OLD MAN EASTWOOD:
WHY BLOOD WORK MATTERS

By Zach Campbell

Clint Eastwood is still trying to exorcise his ghosts.  His later films all seem to be organized around a basic principle, chiefly, that the drama unfolding in the plot is in fact a way for Eastwood to understand his own persona (its fame, its transformation, its death), to express his feelings on the subject to the audience, and to invite the audience to contemplate the same questions he does.  Why might this matter?   Because mortality seems as good as any subject, and introspection as valid as any quality to an art work.

Reading Eastwood this way certainly postulates a measure of detachment from the movie: one has to know and understand the Eastwood persona to some degree to be able to follow this line of thinking.  But what this sacrifices in universality it more than makes up for in insight, for films that may appear to be competent (or even not-so-competent) genre exercises attain depth and texture.  In short, the necessary change in perspective allows the viewer to see the Eastwood square as an Eastwood cube.

His work opposes the statement-tradition of Arthur Miller and countless award-winning Hollywood directors.  (In fairness, Eastwood himself won an Oscar or two for Unforgiven.) His own Common Man stories never swell into a climactic self-summary, and avoid celebratory passages.  Eastwood’s affection for his characters manifests itself in the openness he provides them – the Lady Chablis showboating in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, for example, or the broad range Jeff Daniels gets in Blood Work.  He’s situated himself comfortably into a good relationship with the bit player: his movies don’t use supporting actors in the same way ‘30s/40s movies do, but they are equally attentive to the economic construction of nuance and individuality among these sideliners.  They provide a feeling of unpredictability because they do not present themselves as hard-wired minutiae, programmed to give momentary comic relief or a few scenery-chewing Oscar pleas (as so much supporting acting has mutated into these days).  One never knows for sure whether most Eastwood bit players are going to fade out of sight, remain in the background, or foreground themselves prominently.

The broad generosity Eastwood extends to his actors/characters also works out in terms of the projects he chooses.  He doesn’t write his own screenplays, but there are distinct patterns that emerge in his work.  This nominally conservative filmmaker is churning out some of the most progressive mainstream cinema right now – he’s highlighted the plight of the black male on death row, he’s sympathized with the adulterous wife, he’s embraced the decadent Southern Gothic underground.  His films display a wide American cross-section, revealing racial minority characters who are neither typecast tokens nor liberal-minded “meaningful” signifiers.  In Blood Work alone we see Korean shopkeepers, a black policewoman, and Mexicans of various social standing and occupation.  In Space Cowboys, the familiar space launch countdown is done by a woman’s voice rather than a man’s: I can’t recall this ever happening in a mainstream American movie.  Similarly, Eastwood is one of the few filmmakers who makes films that cast a blind eye to lucrative demographic concerns: very many of his films lack hot young actors, and many of them explore middle-age (and older) relationships with respect, charm, and sensitivity.  These are small, often uncomplicated gestures that have no overt political significance, except that they indicate a more accurate depiction of American life and American communities than the vast majority of mainstream films. 

And because these are not isolated, stilted insertions, Eastwood’s fluid touch keeps them from mere signification – they interact, sometimes without any sort of overriding (over-simplifying) social opinion.  In Blood Work, Jeff Daniels’ complacent rich white do-nothing, Buddy Noone, talks of attraction between white authority figure Terry McCaleb (Eastwood) and his client/lover, a working-class Latina named Graciela (Wanda De Jesus).  (How much does McCaleb himself really resemble Buddy, and how much does ethnic awareness come into his feelings for her?)  A police officer of Mexican ancestry becomes a comic explosion near the end of the film, warning McCaleb, “Just because you’ve got a Mexican heart doesn’t mean you’re one of us!”  Eastwood refuses to shy away from racial and ethnic divisions and diversity in his work – but he apparently feels no pressure to sculpt any of this into a persuasive essay about race relations, the sort of thing that dries up three-dimensional feeling and summons award-night waterworks.  This is what makes the “socio-observational” aspect of Eastwood’s cinema so vital an interpretation of America.

Throughout almost all his work, Eastwood the actor constantly appears as a stand-in for white America, not because he attempts to make an explicit statement about race, but because his technique involves the recognition of cultural or ethnic groupings.  He alternates between established institutions (think law enforcement, think the Union) and anti-establishment groupings (think artist, think the Confederacy).  In many late instances, he’s become a dinosaur in an institution (FBI, N ASA, a newspaper) where he must fight against the dominant trends of his own “team” in order to set things “right.”  Eastwood struggles against more than his junk fiction villains.  When he isn’t rubbing his institutional peers the wrong way, he’s acted as a free-spirited photographer (The Bridges of Madison County), a military superman (Heartbreak Ridge), a thief trapped in political power plays (Absolute Power), and many times over either a cop or a laconic frontier warrior.  So often he’s either a drifter, homeless and rootless (Madison County, most of his Westerns), or he’s static within a changing world, often prompted to initiate change or change himself by some immutable, often vague sense of justice drawn out from his character’s core (True Crime, Blood Work).

