Thick as Thieves

Clint Eastwood -Talk to the Chair

*spoilers for more or less every single film mentioned in this article*

Last year, when Clint Eastwood showed up at the Republican national Convention and angrily debated America’s future with a chair, I don’t think I was alone in being horror-tained. The segment wouldn’t end, it made little conceptual sense (pretending your rhetorical opponent is there even though he’s not, without any other creative thought going into the bit), and weirdest of all, it wasn’t even accurate, as Invisible Chair Obama wasn’t arguing anything remotely close to what Visible Actual Obama has ever said. So most of America wrote the whole thing off as the rantings of a cranky old coot, an aging curmudgeon doing what aging curmudgeons do: bitching and moaning about the way America used to be and blaming minorities for the way things are.

Only this particular aging curmudgeon isn’t your grandpa. He’s Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood who, half a year prior, had been accused of starring in a pro-Obama superbowl ad: Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” spot, wherein Clint argued that America’s “second half was about to begin,” and that we shouldn’t give up just because we were down. Frankly, I found the accusations of the commercial being pro-Obama to be a little paranoid, but considering Clint’s politics (or what I’d thought to be his politics), I guess I could understand the resulting hysterics.

I assumed Clint’s politics to be fairly left-leaning, mainly because of his films. Well, that’s not true. I thought he was a lefty because of his film, Million Dollar Baby. To me it felt (feels) like the only Eastwood film with a strongly political message, i.e. the right to die movement, weighing in so heavily on the issue of euthanasia that it may as well have been a paean to it,  near-manipulative in how it paints who’s right and who’s wrong. Coming down on the side of euthanasia (and by pure coincidence, just before the Terry Schiavo incident), Baby seemed to brand Eastwood as a rare being—a liberal cowboy.

Except really Baby isn’t a leftist screed at all, and when you look again, at least at its political stripes, it comes off as just another crazy-grandpa diatribe from an old crank. Like the villain in Unforgiven (Gene Hackman’s Little Bill) who—horrors!—outlawed guns, or the little kids in Mystic River, who killed the girl because of those damned violent videowhatchamacallits the kids are always playing with, Baby is packed to the brim with cartoon characters who exist pretty much just to be cartoonish and to get some rantin’ and ravin’ off grandpa’s chest. Look at Maggie’s family, for instance, the repugnant clan who treat her like shit until she gets money, then try to get her to sign a will with her teeth—and who also, as the film gratuitously mentions, are on welfare (damn welfare families, stealin’ my checks!).

Or look at Morgan Freeman in his umpteenth role as a second-string Uncle Tom who stands politely on the sidelines and narrates the virtues of the really awesome white guy he’s friends with. Freeman once played Joe Clark in Lean On Me, a badass motherfucker of a high school principal who claimed, “I don’t gotta do nothing except stay black and die.” But then I guess Samuel L. Jackson started taking all those roles and Freeman happily stepped aside for white people to hang out center stage while he played sidekick and spent the film talking about their virtues: Driving Miss Daisy, Unforgiven, The Bucket List, Se7en—shit, even when he plays God in Bruce Almighty, he has to step aside and make a white dude the center of the universe. It’s unsurprising, then, that Freeman and Eastwood are frequent collaborators. I don’t know which one of them built the mold and which one of them fit it, but I do know that once I realized what a Trojan Horse for conservative ideals Million Dollar Baby was, I started thinking of yet another Freeman film.

The Shawshank Redemption is beloved—and rightly so. I don’t want to step on any toes here (the film has been rated #1 at imdb pretty much since that website’s inception, and there’s a reason it plays twenty-six times a day on TNT). I love it to death and can quote it backwards and forwards—impressive for a three-hour film. But what’s always confused me about it is that it is, indeed, universally embraced, even—especially—by my rather conservative friends and students. This is confusing because it a) takes place in the left-leaning Northeast and purports to espouse those values, b) was written by the notoriously liberal writer Stephen King, c) is staunchly anti-death penalty and pro-reform, and d) stars the notoriously liberal activist Tim Robbins (who followed the film up with Dead Man Walking, another anti-DP film). My conservative friends (and conservatives in general) believe firmly that prisoners aren’t very valuable human beings; they’re against prisoners having voting rights; they’re in favor of capital punishment; they believe we should spend as little as possible on food and amenities for prisoners; they don’t even question the length of prison sentences, the horrible conditions, or whether the punishment fits any one prisoner’s alleged crime. And yet these same friends of mine have screennames like Andy37927, and send me youtube videos paying homage to specific shots and scenes. Hmm.

Well first, let’s just dispel the obvious counter-argument that I’m sure you or they or anyone reading this will make, which is that Shawshank is just a film, and that just because I have trouble separating my entertainment and my politics, it doesn’t mean everyone else does. Well, okay, except lovers of Shawshank don’t look at this thing like it’s just a movie. I’ve had at least twenty students write about the film’s values and sensibility and teaching methods for my class. There are message boards and forums all over the internet whereupon people argue about it. My aforementioned conservative friends point to it, like a racist person showing pictures of his one black friend, in defense whenever I tell them they’re single-minded in their worldview, as if to say that by being a fan of the film, you’re embracing liberal values themselves.

Except that, like Million Dollar Baby, it’s actually shockingly conservative, when you think about it. For one thing, while it does expose the prison system as corrupt, that system works—Red is indeed reformed by the end, as demonstrated by his final speech to the parole office (“I want to see my younger self and shake some sense into him. There isn’t a day I don’t regret what I did”), so you have to rethink all the violence the guards did to the prisoners in the preceding two-and-a-half hours and realize that maybe it was for the best. And sure, Brooks get institutionalized, but Brooks is about three-hundred years old, and while he does hang himself, I’m pret-ty sure he was gonna die soon anyway (sorry). And on the subject of reform and police brutality, what’s with the Sisters? Why is it that Bogs gets paralyzed as a result of beating Andy, and it’s staged so that we’re supposed to cheer at this? Can Bogs not be redeemed or reformed? Is he really “not human” as one character states? Is redemption only reserved for our central characters?

And Andy himself presents problems, too, once you start thinking into the film this way. While certainly an interesting character, he’s also innocent (unlike, for instance, Sean Penn’s character in Robbins’ own Dead Man Walking), which makes it much, much easier for us to “like” the prisoners and see Norton the Warden as a villain, picking on a guy who didn’t do anything. Likewise, we never even see Red’s crime (we do in the book, btw, which is politically much more sound although artistically far less enjoyable or rich), which makes it extremely easy to side with him, and to get on board with Freeman’s—wait for it—narration of the virtues of the white guy who’s center stage (boo ya—you didn’t think I was gonna connect all this, did you?).

“You’re thick as thieves, you are,” says Norton the Warden to Red when he finds out Andy’s escaped. And I can’t help but think the same thing about people like Eastwood and Freeman (and plenty of others, including TV creators as well) when I recognize that some pretty ugly sentiments are being snuck under the door, wrapped up in some pretty nice packages—really nice. Because I love Shawashank, I swear.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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