A short thought today I have not seen anywhere else:
Several years ago in one of the few television interviews the filmmaker give, Clint Eastwood described an event at a party he once attended. Soon after the release of Dirty Harry, the veteran director was approached by someone critical of his movie.
"Your movie is a Fascist masterpiece!" I guess the partygoer could not resist. The way Eastwood tells it you are to understand this was a gushing drunk.
At that point in the interview, Clint broke that famous unyielding gaze of his for moment and quoted himself with a laugh, "Yeah, but as long as you liked it."
. . . at least that is the way I remember it. I found a reference to the same episode on the Internet--is there nothing out there one cannot find?
http://www.the-dirtiest.com/...
Yeah, what Eastwood presents in Dirty Harry is not intentionally a political message in Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry as a fascist does stretch things; the filmaker claims he just wanted to represent a frustrated police officer. If you allow me to stretch things a bit myself, a latent--and likely unintended--economic message is hidden in the recent, now famous superbowl ad is that the American auto industry, the American workers and the rest of us by extension do not care where the chances come from. We just want our chance to roar back.
To borrow a phrase circulating in China two decades ago as it accelerated its own economic reforms, we do not care if the cat is black or the cat is white as long as it catches a mouse.* If a chance to do well comes before us we are not consciously political or ideological. The lender, a market or the taxpayer, is immaterial; what counts is that we are given a chance. Do you think I cared whether someting was Keynesian when I sought my long education? I was given a State Student Loan, a Federal Student loan, an NIH grant, and a loan from Suntrust (later sold to Deutsche Bank.)
Let me leave with two observations. First comes a political message from Joan Walsh:
"If Clint Eastwood sounded like Obama, it's because the GOP has ceded optimism to the Democrats"
http://www.salon.com/...
Next a more profound thought from David Kehr, by way of PBS:
“Eastwood remains impossible to pin down ideologically — despite the facile charges of "fascism" he faced in the 1970s — it's because he has never forced these values into tidy, artificial reconciliation. The ambivalence runs deep in Eastwood's work, just as it does in American life.”
http://www.pbs.org/...
h
*Check out the comments here (page 2) for an interesting tidbit
ttp://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145184551/the-friday-podcast-the-secret-document-that-transformed-china