Hugo Schwyzer

Long post a’ comin’.

Leon Panetta is to be the new CIA chief, according to president-elect Obama’s transition office. Before I’d had a chance to read it on the wires or see it on CNN, my mother called me from Carmel with the news, describing herself as “overjoyed.” We’re big Panetta fans in our family; Leon Panetta represented my home district on the Monterey Peninsula from 1976 until 1993. Though my first political memory was of working for William Roth in the 1974 California Democratic gubernatorial primary, one of my earliest memories of political victory came when I “precincted” with my mother for Leon Panetta in 1976, when he upset incumbent Republican Burt Talcott to take over California’s 16th congressional district seat. I’ve only met him at fundraisers, but I went to high school with two of his sons, and the family — and the Congressman — were much liked and admired on the Peninsula.

Panetta is a fiscal moderate, a strong environmentalist, and a terrific policy wonk. Though he doesn’t have a background as a spy, he’s the ideal person to come in and restore restraint and responsibility to an agency that many believe has run amok under the Bush Administration. Panetta is the wise sort who will balance issues of national security with responsibility to the Constitution. I’ve already called Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to express my strong support for Leon Panetta, and encourage my like-minded readers to do the same, or to email her here.

I’m also thinking this morning about Clint Eastwood, having just seen his new film Gran Torino. The connection between Eastwood and Panetta is a geographic one: both are men with whom I share a home town, Carmel by-the-Sea. (Eastwood was raised, however, in Piedmont in the Bay Area — the same town in which my mother grew up. Eastwood’s father was one year ahead of my grandfather at Piedmont High.) For two years in the 1980s, both held elected office, as Clint was a surprisingly decent mayor of Carmel for two years. And while Panetta was our most prominent politician throughout most of my youth, Clint has always been, for as long as I can remember, Carmel’s most renowned celebrity.

The first time I saw Eastwood on the street was in early 1983. I was not quite sixteen, and I had a learner’s permit but not yet a driver’s license. My mother and I were out for one of our afternoon driving lessons in the family car, a 1980 Datsun 210 wagon. Driving down San Carlos Avenue, I saw a familiar looking man step out of a Mercedes sedan, glance towards the oncoming traffic (led by me) and begin to jaywalk across the street. It was Clint, and I gasped in recognition. I also didn’t slow down, and forced Eastwood to do a double take and quicken his pace. My mother said “For God’s sakes, Hugo, don’t hit him”, and I carefully applied the brakes. I don’t think Clint was more than a little unnerved, but I do remember our fleeting eye contact. How ghastly it would have been had I struck him — and how different cinematic history might have been as well. After all, Eastwood’s greatest triumphs as an actor and director have come in the last two decades, well after our very brief encounter on the roadway a quarter-century ago!

In any event, I enjoyed “Gran Torino” very much, and in particular, I was struck by the wry way in which Eastwood used the film (which he both stars in and directs) to reflect on his long career and upon American masculinity. Because there are plot spoilers ahead, the rest of the post is below the cut.

The 78 year-old Eastwood has said that this will be his last major film as an actor, though he intends to continue to direct. Any fan of his nearly fifty-year career will recognize the various salutes he includes in Gran Torino to his earlier work, and to many of his most famous roles. The film is, as many have pointed out, so much a servant to formula that it ends up transcending formula — it is utterly predictable, and perhaps all the more delightful and moving because of the gentle, irresistible, and knowing pace it takes down a very familiar road.

In many ways, the character Clint plays — Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet and retired Detroit auto worker — is a classic archetype of 20th century American working-class white masculinity. Despite his ethnic surname, Kowalski is a white Jedermann, universally recognizable, a member of the Greatest Generation renowned for many qualities, not least among these their work ethic and their inability to articulate any emotion other than anger. Kowalski is recently widowed (the film opens at his wife’s funeral), a hat tip to the cinematic convention that heroes do their best work unencumbered by relationships with actual women. Walt is also alienated from his two sons; he has no vocabulary for talking with them (or his grandchildren, who bewilder and annoy him), and at the post-funeral wake, he does everything he can to avoid contact with them or with anyone else. He is a Lone Ranger, ageing but not yet enfeebled.

Eastwood is an actor of famously limited range, who tends to do a very few things onscreen very well. (Of course, this is akin to pointing out that as he ages, David Beckham does only a few things very well — but when they are done, what things they are!) As Kowalski, Eastwood shows us the cracks in the veneer not only of this one ageing and lonely man, but also in the very archetype that he, as an actor, has done more than virtually anyone else to create. Since the passing of John Wayne three decades ago, Eastwood has been the consummate American “man’s man”, and his most famous roles from the ’60s and ’70s (”the man with no name”, Dirty Harry Callahan) continue to define a certain kind of masculine response to modernity. In the face of rule-bound, feminized contemporary culture, the characters Clint played in his earlier Westerns and his crime dramas embodied the “give ‘em hell!” pugnaciousness and independence that Americans have admired in their men for close to two centuries. And of course, there are knowing nods to these earlier roles in almost every scene in the film.

