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Jeff DeRiso

RTF 370 – Eastwood

5 May 2011

From Man’s Man to Everyone’s Man:

Control. Filmmakers, by controlling what audiences see and hear and in what sequence,

essentially formulate how we identify with the subjects of a narrative in context of their relation

to their fictional world. Clint Eastwood’s star image was built around the subject of a Man With

No Name (Fistful of Dollars 1964), a character with an impenetrable gaze who is at once

frequently absent from inside the frame but also seemingly embedded in the apparatus of the

narrative itself (Bingham 176). In Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy (1964-1966), Eastwood’s

persona is an embodiment of the desire and ego of the male spectator “whereby a basically

incoherent existence is rendered coherent by an idealized reflection that the subject embraces…a

monolith Eastwood would spend much of his later film career distancing himself from and

condescending to” (Bingham 179).

How, why, and to what extent Eastwood has distanced himself from the exploitation of

gaze which projects his image as the embodiment of phallic fantasy will be the topic of this

study. Through taking control of the perception of his own image in a way few stars in cinema

are able to, Eastwood as a director has been able to express a progressively subversive viewpoint

toward conventional masculinity that directs the male gaze inward and attempts to explore how

representation of his own masculine image has affected perceptions of masculinity. Through

analysis of the films Play Misty for Me (1971), Tightrope (1984), Unforgiven (1992), The

Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Million Dollar Baby (2004), this essay will contend that
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these films act not only to subvert their respective genre conventions, but also the conventions of

masculine representation in cinema as a whole. A more appropriate filmmaker/star to explore

this territory could not be found; Eastwood’s image is close to the embodiment of masculinity in

cinema. Yet at the same time, because of his star power, he is able to exercise complete artistic

control over the representation of his own image, allowing Eastwood the filmmaker to use

Eastwood the image as a tool to repeatedly defy audience expectation.

Eastwood’s first filmmaking endeavor, Play Misty for Me (1971) in which he plays a

slick Jazz DJ, is a film that explores voyeurism, obsession, and fame, and reverses the

phallocentric convention of male agency in cinema which normally relegates female characters

to victims who must be rescued by a male protagonist. In Misty, the male protagonist Dave

Garver is a victim subjected to the voyeurism of an obsessed fan. Sam Girgus calls the

interaction a “dialectic between female aggression and Eastwood's ‘male hysteria’” (218). It is

the actions of this fan, Evelyn, that drive the story forward and lead to its conclusion. Instead of

the viewer subjecting others to his look, Dave is the object that is being looked at and projected

with the fantasies of the voyeur. Play Misty for Me is Eastwood’s first attempt at self-reflexivity

and though conventional in plot and at times predictable, it opens issues and themes that will be

revisited throughout the middle part of Eastwood’s career.

The film makes a clear delineation between obsession and love which is embodied by

the two female characters. Evelyn, who manipulates situations to attempt to fulfill her unrealistic

expectations, represents obsession. Tobie, Dave’s former lover who left him because she felt her

own jealousy of Dave’s groupies getting the best of her, represents a pure love. The fact that

Tobie, rather than subject Dave to her own feelings of attachment and jealousy, instead let him

go shows her self-esteem and connects her to the feminist viewpoint. Dave seems to care for
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Tobie especially for this reason, though he fails to understand how his actions of exploiting his

own fame for sexual pleasure are contradictory to the love that someone like Tobie offers, until

he meets Evelyn. It should be noted that in their first encounter, Dave exhibits a somewhat

conventional masculinity by first using a game as an excuse to engage Evelyn in conversation,

and then smoothly agreeing to sex upon her request (even after she reveals that she planned the

meeting at the bar). Evelyn continues to exploit Dave’s character weakness by reinforcing (and

sometimes even emulating) his machismo and by using sex to try to force him into intimacy with

her. Dave’s line to Evelyn, “You don’t listen, do you?” is a commentary on her voyeurism in

that she seeks only to carry out her desires through him, not actually understand or care for him.

Evelyn consistently uses guilt to maintain closeness with Dave and it is her unabashed jealousy

for Tobie’s mature connection with Dave that leads to her downfall. In the end, Dave does

rescue Tobie from the murderous rage of Evelyn, but it comes in the form of taking

responsibility for the course of events influenced by his early decision to adhere to conventional

masculinity and thereby consummate Evelyn’s obsession.

