Why liberal Hollywood hates Clint Eastwood – but shouldn’t

Of course, Hollywood doesn’t exactly “hate” Clint—after all, he’s won two Best Director Awards. The most that can be said is that—after Eastwood mocked Obama’s empty chair at the 2012 GOP Convention—there is no love lost. This year, American Sniper is nominated for Best Picture, but not Eastwood for Best Director.

I would argue that Eastwood is a case of Hollywood liberals not knowing who one of their best friends is.

Eastwood to me is now the master of perhaps the most difficult of all political movie genres—the antiwar film. How can this statement be squared with the current blizzard of left-wing criticism of American Sniper as xenophobic, paranoid-patriotic, racist slime? Well, even A. O. Scott in the New York Times is discerning enough to characterize it as both “a pro-war film and an anti-war film.”

Eastwood’s own defense is that much criticism of his movie is a “stupid analysis.” Calling American Sniper, “the biggest anti-war statement any film can make,” he says:  “I was a child growing up during World War II. That was supposed to be the one to end all wars. And four years later, I was standing at the draft board being drafted during the Korean conflict, and then after that there was Vietnam, and it goes on and on forever . . . I just wonder . . . does this ever stop? And no, it doesn’t. So each time we get in these conflicts, it deserves a lot of thought before we go wading in or wading out. Going in or coming out. It needs a better thought process,  . . . . One of my favorite war movies that I’ve been involved with is Letters from Iwo Jima and that was about family, about being taken away from life, being sent someplace. In World War II, everybody just sort of went home and got over it. Now there is some effort to help people through it.”

Why is so hard to make successful anti-war films? It just is, for both artistic and political reasons. This is ironic because the first anti-war talkie—All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on Eric Marie Remarque’s novel—is an all-time classic that is reportedly in the pre-production phase of a remake. A classic case is the adaptation history of young Dalton Trumbo’s novel, Johnnny Got His Gun (1938)—the title comes from a George M. Cohan’s patriotic “Over There”—about Johnny aka Joe Bonham who loses his arms, legs, eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue to a WWI artillery shell, but lives to find ways to tell the tale. Johnny was serialized in the Daily Worker during the Hitler Stalin Pact—and conceivably could have been made into a movie then—but was unceremoniously pulled from publication by Trumbo the day after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. It wasn’t made into a film until the Vietnam War Era when the message again resonated on the left.

American audiences, even during antiwar periods, are at best ambivalent about films portraying their soldiers as victims, fools, or—worse—bloodthirsty nuts. The late literary historian Paul Fussell also argued that there is a psychological and mythical cycle, going perhaps as far back as Homer, about how sanguinary wars are depicted on the page or screen. The cycle, in some ways, parallels the cycle of grieving. There may be an initial phase of angry realism, but often instead artists for a time are detached or silent from the war. Case in point: it took about a decade from the beginning or end of  both WWI and Vietnam for those wars to be treated in generation-defining books and films like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, In the case of the Vietnam War, Hollywood first told the story by indirection—for example, in Robert Altman’s MASH!, set in Korea, but really about Vietnam.

Only then, are such wars memorialized as the epics they were. Oliver Stone may think of his Platoon (1988) primarily as an antiwar movie, but it is probably better viewed as an update of Homer’s Iliad about archetypal warriors experiencing “heroic” emotions of courage, hubris, and revenge. More clearly, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1999)—the biggest-grossing war movie before American Sniper—was a film about heroism in the midst of war not an ode against war, despite all the realistic blood-and-gore.

Why all the visceral negative reaction to American Sniper from the left despite the fact that, in its melodramatic aspects, it is arguably a more effective plea against war than The Hurt Locker, 2009’s Best Picture.

Here are these two differences: Hurt Locker was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman  to win the Best Director Award. And Hurt Locker had three main leads—not one like Bradley Cooper playing Chris Kyle in American Sniper—despite Jeremy Renner’s particularly memorable performance. This difference diffused criticism of Hurt Locker for glorifying one central gung ho hero in the person of Chris Kyle.

Indeed, I would argue that it is Chris Kyle’s hypermasculine persona, both in his autobiography and played by Bradley Cooper, that is the barely-disguised subtext of much of the criticism, especially in the blogosphere. We are over twenty years into a “long war” between “metrosexuals”—and their gay and transgender allies—against the rearguard action by John Wayne-worshipping men who love to withdraw into the woods and tell stories around the campfire “Iron John”-fashion or practice “lumberexuality”—a term coined recently by Willa Brown in the Atlantic for men who like to dress up like lumberjacks when trying to pick up girls.

Eighty-four year old Clint Eastwood—whose step father, in a wonderful poetic touch, was actually a lumber magnate—represents one pole (though in his film version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Eastwood tried to empathize with the unstraight), while geriatric Alan Alda—emerging as the first “metrosexual”  in his role as Hawkeye in the tv version of MASH!—represents the other.

Maybe this is the underground war which the Hollywood left is really fighting in detesting Chris Kyle and dissing Eastwood.