J EDGAR THE MOVIE

     the original g-man, j edgar hisself

Clint Eastwood's new film, J EDGAR, the story of J Edgar Hoover, the FBI thug who ruled Washington DC with a fascist grip through the 50s and 60s, is up there among Eastwood's best. Hoover had the goods on everybody active in government, and everybody knew it. Go up against Hoover and your entire life is destroyed with a smear campaign and labeled a communist. In his day, nobody wanted to be called a communist, even in jest, and everyone knew phone-tapping was their way. It was common in the 50s and 60s to make remarks on the telephone to the people listening in. This came up whenever talking on the phone and saying something critical of government. The people I talked with were not people to be wire-tapped, but entities like law enforcement, FBI included, really don't know the difference between somebody really subversive and somebody not. It shows in the police treatment of Occupy demonstrators, and the people in demonstrations in the late 60s, early 70s. They arrest you and torture you (yes, torture is American policy) until you confess to what they want you to confess to. Doesn't matter to them whether you did it or not. The confession is all they want.


We had the same kind of paranoia with both the Reagan and Bush administrations, imagining G-man ears hearing us. Hoover created a situation where anti-communism became at least as big a menace as communism. Worse, because Hoover's way is the way of destruction of our own "freedoms," the way of Cheney, Rummy, Rice and W, Reagan and Nixon before them. Mind control of the population through fear has been republican strategy ever since J Edgar. Communists have evolved to terrorists. The difference between the Vietnam war and the war on the Iraqi people is the Vietnamese were communists and the Iraqis are terrorists. Same thing: not us. At home, it's liberals, the educated portion of the population, the people not so easily hoodwinked. Hoover was also of the mind, whatever it is, I'm against it. Like now with the Supremes, Scalia and Thomas, in lifetime appointments, all we could do in Hoover's time was wait for him to die. His death date sent a wave of relaxation throughout the land, on the order of Mao's death date in China.


I'd been curious to see how Eastwood handled Hoover's life since I first heard he was making it, or had already made it. My respect for Eastwood as a director has been a stair-step progression. After Unforgiven, I put Eastwood aside as a director of interest. It was well made, looked good, good idea, but was emotionally dead. Devoid of feeling. That's what I found with Eastwood films, emotional stasis. He must have caught on at the same time I did, because by the time he made Million Dollar Baby, he had begun to solve the emotional issue in his film making. It was an emotional powerhouse. It also had the mental, logical progressions. I felt like he'd brought his imbalance to balance. Gran Torino was even a greater emotional powerhouse. Legitimate emotion, too. Strong feeling. After Gran Torino, I hold Eastwood up among the great American directors of past and present. He understands the American male perspective, like the writer Russell Banks, in a non-sensationalist way. Steven Seagal's idea of a man and Eastwood's are not far apart, except that Seagal's is sensationalist and Eastwood's is not. In Eastwood's stories the man is just a man.


Eastwood's treatment of Hoover was just a man. He left off the public persona, the multiple suicides he'd inspired, the multiple murders, the assassinations, framing innocent people, all the reasons We The People wanted him dead. Of course, republicans were happy with him, but not all. In a way, Eastwoods presentation of Hoover was without context for people who did not live in that time. References are made to the public context of his life, but Eastwood kept it close to the heart. He looked at Hoover subjectively instead of objectively. Subjectively, the context of his life was as he, Hoover himself, interpreted it. I even had the impression that Eastwood was following Hoover's autobiography, his life as he saw it. He showed that Hoover was wound up tight as a banjo string inside. His affection for a man kept him paranoid, which appeared the foundation of his paranoia about communists. His loving, unto doting, mother and his indifferent father, Eastwood shows us to give an idea of the context Hoover came from within. He shows Hoover's homosexual persuasion sympathetically, while at the same time showing the nature of his relationship with Clyde Tolson domineering until Tolson became a ghost of himself. That showed Hoover's character as much as his obsession with Eleanor Roosevelt's affection for another woman.


Toward the end, I'd become sympathetic with the man J Edgar Hoover, cared somewhat about his fate, just by the dramatic device of making a character understandable. Understanding is the quick way to getting to know somebody. By the end I had to remind myself this guy was a monster. Justin came in about 10 minutes before it was finished, cutting some firewood in the woods across the road. When it finished, I had to tell Justin right away what a low-down, despicable piece of shit we had in DC as the top dog at the FBI, terrorizing American citizens with draconian law enforcement. By the end, I was liking Hoover, feeling like I understood him, and had to remind myself that sympathy for Hoover equals sympathy for Stalin, or like the Rolling Stones song, Sympathy for the Devil. I briefed Justin on his terrorism of the American people, ruling by fear, having the goods on everybody with any degree of power, such that he controlled them. All in Congress, Senate, all who worked in government in DC knew Hoover had the goods on them and they walked his line. It's not like this behavior is unprecedented. And it's not like it died with Hoover.


