Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino: the death of America’s hero

by Robert Alpert

Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino is a meditation on time, its elegiac tone reflecting
upon U.S. mythology and Eastwood's film life. The movie expresses Eastwood’s
pained sense of loss everywhere around him, to which he has himself contributed. It
is appropriate that Eastwood's craggy, low key voice sings over of the end credits,
mourning the temporary comfort of the Gran Torino which represented, in
Eastwood's view, the "best" of the United States but a United States which could not
prevent the loneliness inevitably suffered by its own heroes. It is telling that the U.S.
flag, which is so often associated with Eastwood’s Walter Kowalski, prominently
flying from his porch and reflected behind him as he constantly sits on that porch, is
last associated with him as an emblem sewn into his coffin.

The Italian director Sergio Leone was
the first to dramatize Eastwood as the
macho hero, the Man with No Name,
in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a
Few Dollars More (1965).
As Sergio Leone stylized Eastwood,
he provided the U.S. Civil War
background and introduced death to
his image, in this case literally a
cemetery that concluded The Good,
The Bad and The Ugly (1966).
In 1971 Don Siegel made the first of
five Dirty Harry movies, turning the
Western hero into an urban hero. Dirty
Harry throughout these movies wields
a 44 Magnum, an undisguised phallic
symbol of U.S. male prowess.
Eastwood directed himself in Sudden
Impact (1983) playing Dirty Harry, the
invincible loner with his enhanced
Magnum.

The plot of Gran Torino is reminiscent of many of Eastwood’s movies. The most
obvious parallel is to Unforgiven. Both movies begin with the death of the Eastwood
character’s wife and end with a confrontation with evil of overwhelming odds. Bill
Munny’s quiet remark in the Unforgiven to The Schofield Kid about the effect of
killing finds its parallel in Gran Torino in Eastwood’s confession of how killing the
enemy in the Korean War has never left him. The hero worship of Walter by his
neighbours reminds us of Dirty Harry, and that Walter brandishes his pistol, first
imaginary and then real, is surely intended to refer to Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum. The
scene in which Eastwood shaves and dons a hand-tailored suit is reminiscent of the
many, fetish-like scenes in which the invincible Man with No Name prepares for his
final showdown, though in Gran Torino Walter’s suit is the one in which he will be
buried.

He repeated himself, including the The Man with No Name reached its
white horse, in Pale Rider (1985). apotheosis in William Munny in the
Oscar-winning Unforgiven (1992).

No other actor today is so associated with a history of film icons, the early ones
created not by Eastwood but by his mentors, Don Siegel in the case of Dirty Harry
and Sergio Leone in the case of the Man with No Name. Eastwood, as the director,
brings to Eastwood, the actor, a self-consciousness of the distance between himself as
film icon and as an actor portraying that icon. Don Siegel depicted Eastwood as a San
Francisco cop who voiced the frustrations of many in such lines as “Do I feel lucky?
Well do ya, punk?” but Eastwood, the actor, now 78 years old, self-consciously
mouths the line “Ever notice how you come across somebody you shouldn’t have
messed with? That’s me.”  Gran Torino is an acknowledgement that these icons are
part of a mythology which has self-destructed, disappeared in the same way that the
U.S. mythic frontier did. In that respect Gran Torino mourns a past both historic and
imaginary.
There is an unease, too, even in
Unforgiven, where a woman’s face is
disfigured and the resulting violence is
over-the-top.
On a hill barren but for a solitary tree,
William Munny tells the Schofield Kid,
“It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man.
Take away all he’s got and all he’s
ever gonna have.”

Eastwood plays a song-writing, guitar- ...tryout, his one moment of possibility

playing, singing cowboy, Red Stoval, and then dies of tuberculosis, even as
in Honkytonk Man (1982). But like he hurriedly records song after song in
Walter Kowalski, he coughs up blood order to make his mark in the world.
and forfeits at the Grand Ole Opry ...

Eastwood, as romantic hero Robert The family devours one of its own in
Kincaid, momentarily rescues Million Dollar Baby (2004), and
Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) in Eastwood is again left alone.
The Bridges of Madison County
(1995), but she is ultimately trapped
by her family.