The opening sequence in Blood Work introduces a vaguely symbiotic relationship between Lawman and Criminal, that is, celebrity detective Terry McCaleb and the elusive serial killer who has begun to leave him personalized messages through his crimes.  (The silly codes through which the killer’s identity is eventually revealed – “no one” – are lame mystery novel clichés that go nowhere with their improbability.  I can only wonder what Eastwood the director might do with less conventional material – or does his artistry really spring from precisely its often “mediocre” contexts?)    After McCaleb leaves the crime scene – a house with various dead bodies – he comes into a barrage of reporters, photo flashes, a cacophony of questions for tomorrow’s article.  A cut to two of McCaleb’s colleagues has one of them remarking, “He loves it.”  The shots of Eastwood negotiating his way through the press crowd could almost be taken from Entertainment Tonight footage of a movie premier, as laconic Eastwood seems simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable amidst the crowd.

When McCaleb spots, at the edge of the crowd, feet wearing the same shoes that the killer is believed to have worn, he begins to chase the hooded figure – who flees.  The chase scene is an uncommonly long sequence when one considers how exposition-light the preceding few minutes have been.  It becomes a vaguely monotonous, solitary exercise – Old Man Eastwood chasing the suspect down sidewalks and alleyways, until finally, he stalls with a heart attack (i.e., he can no longer “deliver” – as a celebrity cop in the film’s plot, but it’s also clearly an intuitive comment on Eastwood’s own action star status).  Working with the source material of two connected, conflicting sides, Eastwood generates this minimalist chase scene that essentially ignores plot, character, even overt style.  The tonal immediacy and intensity of this “unjustified” scene then commandeers a new sort of significance when seen in comparison to the Eastwood persona: it achieves a purity of vision, paring down everything (for a few long moments) into that aforementioned conflict, Lawman versus Criminal.

The law, in a moral sense, has always been a concern for Eastwood.  On whatever side his characters may be, certain questions trouble him.  Some may criticize Eastwood (as both actor and director) for refusing to change, to open up, to play “complex” (?) characters – but it’s this precise, conservative, aging refusal that I find interesting in Eastwood’s work.  It allows us to question our own affinity (cultural and personal) for the uncompromising hero – why else do we (Americans and others) admire the brave integrity, the physicality, of stars like Dana Andrews (of yesterday) and Mel Gibson (of today)?  When Eastwood spots a suspicious car in Blood Work, he pulls out a shotgun and commences a destructive, quick, awkward attempt to stop the driver.  Eastwood’s character risks his life, and the car easily escapes, and both he and the viewer are, presumably, left with an uncomfortable feeling.  Clearly a message is conveyed through a scene like this: more than simply obeying the genre convention of a “close encounter” with the enemy (which it also does), Eastwood’s attempts vaguely connote clumsiness and inefficiency. 

In David Fincher’s Se7en, when Brad Pitt chases the killer through the rainy rooftops and streets, art direction and color tones prevail: the scene is meant to visually enrapture the viewer, and the shadowy form of the killer in the gray rainy haze remains vague, in total control and calmness.  Plot convention allows Pitt’s character to live even when the serial killer has him at gunpoint.  In Blood Work, too, Eastwood comes close to the killer well before he knows much about him, and plot convention ensures that he lives – the killer doesn’t actually run over Eastwood, who remains quick enough to roll out of the way of a car.  (This is an example where conventional story structure and Eastwoodian concerns are clearly at odds – if Eastwood were an “art filmmaker” in the avant-garde sense, he might have abruptly killed off his own character, because the concept underlying the story is that the Lawman-Hero-Star is dying.)  The difference is that of emotional tone: Fincher chose to stylize his surroundings and emphasized shallow, distant feelings (which is not to say that these feelings are ineffective or spurious, necessarily: I’d rather not get into whether or not Se7en is a “good” film, though).  Eastwood, shooting in clear daylight and with little focus on the surroundings (a vaguely rundown, ethnic part of town), is able to get a deeper emotional focus on his characters, particularly Eastwood’s face after the killer’s getaway.  For a moment, he looks surprised and disappointed, as if he should have captured his man, and he realizes that he was physically unable to live up to t his ideal, the ideal of the lawman (diegetic) and the action star (meta-diegetic, if you will).  I sense a direct connection between this sort of job failure with another failure, in True Crime, the failure of parenting in which Eastwood inadvertently causes his daughter to have a bicycle accident. 

These motifs come up too often in Eastwood’s work to be accidental, and are too revealing and rare as gestures to be conventional.

My purpose isn’t to suggest that Eastwood’s films should immediately become riveting to those who find him boring, or that his genre stories are subversive in a narrative (or even political) sense.  My aim is to propose an alternative way of looking at Eastwood, a way that I find more generous and revealing and fascinating.  It is the nuances of a film like Blood Work and its predecessors that end up captivating and teaching me, a series of auteur tendencies that exist outside the personal vacuum of a hailed artist, and instead in the amorphous rapport between a culturally-savvy viewer and the now contemplative old man who continually maps out this rapport

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