Blood truths

The long and improbably brilliant career of Clint Eastwood has had its share of surprises, few as striking as his emergence as a serious director. Eastwood’s transformation from cinematic action figure -- good for a night’s entertainment and some lusty ringside catharsis -- into sanctified cinematic auteur has been a long time in coming. Rife with controversy and punctuated by the occasional flop, it hasn’t been an easy or peaceful evolution. How did Dirty Harry get so clean?

On Wednesday, Eastwood’s 24th feature as a director, “Mystic River,” opened to great acclaim, with the filmmaker receiving some of the most effusive and respectful reviews of his career. A dirge about vengeance in America involving three men and their families, the film has been received in some quarters as the latest chapter in Eastwood’s late-life turnaround from thug to director emeritus, with some former detractors grudgingly admitting that the old man wasn’t half bad behind the camera. According to this new critical orthodoxy, Eastwood’s importance as a director isn’t just a function of his refined technique and deepened artistry, but a professedly more mature attitude toward violence. In the new orthodoxy Eastwood now matters, in part, because he’s paying penance for his violent past.

But “Mystic River” isn’t just about how violence passes from man to man like a virus, ravaging each one and his family -- it’s about the kick, the thrill and the rejuvenating power of violence. The film’s tag -- “We bury our sins, we wash them clean” -- could come from any number of the director’s movies; it’s Eastwood’s obsession and persistent, ambivalent theme.

Gripped in the logic of what Richard Slotkin, a scholar of American history, calls “regeneration through violence,” his movies always have derived their power from violence that’s equally destructive and restorative. And it’s violence that has made them beloved and despised. That many now see the newer films as apologies for violence raises the question: Is it Eastwood who’s revised his course -- or are the revisionists sitting in the audience?

GRIM VISION

Movies are fantasies, but they’re our fantasies; Hollywood manufactures desire, but we help run the factory. The fact that we like fantasies in which we not only fight the good fight but also always win explains Eastwood’s popularity to a point. His movies appeal to our love of heroes, but from the beginning there has been something different about Eastwood’s avengers -- something unforgiving. Part of this comes from his early influences. He became a star in movies directed by Sergio Leone and Don Siegel; the former made art-house exploitation movies, the latter old-fashioned pulp fiction. More important, though, Eastwood consistently has exposed the contradiction of a people caught between ideals and actions, dreams of benevolence and a lust for blood. No other director working in this country today has peered so long -- and to such a deeply ambivalent end -- into this dark part of our American soul.

Nothing if not brand-conscious, Eastwood has played a variation of the same taciturn stoic for decades. Cannily aware of the mythic power of movies, he long ago transcended his limitations as an actor by turning his face into a mask of implacable cool. (No matter how different the stories, the mask rarely slips. When he pastes on a smile, as he does in his underrated 1980 comedy “Bronco Billy,” the effect almost is as scary as Dirty Harry’s grimace.)

The mask became his signature, and because it revealed so little -- a twitch of contempt, a shadow of doubt -- it became a screen onto which audiences could project wildly different fantasies, some straight from the id. The durability of Eastwood’s iconic presence -- at once avenger, savior, grim reaper and always the last man standing -- ensured fan loyalty and some lashing derision, but it also could obscure the basic contradictions in his work.

For a man who likes to wave the flag in his movies, Eastwood has an unusually grim vision of our country. Taken together, his films depict an America dominated by violent crime, sexual predators, racial antagonism, alienation, grief and fury. The movies often center on loners who in one way or another come up against a deeply corrupt system and somehow always mete out extreme payback. The loners usually are white cops, as in Eastwood’s enjoyably whacked-out 1977 thriller “The Gauntlet,” but the same type shows up as a black musician in the director’s 1988 film about Charlie Parker, “Bird.” (Parker dies, of course, but his payback is his legacy.)

Eastwood typically casts himself as the alienated loner, and it’s this type -- complete with trademark squint, sneer and Freudian-sized gun -- that made him a star in the late 1960s in a trilogy of westerns in which he played a hippie-cowboy dubbed the Man With No Name. Directed by Sergio Leone, the westerns represented genre stripped to the gleaming bone. As with many genre stories, their plots, which alternate between simple and convoluted, matter less than the visual markers of the loner: his gun and masses of dead bodies. Awash in blood, punctuated by macabre humor with a hero who behaves like a villain -- he always shoots first -- the films outraged many critics.

