You probably haven’t read the new paper from David Galenson and Joshua Kotin from the University of Chicago’s Economics Department. This is a good thing. The University of Chicago’s Economics Department is the spiritual home of Milton Friedman’s right-wing free market theory, whose application in Latin America went hand-in-iron gauntlet with savage dictatorships and shocking state violence supported by the US in the name of freedom. Corporate freedom, that is.
Anyway, that’s not the point. Dave and Josh have published a new paper, ‘From The New Wave To The New Hollywood: The Life Cycles Of Important Movie Directors From Godard And Truffaut To Spielberg And Eastwood’. It’s pretty long and, to be honest, we didn’t read the whole thing. In fact, we couldn’t get past this lot on page 2: “Clint Eastwood did not direct his first movie until he had passed the age of 40, and did not emerge as an important director until after 60… This paper examines the goals, methods, and creative life cycles of Godard, Eastwood, and eight other directors who were the most important filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century… Woody Allen, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Martin Scorsese are classed with Eastwood as experimental old masters… Eastwood was an experimental innovator who improved with experience.”
Now, quite possibly, the rest of this article goes on to make a coherent argument about the grizzled right-wing buzzard, but we’re not actually going to stick around and read it. Clint Eastwood? An ‘important’ film director?! To paraphrase Frank Butcher: do us a fav’ah! Ah, but what’s this? A clue as to what Dave and Josh mean by ‘important’ can be gleaned from a following paragraph: “It was only in the early 1990s, after more than two decades as a director, that Eastwood emerged as an important filmmaker, as Unforgiven swept the major American film awards.”
They choose to equate ‘important’ with the receipt of an Academy Award, in which case Martin Scorsese has only recently managed to shake himself from the margins of unimportant filmmakers (where he languished with Alfred Hitchcock), and raise himself to the seminal cultural heights occupied by the likes of Rob Marshall, Ron Howard and Bruce Beresford.
Er, right.
It’s not that Unforgiven isn’t a good film – in fact, it’s quite possible that Eastwood really was the only director who could have made it; he was certainly the ‘right’ director to make it. But seriously, bullshit awards or not, 20 years later who really gives a fuck about Unforgiven? Or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? And let’s not even get started on the reactionary dross that is Million Dollar Baby. Flags of Our Fathers and Sands of Iwo Jima are perfectly serviceable, but let’s not pretend they’re ‘experimental’ or ‘innovative’.
Why this love for Eastwood? Maybe it’s because he’s old and has earned his dues. Maybe it’s because he represents a fading connection to a time that seems somehow more earnest and less frivolous than our own so we imbue his dubious ideological projects with a gravitas that they patently don’t deserve. Maybe we mistake this great American for a great filmmaker.
Maybe that’s over thinking it. Frankly, Eastwood can just fuck off. He was an average, limited actor who turned into an average, limited director. Limited of vision, limited of talent, limited of legacy. If he represents the passing of an era then good: let it, and him, go.
