I have a Tivo so I normally don't watch commercials. And I'm not much of a football fan so I don't watch many games. But I have been using the Superbowl as an excuse to visit my sister for years. And you have to watch the commercials. In fact, many people claim the commercials are the reason they watch the game. And the Eastwood commercial has generated a lot of talk, justifiably so. It's a great commercial. Like most things, context is important.
I remember watching the game a year ago when this commercial came on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc It just blew me away. This is not a typical commercial. Most commercials bang you over the head with the product they are selling. Since this commercial is for Chrysler you would expect to see a bunch of pictures of Chrysler cars. They are in there but what's really being sold is the City of Detroit. So what's going on? Chrysler is not even the biggest car company in Detroit. Well, Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, an Italian company. I'm sure they are worried about being seen as a bad old foreign company that has taken over a true blue "Made in America" company. So this add is an attempt to generate some good will as a counter.
And Detroit has fallen on really hard times. An attempt by someone, any one, to buck up its spirits is a good thing. Detroit used to have a lot of money. So it has some really interesting architecture. I was happy to see that showcased. And it's just a damn good add by any measure. I don't know that I expected Chrysler to do something similar at the Superbowl this year. But the commercial they did last year has stuck with me even though I only saw it the one time.
So there I am watching the game this year and this commercial (http://www.5min.com/Video/Chrysler---Clint-Eastwood---Super-Bowl-Commercial-517263677) comes on. My first question was "Is that Clint Eastwood?". It didn't take long for me to figure out that it was. And by that time I am completely sucked into the add. And as the add evolved I started seeing the parallels to the add from a year ago. So I confidently announced that it was a Chrysler add as the others watching with me were confused. There are some Chrysler logos at the end of the add. And, if you are really good you can identify the vehicles shown in the add as all being Chrysler products. But it's not obvious. You see the front wheel of a vehicle for a few seconds. I assumed was a Jeep but that's just because by this time I had figured out that it was a Chrysler add. And like the add from a year ago, I really liked it. But I figured it was just an add. I didn't think there was any reason that it would blow up to be a big political thing. Silly me. Everything is now political.
The next day Carl Rove and other GOP types are all over the air waves opining that it was some kind of Obama or Democratic plot. Really? Clint Eastwood has been well known for decades for being a rock ribbed Republican. He is no fool so he isn't going to be conned into doing something he doesn't want to. He is rich enough and famous enough he doesn't need the paycheck or the publicity. He has since indicated that he stands by the content of the commercial and that he donated the money to charity. So what about the contents of the commercial?
When I saw it I saw it as an expansion of the theme from a year ago. The older commercial focused on Detroit. I felt that the new commercial expanded its scope to encompass the whole country. I thought the "half time" idea was great. The idea is that it is half time in the big game. The first half has not gone so well. But with the right adjustments we can win the second half and the game. I think this is a good analogy and a good idea. But it interferes with the GOP narrative that whatever Obama says or does is wrong. So any idea that he has done something right in the past or might do something right in the future (the second half) has to be batted down immediately and vigorously.
I didn't find any of the sentiments expressed in the commercial noticeably different than what you can hear spouted in any number of Clint Eastwood westerns or cop movies. And it's not just Clint. You can hear the same kind of thing in John Wayne westerns and hundreds of other movies churned out by Hollywood in the last 75 years. It is all standard "hero" stuff.
I was particularly struck by one thing Eastwood said, however. "This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines". I have been waiting for this sentiment to be expressed for over ten years. My profoundest thanks to Mr. Eastwood for finally doing it.
So 9/11 was a jab at best. And what did we do? Did we get right back up. No! Instead we have spent years whimpering on the floor afraid of our shadow like the whiny guy in westerns that we hate because he is such a wuss. The media had a lot to do with this. They hyped the event like it was Armageddon. It wasn't. They told us over and over that we should "be afraid - be very afraid". They did not permit anyone to be heard that might have voiced a contrary opinion. One reason for this was that it happened in New york City, a major media market. But it wasn't just the media. President Bush did a terrible job of leadership in this trying time.
He encouraged over reaction. I was in favor of Afghanistan but it was obvious to me that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. We put in all those stupid "security" restrictions on airports. We threw all of our privacy away and built up a domestic spying system that is far beyond anything that has been done before. And its all secret so no one knows what it is doing besides costing tens of billions of dollars per year, more per year than the value of all the property destroyed on 9/11. He also accused anyone who disagreed with him of being unpatriotic. 9/11 was a terrorist act. It was designed to spread terror. Thanks to the media and the Bush administration it succeeded beyond Bin Laden's wildest expectation.
And consider this, what if we had really gone after Bin Laden at Tora Bora? We could have killed or captured him less than a year after 9/11. But for Bush he was not that important. It was more important to start the buildup for the Iraq war. Instead we got him ten years and hundreds of billion dollars later. The death of Bin Laden has finally brought a measure of closure to 9/11. We are finally "getting right back up". And our engines are now roaring. General Motors is again the largest car company in the world.