Eastwood has always been understood as an actor who embodies what is

stereotypically macho – little emotion and few words, action-oriented and
professional. The title of the movie, Gran Torino, tells us all. It was an ordinary car
but viewed as a "muscle car" for men. That Eastwood as Walter Kowalski installed
the steering wheel column in his own Gran Torino conveys the identity between the
man and his car. That Walter pointedly leaves in his will the Gran Torino to Thao Lor
(Bee Vang), his surrogate son, rather than to his granddaughter Ashley (Dreama
Walker), represents the passage of the rite of American masculinity to the next
generation of males. Indeed, the movie’s story shows the progressive development of
Thao into his assumption of that role - from our first view of him washing dishes to
his unsuccessful initiation into the gang by his failed theft of Walter’s Gran Torino to
his washing of the car during his week of redemptive tasks to Walter's offer to allow
him to drive the car for his first date (dinner and a movie!) with Youa (Choua Kue).
Eastwood seems to express a continued belief in the macho male. His movie
seemingly shows the development of Thao from “pussy” kid – Walter’s repeated
epithet for Thao - to his being “manned up” – so that he can become a construction
worker. From that perspective it is appropriate that in this fairy tale Walter’s other
nickname for Thao is “toad.”  

Yet for all the film’s apparent reiteration of this mythology, Eastwood, the director,
calls into question its basis in reality and value. No scene better illustrates
Eastwood's understanding of the artifice and falseness of his film image than the
lengthy, humorous scene in which Walter explains to Thao how he should speak with
his barber buddy Martin (John Lynch). The irony of the scene is that Thao succeeds
in bettering both – and thereby unmanning them — by his story of his sore ass
caused by his too many construction buddies (a joke at Walter’s expense on the
eroticism of male bonding) and his later suckering of Tim Kennedy (William Hill),
the construction foreman, into hiring him through his made up story of his non-
existent car. Indeed, while Walter helps Thao find a job in construction, Thao seeks
only to match what Walter’s son has achieved, namely a job in sales, a job which
surely will result in economic benefit but also an uprooting from the neighborhood in
the same way that Walter’s son’s success benefited him and his family but estranged
son from father. Walter judges his son harshly for selling foreign cars and never
buying American. It is surely ironic, though, that the mixed-race gang, which is
comprised of the children of the newest generation of immigrants, pointedly drives a
foreign car. Walter passes on the Gran Torino to his adopted son, also of that
generation, but Eastwood leaves us with no doubt that salvation is not to be found in
the Gran Torino, the end credits playing over a highway filled with one foreign car
after the next going down the highway.

Eastwood, through his doubling of events and characters, creates a sense of both
inevitability and circularity to what we watch. The first scene at Walter’s home begins
with Walter commenting that the large crowd came not to mourn his wife’s death but
rather for the food he has set out, and it ends with the stream of guests leaving his
home. The camera pans over to the house next door where the guests are streaming
in with their food offerings to celebrate the birth of a new baby. These are the new
immigrants who have come to replace the white Europeans who have fled the
neighborhood, leaving behind only Walter and a few others of his generation who
congregate at the local bar. The comic irony is that Walter’s double is Thao’s
grandmother, who also sits on her porch and who can out spit him. Both are simply
old, as Walter later observes in leaving his dog Daisy with her. While Eastwood
shows Walter pummeling one of the gang members and threatening to wreak more
violence if the gang does not leave Thao alone, he follows that scene with Walter out
of breath as he enters his own home so that we fear for his safety. The film enables
Walter to relive his life through his new family, but the film ends both unexpectedly
and unpleasantly. History repeats itself, and Walter's country does not improve itself.
Eastwood sympathizes more with these newest immigrants, symbolized by the
difference in the two scenes of confession – one to the baby-faced priest, Father
Janovich (Christopher Corley), and the other to Thao in which Walter acknowledges
killing, unordered, a kid Thao’s age who simply wanted to live. Nevertheless,
Eastwood understands that these immigrants will wind up in the same place as the
prior generation. He self-consciously brackets his story through the use of untrained
actors as well as through the clear, crisp lighting which encapsulates the idea of a
working class neighborhood, complete with separate backyards and porches. Walter
is himself perfectly framed on his porch, dog next to him, a U.S. flag waving in the
wind, and Gran Torino in the driveway. This is a fable, an enactment of the American
dream, Eastwood tells us. Thao helps Walter carry the freezer up the basement stairs,
a symbol of the developing emotional connection between Walter and Thao, but
Eastwood ends the scene with Thao’s family buying the freezer for twenty-five
dollars. They, too, will acquire the material goods, a freezer in this instance, and
later, if successful, tools and a car, which Walter’s sons, the inheritors of the
American dream, already possess in abundance. 

