ABSTRACT

Eastwood’s defense of Dirty Harry in the context of the critical controversy that the film provoked really makes matters worse rather than better. I do not mean by that to simply reject the political options that Eastwood takes here, but to point out one way in which his self-presentation is coincident with that of the industry in which he works; coincident, too, with the narrative structures of Hollywood. That is, he is apparently willing to espouse the politics represented in the fantasized narratives of American cinema and speak of them as if they were applicable to the politics of everyday life. One way of saying this is that in those comments the fantasy becomes the equivalent of reality. His responses are thus importantly different from Siegel’s “realist” position, which is able to distinguish sharply between the task of representing reality and the gesture of endorsing the politics implied or depicted in the representation. Eastwood on the other hand acts, as I have suggested, more or less as a functionary, or as if he were a mouthpiece for the industry.