The Purpose of Clint Eastwood

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was listening to the latest The Big Picture podcast on Friday morning, this specific episode being a retrospective on Clint Eastwood’s career with the release of Clint’s latest, Cry Macho, in theaters and HBO Max. Sean Fennessey is the host, with two guests - Adam Nayman and Chris Ryan - appearing this week to give their top 5 Clint films. Early on, they were chatting about Clint in general when the following (edited for clarity) points were noted (about 4 minutes in), the topic being why Clint Eastwood… at 91 years of age… is still making movies:

Adam Nayman: “But this is past that, this is one of the last men standing… Clint has written and directed and starred in what is probably going to be a pretty profitable movie and it’s unreal that he keeps doing this because, why does he keep doing this? Is it pleasure? Is it compulsion? Big question.”

Chris Ryan: “I can’t help but feel that he (Clint) felt he had to do this before it was too late. And that there was something about making this movie which was him saying ‘I will always have a place and a purpose… as long as I am behind a camera. As long as I am making movies, I will always have a sense of purpose, a sense of worth, a sense of place’.”

There have been a million and one expositions on Clint Eastwood and American masculinity, and Lord knows I didn’t begin this life or even this week with the intent on writing another one. But… let’s go ahead and talk to the above quotes, for they actually do touch on an underappreciated and underdiscussed aspect of American masculinity and how it ties to Adam’s question above: the need for men to have purpose .

Imgur

The Bear, the Lion, and my Grandfather

His health failing, his team finishing 6th in an SEC he dominated just a few years prior, Paul “Bear” Bryant announced his upcoming retirement as head coach of the University of Alabama football team at the end of the season, this finally occurring after Alabama beat the University of Illinois in the 1983 Liberty Bowl. When asked after the game what he planned on doing next, the Bear simply responded “Probably croak in a week.”

He lasted four, dying on January 26th, 1983.

Imgur

->->->Fast forward 18 years->->->

January 2001, a few months after moving into the retirement community, my grandfather passes away from what my grandmother called “boredom.” “Jimmy had nothing to do, he just sat here with his energy and he had nowhere to put it. He didn’t have his house to upkeep, his garden to tend, his trees to prune”, she said.

Of course, she passed away within a year, preferring to join her Jimmy in heaven than wait w/o him on Earth. She had spent every day from 1928-2001 with the man and wanted more. Good for her!
Imgur
->->->Fast forward 10 years->->->

Up until November, Penn State Nittany Lion’s football coach Joe Paterno was having a fantastic 2011. Then his former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, gets arrested for pedophilia-related charges regarding incidents which occurred at Penn State, Paterno gets fired at the same time his son announces he has a treatable form of lung cancer, the treatment of which kills Joe Paterno a mere 2 months after the Sandusky arrest.

Regardless, just like Bryant: While he was still coaching football, nobody was saying “Joe Paterno is near death, let’s win this for Joe”. No, he was having a good season. His health wasn’t great, but nobody in September 2011 was predicting a January 2012 funeral for JoePa, nobody . But… past sins caught up with the man, he lost his job, and, because of this, passed away 2 months later.
Imgur
How to Kill a Man

All told, men are pretty simple creatures. Just not going to lie about that. But one thing which is underappreciated by most people, both women and men, is men’s need for purpose and its impact on their health.

Chris answered Adam’s question above – making films is what gives Clint purpose. And unless Clint has plans on what to do after he can no longer make movies, once he realizes directing is beyond him it is likely that he will pass within a year or two, solely because his purpose was removed. So if you want to kill Clint, it is simple: just stop funding his movies. Remove his reason for living. If you want to keep him alive, give him $10-40 million/year so he can continue the most comprehensive career in Hollywood history.

You remove a man’s ability to serve their purpose and they can literally die.

Bear Bryant, Joe Paterno, my grandfather, more… all of them lost the will to live once they could no longer serve their purpose. And while my examples are largely career oriented, men can also find their reason for being in a lot of things – their religion, their family, their golf game, hell, even their anger. And when they lose this, when men can no longer continue serving their purpose, their health inevitably declines.

And this goes for life events as well. If you know a man going through negative life changes: deaths, divorce, empty nest, financial issues, lost job… have a talk with him, try to see where his head is at. Understanding that much of their purpose of the past years, decades, is now gone, talk to him and find where or what he is finding new purpose in. Constantly getting angry at something seen online? Red flag. Going to the gym? Good sign.

This isn’t hard, it just takes people who care enough to ask and who also understand that the problem isn’t the immediate issue, it’s the unmooring of preset habits and change/loss of purpose.

Imgur

2

(Obviously, while this is about Clint, it’s not really about Clint. That’s why IMHO, not CS.)

3

Or they weren’t creative enough to make new purposes that they could still accomplish in their later years.