Thus, there is a circularity to Eastwood’s film. We first visit Walter’s basement at the
funeral luncheon when his grandchildren wide-eyed and excitedly open his trunk and
spy his medal; and we later revisit the basement when Walter opens that same trunk
to show that same medal to Thao, only to tell of the horrors that it has inflicted on
Walter’s entire life. There is the myth of heroism embodied in a Silver Star and then
there is the reality of that medal. Eastwood spins his tale so as to tell us that this is
what a 50s neighborhood in Detroit looked like when he raised his sons and this is
what it still looks like today but with a new generation of U.S. immigrants. It is funny
and sad, sweet and bitter, that Walter rises to heroism by declaring to the Hmong
gang: “Stay off my lawn”, a variation on the Westerner’s threat of the 50s to “stay off
my land.” These new immigrants, like Walter, believe in the American myth of
Bronco Billy, the individual who can be whomever he wants, needs only a small plot
of land and a family, and which in the 50s took the form of separate neighborhoods
of single family homes. In contrast to the father of Thao and Sue, Walter is American
old school and hence is revered as a hero by these newest immigrants. The American
pragmatist, he fixes things as well as finishes things. He spends a lifetime
accumulating the tools in his garage, material goods, naming them and knowing how
they work and in the film’s most awkward moment fixes the broken leg on the
washing machine in the Lor’s basement. The members of the younger generation in
the meantime flirt with one another nearby, uncomprehending of the icon before
them and, ironically enough, ignorant of its meaning for them.

Eastwood mocks Walter’s image of himself, including his professionalism, and as

such his own film image. While Walter reacts violently to his son’s suggestion of a
home in a retirement community, Eastwood later shows Walter sitting alone in the
dark, watching baseball on his television set, and helplessly pulling out his gun the
night the gang attacks his neighbors. Walter chastises Father Janovich for his bitter
and sweet speech but what does he substitute?  He has only the bitterness of killing
for his country, for which he was awarded a medal and now bleeds internally, and the
sweetness – Walter’s term — of the Gran Torino, a material object which disappears
during the end credits. The rage he feels for receiving that medal finds its most
explicit, albeit misplaced, outlet in his smashing of his kitchen cabinets and the
bloodying of his hands. Revenge is its own end, resolving nothing, Eastwood tells us.
In retrospect, recalling Walter’s coughing at his wife’s funeral, we realize that Walter
was already dying. There is no glory in dying; rather, each of us dies alone, regardless
of how we die, Eastwood also tells us.

There is despair at the center of Eastwood’s recent films. Characters inevitably sit
alone in mostly dark space, conjuring up the loneliness of a Hopper painting. In
Gran Torino Walter sits alone in his poorly lit kitchen thinking about what he will do
to exact revenge and then finds peace only in his acceptance of dying, a decision
which represents a reversal of what we anticipate, namely a violent reprisal on the
gang for the violence it had exacted on the Lor family. It isn’t fair, says Father
Janovich, but it never is, Eastwood responds. It is the same observation which Bill
Munny made to The Schofield Kid. Thus, we expect the myth to play out and prevail,
but instead Eastwood brings us down to the reality of an individual alone and mortal.
Instead of the myth which is beyond time, Eastwood gives us only time which washes
over all of us, including him, as well as our possessions, including the Gran Torino.
Eastwood has himself come full circle in acknowledging the failure of his own
mythology.

In the ownership of his home, Walter Until the very end Walter continues to
has achieved the American dream. He sit alone, watching TV and “at peace”
sits alone all day on his porch, with his decision to die – “all he’s got
drinking beer. and all he’s ever gonna have."