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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsClint Eastwood, actor and director
I watched the Actor Studio interview of Clint:
The experience strengthened my view that this great artist has been and is a great healer of American Society. Especially so in his work in genre of Western movies and deconstruction of the myth of the Lonely Cowboy, which culminated in the Unforgiven. Which deserves to be considered and called the last Western, not because it was the last of the genre, but because it was the end and transformation of the myth. Eastwood's Cowboy is neither hero nor anti-hero, just working man with guns, the great opportunist who is not without conscience. A multidimensional human being like all of us. In other movies he has rehumanized national enemies from Native Americans to Japanese.
A great artist does not preach. He lives the myth so that those believing in and re-enacting the myth can identify with his mythical character. When the mythical character of violent cowboy transforms into anti-war, anti-racists jazz lover, feminist, environmentalist anti-gun type, he is still the same Dirty Harry that Hard Man America identified with. And that is how the myth of Hard Man is able to transform. When Dirty Harry speaks against war in Republican Convention, the American Cowboy applauds. Not to Bush wearing Stetson, but to Clint The Man who knows and has lived the life of violence and says no more war.
A great artist who lives a myth and transforms it is a shaman, a wounded healer. He does not externalize the wound of the myth to be healed and balanced, stand out and condemn, but opens to it and relives and transforms it by balancing himself, the mythical character. It is not conscious work but intuitive, so all rationalizing explanations always fall short, including this.
But this I know. Something big happened in and around the Republican Convention. Not just Clint's performance, but much more. The whole thing was more ridiculous than powerful and scary and to be angry about. We don't fully understand what happened and we don't need to, and we can each offer our various interpretations. But something changed as the Big Wind was blowing. This is now - again - a new world open to new possibilities. Let's make the best of them.
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flamingdem
(40,888 posts)who talks to chairs!
CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)or why he did it, makes it a piece of performance art in my opinion.
There was a very perceptive post by DUer Fumesucker yesterday morning that predicted that Clint would do something controversial if he was true to the type of characters he plays in his movies.
flamingdem
(40,888 posts)Every artist has a bad day
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)
Chorophyll
(5,179 posts)means that his speech was a rhetorical failure.
This was a political convention. If he had something to say he should have just said it.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)He holed the Republican cruise boat below the waterline, by drawing attention to the crazy that was already there.
I'd think you'd be cheering in the aisles, not calling it a failure.
Chorophyll
(5,179 posts)I have a problem with Democrats going all starry-eyed, as if Eastwood had deliberately (but obscurely) tried to sabotage the convention. There are better ways to sabotage the convention, if that's what you've set out to go. Get up there and deliver a coherent speech, for one.
From where I sit, he looked every bit as creepy, nuts, and hateful as the rest of 'em. So no, I won't be cheering in the aisles. (I wouldn't have been anywhere near those aisles.)
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)It would probably be that the convention was coherent, well-produced, organized... all that crap that gets people in the media so happy.
I can just see Tweety crowing about how "presidential" Romney looked.
But that's not what happened, oh no.
People--ESPECIALLY young people--are going to equate the Republican convention with a senile old white dude having a conversation with a chair.
They picked Eastwood as a symbol of strength and they got a symbol of weakness and craziness that is going to tar them for weeks.
Chorophyll
(5,179 posts)I'm only taking exception to the people who are calling him some kind of brilliant shaman, as if his sabotage was deliberate, or as if he's somehow on our side. It wasn't and he isn't.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)
Ron Paul.
flamingdem
(40,888 posts)He's a Ron Paul supporter
tama
(9,137 posts)the guy he told to go fuck himself (in silent speach from the chair). But second hand knowledge told me on DU that he said to some media was pissed about how libertarians had been treated and that they shouldn't vote for Romney.
And what he said about Obama was the same that left is pissed (or purely cynical) about Obama. He's libertarian "individualist" who does not care about right or left. But most of all he's great artist, actor and director, who act spontaneously and follows the inspiration. Mystery performer indeed.
RKP5637
(67,112 posts)no senile older person. That's just my gut feel for what was going on ...
and I make no secret that if we want actual change on matters we care about and feel and see as important, better to ally with those who share same goals on issues we care about and make changes happen. E.g. on social liberal issues we are the great majority of live and let live, and the real question is how did the social conservatives ever get so "important"?
My political position is that of result oriented (instead of dogmatic) social libertarian aka communitarian anarchist. I have my disagreements with RW libertarians and many others, but that's how it's supposed to be.
cali
(114,904 posts)limited, studied and he played the same role over and over. He is, in my estimation, an overrated director. I find his movies largely one dimensional and heavy handed.
Your post just seems like pretentious twaddle that means, well, very little.
loli phabay
(5,580 posts)gotta love me some harry callahan.
