Outside the Walls: Men’s Quest in the Films of Clint Eastwood

Dave Kehr has written of Clint Eastwood that he “spent the first half of his career creating an image and the second half of his career dismantling it.” In his early films—and on a more conscious level in his later ones as well—Eastwood embodies the outlaw vigilante loner, a man’s man who patrols the margins of civilization to protect it from threat. Because he is not fully at home inside the city walls, he relates awkwardly and with ambivalence to women—to him they are that civilized world—yet it is only his devotion to them that motivates and gives meaning to his work on the borders. Outlined so starkly, it is clear that the Eastwood persona falls squarely within the lineage of the film Western, epitomized by John Ford and worthily carried on by Eastwood’s mentor Don Siegel (and a few others). The myth of manhood agonizingly explored in all Eastwood’s films far predates the Western movie, however. It can be seen in such Arthurian characters as Sir Lancelot, and has roots in the Indo-European cultural vision of men standing on guard at the periphery of a woman-centered society eternally threatened by male predators from other groups as much as by wild animals, weather, and the other catastrophic forces of nature. Men are the protectors of society, in this myth, but—like Moses on the hills overlooking Israel—never quite part of it.

Charged to sustain the boundaries between inside and outside, to distinguish what is good from what is evil for one’s family, men must protect against threats even at the cost of violating the very rules they, or their fathers, instituted in the past. Moreover, their violence towards predatory outsiders tends to spill over onto the beloved women and children inside the stockade. The “wolves” without and the hunters manning the barricades of civilization are hard to keep separate, and more and more as Eastwood’s career progresses they merge. Some of the most fascinating characters in his late films are damaged men living beyond the line. Despite the ambiguity and confusion, however, the fundamental value remains: a real man is society’s only protection and this ideal must be upheld at all costs. Such a heroic vision flies in the face of feminism and liberal values; nevertheless, the skill and depth of Eastwood’s exploration—and enactment—of the myth has earned it serious consideration. His passionate and sustained exploration of this vision has made Clint Eastwood a film artist of the first rank.

“Mystic River,” like “Unforgiven” a few years ago, pulls Eastwood’s male imago asunder to explore its parts in extremis. More of a deconstruction than a dismantlement, these films return in spite of themselves to the central conviction of Eastwood’s oeuvre, a stark truth that neither he nor his characters want to acknowledge but that they must, if they are to hold onto their honor as men: violence motivated by love of woman and child is the only antidote to violence directed against them. Like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in Ford’s “The Searchers” (even, in some ways, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) the Eastwood man must go out and down, live away from society and its institutions in order to protect them. In the process he is in mortal danger of losing his humanity and becoming a hermit or an outcaste.

John Ford, unlike Clint Eastwood, never quite lost faith in our institutions (Cheyenne Autumn perhaps excepted): the army, schools, government, and the church being the recipients of his deepest loyalty. Eastwood’s recent films more and more question these institutions (perhaps only music and filmmaking are excepted) and find them powerless to protect our loved ones from the brutality lurking outside. In “Mystic River,” his scorn for the Catholic church in the aftermath of the priest sexual abuse scandal is withering. This is perhaps where the film’s archetypal questioning goes farthest, as Eastwood searches the church’s depths for the strength to resist evil and finds only werewolves in the cellar and satanic fathers preying on the young. Mystic River plunges us without preparation into a world where our most sacred protectors have become indistinguishable from the ravening wolves. Two pedophiles—a policeman and a priest or men clothed as such—abduct an eleven-year-old boy whom they sexually abuse until he escapes four days later. We are presented with a hopeless choice: either the police and church are corrupt or they are powerless. The church fares worse in this film, as its rites are shown to be a travesty and only the demonic powers at its dark margins—werewolves, Dracula, and Satan—still have the force to command respect. (In Unforgiven it is the law that Eastwood zeroes in upon, in the smiling but corrupt sheriff Little Billy.)

