ABSTRACT
The Esquire feature on Clint Eastwood (14 Mar. 1978) from which the first epigraph is taken is one of the many that have appeared over the years in the tributary media and magazines, celebrating Eastwood as man and as star. In this instance the journalist Jean Valleley follows Eastwood on his daily round at his home in Carmel, seeming to be especially intrigued by his exercise routine and watching him build his body for the hard work that he puts it through when making films. At that point in his life, Eastwood was apparently able to submit himself to two one-hour sessions of exercise every day, including repeated sets of sit-ups, weight training, and work with punching bags. In addition to all this he would play tennis, run, or play golf (the latter of which “I don’t consider exercise, all that standing around with a lot of blood in my feet” [39]). The article justifies the near obsessiveness of Eastwood’s fitness routine by repeating the shibboleth about his performances that seems to have so much impressed the tributary media over the years: “He does most of his own stunts, like jumping off a bridge onto a moving bus in Dirty Harry and mountain climbing in The Eiger Sanction” (40). The body that Eastwood builds for his most typical performances is a body that, as I have suggested, is destined to disappear in the end, and yet it must submit itself along the way to the harsh regimes of the action. It is a body that must at least appear to be both powerful enough to be indestructible and experienced and at the same time ordinary enough to be able to disappear. The typical Eastwood performance is, then, a performance of the body as it is carried through the phases of objectification, destruction, and resolutory hypostasis.
