Clint Eastwood, actor and director [View all]

[tama]

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.