In MY humble opinion, there are a lot of wild over-generalizations about what “men” are like here, and I don’t buy them. Millions of men every year retire, many from jobs that they really liked or even loved, and yet manage to live productively and/or happily for another 20 years or more. You don’t mention why your grandparents moved into a retirement community, or at what age, so I am going to assume it had something to do with health issues around aging. Lots of people don’t like retirement communities – my father tried it after my mother died, and left in under a year. He didn’t roll over and turn his face to the wall, he chose something else. There are a lot of different kinds of purposes in the world, and woe is the person (not just men, by the way) who can’t or won’t figure out something new for themselves when their original “life’s work” is no longer viable. That becomes more true as people live longer.

What you’ve written may be, or even probably is true for the particular examples you picked, and for a subset of men, but it’s not true for all or even most men.

4

Yep, just going to agree with everything @Roderick_Femm said there.

5

Same here.

Take Vin Scully, radio announcer for the LA Dodgers for 67 years. He retired in 2016 at age 88 and did not keel over two weeks later*.

  • — he’s still going strong, today, at a spry 93.
6

As usual, @Roderick_Femm has nailed it.

Eastwood really loves directing movies. It’s what keeps him happy. It doesn’t need to go any deeper than that.

7

I’ll agree with the premise that the reaction to an abrupt termination of one’s life work varies a great deal with the individual, and it’s not something one can reliably generalize about for all people. Nevertheless, I think there are strong elements of truth in what @JohnT says that applies to many creative, passionate individuals. I believe, moreover, that what has euphemistically been called “the will to live” is very much a real thing for many, that sustains them not just in the throes of a life-threatening illness, but sustains them, too, in the day-to-day life of their sunset years.

And that’s all I have to say about that. Back to Clint Eastwood, although I have no particularly great affection for the man or many of the characters he played, and I think (and he probably now agrees) that he made an ass of himself with the “empty chair” fiasco at the 2012 Republican Convention, he’s directed some impressive films.

I thought The Mule was going to be his last film, his swan song, as it were, and it probably should have been, as Cry Macho has been getting mediocre reviews. The song that runs with the end credits, Don’t Let the Old Man In, written and performed for The Mule by Toby Keith, was inspired by a conversation Keith had with Eastwood. I’m no fan of country music but this is a lovely and haunting song that is as much of a tribute to Eastwood as a theme song for the film. The film is well worth watching, and the song well worth hearing, especially for those of us reflecting on our lives as history gone by.

Here’s a YouTube montage of clips from the film with the song as background.

Bit of an article about that here:

8

Eastwood is now directing movies starring an old person (i.e., himself) who is belongs to a group who few other people want to make movies about (i.e., people his age). And it will be profitable for the companies who funded it, so it’s not the case that they are throwing away money on his movies. It won’t be a blockbuster, but it will be a reasonable investment for them. It’s not the case that nobody his age ever makes films. Consider the case of the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira:

He made some documentaries and short films up till he turned 64 but only a couple of fictional feature films. He then made many fictional feature films, actually increasing the speed at which he made them as time went along. The last one came out when he was 103. He died at 106.

I liked Cry Macho reasonably well. I want to see movies about every age group, every ethnic group, every sex, every sexual preference, every gender identity, every economic group, from every city and country in the world, about every subject. One of the most interesting things about it, incidentally, is the history of its screenplay. It’s been passed around Hollywood since the early 1970s, several times almost getting made:

9

I saw Cry Macho and thought it wasn’t that good and thought about why Clint would make such a film as his possibly last one to star in. The only reason I could think of was that he wanted it to be said that he was making movies until he was in his 90’s and that in itself was significant accomplishment.

The Mule was good and would have been a crowning achievement for anyone else. But Clint just had to do one more even though it was subpar for him and probably made just to round out his legacy. Cry Macho just made me feel sad for him, trying to portray a macho tough old man that he isn’t any longer.

But Clint knows history will just remember his enormously great body of work and ignore this final one just to have the tagline of producing and starring in movies into his 90’s.

In comparison, I much prefer the way Burt Reynolds went out with his final film. Clint might still direct, but I think his days on the screen are over now.

10

Whether or not the scenario painted by the OP is valid, I believe, depends on individual personalities. I think men dedicated to a single purpose to the point of obsession are much more vulnerable than men who are open to change and new experiences.

11

By dying before filming started?

12

I don’t see him listed in the link for acting credits anywhere.

I am of course referring to The Last Movie Star. Even though his wiki shows some minor works posthumous.

13

“Burt Reynolds was cast as Spahn, but died before filming and was replaced by Bruce Dern.[70] Reynolds did a rehearsal and script reading, his last performance. After reading the script and learning that Pitt would be portraying Booth, Reynolds told Tarantino, “You gotta have somebody say, ‘You’re pretty for a stunt guy.’” The line appears in the film, spoken to Booth by Bruce Lee.”

