The Modernism Post

Although this blog is still looking very bare and innocent, I can’t stand to deflower it with course work. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to have a rant about the last movie I saw, because despite the appalling acting therein, Clint Eastwood's latest urban western is the best thing I've seen at cinemas in a few years. Judging a film by its acting quality is akin to judging a novel by its printing quality, and a blurry character here and there won’t ruin Gran Torino.

A few movies have recently attempted to tackle the issue of racism by using an exaggerated scope to compensate for an inability to form a decent argument. Oscar-winner Crash figured that a bunch of short stories with one-dimensional morals amounts to a multi-dimensional discourse, and coattail-rider Babel ended up imitating the eponymous babble rather than analysing it. The rationale, I think, for these sorts of all-encompassing storylines is to make totalised arguments all the more impossible, thus justifying the film’s lack of conviction or articulation. Really then, it's just a failure of nerve.

Enter Clint.

The only time that Clint Eastwood was ever unsure about anything was when he forgot how many bullets he’d fired, and even then he wasn’t fussed. So if anyone has balls enough to examine the American psyche from the focused, unflinching perspective of the individual rather than withdraw to the impersonal perspective of the society, it’s him. And whoever did American History X.

Gran Torino’s Clint is an incredibly racist old coot who perceives the immigration of people and the emigration of jobs as causing or exhibiting some downfall of American society. A Detroit ex-labourer, he laments to see the nation that invented the automobile walk away from it; but as he gets to know his decent neighbours and compares them with the shallow remains of his family it becomes clear to whom he should pass on the torch of the American soul. (Don’t worry, it’s not nearly as melodramatic as I just sounded.)

And that’s pretty much it. A simple, but original and well-stated point. If I must make an effort to in some way relate this post to our course, I think that this film stands as a good counterpoint to Burgin’s defamation of the narrative in the first reading. There’s certainly merit – aesthetically and critically – in naturalistic collages (or ‘rebuses’, as Burgin calls them) like Rose Hobart, but in movies like Crash or Babel that are intended to actually address a real problem these modernist modes seem like an excuse for fruitlessness. Gran Torino, simply by saying something – anything – proves wrong their self-defeatism and reaffirms the value of linearity and microscopy in the narrative.

Okay, I admit to trying to invoke the ire of disagreement a bit there (‘trolling’, to use the lingo). But let me know what you think anyway!

Sorry for the sore, eyes – sprucing up of layout to come.