Clint Eastwood is an American actor and director, most identifiable in his roles as the lone gunslinger and avenging angel in his western movies. Clint Eastwood embodied the strong yet silent masculine ideal in these western films which featured him alone in the wasteland, surrounded by corrupt individuals, and with nothing between them other than the speed and accuracy with which he could draw his gun. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1984), and Unforgiven (1992) one can chart the evolution of the masculine ideal with which Clint Eastwood embodied his roles and the development of his persona over time in the genre of Western films.
As Richard Slotkin writes, the Western myth portrays "the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation [from 'civilization'], temporary regression to a more primitive or 'natural' state, and regeneration through violence.'" In the Western myth, ritualized violence is purgative because it cleanses society of the "Other" in eliminating the outlaw or "savage" (654). As we see in the three films A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992), we follow the evolution of the stereotype of the lone gunslinger in the embodiment of Clint Eastwood as he goes into the midst of a savage world, cleansing it of outlaws who terrorize and oppress the innocent.
In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood plays the “Man With No Name”, or Joe as he is sometimes called, which is another name of anonymity. This movie was a western remake of the Kurosawa movie Yojimbo (1961), a samurai who plays two outlaw factions against each other in the attempt to get them to destroy each other, and free an oppressed town from their presence. According to www.clinteastwood.net, “A Fistful of Dollars marked a change in the way western heroes were portrayed” (A Fistful of Dollars page). The stereotypical honest and upright, the “Gary Cooper sheriff type who would never draw first” was replaced by an anonymous character embodied by Clint Eastwood as the “Man With No Name”, with “dubious morals, who emerges as the hero more by comparison with the other characters than by his own merits” (www.clinteastwood.net). According to www.clinteastwood.net, “this change of attitude gave the western a new lease of life in the changing social climate of the sixties” (A Fistful of Dollars page). In the era of chaotic and turbulent societal change of the 1960’s, Clint Eastwood in his role as the “Man With No Name”, becomes one of the first anti-heroes, who embodies “personal power, flint-like resolution, resourcefulness, uncanny endurance, and above all, heroism”, but only a hero because he is less evil than the one’s that are doomed to suffer his punishment. Clint Eastwood in his role of the “Man With No Name”, embodies an American character that had yet to suffer its Vietnam, while still trying to reconcile the horrors of a previous war, in a land that no longer had any clear demarcation between right and wrong, good or evil, only what one could accomplish in the pursuit of one’s goals.
In Pale Rider (1985), Clint Eastwood plays another lone gunslinger as avenging angel, but in this instance Eastwood is reinvented as an honest righter of wrongs, and an avatar for good and justice in his character aptly named the Preacher. In this movie, Clint Eastwood is reinvented from the nameless and cunning self-interested manipulator, to the honest hero who delivers a terrified people suffering under the power and whims of evil men, after one of the oppressed prays to God for a savior.
In Pale Rider (1985) Clint Eastwood evolves not only his stereotypical character, and his role as actor and movie star, but evolves himself into the role of director as well. Clint Eastwood, now a successful and accomplished veteran performer from decades in film, “chose the theme for the film and then commissioned a screenplay” for the story that Mr. Eastwood was compelled to tell (www.clinteastwood.net). In the early nineteen eighties, Clint Eastwood had already become a well known actor with a highly recognizable name, becoming the “established star” that guarantees “a certain return on the high-venture capital invested in a film” (Belton 89). The tale that Mr. Eastwood wanted to tell was one of a moral savior of a fearful people, exploited by the rich and powerful tyrant who ruled with brutality, a theme originating in the stories of religion. In the nineteen eighties as well, America had suffered the war in Vietnam and was still trying to heal from this lingering wound, trying now to define a new sense of morality while fighting a cold war with an enemy that was capable of ending the world in a nuclear war.
In Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood is now an old widowed farmer named William Munny, who having promised his dead wife that he had retired from violence, and having no great talent at being a farmer, returns the life of a paid gunslinger when prostitutes put a bounty on some cowboys who abused one of them, and they could not receive any satisfactory closure from the legal authorities. William Munny has no choice but to return to a life of violence when his farm suffers from misfortune, and his children’s financial future is now at risk.