This image of a male learning to take responsibility for his decisions in Play Misty comes

in stark contrast to the Clint Eastwood character we see in Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968),

an abrasively unrefined womanizer who applies his own form of monolithic justice and

frequently uses sex and trickery to gain information and manipulate his surroundings. He truly

embodies the phallic agency in classic male cinema; even the name of the film implies that

because he is the sheriff of this bluff, it somehow belongs under his ownership. Coogan pales in

comparison however to the masculine power of Harry Callahan in Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971),

released a month after Play Misty for Me. Harry is himself a violent and lustful voyeur rebuilt in

the image of the monolithic Man with No Name, and placed in a narrative space in which he and
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only he can wield the phallus (.44 Magnum) of justice to replace the “broken” socialized system

with cleansing violence. The film is considered in most critical circles to be an ideologically

reactionary response to the “permissive philosophy” of 1960s counterculture, but much more

damning is its use of the anti-establishment hero to reaffirm masculine power. Dennis Bingham

points out in Dirty Harry: Authority of One that the crime is shown to the audience before Harry

sees or knows about it, “the absence of the hero indicates a kind of voyeuristic bloodlust in

which the audience is implicated at the same time as it is isolated from it, secure in the

knowledge that Harry will put things right” (184). The violence in the film seems

inconsequential and unreal because Eastwood’s calm style of acting invites the audience to

identify with him, but the course of the narrative disallows us from empathizing with any of the

other characters. This film does not see the voyeurism of its protagonist as a flaw, but rather

takes delight in Harry’s overtly subjective gaze through the “fantasy-mirror” of the male

spectator’s imagined self-image (Bingham 186).

By continuing the successful Dirty Harry formula through the early 1980s, Eastwood

films as a subgenre came to represent the re-assertion of masculinity upon the overly feminized

“system” which Harry battles against. By the time Sudden Impact was released in 1983, he was

becoming critically infamous for constructing a monolithic violent form of masculinity that

seemed to be unknowingly hiding from its own vulnerability by projecting femininity on

everything that opposed it, such as the system of laws protecting rights of the accused. Bingham

concludes “although law is the product of the symbolic order and acts as arbiter in society, it fails

in Dirty Harry to perform its function as regulator and facilitator for the phallus. It has been

‘feminized.’” (190). Though the film was directed by Eastwood, it’s adherence to the similar

formula of the previous three films disconnects it with the artistic spirit of Play Misty for Me,
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which seeks to show causality in the isolation of its protagonist and encourage change over

regression (Knapp 18), rather than celebrating isolation by coding it with masculine imagery.

In this sense, the film Tightrope (1984, Written and Directed by Richard Tuggle) is the

first attempt at unraveling the darkness behind the façade of Clint Eastwood’s “cowboy cop”

character, and foreshadows and inspires the sharp inward turn of Eastwood as a director toward

more personal and honest representation in the early 1990s. By showing the personal life and

manifestations of sexual frustration in the protagonist Wes Block (Eastwood), the film forms in

an ironic doubling between “a cop who pursues the prostitutes’ murderer and… a civilian who is

caught up in the same erotics of violence that leads his antagonist to murder the prostitutes with

whom he has sex” (Cornell 41). By creating an antagonist that is essentially an extension of the

darker side of the protagonist, Tightrope undermines “the stereotypic division between the good

man as protector and the dangerous man from whom women and the weak must be protected”

(41) and also forces the protagonist to face the fear in himself that leads to violence.

Block curiously becomes interested in the rape counselor Beryl Thibodeaux, who

confronts male violence head-on by encouraging women to “defend themselves, because they

cannot expect men, who are themselves implicated in the eroticized violation of women, to

defend them” (Cornell 44). The relationship between Thibodeaux and Block explores the

closely-linked relationship between sexual fantasy and violence. When Thibodeaux openly

confronts the violence within Block by offering to be handcuffed, she gives him a chance to

explore the male need to control women in order to feel safe. Block can only confront the

violence in himself through the honest caring help of Thibodeaux who understands dark, violent

tendencies inherent in all humans. “Anticipating these developments in Play Misty for Me,” says

Girgus “Eastwood in the sequence of films since Tightrope (1984) attempts a reevaluation of
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both cinema and culture in the form of a reconstitution of definitions and representations of

heroic masculinity and subjectivity” (218). The notion that violence is linked to sexual fantasy

and can only be eliminated by being understood, will be the basis behind the film Unforgiven

(1992) which is one of Eastwood’s most powerfully subversive and revisionist films.