But though Kowalski is still agile and capable of intimidating power, he is also evidently frail. In one scene, the camera pans across him as he stands smoking on his porch, as outrageously handsome as any septuagenarian has ever been. Clint is impassive, and he is smoking. As the smoke curls around his face, he makes smoking look more desperately appealing than it has in thirty years; he “out-Marlboros the Marlboro man”, if such a thing were possible. But Kowalski is also very sick; he coughs up blood, and appears to have the early to middle stages of lung cancer. The message is clear; nothing is without cost. The image is only that, an image.

Kowalski becomes close to young Thao, a Hmong boy whom Walt finds burglarizing his garage. Improbably (but of course, predictably) Walt begins to serve as a surrogate father to Thao, whose own Dad is conveniently and equally predictably out of the picture. He begins to teach him, in scenes both tender and hilarious, how to be a man. Walt teaches Thao to use tools, but he also teaches him how to carry himself, and particularly, how to bluff and posture. Two scenes, one at a barbershop and the other on a construction site, are as satirical a play on the conceits of American masculinity as I’ve ever seen in a mainstream film. The relationship between Walt and Thao is tender and real, and reminiscent of the relationship between the characters played by Eastwood and Hillary Swank in the former’s Oscar-winning “Million Dollar Baby.” Clint is clearly interested in exploring ways in which American men do — and don’t — fulfill their responsibilities as fathers and father figures; many of his recent films (think of the devastating “Mystic River”) are concerned with the relationships between fathers and children.

But though Walt is close to Thao, he has failed as a father to his own sons. The most heartbreaking scene in the film, I think, comes after Kowalski realizes just how sick he is. He calls up one of his grown boys to chat; the inability of either man to communicate, and the eagerness of the son to get off the phone is all-too-familiar to legions of American men. (One starts to think of the lyrics to Harry Chapin’s famous Cat’s in the Cradle.) Men like Kowalski, decorated war veterans who worked desperately hard to build a prosperous life for their families, are celebrated time and again in popular culture. Too often, these celebrations of the Greatest Generation ignore the huge culturally-imposed limitations that these men had, limitations that made courage easy and intimacy all but impossible. Eastwood brilliantly and unsentimentally exposes the tragedy of those limitations. He is close to Thao and his family, but remains an irritable and exasperating cipher to his family until the end of his life.

And of course, there’s no getting around the end of the film. The set-up, of course, is classic. After Thao’s sister is raped and beaten by members of a Hmong street gang (who have also harmed Thao), Kowalski prepares his vengeance. We see him cleaning his gun; we see him carefully getting fitted for a new suit and asking his friend the barber to give him an unprecedented hot shave. The expectation that the audience has is that Walt is getting ready to die in a blaze of glory, taking out as many of the gang as possible, perhaps while showing some of the gunplay skills we associate with Eastwood characters. But when the denouement comes, Walt Kowalski meets his end armed only with a cigarette lighter, goading the gangsters into killing an unarmed man in front of witnesses. The gangsters are all arrested; Thao and his family are safe. And Eastwood has sent a powerful message about love, redemption, and sacrifice.

The only character to die in “Gran Torino” is Kowalski, and he dies without a weapon in his hand. This is not the Eastwood we grew up with, this is not the archetype we’ve been raised on. But as Kowaski makes clear in his horrible memories of the Korean conflict, and as Eastwood has made clear in his recent films (”Flags of our Fathers”, “Letters from Iwo Jima”) there is nothing worth celebrating about war. Some men die in war. And those who don’t die awful deaths are twisted and battered by their memories, so deformed in spirit that their relationships suffer for the rest of their lives. Not everyone finds the kind of redemption that Walt Kowalski does, and even his redemption is in some way incomplete. He never is restored to a healthy relationship with his sons, and he remains an inscrutable puzzle to them even after his death. Our rules about manhood do great damage, and that damage is passed on. No one knows this better, it seems, than a man who has become internationally famous playing hyper-masculine parts on screen. How sweet and proper it is that as his career draws to a close, Clint Eastwood has chosen to spend these years making film after film which, each in its own way, exposes the tragedy of violence, of war, and of the American masculine archetype.

I only formally met Clint once, in the summer of 1986. He was the new mayor of Carmel; I was working a summer job for our town’s public works department. I wanted to joke with him about our previous encounter on the roadway, but thought better of it. He gave me a warm smile, told me I was “doing fine”, and moved on. He turned out to be a much better mayor than many of us expected (my mother and I supported his opponent, a friend of ours). He has also turned out to be a much better actor and director than any of us could have imagined a few decades ago. And I am so pleased and moved that here, at the end of his onscreen career, Clint Eastwood has chosen to do the right thing: beautifully, elegiacally, he offers us in “Gran Torino” a reflection on the strengths and failures of American manhood. It is a better film than many understand.