces Eastwood creates may be devoid of pleasure for some viewers, which makes discussion difficult.
Your response leaves me a great deal more puzzled than I was before. Now, it seems that you’re adverting to ambiguity, which is precisely what someone like TFB seems to think Eastwood lacks. When I or he say that Eastwood’s characters lack psychological complexity, we’re not saying that he fails to achieve Sallitt’s ideal of twoness. Rather, we’re saying that he fails to create precisely what you say he does create – alternate possibilities as to the characters – and that he’s always giving us characters about whom he knows exactly what we ought to think. This is very much the case, for example, of almost all the minor characters in MILLION DOLLAR BABY, GRAN TORINO, CHANGELING, so insistently so that, when I watch these films, they do create a space for me to react, but not at all the sort of space you suggest, a space in which I question Eastwood’s moralizing judgments about characters that begin to seem sympathetic because Eastwood obviously hates them so much.
Surprised to see so little mention here of ‘Flags of Our Fathers’, whose structuring concerns – Which of the two Iwo Jima flag-raising photographs is the more ‘real’? Which soldiers are in the photographs? Who ‘really’ raised the ‘real’ flag? – insist on ambiguity and irreducible complexity.
Thank you, Asher, that’s exactly it. I really wish I could see the movie Brian is describing—it sounds like something between Agnes Varda and Spike Lee!—rather than the movie I do see when I watch, say, MILLION DOLLAR BABY, which is a stolid piece of naturalistic fiction that bangs me over the head with both its message and its interpretation of the character and never, ever, let’s me dissent from the view it puts forth about every character.
Brian: I’m sorry to be That Guy, but this is bugging me: I think you’re saying “modernist” when you mean “modern”, and those are actually very different things. “The modern drama” referred to O’Neil, Ibsen, and Strindberg, who created plays with psychological complexity and hidden motives. This was actually much less oppressive than you might think, by comparison to what came before: plays in which single-trait characters would enact intensely moralizing tableux—part of the revolution of the Modern Drama was its insistence that moral instruction should be presented, if at all, as character dialogue (which could well be a lie, or a self-deception) rather than authoritative commentary.
Modernist drama is entirely different—in fact its the opposite. That’s the theater of Brecht, Elmer Rice, arguably Maeterlinck, arguably Beckett. Like Modernist painting, Modernist drama liked to flatten the picture plain the better to view the work’s formal properties. Think of Brecht’s plays, where characters’ identities are entirely a function of their position and purpose, and they bounce off each other with the vaudevillian energy of the single-minded.
So why you say “modernist” drama wants psychologically consistent characters and development, I’m pretty sure you mean “modern” drama. It’s a rather confusing nomenclature, I know, made even more confusing by O’Neil’s tendency to call his plays Modernist, and eventually to write Modernist plays which were very different from his Modern plays (A Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a very different approach to drama than The Emperor Jones). Sorry to be finger-wagging, but modernism and theater has been an interest of mine for a long time, and I thought you might be interested in the degree to which a lot of the actual modernists anticipate your concerns.
I am truly enjoying this discussion and thank the particpants. Also, I am aware that the following is very, very rough, since the majority of it has come together for me quite recently. I am working under the premise that everyone has watched Eastwood’s work with similar attention and care. I believe our differences demonstrate how different aesthetic lenses can result in highly varied experiences of the same work of art.
TFB: First, a note on terminology: when I use the term “modern,” I try to restrict its use to identifying something that belongs to the historical era of modernity, which stretches from the mid-1400’s to either the late 20th century or possibly the present day. When I use the terms “modernism” or “modernist,” I am referring to the aesthetic movement that emerged in the late 19th century and continues on until the late 20th century or – some would argue – the present day. Modernism as an aesthetic movement occurs within the era of modernity, just as Romanticism, Naturalism, and Realism do. I also believe that Modernism can be understood to have an Early, High and Late period, with art from the late period showing postmodern tendencies and gestures. So while Ibsen and Beckett are both modernists, they are modernists at opposite ends of the spectrum, with Beckett showing distinct postmodern aspects as his career progresses.
As you note, Early Modernism produced “plays with psychological complexity and hidden motives” using the psychodynamic model of the human mind as developed by Freud. As Modernism progresses, this model is critiqued/challenged/rejected and things get “flatter” until we reach Beckett who sits on the modernist/postmodernist border. Postmodern drama emerges with Pinter and Albee – Albee in particular, who in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” has the father kill the son on the road instead of the other (Freudian) way around – the most powerful rejection up until that time of the psychodynamic model of dramatic construction. In general, I think we are in agreement about how drama developed, and are disagreeing about how to name it.
Back to Eastwood: doing some thinking and following up on Jaime’s notion of space and the responses from Asher and TFB, I would say that the scripts Eastwood uses are written in a modernist vein and, in general, accept the psychodynamic view of the human mind. The majority of scripts he has used are mediocre at best, with UNFORGIVEN being the best crafted of the lot. But the quality of the scripts is irrelevant since Eastwood’s direction of them is postmodern. And for this insight, I deeply thank Jaime for writing: “Eastwood creates spaces between personality (his direction of the flow of images) and the concept (the script/premise).”
I have always loved Eastwood, and in some ways, never understood why, since on the surface he was as far from what I would consider my kind of director as I could imagine. I was Mankiewicz and Fassbinder, but Eastwood was never dismissible, and repeat viewings only deepened my admiration. So eliminating the possibility that I was insane, and knowing that I have a deep preference for postmodern art, I came to the conclusion that Eastwood was a postmodernist. Now thanks to Jaime and the other contributors to this conversation, I understand how his postmodernism operates through creating space between his direction and the script/premise. What remains for me to work out is what it is specifically in his direction that I experience as postmodern – lighting, editing, lens choice, acting, etc.
Asher: in my previous post, I did not develop an important point, but rather threw it out and moved on. I wrote: ”Modernism privileges ambiguity; postmodernism privileges multivocality. The one can be mistaken for the other, but they are different.” Eastwood does not create alternative possibilities for his characters – he presents whatever possibilities his scriptwriters have comes up. But the success of these scripts on modernist terms is irrelevant, since Eastwood is working in a postmodernist idiom. So instead of making sure that his scripts are replete with modernist ambiguity, what Eastwood offers is a directing of these scripts which offers a postmodern space for multivocality where a spectator can come up with alternatives on her own. Modernist art (at least of the Early and High variety) comes fully equipped with alternatives ready to be revealed/discovered in order to create a sense of ambiguity. Postmodern art does not come decked out this way (and to some viewers may be experienced as “thinner” or less substantial). In Pinter’s THE HOMECOMING, Ruth decides to stay with her husband’s family, and Pinter offers no reasons as to why she does stays – he just offers up a space for speculation. In Early and High Modernism, characters were created who were revealed over the course of the play or novel to be more complex than were first imagined, and a modernist’s goal was to limn this complexity (most often presented in psychodynamic terms). Postmodernism operates differently – it admits to the complexity, but instead of trying to limn the various alternatives, it creates a space in which the reader/viewer can do so herself.
Lastly, in response to the question Oliver asks: a modernist would ask and then try to resolve the question of which flag raising was the real one (ambiguity). As a postmodernist, I would say that each raising of the flag, even the ones back in America at bond rallies, was the real raising of the flag (irreducible complexity).