ABSTRACT
There is the beginning of a shift in the shape of Eastwood’s public image that roughly coincides with the release of Pale Rider in 1985 and Heartbreak Ridge in 1986. The first of these two movies constitutes, as I have argued (see “Restitution”), the reconstruction of the western genre after the damage done to it by the first big movies of Eastwood’s career, and it is a film that resolves into what is almost the exact type of the western. Heartbreak, by the same token, is perfectly consonant with Hollywood’s general project of fusing cultural and cinematic verisimilitudes; despite the disagreement between Malpaso and the Department of Defense mentioned earlier (see “Servicemen”), that project remains. With these movies (the first especially), Eastwood begins to receive attention from the tributary media that, in degree, he has not seen since the days of the spaghetti westerns and the “Harry” movies, and that, in kind, he has not seen before at all. That is, the restitutional gesture that Pale Rider constitutes seems to have concentrated the attention of the media on Eastwood to an unprecedented degree. The years 1985 and 1986 saw an unusually high number of major spreads on the star in the press: from Rolling Stone and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, through Us and Newsweek, to 50 Plus, Eastwood was feted on a regular basis. That degree of media attention increased even further during 1986, when he began campaigning for office as mayor of Carmel-an episode I shall look at later. But in relation to Eastwood the filmmaker, it could be surmised that the media were responding to the clear reestablishment of the classic Hollywood parameters in Pale Rider, or that they were simply joining Heartbreak on the bandwagon of Reagan-era support for military adventurism, so-called patriotism, and so on. Or else the new attention might have been encouraged by the fact that Eastwood, making his first serious attempt to win a prize at the Cannes film festival with Pale Rider in 1985, was now self-consciously beginning to take
advantage of the higher critical esteem in which his product is held in Europe, and that this gesture provoked the American media to begin to take his work more seriously Indeed, one of the major articles on Eastwood during these years is entitled, “Clint Eastwood, Seriously,” by John Vinocur, and is constructed around his early-1985 promotional tour around Europe (New York Times Magazine, 24 Feb. 1985, 16ff); another, in Newsweek (22 July 1985, 48ff.) specifically tries to claim him as “an American icon,” stressing throughout the ways he and his films embody the so-called traditional American values. But aside from the sheer amount of coverage Eastwood receives at this time, the nature of the attention is also interesting and different. The article by Vinocur in the New York Times Magazine marks the change in an exemplary way, making much of the fact of its own gesture; that is, it wonders throughout about this man who has been “treated as a third-rater for so long, respected so late” and who has become “terribly significant, almost overnight.”