The tenuous connection between the outsider male and the Woman—this is myth as much as the actual women that embody Her—is expressed via physical and emotional distance, loss, and especially death. In “The Outlaw Josie Wales” (and similarly in “Unforgiven”), an aging gunfighter converses with his dead wife, drawing strength from his relationship with the lost woman to do the killing necessary to avenge her and protect other women from her killers. The theme repeats a third time in “Mystic River” when Jimmy talks to his murdered daughter Katie, and with equally violent results. The telephone call from a mysterious unknown woman in “Play Misty for Me” is repeated in the mute calls Sean receives from his estranged wife in “Mystic River.” Reticence, of course, is an essential quality of the outsider cowboy hero in movies like “The Searchers,” “Shane,” and so many more, but Eastwood explores the theme more deeply, showing how the male disconnect affects women and children too. The teenaged boy killer in “Mystic River” is an elective mute, as functionally is Sean’s wife, and the murder case breaks open only when boy and wife finally speak.

Eastwood focuses intently—even obsessively—in all his later films on the psychological development of the lone male lover of a world he can never quite inhabit. His artistic identity on both sides of the camera (or microphone) is at stake in such self-reflexive films as “Play Misty for Me,” “Bird,” “White Hunter Black Heart,” and “Bridges of Madison County.” In the last—one of his greatest achievements—Eastwood’s filmmaker personality is reflected in the photographer Robert Kincaid. Here we are allowed to understand that the artist, at least Clint Eastwood’s incarnation of the artist, is himself a loner outlaw working toward consciousness of his role on the borderlands of society. Kincaid takes pictures of far-off places and cultures for National Geographic magazine but has never connected with himself deeply enough to create real art. The aim of the film is to find its way, and Kincaid’s, to the miracle of authentic artistic expression. It succeeds on both counts.

The tension that makes art, and that for Clint Eastwood makes a man a man, lies in the willingness to be wholly open to love of woman and child while acknowledging that one can never quite belong to their world. As Robert Kincaid falls in love with Francesca, an Italian war bride and now a lonely farmer’s wife in the heartland of Iowa, he loses his distance and privileged status as a simple outsider. Like Tristan and Isolde, Robert and Francesca become one in spirit and can never again be separated. Also like Tristan and Isolde, however, the two must separate and can never be together again physically until death. Francesca remains with her husband and children while Kincaid goes back to his life on the periphery. There is a difference, though: he is an artist now and can do work worthy of being published as art and not mere reporting. (He had formerly offered his photographs to six publishers in vain.) As Yeats’ Crazy Jane said, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” Standing in the rain, his ravaged face expressing the naked pain of a man bereft, Eastwood the actor gives Eastwood the director an unforgettable image of wholeness rent, the inward scream of loss that is also a finding of the self.

In “Mystic River” the archetypal surround of the Eastwood mythos is brought nearer to the story and characters’ personalities than before. The title of the film (besides its designation of the Boston river defining the neighborhood where the action is set) suggests the mystery of Nature that lies just beyond the bounds of civilization, and that increasingly encroaches on a shallow and fragile culture. Religion and the law are corrupt and weak in this vision, possessing little archetypal juice. Dave, the boy abducted 23 years ago, is possessed by fantasies of being himself a werewolf (literally a “man-wolf”) because he was infected by the priest and fake cop who sexually abused him in the cellar where he was held for four days. (The allusion to traditional rites of initiation of young men via homosexual impregnation by adult males gives the rape a particular horror—perhaps the horror is somewhat different for gays and straights— and suggests why Dave’s friends drop him after he escapes from his ordeal.)

The scene of the abduction recurs several times in the film, each time at a crucial moment. Eastwood’s montage shows us the child Dave, as imagined through the eyes of the adult Jimmy and Sean, being driven away by his kidnappers, peering back terrified at them through the rear window of the car. Suddenly our point of view shifts to the perspective of the boy being taken, and we look toward grown up Jimmy and Sean standing on the street, their figures receding as the car drives forward. Past and present are irretrievably linked in the juxtaposition of images. Later, at the film’s penultimate moment, we find Jimmy and Sean again in the same spot. This time, Jimmy walks away down the street, following the course of the auto that carried Dave away so many years ago. It is clear that Jimmy, too, has been bitten by the werewolf and must leave this world.

Like The Brothers Karamazov, the men of “Mystic River” divide a more complete male personality among themselves. Only one of the three boys was abducted but all three have been infected by the bite of the vampire/werewolf. Dave, the most wounded, has a labile sense of reality and seeks solace in lies and fantasies, imagining the “beauty” of losing his soul and living on the margins of reality like a vampire. His face transforms into a vulpine mask (as in a horror movie from the 30s) as he dissociates, terrifying his wife whose sense of security we sense has been eroded by years of living with this centerless man. Jimmy has joined his friends the Savage brothers as an outlaw, returning to society only from love of his daughter. Her murder sends him back beyond the fringe. Sean, the cop, is the only one of the three to survive as a fully human being at the film’s end, and does so only because he is able at last to speak to his estranged wife. Even so, he is irretrievably wounded by the downfall of his friends.