Eastwood’s Westerns had become a subgenre of their own by this point in his career.

The three most successful, High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and

Pale Rider (1985) are in their own ways subversive of the genre and progressive in themes of

justice and revenge, but still portray cleansing violence and monolithic male protectors in the

conventional pattern of American realism that the Dollars trilogy had parodied in the late 1960s.

Unforgiven is separate from these previous Westerns in many ways. The one that interests this

study is its depiction of violence as a choice that affects each one of the characters in a different

way, rather than a cathartic way for the imagined self of the protagonist/spectator to exact his

subjective “look of death” upon others. The film opens to a text description of Will Munny

(Eastwood) who we assume will be the protagonist, describing him as: “a man of vicious and

intemperate disposition” who has just lost his wife to smallpox. In the background, we see

Eastwood’s silhouette burying his wife next to his farmhouse. The established environment of

loss and grief coupled with fear and isolation provides rich soil for the seeds of violence to be

planted. Unforgiven takes the connection of violence and sexuality in Tightrope a step further in

the opening sequence that Susan Kelley asserts, “depicts a scene of castration anxiety” in which

a prostitute giggles at the insignificant size of her john’s penis (98). A giggle that “threatens the

foundation of phallocentrism” by refusing to acknowledge difference, and prompts the john to

re-assert his phallic power over her by wielding his knife to visibly mark the castration of the

female (Kelley 98-99).

This fear of castration and threat to the disavowal of phallic power becomes the driving

force of agency in the narrative which ironically leads to a reversion back into the cycle of

violence. The owner of the prostitute, Skinny, re-asserts his “ready-to-fire phallus, one even

more assertive and powerful than a knife… This second threat of castration, even though it

comes in the form of a cocked and loaded gun, is apparently less disturbing than Delilah's giggle,

perhaps because it asserts power rather than questioning it” (100). Skinny also establishes his

power through symbol substitution when he refers to Delilah as his property, and accepts

exchange of horses for the damage to his property. Will Munny, at the beginning of the film is

established as lacking in power in the symbolic order of male identity. He seeks to act out the

killing of the john, under the guise of helping the cut woman achieve justice, but in reality the

killing will only serve to re-assert his dominance of masculine identity, not to repair his

blackened soul.

All the male characters in Unforgiven act in a way that seeks to hide or deny the lack

exposed by the woman in the opening, and by the end, only Will Munny “succeeds” through the

elimination or emasculation of all those lower in the symbolic order. Munny’s feeling of

responsibility for the death of Ned causes him to feel a vulnerability (mirrored by the

vulnerability of The Schofield Kid after making his first kill); this is the very moment that he

reverts back to his fantasy, takes a drink and resolves to exact revenge on Ned’s killer in order to

mask his own feelings of vulnerability. Munny regains his masculine identity by killing

authority figure Li’l Bill and everyone who gets in his way to avenge the death of his friend Ned

and rides out of town with his phallic power re-invigorated, symbolic in his final speech to the

town “I’ll come back and kill every last one of you sons of bitches.” This ending confuses many
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critics into thinking it is a reversion, a film that explores in depth the fears and insecurities linked

to male violence but seems to end by saying “boys will be boys.”

The reversion to the cycle of violence at the climax of the narrative is foreshadowed

throughout the entire film, first by the decision of Li’l Bill not to violently punish the john who

cut the woman because he deems it a matter of damaged property. The women are justified in

their feelings of contempt for being relegated to the worth of animals, but their decision to “rent”

the phallic power of one man to exact the justice they feel they deserve solves nothing in that in

only reaffirms phallocentrism and makes the final conflict inevitable (Kelley 103). The ending,

then, is a reversion for the protagonist but a tragic one for Eastwood that comments on the

limitations of the Western genre itself in dealing with modern issues and themes. Munny’s final

line to Li’l Bill, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it,” is subversive in that it seems to

acknowledge that the events of the narrative have all essentially been a game, or a glorified dick-

measuring contest. Because Munny lacks the ability and insight to forgive himself for the

atrocities he has committed, he instead embraces them as symbols of masculine power.

Westerns will always revert to this cycle of violence because they refer to a world where the

power dynamic is set to favor masculine identity and so male anxiety and vulnerability can

always remain hidden. Unforgiven is a film that constantly refers to its own genre limitation, as

well as the limitation of male dominated representation in cinema, which is why it is appropriate

to be Eastwood’s final Western, a mocking farewell to the Man with No Name.

