eastwood as an artist

Striving for Art: Clint Eastwood, White Hunter, Black Heart and Unforgiven
With the duration of his term as Mayor of Carmel serving as a time-consuming dividing point, the total scope and artistic ambition of Clint Eastwood’s cinema expanded radically and immediately, beginning with his 1988 Charlie Parker biopic, Bird. Almost thirty minutes longer than any Eastwood-directed film to date and featuring a disorienting non-linear structure, the Hollywood establishment, to the tune of one minor Academy Award, tentatively accepted Bird as an artistic triumph. While churning out three pictures more natural to Eastwood’s star persona, none of them significant box-office successes, he continued his quest for acceptance as an auteur with White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). He built on that film’s positive reviews and undercut his lack of recent box-office success by making a critical and commercial success – a rarity in the Eastwood oeuvre, especially before his canonization as a director – with 1992’s Unforgiven.
Unlike the widely held perception at the time, Unforgiven ultimately didn’t mark a rebirth for Eastwood so much as a hyper-conscious muddling of his star persona and past genre territory. Clearly, a number of his decisions with regard to Unforgiven’s production read today as direct appeals to critics and the Academy brass (according to Richard Schickel’s biography, Eastwood thanked the former in his Oscar acceptance speech for their support, an unprecedented move). Most notably, his decision to cast three first-rank stars (or former first-rank stars, in the case of Richard Harris) that double as excellent character actors, an exceptional move in Malpaso’s history, and to undertake a more arduous, perfectionist location shoot can be seen this way.
Yet the clear markers of difference surrounding Unforgiven were not sui generis for Eastwood – his artistic ambitions, however they worked with his screen persona, had been blossoming since financially dicey labors of love like Bronco Billy (1980) and Honkytonk Man (1982). White Hunter, Black Heart is an excellent thematic companion to Unforgiven, and it’s a film that shows his aggregate career in a state of expansion and deepening before the Best Picture winner’s release. Using White Hunter, Black Heart and Unforgiven as prime case studies, I will argue that Clint Eastwood consciously develops into a roundly accepted auteur by embracing subjects seemingly unexplored by him, by thematically linking to and revising his past work with increased critical precision, and by invoking a passive acceptance of a stringently defined “nature” as truth.
Eastwood’s first fifteen years as a filmmaker, up to and including Heartbreak Ridge (1986), most clearly show the artful and rough-hewn streamlining of filmic elements that would mark all of his directorial efforts, even those after his first Oscars. His to-the-point, direct, fast-moving shooting style enhanced, and perhaps even caused, this often bare-bones effect, one that did not endear him to contemporary critics. Today this seems most likely because this classicist style – one that tried to emulate old masters like Hawks and Ford, especially in Westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) – was paired with his brutally violent and simplistic screen persona that ostensibly disregarded pretense and artiness. To change the critics’ lazy misreading of Eastwood’s mid-period work, such as Josey Wales and Bronco Billy, Eastwood decided that rather than hide his art away in genre pieces, he would open his cinema up to settings and subjects deemed foreign to him at the time.
More than Bird, which dealt with a nearly lifelong passion of Eastwood’s, White Hunter, Black Heart proved to critics that Eastwood could make a relatively small art film that supposedly stretched his talents and personal experience. Granted, it is known from Schickel’s biography that Eastwood had never before been to Africa and that he personally had an extreme aversion to killing animals, which happened to be his character’s very goal in the film. Despite the superficial departures, Eastwood stuck to a few central themes he had been developing since Honkytonk Man – chief among them self-destructive men and their inability to comprehend their own shortcomings until it is too late.