Mythical resonances fill the movie. When Sean’s wife calls him periodically, only to remain mute as he waits for her to speak, we are reminded of Percival at the Grail Castle, unable to ask the right question. With Sean, we finally realize that it is he who must speak. Like a fairy tale, “Mystic River” ends in a sort of marriage, as Sean rejoins his wife and baby daughter, who figuratively replaces Jimmy’s murdered Katie.

Eastwood punctuates all his later films with moments of release, as the camera pans away from the human story and moves into nature, across water or into the sky. Nowhere is Clint Eastwood’s seriousness as a film artist more evident than at these moments when, as in a Greek tragedy, we are given to contemplate the calm implacability of nature, our emotions purged by the pity and fear of the unfolding cinema from which we take this interlude. It is as if nature has absorbed the drama along with our minds, and now gives it back to us relieved of suffering, a sense of peace beyond understanding, what is called “shanta-rasa,” the “sap or essence of peace,” in Sanskrit poetics.

“Mystic River” is a self-conscious tragedy, as the doomed males play out their fate, taking their wives and daughters into the dark land with them. Jimmy’s daughter is killed by the son of a man Jimmy killed years ago because the man kept Jimmy from comforting his beloved wife who died of cancer as he sat in prison. Jimmy’s second wife becomes a Lady Macbeth at the film’s end, fantasizing that Jimmy has four hearts and claiming that he can do no wrong if he acts from love of his family—even if he has killed an innocent man in their name. She finally imagines him becoming “king of this town,” unconsciously alluding to the ambiguity of the King who embodies society although as chief warrior he must lead his army outside its walls.

In contrast to tragedies like “Mystic River” and “A Perfect World,” “Madison County” belongs with Eastwood’s comedies, though it has a sharper edge than most tragedies. His comic sense has evolved over the years toward the Shakespearian as, seemingly beyond embarrassment, he flays the social skin and lays bare the heart within. There is a sweetness in the Eastwood comic film persona—even when playing such goofy characters as Bronco Billy and the gorilla wrestler in Any Which Way but Loose—as virile, even brutish males confess vulnerability and love. In “Madison County” even Francesca’s unfeeling husband Richard—he turns on the truck radio to drown out her sobs—is given his moment of nobility in a deathbed scene when he tells her “I know you had your dreams. I’m sorry I was not able to give them to you. I just want you to know that I have always loved you deeply.” The happy ending in “Bridges of Madison County” is given to Francesca’s children, who drink a toast to her and her lost love the night before they carry out her last wish and scatter her ashes to join Robert Kincaid’s beside the covered bridge where their love began.

John Beebe’s insight that films—especially films of value—play out the archetypes of the director’s psyche through their characters is especially relevant to Clint Eastwood’s work. The central archetype with which he is concerned is, as I have argued, that of the warrior male. The men’s movement a few years ago distinguished man as warrior from the lover, magician, and king. As Eastwood’s vision grows, the lover increasingly comes to the forefront. The magician appears in the figure of the artist, with whom Clint Eastwood is personally most identified. Kingship is occasionally alluded to, as when Sean’s wife recognizes it in him (it is also perversely suggested in “Unforgiven”’s monarchist killer English Bob), but is rare in Eastwood as in our culture generally.

In “Mystic River,” as in “A Perfect World,” “Absolute Power,” and other films, parent-child, and especially father-daughter relationships are brought into the foreground. We begin to see the beginning of a real father-son (and father-daughter) dynamic where the younger person is capable of defending herself and not wholly dependent on a man. Nevertheless, even as we sense the late-middle-aged Clint Eastwood struggle toward a recognition of women as potential warriors and protectors in their own right, his loyalty to the patriarchy remains paramount. Here, too, he is faithful to his great predecessor John Ford. Such a vision may be limited and anachronistic but in Eastwood’s hands it has shown itself far richer, more subtle, and more capable of self-transformation than anyone could have projected. In saving himself, Eastwood the actor and director has given hope to the men among us.