Jennicut
(25,415 posts)Incredible movie really, because we never really see WWII from the Japanese side. His characters were not cliched, they spoke in Japanese, they had lives, they had families, they had real emotions. It makes me sad that someone can direct that and then turn around and give a crazy idiotic pandering to the RW speech like this. Then again, my father is a great guy and would do anything for me and my little girls but he votes conservative. He listens to Rush everyday. My Dad is very giving and caring to me and others and yet he believes some ugly things. At least he is not very socially conservative, it is all on the economic side. I guess human beings are not always logical.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I do have a sense that somehow the ghosts of all the archetypes he has played live in him today. He is bound to be wounded, because he's human. He can't avoid the wounding any more than we can, and he has opened himself to the spiritual knife even more with the roles he has played.
I have the impression that what Clint did at the RNC was a shaman's dance - incomprehensible to us, but pregnant with meaning and overflowing with transformative spirit. I don't think Clint is either senile or stupid. If he's crazy, it's in a way that is both important and missing from the public square today - shamanic crazy.
flamingdem
(40,888 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)He's apparently got everybody convinced he's crazy, and he has the whole country looking at the convention, thinking about it, and noticing Romney's and Ryan's shortcomings while thinking, "You know, the whole bunch of them are crazy!" He painted the convention with a shining coat of nutso.
No wonder Obama's getting a chuckle out of it. Clint couldn't have worked out better for Democrats if he'd been a mole - regardless of whether anyone has the gray-scale perception to see any deeper significance to his performance.
flamingdem
(40,888 posts)It sure put a spin on things 
Chorophyll
(5,179 posts)Just as long as the ghosts, archetypes, and shamans stay far the hell away from the DNC. We actually need to win in November.
Walk away
(9,494 posts)Watch him smile after he pretends to cut the President's throat and the crowd cheers and chants. What ever else he is he certainly enjoyed ginning up that Obama hatred.
I seem to remember that Hitler was also an artist. Maybe it's not a good enough excuse for being a lousy person.
tama
(9,137 posts)But I hear what you say. When a Native American wheel man came to where i live and shared his medicine with us, showing the power of forgiving, his example opened my many gates in my heart and I was able to cry out and shake out of my body many sorrows of my personal life. Now I know it is easier for wronged people to forgive the wrongdoer, such as Europeans and Hitler, than for Europeans and Hitler to forgive themselves for what they did to other peoples. That is why the war still goes on.
All I can say is: it is not your fault, it's not my fault, not any one's fault. It is not your character and nature that you and I project, that is our how we radiate. Our personalities and their actions are products of their environments, and the chain of causes goes on and on. To be able to forgive not just others, but our very selves, is the work of letting go of control and going into the dark places we deny that even exist.
We all have killed and live from killing and then die. That is the wheel of life and death. That is not the problem. What is the problem if there is any?
Walk away
(9,494 posts)Enjoy your point of view.
joeybee12
(56,177 posts)And don't tell me about his Oscars...all I have to say in response to that is: Nicole Kidman.
nolabear
(43,850 posts)by falling prey to its shadow. Let's say he does embody the universal Lonely Cowboy, and his art transmits that archetype and its ability to stir identification and healing. What I saw, though, was abuse of the archetype in the service of the ego. I think he bought into the myth, not of the Hero, but the simply powerful, and the Romney campaign, which worships the power and not the wound, never gave a thought to how destructive that shadow can be. And if you really want to get into mythology and symbol, Trickster had his way with the lot of us.
Trickster, thanks for pointing that out. 
Bonobo
(29,257 posts)Or is it just the opportunity to make fun of him because he is old and stumbled around a bit?
cali
(114,904 posts)Saying that Obama had told Mitt to fuck off? How about drawing his finger across his throat in reference to Obama?
But more than being offensive, it was bizarre and pathetic. Old age is not an excuse. He played up to the worst in that disgusting crowd.
Hydra
(14,459 posts)I had to listen to some of it in the background at work, and it was upsetting me. Then I read a DU post about how under the radar, Clint was making a direct and focused attack at the person he was supposed to be stumping for.
The Repubs will never get it, but as the poster pointed out, he made the RNC cheer for an anti-war stance...that's nothing short of a miracle, so indeed, this could be a shamanic type work.
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)Whether you think it's a train wreck or a master coup, it's worth checking out.
BlueToTheBone
(3,747 posts)and the rumpled hair? That was all so weird.
unc70
(6,501 posts)Possible explanation for Clint.
Clint had supported Ron Paul. Maybe the treatment of Paul supporters. Consider:
Not an empty chair. Obama "The Invisible Man" a la Ralph Ellison. With all the racial imitations. Time to step aside.
Clint also spoke to the other Invisible President, George W.
By appearing to stumble around as a caricature of the crazy old RW white guy, he had the convention cheering his statements against W for starting war, cheering against lawyers as President (oblivious that R also Harvard Law), not shutting up (Paul reference), and much more.
Clint brought up many things invisible at that convention. Not senile, carefully scripted, designed to suck away all the buzz from RR.
Andy Kaufman with a touch of Colbert.
Or maybe not.
CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)There are examples of similar kinds of speeches in the Borat movie where Borat makes people agree with his extreme ideas but he's really showing how ridiculous they are.