Clint Eastwood and his movies have something to say, but nobody's listening

Clint Eastwood’s politics are harder to pin down than you might think. His image is that of a gruff old conservative man, sneering and growling at the frivolous youth who have no sense of responsibility, talking to empty chairs that serve as strawmen for him to tear down. That is Eastwood the public figure, and, indeed, it probably is true of much of his politics personally. But then there is Eastwood the filmmaker, the minimalist director who navigates genre cinema to arrive at surprisingly humanist conclusions within a violent, corrupt, and unjust world. 

This Eastwood, not unlike his fellow Hollywood acolyte Steven Spielberg, has been arguably underwritten at home while championed by French critics, yet more recently has been propped up as one of the last stalwarts of the American film industry. What is truly interesting about Eastwood is immediately missed when one focuses on his politics—the politics he proposes, his solutions to issues—because what he is good at doing as a filmmaker is deconstructing contradictions, having ideologies and actualities of power rub up against each other so that they reveal something more complicated about how humans work within a world of imposed, imaginary systems. Eastwood is not so much a person with a vision for the future, but a critic of the present.

“Walt definitely had no problem calling it like he saw it,” so eulogizes the priest of Eastwood’s character at the end of Gran Torino, a film that solidified the contemporary image of Eastwood as the racist, reactionary, “get off my lawn,” old man that he’s popularly thought of as today. The same sentiment could be said of Eastwood, both the man and the filmmaker, and it’s his immediate bullshit detector that makes some of his supporting characters so hard to watch, particularly in his portrayal of families. There’s Walt’s family in Gran Torino, that sees the old man as baggage, but maybe with some property to will to him; there’s Maggie’s family in Million Dollar Baby, who only show up at the end when she’s on life support to try to get her money; it’s Francesca’s kids in The Bridges of Madison County, who have mixed and extreme responses to seeing their mother as a complex person for the first time. These are familial bonds perverted by people ignoring their complicated human relationships and instead deferring to what they can get out of another person through legal means.

Clint Eastwood’s politics, if one were to try to reduce them to a label, would be “libertarian,” commonly used as shorthand for someone that is small government, pro-capital, pro-freedom (although freedom for who and from what can be mercurial). “Libertarian” as a term used by right-wingers in the 20th century is borrowed from left-wing socialists from the 19th century, who prioritized concepts of freedom over that of domination as a means to achieve utopic communism. Libertarianism as we currently understand it is an appropriation of this term by anarcho-capitalists (itself an appropriative terminology, as anarchy and capitalism are inherently contradictory, as capital cannot exist without hierarchy), but if there is one thing that Eastwood genuinely borrows from anarchism it is his distrust of strict systems in favor of complex reality. Eastwood does not believe that bureaucracy and regulation can genuinely solve problems, and his films often work as piledrivers between the cracks in the systems—whether literally imposed by governments, broadly social, or composed of personal values. 

This is where his latest, Juror #2, so perfectly fits within his filmography: a recovering alcoholic, Justin Kemp (Nicolas Hoult), is selected to serve on a jury to try James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) for the murder of his girlfriend Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s daughter). Only, in the immediate proceedings, Kemp realizes that he likely hit Carter with his car that night. The prosecutor, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), is using this trial as a cynical element in her run for district attorney, an issue-based piece of electoral propaganda about putting violent domestic abusers behind bars. 

Kemp is wracked with guilt, although he doesn’t feel he can do the right thing and come forward because he believes that he will be sentenced for vehicular manslaughter given his history of DUIs and the fact that he was at a bar that night, even though he didn’t ultimately relapse on drinking that night. He and his wife have a baby on the way; he can’t compromise his family. It is best to try to live the lie that he hit a deer, rather than the truth that he accidentally killed someone. This leaves Kemp in the jury room trying to convince the other 11 of Sythe’s innocence while not implicating himself. Juror #2 launches into an explicit discussion about whether people can change. Kemp believes they can. Eastwood doesn’t.

