ABSTRACT
In Pink Cadillac Tommy marks the inception of his alliance with Lou Ann by vainly reminding himself, “This is so wrong.” He continues regardless, and finds himself pulled into the narrative lines of force that I have described. This reminder to himself is interesting in that it indicates how for the male protagonist to enter such an alliance he must drop or at least loosen some kind of moral code. This in its turn entails a confrontation with or a turning away from the forces in the diegesis that define the cultural stakes of what it is supposed to mean to be masculine. It may be that this ignoring of the phallic stakes of such codes is necessary for the appearance of the hysterical residues that I have been adumbrating. That is, these hysterical residues can be understood as the tics and gestures dependent upon a kind of negligence and even guilt in relation to the phallic regime. To posit such a guilt would not, of course, contradict Freud’s understanding of the hysterical symptom, which is for him a certain kind of debilitation occasioned by guilt about childhood pleasures and sexual awakenings. The alliance with the woman, then, produces hysterical symptoms that bespeak guilt over the remaking of pleasure. But there are also perhaps other kinds of guilt attached to these symptoms. One is suggested in what Eastwood says in the epigraph I have used above, and is particularly apparent in the movie about which Eastwood is speaking, Heartbreak Ridge (1987). That guilt derives from the recognition of having ignored the claims of women (and of feminism) to what we might call, for want of a better term, equal emotional rights. As I have been suggesting, that concern is one that has operated as an increasingly important thematic element in many of Eastwood’s films since The Enforcer. It is in Heartbreak Ridge, however, that the concern reaches a kind of climactic point. But, as I shall attempt to say, it is a
climactic point that tries to leave the earlier explorations behind, that tries, in other words, to tie up loose ends in the narrative of this concern and turn the explorations to their proper and righteous conclusions.