I came away from this film all the more inspired with Clint Eastwood as director and Leonardo diCaprio as actor. DiCaprio was the actor for the role, the actor with the acting ability, but sometimes all the makeup and masks it took to make his flawless doughboy face look like an old man with bulldog jowls was stretching the unbelievable unto fantasy. The zombie mask they put on Tolson was a bit extreme too, but it definitely got the message across that his relationship with Hoover had drained his life energy. Theirs was a sad, severly dysfunctional relationship, not a great deal of joy in it. Not even much feeling. I was wondering if the cause could be in giving up spontenaiety, not allowing it, their lives utterly devoid of it. Artists know the importance of spontenaiety, but lawmen seldom do. I was grateful to Clint Eastwood for his rendering of Hoover. It was balanced and subjective. I liked the subjective most, because, like me, Eastwood has only known the objective Hoover. He wanted to get behind all the externals into the internal man. I feel like I have a good biographical understanding of Hoover now. I'm sympathetic with him the first time, to some extent, after seeing the film. It amused me that at the end I was feeling so much like I understood Hoover's inner motivations, I had to tell Justin right away that this man, from my point of view, is a mass murderer and all that goes with it. He was dead before Justin was born. I still didn't talk myself out of feeling a certain empathy for him. His role was made by the context of his time. He suffered mightily within. Anybody wound up as tight as J Edgar Hoover has serious mental/emotional issues. And he did.


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GRAN TORINO THE MOVIE

constantin brancusi, sleeping muse, 1909



Last night I saw Clint Eastwood's film, GRAN TORINO. I anticipated a fairly good movie, considering Eastwood's films have been better with each one over the last several years, like a stairstep. Perhaps I appreciate most in his films that they look into the lives of working people sympathetically, people seldom seen in generic Hollywood movies. He evidently is based in Hollywood, but makes a film like an independent director. He goes with his own vision instead of the boxoffice formula. He understands boxoffice too, because he does very well there with excellent films that don't play down to the audience. His films give the audience the benefit of the doubt to be able to handle something on the verge of an art film without subtitles.



He brought to life a character in his 70s, instead of twenty-something, and used the story to develop the character. He took a block-headed Korean war vet who has lived his life seeing all the young guys he killed in the never ending slideshow of the mind. He was the American flag-waving racist the world passed by. His wife had recently died. His mint condition Gran Torino he kept in the garage while he drove an old Ford pickup. I had a feeling that his classic car, a real road runner, was the symbol for who he was within, behind the growling old curmudgeon, the ratty looking old garage. As the story went along, the curmudgeon stayed the same, but his heart became apparent from time to time. He was just a disappointed old turd that the world had turned out as it had with kids in gangs killing each other.



A family of Hmong people from Southeast Asia had moved in next door. When the old woman next door sat in her rocker on the porch and he was in his rocker, they cussed each other in their own languages. He hated it that Asians had taken over the neighborhood. When the Hmong gang was beating up the teenage boy next door on his front lawn, the Dirty Harry within came to the surface, pointing a rifle at them, telling them to get off his lawn. They talked back to him and he said, 'I could blow a hole in your face and sleep good tonight.' Next day all the Hmong families in the neighborhood
brought him food and flowers, thanking him. Though he continued to call them every gook name there was, zipperhead, slope, etc, just to name a few, they took to him.



As the story rolls on, it comes to a place where he commits the ultimate act to get all the gang boys that beat up the neighbor kid and his sister put in prison, shutting down the neighborhood terror squad. The end of the story was what I can only call perfect. It showed the true fullness of the man inside to be as grand as his polished Gran Torino. It's the kind of wrapping up that only Clint Eastwood the artist could make work. My first impulse was to think, 'Come on. Give me a break.' Immediately following that first split-second thought came awe. I love that it took a character an awful lot of people find objectionable, and looked into his life until we found the core that turned out to be a very beautiful soul. As in life. While we see him gradually become able to accept others as they are, we, the audience, become able to accept him as he is.



It is a rare film, let alone American film, that makes the story the development of a character, letting increasing insight into the individual's inner world be the story all the way seeing his soul. It brings to mind the film, That Evening Sun with Hal Holbrook. My objection with Eastwood films up to and including Unforgiven was absence of emotional depth. Emotionally they were flat. Then it seemed like about the time I caught on that was the problem I had with his films, it seemed like he began to notice too. Each film after that paid a great deal of attention to the emotional range unto Million Dollar Baby that took emotion all the way. This one, Gran Torino, was an emotional rollercoaster ride that said a very great deal in an hour and a half.



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