There have been a few Americans capable of transferring the epic of an entire country to their physical bodies. America has a hurricane way of embodying itself as heroes and heroines, from Walt Whitman, founder of the American fraternity, to Clint Eastwood, the most athletic and challenging 5-foot-5 man on the screen. The last of the discriminations that still remained (since those of race, sex, politics or religion have been fought with courage), was that of age, and this has just been struck down by Eastwood in the recent film Cry Macho. It is not the first time that the filmmaker has built a film in which he celebrates and exalts old age. Clint Eastwood is 91 years old. And he’s been able to get in front of the cameras and keep punching (well, in Cry Macho He only gives one, very original and elegant by the way) and of continuing to fall in love, and here he does it with a Mexican. The director of that wonder called Without forgiveness He has not concealed his political opinions, which are quite unclassifiable and misplaced, since he supports republican individualism as well as defends abortion and condemns weapons, and I very much doubt that there has been a more critical and lucid filmmaker with the unjust and inhuman dimension of international politics than Clint Eastwood.
Eastwood is an example of that so American that he has come to call himself the man molded by his own will, something of which we have always been suspicious in Europe, because he did not comply with the Marxist and Ortega determinisms of existence, but which we have always seen with unspeakable envy. We Europeans increasingly seem like an end of race, yes, a very educated and informed end of race, and we want Americans to join us in our melancholic collapse, but suddenly Clint Eastwood appears on the scene to say no, no they will accompany us in our calm and sensible way of understanding art and life.
The serious intellectual world and high culture Clint Eastwood find it very uncomfortable. It has been a long time since he has been overlooked or underestimated, something that was done to him as an actor, especially when he played Dirty Harry or was a gunman in the westerns by Sergio Leone, who always seemed like masterpieces to me. But from movies like Bird, His figure as a filmmaker began to take off and reach very high flights, and his cinema has grown in sophistication and moral and political solvency. He has achieved a re-foundation of the American epic, based on characters with lives of heroic vulgarity, of a failure full of poetry and guilt. He has turned his failed heroes into a kind of angels of beauty. He has put his finger on all the wounds of politics and has always succeeded. The complexity of his figure thwarts the idea of the creator that we have in Europe, for the simple reason that Clint Eastwood is not an intellectual or a moralist. For example, his condemnation of wars in his films is subtle and distinct. Europe may have stopped believing in the blatant and elemental force of life, which is what is in Eastwood’s cinema. In Europe we believe more in the labyrinths of ideology than in the fury of living. How is it possible that a handsome man from the 50s, a B-series gunman from the sixties, a badass cop from the 70s, have become the greatest cinematographic genius of the last 30 years? Perhaps because this passive and historicist conception of art, so sticky moralistic, that weighs so heavily on us Europeans, does not operate on him. Since the North American exit from Afghanistan, there has been talk of the loss of political and military leadership of the United States in the world, ignoring something of transcendental importance, as that leadership rests on a very powerful cultural colonization that is still in force.
A new Eastwood movie is always a cyclone. His films are beyond opinion. It is true that Cry Macho It has imperfections, but the prodigious thing is that it does not matter if it has them, because in Eastwood’s cinema the degree of adherence to life is greater than any critical consideration in which we strive no matter how rigorous it may be. A 91-year-old guy who doesn’t believe in old age, who doesn’t believe in the existence of old age, is a triumph of life. A 91-year-old guy who behaves as if time does not exist and death is a force of nature that is beyond reason. A 91-year-old guy who does believe in beauty and poetry like Walt Whitman himself would only deserve a raging applause, because to applaud Eastwood is to applaud the mystery of life.
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