Make My Day [View all]

[Plaid Adder]

I didn't watch the Republican National Convention. But after all the hoo-ha about it, I did go and see Clint Eastwood's 11-minute theater game. The memes based on it are so funny...and after all, I enjoy the absurd, especially in theatrical form.

The memes are funny. The speech itself is not funny. For a few reasons.

One: Clint Eastwood is not well.

In some of the post-mortem articles on this it is averred that the chair shtick was a surprise. Eastwood asked for one at the last minute, and someone gave him one, thinking that either he wanted to sit in it, or that he would use it as a prop. And then this happened.

He absolutely was using it as a prop, and in a very specific and consistent way. If you watch the video and keep track of when invisible Obama 'talks' to Eastwood, it pretty much always happens at a point where Eastwood has wandered to the end of whatever tangent he's on and has run out of thought. The chair is there so that when these moments happen, Eastwood can engage in hilarious byplay with invisible Obama, using one of the cheap jokes he's prepared (there's really only two: pretending that invisible Obama has told him to shut up, and pretending that invisible Obama has told him or Romney to go fuck himself). Said cheap jokes can be relied on to generate a cheap laugh which then gives Eastwood time to start over with a new topic.

This tells you two things. One: like many 83-year-olds, Eastwood is losing some of his mental agility. In fact, this performance reminded me a lot of Ronald Reagan's later debate performances. He can still perform; he can still charm; but he's in trouble when he has to think on his feet. Two: Eastwood is aware of this. Because that's why he wanted the chair. And that is not funny, it is sad.

Each time Eastwood does this invisible-Obama-enabled reboot, the new thread he starts has less intelligible content than the one before. He seems, in fact, to be really struggling for things to say, perhaps because he's not actually very enthusiastic about Romney himself. The only thing nice that he says about Romney is that he's a "stellar" businessman and he for some reason repeats this to make sure everyone heard the scare quotes. He obviously didn't have a clear idea of how he was going to end the speech; he eventually found refuge in telling the crowd how wonderful they were, but it wasn't until someone yelled something at him during one of the pauses that he was able to formulate an exit strategy.

What she yelled at him, apparently, was one of his famous taglines from his days as Dirty Harry: "Go ahead. Make my day." Everyone in that hall was thinking of it; in fact, they started chanting it when he first showed up, stopping only when he admonished them to "save some for Mitt." I couldn't hear her well on the tape; but everyone in the hall heard her, and so did Clint. He said, "I don't say that word any more." And then he said, "Well, maybe one more time." And sure enough, that's how he ends the speech: by turning to the invisible Obama in the chair, and saying, "OK. You wanna make my day, huh?"

Huge applause and cheering; and then Eastwood says, "All right, I'll start it, you finish it. Go ahead," and the whole audience chants gleefully, "MAKE MY DAY!"

And this is the second reason why that performance is not funny.

I've spent some time in the past few years trying to understand exactly when it was that it became OK, and in fact laudable, for the 'good guys' of American mass entertainment to kill people indiscriminately. I think the fact that our action heroes so often behave like mass murderers is a symptom and perhaps a contributing factor to some major cultural problems. When I try to remember when this changed, one landmark that always sticks out is Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry was a cop, and he was 'dirty' primarily because he routinely used excessive and deadly force on the job in situations that did not call for it. It's the nickname that marks him as a transitional figure. In the early 1980s, the fact that Harry liked killing people even when it wasn't necessary was something that made him an antihero, something that made him seem 'dirty' to his superiors and even to the superegos of the moveigoers watching him. His extralegal killing was enjoyable, but controversial; we were supposed to feel bad about being satisfied by it. Now, guys who do what Dirty Harry did are just straight-up action heroes, and it doesn't bother anyone.

OK. So, "Go ahead. Make my day" comes from a 1983 Dirty Harry movie called Sudden Impact. Go and take a look at the original context in which Eastwood's tagline occurred.

So, after shooting about five people--all of them dark-skinned--Eastwood delivers this line to a Black man (in this universe, there are no African-Americans) who is holding a white woman hostage. The police have already pulled up outside the diner, and since they are not as endearingly 'dirty' as he is, one assumes that once they take over Harry will lose the opportunity to execute the last remaining Black man on the scene. When he says "Go ahead," he's telling the unnamed assailant to shoot, move his gun, reach for something, do anything that will give Harry a good enough excuse to fire the gun he's pointing and blow this Black man's head off. That will "make" Harry's "day," because there's nothing Harry likes more than blasting people's brains out.

So let's review those last couple minutes of Eastwood's speech.

The anonymous enthusiast yells out the tagline. Eastwood says "I don't say that word any more." Presumably he means "that phrase." Presumably there's a reason he doesn't say it any more. Maybe he's tired of it. Maybe he has some regrets about the Dirty Harry character. Maybe he, since he was after all in the damn movie, remembers the original context, and is thinking that the Republican National Convention might be an inappropriate place to threaten our nation's first African-American president with the same words he used to threaten the scared Black thug whose head Harry wanted so badly to spatter all over that diner.

But then, giving into the mood of the room, he says, "Maybe one more time."

And they are all so delighted when he turns to the chair--in which, remember, Obama is supposed to be sitting--and says, "You want to make my day, huh?"

I mean am I the only person seeing this?

And then he gets the entire room to help him threaten to blow Obama's head off.

I'm sorry, but as a moment of creepiness this beats even Eastwood calling out, "We own this country!" to his put-near-all-white audience. All right, I know he was off-message and off-script and over time. But he was only doing what actors learn to do, which is give the audience what they want...and this is what they wanted.

Gonna be a while before I get to sleep tonight.