For Eastwood, who a person is is less important than what they do. A killer is a killer, but in Unforgiven, the one we are supposed to root for is the man who tries to give up that life and hide it away, rather than the one who embraces that cruelty. It’s borrowed from Eastwood’s own interpretation of the Western, using the irredemptive model of the ending of The Searchers, where Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) ultimately can’t return to society even after he chose to try to overcome his racist hatred at the final moment of judgment, because the violence he’s already embraced has stained him for eternity. In Juror #2, Kemp’s alcoholism stains him in a similar way: he can’t shake it, it’s something he has to live with and fight for the rest of his life. 

Yet what Kemp continues to do, under the guise of righteousness, is protect himself, acting selfishly in the name of his family. It creates an interesting narrative switch, where the prosecutor Killebrew, in her own interrogation of whether she’s right, falls back on her innate sense of justice, becoming ambivalent about her own position within the proceedings. Both Kemp and Killebrew betray themselves by being presumptive, but it’s their choices and not their identities which make us judge them.

While I fall in line with Eastwood that people should be understood by what they choose to do, I don’t agree with his apparent view that people are moored to an unchanging baseline. But it is informative of why his films fit well within a conservative American viewpoint despite their decidedly complex, humanistic conclusions. 

Looking back at Gran Torino, racist old Walt ultimately learns to love his Hmong immigrant neighbors, but insofar as they integrate into what he believes are American values. The trick Eastwood pulls is that these values have nothing to do with imagery, but action. American values, in his mind, are not cultural indicators like food, ritual, or religious practice, but things like respect and stewardship. Walt Kowalski is of Polish immigrant descent and married to a devoutly Catholic wife, two things which until the 20th century were not considered “white” by the Anglo-Protestant hegemony in the U.S. but we now classify as naturally part of that supremacy. A pivotal scene comes when Walt takes his neighbor that he is effectively fostering, Thao (Bee Vang), to his barbershop. Walt and the barber (John Carroll Lynch), trade slurs with each other for being Polish and Italian, respectively, and teach Thao how to do the same, helping him to supplant his inherent Southeast Asian identity with the chosen one of American community. 

Gran Torino might not be revelatory or particularly radical, but it is, importantly, commenting very specifically on 2008—the disrepair of Detroit, financial crises, racial tensions spurned by immigration and white flight. It was a film to be considered when thinking about this moment in America, as reflected by the direct financial resonance it had: in 2008, Gran Torino was the 12th highest-grossing film domestically (the 3rd highest with an R-rating). It was in the cultural conversation, and there is something to be gleaned from that. But if films like Eastwood’s are not in the popular consciousness when released, they lose their ability to communicate with the present.

From Caligari To Hitler, a foundational study of Weimar cinema, is often reduced to a pop-psychology interpretation of this observation: “Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool—a technique foreshadowing…that manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale.” What people often misread here is a predictive quality in pop culture, as if images of destroyed American metropolises in ‘90s blockbusters “predicted” 9/11, rather than revealed a specific fear which underpins the psychology of a culture. We can pinpoint these fears by which films are embraced and which fall to the wayside at the box office. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari was an important case study because it was a popular film, and also one that underwent many changes during production. (The most important change being the final twist, framing the narrator as insane and Caligari as the keeper of the narrator’s asylum, rather than how the story was originally devised, to end with Caligari becoming institutionalized himself.) This type of analysis falls short, though, when cinema ceases to be a cultural force at all.

This critical lens doesn’t exactly work in the wake of COVID, where studios aren’t even giving their films a chance at societal saturation at all: After only a week in theaters, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Juror #2 is to be pulled, then dumped on Max in December. It wasn’t originally intended for a theatrical run at all. From a conventional business standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense: Juror #2 has an estimated per screen performance of $7,500, reasonably higher than the similarly budgeted Smile 2 had its opening week at $6,361, so it would seem the right move would be to extend that theatrical window rather than shut the door. 