That said, Eastwood’s unexplored territory here is not Africa so much as new challenges in script and characterization. The role of John Wilson required Eastwood to ape a well-known figure (the mannered and mellifluously expressive John Huston), to engage in long dialogue exchanges central to the film, and to generally discard most aspects of his established persona, all of which he had very rarely attempted before, much less all in one film. Gunplay is important to White Hunter, Black Heart, but the film’s core is the layered characterization of Wilson, a grandiose and likable yet careless and inexplicably selfish figure who starts out as a mess of contradictions and ends up as just a mess. This departure of purpose jarred critics and introduced them, along with Bird, to the possibility of Eastwood’s consistent maturation as a director.
With Unforgiven, Eastwood stepped into much more familiar genre territory, but he attacked the film much differently than he had, say, High Plains Drifter (1973) or Pale Rider (1985). Those films paid obvious homage to the Man With No Name mythos of his Sergio Leone period, but that supernatural figure only arises near Unforgiven’s end, and he does so with exceptional ambiguity. Never in Eastwood’s history had a climactic shootout seemed less ritualistic and clearly readable, and never had it been more painfully human and laced by punchy, ominous dialogue (like Little Bill’s disbelieving parting shot, “I don’t deserve to die like this”). More obviously for critics, William Munny’s empty platitudes and tortured psyche stepped strikingly away from Eastwood’s mystical heroes and into the first fully human Westerner he ever played. He manages a delicately shaded ensemble for the first time, making every last significant speaking role as human as Munny is. Finally, Munny’s “It’s a helluva thing, killin’ a man…” speech is so widely seen as Eastwood’s defining, climactic moment of self-repudiation and moral responsibility that it probably won him the Best Picture Oscar by itself. All of these lofty, over-arching artistic trappings contributed to Eastwood’s sudden respect from the critical establishment, but they worked in tandem with Eastwood’s more subtle (and unsubtle) revisions of his screen persona.
While Unforgiven’s total critique of masculinity is ultimately so complex that it can be difficult to read at times, White Hunter, Black Heart aspires to a similar reappraisal of Eastwood’s older machismo that is much less subtle and, arguably, just as effective. The latter’s deconstruction of Eastwood’s past is more thorough on all levels. John Wilson, although he thrives on the hunt, uses verbosity as his chief weapon against others, not a gun. Wilson’s deep confusion of purpose, exemplified in the moment when he admits to Peter Verrill, “How could you [understand me]? I don’t understand myself,” is exceptionally rare for usually decisive Eastwood characters. Wilson talks a lot, but unlike Dirty Harry Callahan, can’t back it up with explosive action – ultimately, he cannot bring himself to shoot an elephant, a task he previously defended with great eloquence (“It’s the only sin that you can buy a license and go out and commit”).
Even when he gives us a classic Dirty Harry-styled put-down moment – when he cheerfully reprimands the anti-Semite for her appalling comments – he immediately follows it up (and checks the put-down’s power by doing so) by picking a fight he has no chance of winning, and doesn’t. When he throws a few good punches, we are reminded of Philo Beddoe’s prowess from the Which Way films, but although he later justifies the fight, he succumbs to age and is ultimately beaten badly. Eastwood had been revising and critiquing his persona for years, but pairing this with a more suitable artistic setting helped to result in increased respect.
By muddling his star persona’s righteous moral directive in Unforgiven, Eastwood signaled to his critics that his awareness and sensitivity as a filmmaker had been vastly underrated. He accomplishes this by both distancing himself from and reentering his own classic tropes as a mythic gunslinger, partially by transferring myth into infamy. Munny’s gargantuan reputation precedes him, a la Josey Wales, except that his name isn’t evoked in reverence so much as mortal fear or disgust. It is very significant that when characters recall his past, they do so not in terms of general reputation or slack-jawed awe, but rather by referencing his specific crimes, a tactic that gets you to ponder the probably terrible human loss involved, rather than just his ability.
