Given that I’ve been aware of him for 50-ish years and followed him professionally for more than half that time, the thing I found most surprising while chronicling the life of Clint Eastwood was how often I found myself surprised.
Going into the project, I thought I knew who and what he was. Turned out, most of what I believed was either wrong or only partly true, or counterbalanced by something about him I didn’t know. As impressive as his longevity is his capacity to contain contradictions.
As to that longevity: Few Hollywood stars can claim 70-year careers. Fewer Hollywood directors have lasted for more than 50. Only Eastwood has done both—and last year, at age 94, he released a film that he directed and produced, making him quite possibly the oldest person to do either job in Hollywood history.
He’s earned that long run in ways you would expect and in ways you wouldn’t. Yes, he’s a lifelong gym rat and fitness freak. But he has also favored an organic, low-fat diet since the 50s, when alfalfa sprouts and yogurt were considered exotic, and in the 60s he was touting the benefits of sushi. He’s practiced Transcendental Meditation daily, often twice a day, since the mid-70s, even while working—indeed, especially while working. All this while playing the Man with No Name and Dirty Harry and other such avatars of bloodshed.
If that makes Eastwood a man of contradictions, well, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, so what? His contradictions are, in many ways, America’s contradictions. His figure in our shared culture has mirrored the best and worst and most irreconcilable aspects of our national character in ways that make him an apt, if not exactly cuddly, symbol of the country. Heck, even his physical form feels distinctly American, like those of Abraham Lincoln, Jimmy Stewart, and Mickey Mantle.
The contradictions run throughout his personality, his career, his life. He’s a loner who’s spent his life working in the most collaborative of media. He’s an independent filmmaker who’s been bankrolled by major film studios. He’s a shoot-’em-up movie star who supported the Brady Bill.
He’s a pro-business libertarian who believes in ecological conservation, equal rights and pay for women and cultural and sexual minorities, and the decriminalization of cannabis. He’s a guy reluctant to seek the spotlight outside of work who nevertheless served as a small-town mayor. He’s a white suburban kid with a lifelong passion for jazz. He’s a near billionaire in his 90s who drives his own car and pumps his own gas.
Most vividly, he’s a Hollywood superstar who built a career on depictions of violence and then dedicated decades to making movies—Unforgiven, Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers, Gran Torino, American Sniper, even last year’s Juror #2—about the terrible cost that acts of violence exact from the people who commit them. In effect, he took the equity he earned during one of the longest runs ever at the top of the Hollywood pyramid and spent it on asking hard questions about the very things he had done to earn that status. No other major actor or filmmaker has ever come close to the same sort—or length—of self-critique.
If anything, that’s the ultimate surprise about Eastwood: he has grown and changed and deepened right before our eyes—and may well still be doing so. That he does it mainly in movies is apt because, in his case, the work and the man are one and the same. It seems funny, given how roundly he’s mocked for his terseness on-screen, but Eastwood’s ultimate contradiction might be that he has told us so much about himself—and us—for so long.
Shawn Levy is a Portland, Oregon–based writer and the author of The Castle on Sunset, Rat Pack Confidential, Paul Newman: A Life, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, and Dolce Vita Confidential