Interrogating why Warner Bros. Discovery would bury Juror #2 at Vulture, Chris Lee plays devil’s advocate for WBD CEO David Zaslav, arguing that Eastwood’s recent directorial ventures haven’t proven the most bankable. I wouldn’t give Zaslav and WBD this much credit. While Lee points out that American Sniper had the highest domestic gross of any film its year ($350,126,372)—as well being nominated for six Academy Awards—he also presents the flop Richard Jewell as an example of adult dramas being a dying breed at the box office, even though the year prior The Mule made a respectable $174,804,407 globally. Richard Jewell didn’t stand much of a chance against the nadir of IP bullshit that was 2019, nor Cry Macho against the impact of the pandemic that dawned that same year, but just skimming the early returns for Juror #2 shows that Eastwood’s name still has pull.

Eastwood does seem out of place in a film world driven by superheroes and children’s toys, but then again, his shtick since he first became a star is that he’s out of place, part of a dying breed, the last of the Wild West, or what have you. This, too, plays into his conservative appeal: As times and tastes change (as will necessarily happen), some people still want to cling on and find themselves out of a place in a world they remember once understanding. As a market, this is something that has often been catered to, because naturally those people (older, retired, possibly with more free time and money) buy tickets to movies. 

But this reality is often lost in the narrative of development in film culture, which tends to focus on progress rather than stagnation. In the intro to his seminal study, Still In The Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969-80, Andrew Patrick Nelson points out that while the conventional narrative of the genre is that it became “revisionist” during New Hollywood, John Wayne was still a massive box office draw, with most of 10 Westerns he starred in from 1969-76 having “earned more at the box office than contemporary ‘revisionist’ Westerns. The very fact that Wayne continued to even exist [author’s emphasis] into the 1970s may come as a surprise to some today.”

The same could now be said for Eastwood’s directorial works, that many in the general moviegoing public would be surprised to hear he is still making movies at all given that his last three pictures have been 1) buried in the IP melee of 2019, 2) lost during the slow return to theaters during COVID-19, and 3) intentionally kept from a larger theatrical release in favor of being dumped on a streamer. 

It bodes poorly for the industry as a whole that a legacy filmmaker like Clint Eastwood would be so blatantly disregarded. It is not just that the likes of Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, or David Fincher can’t get their films off the ground without abdicating to streamers, but even films that are expressly populist like Ryan Johnson’s Knives Out series can’t break themselves from a Faustian bargain with Netflix. Juror #2 getting dropped into the ephemerality-disguised-as-access that is the streaming world isn’t even equivalent to made-for-TV movies of a bygone century, because we don’t know if people are actually watching them. We don’t know what people are watching on streamers, or how much, or for how long. But what we do know is that supposedly major works of cinema seem less culturally saturated than ever before on their platforms. 

In 2024, still apparently the heart of Trump-era conservative media, the appearance of importance is always prized over actual content. Take this year’s Reagan film, which star Dennis Quaid boasted had the “largest gap in cinema history between critics and audiences,” as if that was a good thing. That film doesn’t work on any level, and instead of doing anything it tells its audience things. That film grossed around $30 million domestically, against a $25 million budget. Hardly a box office blowout, but the film is paraded as a success—it is not a film, but a bullet in the culture war.

S. Craig Zahler’s movies, despite their obviously conservative bent, have not become staples of this culture; hardly anyone has seen besides those that actively seek them out, because their complexity in form and ambiguity in content do not speak to the current moment of popular consumption. Instead, Taylor Sheridan has become the voice of new conservative media with Yellowstone as his staple—a show whose appeal is a gruff Kevin Costner telling off liberals and phony transplants (ironically, the show has caused a mass influx of wealthy people to the state). It makes you wonder how a Clint Eastwood film would be received if given a real chance, given that the older, more conservative crowd that his name draws has become so diametrically opposed to the kind of films that he makes, ones that prefer to show rather than tell.

But it is hard to know if Juror #2 will be received at all given its ultimate distribution fate. It’s tragic, as present-day cultural conversation is an essential part of Eastwood’s work, and now that opportunity is being directly denied. It also makes criticism come from the abstract—criticism that seems for its own sake rather than some societal value, talking in circles on film websites rather than having conversations in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps the most revealing thing about Eastwood’s films now is that they, like so much of cinema, aren’t really afforded the chance to be talked about at all.