And what about Eastwood himself? Many still think of him as Dirty Harry. But who is he really? Looking at the modern Eastwood I note two movies he has made recently. In "Gran Torino" his character starts out as a classic "Dirty Harry" type redneck. By the end he has befriended and is protecting some Hmong immigrants from Cambodia. This is contrary to the current rabid anti-immigrant stance of the Republican party. He also did a movie called "Letters from Iwo Jima". This is a sympathetic portrait of the famous World War II battle for the island of Iwo Jima that is told from the Japanese point of view. All red blooded true blue all Americans know that this event can only be told in the most heroic terms and exclusively from the American point of view.
Both of these movies and many others indicate that Eastwood's thinking is more subtle and sophisticated than many would have believed possible. One way to look at "Gran Torino" is as a standard "stalwart hero takes good but downtrodden folk under his wing and defends them from the big bad guys". And similar things can be said about "Letters from Iwo Jima". There was great heroism demonstrated on Iwo Jima by American soldiers. And I subscribe to the "the Japanese were the bad guys and behaved barbarically" school of thought. But that does not mean that there weren't good people doing heroic things on their side.
So maybe there is more to Eastwood that people think. But let's pretend that we have the "new - enlightened" Eastwood as opposed to the "old - Dirty Harry" Eastwood. Does that idea stand up? Well it turns out that there is more to Eastwood than most people think even back then. The same year Eastwood did "Dirty Harry" (1971) he also did something called "Play Misty for Me". Misty is characterized as a "psychological thriller", which sounds generally "Dirty Harry"-like. But many would also characterize the move as "arty".
It gets worse for the "Dirty Harry" scenario. Let's just stick with the "Dirty Harry" movies and look at the second movie in the series "Magnum Force" (1973). It has a suitably macho title. But the movie is about vigilantism. There is a secret group of cops that are taking the law into their hands and dealing out justice to bad guys. Sound's like Harry's kind of thing. But in the movie Harry is opposed to vigilante justice and takes his fellow cops down. So Dirty "let's stop molly coddling the bad guys" Harry himself ends up coming down on the side of due process and all that sort of "soft on crime" thing. Harry is not as Dirty as people think.
Finally, let me go back to the original "Dirty Harry". At it's core it is a standard "lone wolf battles the bad guys" movie. And a typical feature of these types of movies is that the lone wolf is up against not only the bad guys but the system. Either the bad guys are the system or the system is corrupt or incompetent. The justification for why the system opposes the hero differs from movie to movie but its almost always there. Viewed in this manner "Dirty Harry" is cut from a pretty normal bolt of cloth. So what caused all the uproar?
Eastwood, when he was publicizing the movie, stirred things up by saying something along the lines that the criminal justice system seemed tilted in favor of protecting the rights of the accused and against protecting victims. This view is what cemented the connection between the movie and conservatives. But in my opinion the events depicted in the movie do not support Eastwood's contention. Harry spends all his time chasing the bad guy and no time doing anything particularly victim oriented. This is what cops, good and bad, do in movies. How is Harry's behavior any different than a hundred cops in a hundred cop shows? So there is really nothing different going on with the action. The bad guy is bad. Harry is picked on. Harry gets the bad guy in the end.
There is a "law and order" subtext to the movie. But my conclusion is that if Harry and his associates were better cops they would have got the bad guy much sooner. There is a big "stake out" scene early in the movie. If the cops had done this competently they would have caught the bad guy then. And generally standard police procedure properly done would have caught the bad guy as quickly or more quickly as Harry's supposedly superior "bend the rules" methods. But if the bad guy had been caught early there would not have been a movie. And much of the plot is driven by the needs of making an exciting and visually interesting film. And Eastwood's remarks generated buzz, which generated ticket sales, which made Eastwood and the studio happy. So Eastwood's remarks were a smart move all around.
It says a lot about the current state of the union that this commercial has generated so much talk. I do not think that was the intention of Chrysler, Mr. Eastwood, or anyone else involved in it. They were just trying to make a dramatic and effective feel good commercial. I think Chrysler intended to reinforce and broaden the statement they made with the first commercial, which was uniformly lauded. I think Mr. Eastwood was happy to come on board and the sentiments expressed in the commercial are consistent with his beliefs.
I think everyone involved with the making of the commercial was surprised with the political reaction. I think they thought they had done work they could be proud of and would have welcomed a positive critical reaction. But I think they all thought they were engaged in a nonpolitical endeavor. Since the controversy has erupted Mr. Eastwood has indicated that he has no objection to anyone, Democrat, Republican, or whatever, making use of the commercial's contents. I don't think there is anything objectionable in the commercial to a traditional conservative like Mr. Eastwood. But the Republican party has strayed so far from traditional conservative values that they see the sentiments expressed in the commercial as a threat to them and an attack on their beliefs. Initially liberals asked themselves what the fuss was about. Now they are happy to embrace the sentiments Mr. Eastwood has so eloquently expressed.
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