Did these damn fool critics expect Dirty Harry to suck up to craven officials and the likes of Obama?The Rosett Report » Clint Eastwood’s Finest Hour
Posted By Claudia Rosett On September 1, 2012
Lucky for Clint Eastwood that he has a sense of humor. He’ll need it, if he tries to wade through some of the zanier criticism inspired by his appearance at the Republican National Convention [1]. From the left, he’s being mocked as rambling, strange, and obsessed with empty chairs. The LA Times is wondering “Did Clint Eastwood tarnish his film legacy [2]?” Among folks not otherwise dedicated to supporting Mitt Romney, Eastwood also seems to have aroused a lot of oddly charitable concern, that he distracted attention from the candidate, or detracted from the seriousness of the occasion, or wasted valuable Republican airtime.
So far, I’d say the standout bizarre critique is a New York Times piece by a professor of medical ethics, Jonathan Moreno, on “What the Chair Could Have Told Clint [3].” Moreno begins by claiming that Eastwood, in interviewing an empty chair as a stand-in for President Obama, was appropriating a psychotherapeutic technique developed by Moreno’s psychiatrist father, about a century ago. Moreno goes on to suggest that Eastwood, instead of lampooning the absent president, should have put himself in the chair, and tried to see things from Obama’s point of view. By not doing that, writes Moreno, “Mr. Eastwood wasted an important educational and therapeutic moment from which our deadlocked political system could benefit; putting himself in the role of the other person of whom he is critical and coming to understand that person’s point of view ‘from inside.’ ”
We can now entertain ourselves by imagining what Dirty Harry would say to that.
Which brings me to the main point. Clint Eastwood has built a film career in which the most iconic moments — those for which he is most often invoked, and acclaimed — involve a character who takes a beating for doing what he sees as the right thing, from Dirty Harry to Gran Torino’s Walt Kowalski. When Dirty Harry defies the craven officials ...
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