Reviewers denounced the movies as needlessly violent but seemed more troubled by the ambiguity of their moral universe, which seemed wholly alien to that of the classic western. Instead of a wide frontier conquered by heroes, Leone’s West was a bullet-torn hallucination in which it was impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad.

That became Eastwood’s template -- an endlessly repeated nightmare for which there was a growing audience. He formed his production company in 1967 but kept close ties to Hollywood, which allowed him the freedom to play both maverick outsider and privileged insider. That dual persona was in keeping with the character types for which he’d soon be famous. Three years later, he made the scope of his ambitions clear with the release of three distinct productions: his directing debut, “Play Misty for Me,” and two by Siegel, the gothic period story “The Beguiled” and a contemporary policier, “Dirty Harry.” Eastwood already was a star; “Dirty Harry” made him a legend. From then on, he would remain the hepcat with werewolf hair who aims a .44 Magnum at a black bank robber and, in the next scene, chills with a black doctor who happens to be a childhood friend.

An equal opportunity misanthrope, a filthy excuse for a human being, Dirty Harry wasn’t on the take. He was crazy -- but there was something mythic and messianic about him too: He was Our Dirty Harry of Divine Retribution, one sure thing in a topsy-turvy world.

A LITTLE TOO RAW

That worked for the audience, but not the critics. Released amid ongoing protests against the Vietnam War and three months after the Attica prison uprising, a thriller with a white cop aiming a cannon at an unarmed black man didn’t sit well with them. Pauline Kael famously denounced “Dirty Harry” for its “fascist medievalism,” while Newsweek settled for just “right-wing.” Eastwood hadn’t directed the movie, but because of his star presence and relationship with Siegel, he was guilty by proxy.

In those days, Eastwood often was characterized as manna for those who like their movies brutal and dumb. In his authorized biography of the star-director, Richard Schickel quotes critic David Thomson as saying “thinking people” avoided Eastwood’s films for the first 15 years of his stardom, meaning roughly until the early 1980s. This is a nice bit of self-serving nonsense. In the late 1960s, two of the country’s finest film critics, Manny Farber in Artforum and Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice, were writing energetically and thoughtfully about Eastwood movies. In the early 1970s, the Los Angeles Free Press sat down to rap with the star, while at the Chicago Reader, Eastwood champion Dave Kehr was limning the complexities of his persona.

For baby boomers who had grown up with “Shane” and who soon would be flocking to “Easy Rider,” the image of the vengeful gunman in a beard and a serape clearly hadn’t been as alienating as it was for the crowd rooting for “The Graduate.” Neither, it turned out, was “Dirty Harry.” But the mainstream press had more trouble with Eastwood. In 1971, Life magazine gave him his first major cover and a backhanded compliment with a headline that read, “The world’s favorite movie star is -- no kidding -- Clint Eastwood.” As late as 1985, the New York Times Magazine seemed embarrassed by its subject when it ran the headline, “Clint Eastwood, Seriously.”

There was something a little too raw about Eastwood to jibe then with many official tastemakers. Maybe it was that he just liked playing cops too much, or maybe there was something too irredeemable -- or uncomfortably familiar -- about his heroes. In 1976 Eastwood directed his first great western, “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” about a farmer who at the end of the Civil War embarks on a course of bloody vengeance after his family is slaughtered by Union soldiers. Although “Josey” is close in theme and brooding mood to Eastwood’s 1992 western, “Unforgiven,” it was dismissed by a critical mainstream that would lavish praise on the latter film. Eastwood had undeniably improved as a director, but the distance between the movies was nowhere as vast as is routinely asserted. “Unforgiven” was more artful; the violence was the same.

BARBARISM’S GRIP

In the late 1960s, Sarris had made the case that although the average spaghetti western was content simply to rack up a body count, Leone’s films had radically transformed the genre. Well into the 1960s, the hero of the Hollywood western had never lost his fundamental faith in the “civilizing, pacifying force of the future.” This wasn’t the case with Eastwood’s character, a nihilistic figure severed from the future and its promise. By moving deeper into American history and setting the final two westerns in the trilogy against the “ragged edges” of the Civil War, argued Sarris, Leone had uncovered “one of the keys to the rapacity and violence of the American West. The America of Sergio Leone is an America of rape and pillage, an America moving toward that nihilistic nowhere with which Europe has been familiar for so long.”