14

I once read (but can’t find now) a really fascinating 1930s psychology paper on crises of identity

No, really, it’s interesting!

The initial example was victims of con artists. Think “The Sting”. The con is elaborate - a scheme to defraud someone else due to access to forbidden info on horses or stocks. You, the mark, are essentially presented with a new identity by the swindlers - you’re a pretty sharp character with a lot of nerve. Then the con carries through and you discover you are not pretty sharp: you’re a rube, a dupe, a patsy, a clown who came to teh big city and got conned out of their savings. Even if you don’t tell the police, you’re going to have to admit this identity to someone - a business partner, a wife or husband, even just yourself in the mirror.

It’s a huge psychological wrench. You are not who you thought you were. Con gangs knew what a big deal it was and devoted a surprising amount of time to “cooling the mark off” - helping them come to terms with their new role, essentially. Because sudden changes in your identity - how you see yourself and how you think others see you - are A Big Deal.

The article listed some other potential crises of identity, which were very much of their time - the girlfriend who does NOT become a fiancee, for example, but others were still relevant - the employee who doesn’t get the promotion they thought they were on track for and, of course, the retiree.

If a person has a big chunk of their personal identity invested in their work, then retirement is a crisis point. Either they’ll find a new role for themselves (gardening, golf, good works) or they don’t and find themselves uncertain of their place in life and plagued by anomie and alienation. I agree with @Roderick_Femm that saying this is a problem for “men” is too reductive but I suspect there is a large chunk of previous male generations who were socialised to identify themselves with work - whether as a worker on an assembly line, or a company man executive, a big part of how they saw themselves in the era of 30-40 year single-employer careers was defined by their work. When that goes, some will adapt and some won’t.

15

This is really interesting. Jimmy’s death for lack of purpose is a tragedy - grandmother’s death because she had no reason to live without Jimmy is to be celebrated.

I’d argue that her death shows just as great a lack of purpose/loss of identity as his. Why wouldn’t we want her to mourn her loss and then find something new to live for?

16

I think a lot of people in the arts would be the same.
For Clint, his work isn’t what he does, it is what he is. He probably can’t imagine not doing it as long as the body is willing.

17

See also Andy Murray, currently entering tournaments he would have seen as beneath him when he was 17 and losing. He says he just loves playing tennis, but I suspect at root he just can’t see himself as Not A Tennis Player Anymore.

(The “Resurfacing” documentary on his treament is too long and very repetitive, but at one point he sends the documentary maker a late-night text message which says something like:

“When I was young a gunman came into school and killed a class full of kids. I knew the guy - we’d given him lifts in our car. Then my parents got divorced and my older brother went to Spain. Tennis was all I had to keep me going.”)

There’s a lot to unpack there, but it’s clear that he won’t be letting go of tennis easily, and when he does he will find it very tough.

18

The ones who retire happily, though, move on to other purposes. I’ve know a few who did not, and they were incredibly miserable.

That said, it’s precisely the same for women. This isn’t just a man thing.

This reminds me of people who wonder why some old 68-year-old musician is still out touring. Well, it’s usually because they love performing music. It’s that simple.

“The Mule” was pretty bad, too, IMHO, often verging into self-parody. But hey, it’s his life and he’s probably financing the movies too. He can do what he wants.

In fifty years no one will remember “Cry Macho,” but they’ll still remember “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Oh and “Pale Rider,” “Mystic River,” and “Play Misty For Me.” The guy has directed a lot of terrific movies.

19

He doesn’t think of any of his recent movies as his last one to star in. Nobody knows when they’re going to die. They don’t know when they will no longer be able to make them. I think that movie people choose to leave their career much less often than you think. It’s not like a lot of jobs where you more or less get forced out at some particular age. It’s more a matter of working until no one wants to pay you for doing anything in movies or you’re bored by what they offer you to do. You should see movies because they are good, not because you think you can understand the “purpose” of the film or the people who’ve made it.

20

I don’t think we have evidence of it in a scientific sense, but I definitely agree with @wolfpup there is a “will to live” element to living. I hate to ever pluralize anecdote as data, but there’s just too many instances where two healthy pairs of a long-term couple die within a short span of each other, often the second dying spouse had no known serious medical issues. And the Bear Bryant effect has been seen in a decent number of people that it’s a little hard to guess it may not have some psychosomatic element.

But I also agree with @Roderick_Femm it’s only a subset of people who are like this, certainly not all men. There’s a lot of good examples of it too, even in very prominent roles. For example remember Pope Benedict? That guy is still trucking and he retired from the papacy 8 years ago, due to infirmity and ill health related to age.