The success of Unforgiven spawned an enlightenment period for Eastwood, out of which

came the films In the Line of Fire (1993) directed by Wolfgang Peterson but very much crafted

around Eastwood’s star image and newly enlightened persona, A Perfect World (1993) and the

1995 adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County. This adaptation is Eastwood’s most
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obviously gender-subversive work in that it maintains the story of the novel while shifting the

perspective of the story to be seen from the eyes of the female counterpart in the romance, rather

than the male, as expressed in the novel. This shift of perspective is something rare to

Hollywood films but gives the film a uniquely personal and honest feel by focusing on the

thoughts and desires of the woman Francesca in her struggle with the difficult decision which

lies central to the narrative, and to her own life. The film finishes the self-reflexive journey that

was begun amidst the male hysteria of Play Misty For Me, embodied by Eastwood’s progressive

yearning for true and honest self-expression, and succeeds greatly in doing so. Eastwood’s

character, Robert Kincaid is a photographer who falls in love with Francesca (Meryl Streep), the

bored housewife of a farmer in Iowa, who together share a four day romance to which the

inevitable conclusion is an ever-present conflict within each of the main characters.

The story is framed by a “present-day” narrative of the children of Francesca finding a

journal of her written account of the affair upon her death, which Cornell points out “challenges

not only the Hollywood romance genre; it also resists one of the most powerfully psychic

undertows of our stubbornly sexist culture” (81). The film focuses on the internal conflict in

Francesca’s choice, which is ultimately to either run away with Robert who she truly loves or to

stay with the family whom she has already committed herself to loving and thereby sacrifice any

relationship with Robert. Francesca’s ultimate decision to stay with her family despite her

yearning for Robert is not a return to convention (which she has already broken by letting the

affair take place), but an acknowledgement of the theme of the film, embodied by her words to

children “we are the choices we have made”, and thus, as Cornell elaborates “we cannot simply

deny the past and the commitments to which we are bound without conceding to an even deeper

denial of ourselves” (89). The moment Robert finally realizes the reality of Francesca’s decision
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is a defining moment of subversive melodrama for Eastwood as a star and as a filmmaker,

“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” (Collins 66). Hope at the end of the film is found in the

next generation (Francesca’s children, who embody and symbolize Eastwood’s audience)

impacting their lives by letting their choices become an expression of who they are, as is the goal

of art. This imparting of protective wisdom to further generations is the jumping off point for the

study of masculine fatherhood that takes place in Million Dollar Baby (2004).

This film adopts Hemingway’s concept of boxing as a metaphor for life, but juxtaposes it

with a deeply personal story about love and loss which outlines the conflict between protecting

those we love and protecting ourselves from attachment to them. The bond that develops

between Frankie (Eastwood), a boxing trainer and Maggie (Hilary Swank), the grief-stricken but

pure-hearted fighter he reluctantly agrees to train is one that closely resembles the classic father-

daughter dynamic. Each is portrayed as lacking the other, evident in Frankie’s unreturned letters

to his own daughter, and Maggie alluding to her father being dead. The story is told through the

narration of Scrap (Morgan Freeman), who establishes the boxing metaphor and its application to

life embodied in the phrase “Everything in boxing is backwards”. Frankie embodies all the

backwardness of boxing in his being over-protective of others in order to protect himself from

grief. As John Gourlie points out, “once the heart is engaged, it becomes vulnerable to the blows

of existence. In this regard…the Hit Pit captures symbolically the exposure of the heart, and of

body and soul, to the outrageous blows of fortune” (245).

Just as the backwardness of boxing might encourage a fighter to lean into a punch rather

than duck away, the backwardness of conventional fatherhood protectiveness would encourage
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the father to protect himself from grief by over-compensating in his “protection” for others. The

relationship between Frankie and Maggie evolves beyond this point through the middle of the

film, and when he takes his speed bag back from her telling her that her dreams are unrealistic,

he seems to reflect for a moment upon the regret of a love that goes un-pursued in The Bridges

of Madison County, and from the moment he hands the bag back to her he begins to support her

dream by training her to protect herself and become a champion in her heart. Their relationship

develops throughout the training as he tells her that his word is the monolithic truth of boxing,

though she questions it anyway. This is mirrored by Frankie questioning the monolithic truth of

the Church by constantly interrogating the priest every day at mass. Maggie, like Frankie, has

faith in boxing because it’s all she has, but the irony of the training is that it protects neither of

them from the realities of loss. Wanting the dream so badly for his substitute daughter, Frankie

tells her in the championship fight to cheat in response to her cheating opponent, again

emphasizing the backward maleness of boxing. This choice, though made out of love, but in the

backward context of the boxing world, causes tremendous hurt for both characters in the form of

a quadra-paralyzing injury that leaves Maggie permanently bedridden.

