Clint Eastwood directed and starred in Gran Torino, a wildly popular movie, as Walt Kowalski, an aging white savior action hero Archie Bunker whose racist and gruff demeanor hides a caring heart as he protects his neighbors from the growing violent element in Detroit. Now I understand why everyone really cares about Presidon’t’s supporters’ feelings. When they say that deep down inside, these people are really good people, they are thinking of Gran Torino, which is a great fictional story that I enjoyed if I didn’t think too long about it. People bemoan movies as dangerous for causing violence, but the most threatening movies in society are rom coms and this movie.
Let me explain what Gran Torino would have you believe about our society. All the criminal elements in once great community are caused by an influx of minorities, specifically young male immigrants, Latino and black men, never young white men, who are victims. The younger white people are soft, selfish people who just want stuff without earning it. How do you earn it? You go to war and work with your hands. Any other type of work is not really work and builds zero character. Even though there are men in the Hmong community, only Walt can teach a teenager, Thao, how to become a real man. Why? He is Clint Eastwood.
I wish that the most insidious fictional element of Gran Torino were true: the person hurling racial epithets at you would sacrifice his life for you and is insulting you as a friendly overture, which is why those insulted should just ignore those words and assume that good things will follow despite all evidence to the contrary. Usually a racial epithet indicates the opposite and precipitates a hostile act, physical or psychological, or at least means turning a blind eye, but this movie erases reality and wants us to plumb the depth’s of Walt’s soul while only giving a superficial exploration of the gangs in the area. If the movie was more consistent in understanding all its characters’ motives instead of just stringing together a bunch of tropes, I think that I would have less of a problem with the movie’s efforts to twist itself into pretzels to make us like Walt. For a great example of this charitable treatment of bad characters, see Can You Ever Forgive Me?
I’m not saying that Walt isn’t likeable. He is Clint Eastwood and was in fifty-seven movies before this one, not counting the TV series that he appeared in. He is an icon and comes with a storehouse of good will. If anyone else played Walt or made this movie, we wouldn’t automatically start liking him and assuming that he is right. If you knew someone like Walt, even if he was the same race as you, you wouldn’t like him. Walt is an emotionally withholding, distant father and grandfather; an unfriendly, mean neighbor; a rude host. It is only due to a misunderstanding that he gains the Hmong community’s trust, and he only likes them because they shower him with presents and adulation. When he says that he has more in common with his neighbors than his family, I really wanted him to list what they actually had in common other than his misguided belief that his view of the world is right and should be rewarded. He was protecting his property more than his neighbors, but because he finally had positive reinforcement for his ordinary socially inappropriate behavior, he continued along that track.
If we’re honest with ourselves, Gran Torino is really enjoyable because without the story explicitly referencing Eastwood’s resume, as a collective audience, we’ve tacitly agreed that Walt is actually a symbol for an aging action anti-hero like Harry Callahan or the Man With No Name. We want him to pull his vigilante schtick. These guys can be awful grandparents and fathers because they embody our cinematic ideals of masculinity. Unfortunately if you are dangerous enough to apply his ideals in real life, you don’t get action Archie Bunker, you get George Zimmerman or Bernard Goetz. In real life, Walt would also be a criminal.
Gran Torino is almost four minutes shy of two hours, but it isn’t until fifty-five minutes in that Walt and Thao begin to have a relationship. Before that, Walt primarily interacts with Sue, Thao’s sister, played by Ahney Her. I was initially really excited that an Asian woman had such a large role in a popular movie, especially since Sue is a smart, tough and kind character. Sue also plays an essential role in making Walt likeable. Because she understands what Walt is saying and does not mind, we take social cues from her. She also acts as (the viewer and) Walt’s patient guide into her community. There is an early scene that hints that in spite of Sue seeming like an independent and endearing three-dimensional character, she only serves a limited function as a catalyst for men to act, but there is little to no exploration of her character’s reaction to a traumatic event. She does not feel like one, but she is a disposable woman. I found this fridging of a pivotal character to be the most disappointing narrative trope in the movie because it is gratuitous though not depicted. In the end, she does not really matter. Most of the girls and women in this movie are dead or jerks, but the one nice one is soon rendered as silent as the women whom Walt and we do not understand except through their physical demeanor. I understand that we are supposed to see things through Walt’s eyes, and he does not have the benefit of subtitles, but this film’s view of women and prioritizing of Walt’s relationship with Thao even though Sue was the emotional center of the movie seems retroactively just as toxic as Walt’s vigilantism.
Gran Torino is the symbol of American acceptance and bestowed upon Thao as Walt’s real heir and the son that he never had. It is supposed to be the fruit of American labor. Walt gives the life that he wanted to Thao without any of the toxic masculinity and the trauma, but where does that leave Sue? Does Sue not get anything as the daughter that he never had? In the end, your race or ethnicity does not matter, but your gender does, and whether or not you’re a good girl, you get zip. Even Hollywood’s fantasy of unity can’t fathom a world in which women matter. They exist to be denied or ruined.
I enjoyed watching Gran Torino. It was entertaining, but don’t try this at home folks. It is just a movie. Skip the insults and racial epithets and just be a good neighbor instead of pretending that your worst characteristics hide a better person without actually doing anything good or self-sacrificial. You aren’t Clint Eastwood, and you never will be. Even Clint Eastwood isn’t Clint Eastwood. During his military service, he never left poolside, I mean stateside.