Unforgiven (1992) was produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, as well as featuring him in its starring role. The movie features several other accomplished actors: Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, and Morgan Freeman, each being veterans of decades of Film, and recognizable for their own starring roles in popular films. The movie featured the typical tale of the hero who is searching for “personal redemption in a modern-day world corrupted by selfishness and greed”, a tale told endlessly in film, but in Unforgiven (1992) this timeless theme had been refined to resonate with a modern audience by experienced and professional storytellers (Belton 246). Because of these refinements Unforgiven (1992) won multiple Oscars at the 1993 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Clint Eastwood, and a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for him as well (http://www.imdb.com). Unforgiven (1992) was a polished project created by Clint Eastwood’s decades of experience in film, utilizing familiar faces of other successful A-list actors, telling a refined tale to a modern audience using the most sophisticated techniques available to visual storytellers at the time, and using the western genre of film which at the time had been abandoned as tired and outdated.
By the time of Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood had become a familiar face to the American audience, not only for his roles in film, but from his introduction on “the TV series "Rawhide" (1959-1965), where he was a supporting cast member for six years” (www.imdb.com). Clint Eastwood had experience in multiple roles, both in and out of the genre of the western, becoming familiar with its strengths as well as the limits of this masculine ideal with which Mr. Eastwood perpetuated throughout his movie career. This masculine ideal with which Mr. Eastwood perpetuated began in the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone who directed Eastwood as the strong yet silent type of protagonist who rides into town to pursue his own self-interests while taking advantage of his skill and cunning at outwitting predators who had made themselves tyrants over a fearful people. This role of the “Man With No Name” made Clint Eastwood a recognizable star overnight but also perpetrated a false and dangerous masculine ideal of a lone thug who manipulates the situation for his own good, and despite whatever lasting good or harm his actions cause, he rides off into the sunset to presumably continue the same cycle of violence upon others, alone and unattached to anyone or anything.
It was Unforgiven (1992) that allowed Clint Eastwood his opportunity to dispel this harmful perpetuation of the masculine ideal of the anti-social anti-hero who is only out for his own gain that was becoming a mainstay of our entertainment culture. Clint Eastwood, in this point in his career, had evolved not only in his roles but in his capacity to develop and portray both our American mythology and his own mythology as well. In regards to Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood states, the movie “gave me a chance to sum up what I think violence does to the human soul” (Jardine par. 9). Mr. Eastwood was now an accomplished and experienced actor and director who could now tell his own stories as he saw fit to tell them. “Instead of glorifying masculine violence, Unforgiven (1992) exposes it as a costly masculine endeavor” (Jardine par. 8). Unforgiven (1992) according to Jardine “offers a "hero" alien to American masculine mythology: a celibate, broken-down widower who can no longer mount a horse or shoot straight, a man who expresses genuine remorse over his violent past, a father of two who prays over his deceased wife” (par.8). Unforgiven (1992), according to Jardine, “stands as a culmination of Eastwood's career-long interrogation of American culture, providing an accurate historical expression of women's lives and raising questions about the disturbingly oppositional construction of gender” (par. 9). Up until this point in his career, Clint Eastwood’s characters were lone killers unattached to anyone, and women were just another background character that served to be used and manipulated like all the others.
Clint Eastwood, in his three roles in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992) shows not only an evolution in his characters but in his own personal evolution from character actor to accomplished director and producer of film as well. Clint Eastwood, having gained his start as a supporting character on the television screen of the late 1950’s, had now become in the early 1990’s a major player in the development of our entertainment culture, standing side by side with other accomplished actors in their own right, and featuring himself in the starring role as a criticism of the type of character that had first brought him to the attention of America. Clint Eastwood reflects through his characters in these three films, not only the times that these movies were made in: the turbulence of the sixties, the greed of the nineteen eighties, and the uncertainty of the 1990’s but also his personal evolution from a barely speaking character actor to a man who is capable of show casing his multiple talents in the realm of film. Clint Eastwood, in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992) shows an evolution in not only his stereotypical character, his personal capacity and abilities in the creation of storytelling, but he also evolved the western genre and the art of film as well.
Works Cited
A Fistful of Dollars. Dir. Sergio Leone. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonté, and Marianne Koch. Constantin Film Produktion. 1964. Film.
Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. 2009. Print.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/awards.
Jardine, Gail. “Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change.” Art Journal 53.3 (1994): pp. 74-75. Web. 10 Dec. 2011.
McDonald, Archie P. Shooting Stars: Heroes and Heroines of Western Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1987. Print
Pale Rider. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, and Carrie Snodgress. Warner Bros. 1985. Film
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: HarperCollins. 1993. Print
Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Morgan Freeman. Warner Bros. 1992. Film.
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