Frankie must choose in the end to let Maggie die at her own request or to keep her around

for his own benefit. Here Scrap re-enters the story to affirm the goodness within Frankie.

Because Scrap is an example of someone who “went out swinging” and got injured despite the

“better” judgment of Frankie, his understanding and forgiveness of Frankie’s love for Maggie in

this final moment is what brings redemption to Frankie, and to the film. Gourlie calls this ending

“one that encompasses the illumination of the human heart in the face of all the vulnerabilities

and adversities that it is subject to” (249). Instead of masking vulnerability behind a front of

violence or protection, Eastwood’s vulnerability is finally open and on display when he finally
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chooses to end Maggie’s life, and to continue his in a new vein (presumably one that honors her

memory).

The Eastwood who has tears in his eyes as he unplugs his loving fighter’s life support is a

man completely evolved from the squinty-eyed man of few words who disposed of people at will

without a care for their lives. Though his star image has been built around his dominant physical

stature and his impenetrable gaze has sometimes been used by others to reaffirm conventional

masculinity (i.e. Don Siegel), other filmmakers (i.e. Tuggle) inspired the artist in Eastwood,

whose viewpoint was foreshadowed in Play Misty for Me, to further explore himself and make

his art an expression of his true self. In doing this, Eastwood first deconstructs the myths of male

aggression with Unforgiven, faces head-on male melancholy in The Bridges of Madison County,

and then finally questions the role of the male patriarch as protective figure in Million Dollar

Baby. Though detractors will say that some of his films seem to re-affirm gender conventions

while some subvert them, by staying true to his intuitions and providing honest performances

and representations, Eastwood has remained successful despite criticism because of his

commitment to always stay true to himself as an artist. Because he is able to exercise control

and allow his art to be an honest expression of his soul, he can be anything and everything to

anyone, just like we all can.

Films Referenced (by year)

Fistful of Dollars. Dir. Sergio Leone. United Artists. 1967

Coogan’s Bluff. Dir. Don Siegel. Universal Pictures. 1968

Play Misty for Me. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Universal Pictures. 1971

Dirty Harry. Dir. Don Siegel. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1971

High Plains Drifter. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Universal Pictures. 1973

The Outlaw Josey Wales. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1976

Sudden Impact. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1983

Tightrope. Dir. Richard Tuggle. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1984

Pale Rider. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1985

Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1992

In The Line of Fire. Dir. Wolfgang Peterson. Columbia Pictures. 1993

A Perfect World. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1993

The Bridges of Madison County. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1995

Million Dollar Baby. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures. 2004

Works Cited

Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson,

and Clint Eastwood. Rutgers University Press. May 1994. pp. 176-190.

Collins, Al. “Outside the Walls: Men's Quest in the Films of Clint Eastwood.” The San Francisco

Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4. November 2004. pp. 62-73
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Cornell, Drucilla. “Dancing with the Double: Reaching Out from the Darkness Within.” Clint

Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity. Fordham University Press 4th edition.

June 15 2009. pp. 40-79

Cornell, Drucilla. “Ties That Bind: The Legacy of a Mother’s Love.” Clint Eastwood and

Issues of American Masculinity. Fordham University Press 4th edition. June 15 2009.

pp. 80-94

Girgus, Sam B. “Representative Men: Unfreezing the Male Gaze.” College Literature, Vol. 21,

No. 3, The Politics of Teaching Literature 2. Oct. 1994. pp. 214-222.

Gourlie, John M. “Million Dollar Baby: The Deep Heart’s Core.” Clint Eastwood Actor and

Director: New Perspectives. Ed. By Leonard Engel. University of Utah Press.

November 2007. Ch. 13. pp. 242-250

Kelley, Susan M. “Giggles and Guns: The Phallic Myth in Unforgiven.” Journal of Film and

Video, Vol. 47, No. 1/3, The Western. Spring-Fall 1995. pp. 98-105

Knapp, Laurence F. “Clint Eastwood, ‘Starteur’.” Directed by Clint Eastwood: Eighteen Films

Analyzed. McFarland and Company. September 1996. p. 18.