Despite the heavy moral morass of Eastwood’s past characters, Munny is simply presented as a murderer while the Man With No Name and his descendants are avengers or righteous defenders. This is perhaps the central point behind the bewildering and richly textured final shootout, and although the dialogue clearly points us in this direction, this is mitigated by Munny’s sudden transformation into the Man With No Name and his incredible prowess during the fight. Munny’s ambiguously short and vague dialogue when in conversation here only amplifies the confusion of past and present Eastwood: for example, his reply to Little Bill’s last words, “I’ll see you in Hell, William Munny,” is a mysterious “Yeah.” However, Eastwood shows Munny’s distance from the punchy Dirty Harry style by drawling these responses to tease out their ambiguity. Munny thereafter recedes into pitch-black darkness, and essentially this (aside from his final silhouetting) is what Eastwood leaves us with. Never so starkly or powerfully did Eastwood articulate this level of ambiguity in his career previously, and its garishly unclear qualities promised overwhelming knee-jerk praise from critics.
Eastwood was now accepted as both a critical and commercial success, and part of the convergence was due to his filmic acceptance of nature – an element portrayed as dangerously potent as any of his prior characters. The natural world itself, a more typical definition of “nature,” is a crucial element of White Hunter, Black Heart, if only because it takes John Wilson the entire film to comprehend its power. His desire to kill an elephant is intended as the ultimate self-assertion: as a self-styled force of nature, he wants to prove it to more powerful forces by imprinting his presence on the supposedly overwhelming natural world. What he realizes, especially when the natural world imprints him by killing his beloved guide, Kivu, is his own natural, unchangeable status in the pecking order, a hard acceptance of his own nature. It’s one that seems especially hard because he has spent the whole film egomaniacally playing over the head of everyone else, acting grandiloquently enough to fashion himself as a force of nature. This crushing realization, shown in his shock and dejected silence at film’s end, harshly restores the balance of nature. This is emphasized, as Lawrence Knapp points out, by the serene shots of the slowly setting sun over the end credits, a symbol that acceptance of one’s own truth spawns peace and order (153).
Unforgiven’s conclusion shows a very similar process, also one achieved through violence. The main difference here is that Unforgiven tells us how violence itself is natural, principally through the cycle of violence bookending the film and Munny’s futile attempts to shed his violent nature. Munny fights nature throughout Unforgiven – animals and the weather give him constant trouble – and ultimately loses. The final shootout is, among other things, an extended demonstration of this idea. Besides this, Unforgiven takes a hard look at its three-dimensional characters, asks a lot of questions about them and offers no real answers: it is, then, a final, fatalistic acceptance of their own natural qualities and of the harsh nature they come from. Among other perceived revelations, this quality, clearly shared by White Hunter, Black Heart, is one that hooked critics, an evaluative body that constantly searches for truth in the human condition (at the risk of presumptuousness, I feel I can speak for most critics when I, an aspiring critic in my own right, state this). For Eastwood, this is an artistic statement clearer than most in his career, and it helps to explain the embrace of him as an auteur in the early 1990s.
After Unforgiven’s smashing success, Eastwood’s development as an artist has taken both progressive (Mystic River [2003]) and regressive (Blood Work [2002]) turns, and his work has expectedly achieved a sort of congruity in some key ways. The ambiguities in the endings of the two films discussed have blossomed into exquisitely unclear parting shots that muddle what we can ultimately take from the films. A Perfect World (1993) features a line whose meaning can be directly traced to the unspoken reality of White Hunter, Black Heart’s conclusion: “I don’t know nothing, not one damn thing.” Mystic River ends with Kevin Bacon’s childlike “shooting” of his hand at Sean Penn, a gesture simply rich with potential meaning, whether or not it exists. Eastwood has also tried to prove his staying power as a visible auteur with somewhat prestigious, well-known book adaptations like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), and the upcoming Flags of Our Fathers (2006). His recent success with Million Dollar Baby (2004) now just another notch in his belt and his status as an auteur fully assured, Eastwood’s cinema continues to expand, and the days when he strove for that assurance seem farther and farther behind.
Works Cited
Knapp, Laurence F. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1996.
Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.