Given the state of the art and the dominance of Jerry Bruckheimer, it may seem strange that there was a time when critics actively engaged with the metaphysics of violence and what it meant for films now that a hero could kill in cold blood. Once upon a time sophisticated moviegoers weren’t supposed to like watching people and stuff blow up; they were supposed to be educated and, in some sort of faux-Brechtian sense, even implicated by screen violence. They were, as Arthur Penn suggested of his 1967 movie, “Bonnie and Clyde,” supposed to feel hurt by the violence, stung. For the famous climax in which the bank-robbing lovers are blown to pieces, said Penn, he wanted the “balletic” violence to remind the audience of the Kennedy assassination.

Of course, the violence in “Bonnie and Clyde” was as beautiful as it was socially resonant and technically advanced. Rarely had the erotics of violence been so openly expressed as with Bonnie’s hootchy-kootchy death dance; rarely had dying looked so sexy.

The violence in Eastwood’s movies carries a similar charge, but it usually is grotesque. As horrible as it is to watch Gene Hackman’s sheriff savagely beat a man in “Unforgiven,” it’s also impossible to look away. (Just notice the townspeople in one scene, wincing and not moving a muscle.) Whether Eastwood consciously picked up on the nihilism Sarris detected in Leone’s westerns, it’s clear his own work is steeped in it. The defining irony of Eastwood’s movies is that although the good guy always wins, the movies tend to end on a bleak and ambiguous note. His characters don’t seem as if they’re riding into the sunset; they seem as if they’re riding into the Big Nowhere.

There’s no question that nearly three decades of nonstop feature-film directing, producing and acting have enriched Eastwood’s filmmaking technique and style. At the same time, knowingly or not, he has been working toward something deeper, more abhorrent and truthful. Long before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, he had started to throw quotation marks around violence in thrillers such as “The Gauntlet,” in which the mayhem was cartoonish and decidedly unreal.

That accounted for the strange hiccups of laughter amid the devastation and confirmed what filmgoers don’t always like to acknowledge -- that screen violence can be as pleasurable as it is terrible. In movie after movie, Eastwood reminds us that as much as we claim to loathe violence, we also love it, at least on screen. It revs us up, turns us on and gives us our happy endings.

But if we wanted simple happy endings -- neat, tidy and unclouded by ambivalence -- we wouldn’t need Clint Eastwood movies. For years, Eastwood has delivered happy endings drenched in blood. His critics have branded him a villain; his admirers have tried to rescue him from this taint by calling him heroic. In his study of the frontier and American myth “Regeneration Through Violence,” Slotkin argues that the first Americans saw the country as an opportunity to renew and reinvent themselves and that it was violence that ultimately became the means to their regeneration. “The mythology of a nation,” he writes, “is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the ‘national character.’ ” No one wears that mask and plumps the depths of our enigmatic relationship to violence better than Eastwood.

Eastwood doesn’t appear in “Mystic River,” but his fingerprints are all over the movie -- he directed it, co-produced it and even composed its doleful score. And, of course, there is the film’s story -- which is really the Eastwood story -- the one about men haunted by violence and pushed to retaliatory, immolating extremes. The male lead characters are so firmly in the grip of barbarism -- theirs and the world’s -- that it has informed all their key life choices, including the women they love and the work they do. Like many Eastwood men before them, each is scarred by violence, and like the movie they inhabit, they also are driven and enlivened by it. Violence pulses through them like blood, and vengeance is theirs, however pointless and futile.

That can make “Mystic River” painful to watch, but it’s what gives the movie its raw, hurting truth. Eastwood always had a pitiless eye. Leone taught him about the tension between faces and landscapes, while Siegel taught him to keep things moving. As the years have passed -- he turned 73 in May -- he has learned to hire actresses whose abilities extend beyond the merely decorative and actors who can hold their own against him. As “Mystic River” proves, he is one of the rare directors who can crowd a movie with an all-star cast and cut it down in size to perfectly fit the frame. He works at a level of ambition and scale rarely attempted by most American filmmakers these days, and he doesn’t seem ready to stop. The revisionists think the tough guy has softened; the truth is, the artist can no longer be denied.