2008. Starring Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang. Directed by Clint Eastwood.
Clint Eastwood has become of those actors whom you cannot pretend is a character not named Clint Eastwood. It happened to John Wayne and Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. But a good role can overcome that curse. As Walt Kowalski, the perfectly-named working-class bigot next door, Eastwood more or less succeeds in creating a believable character through his trademark squint and a variety of grunts.
Walt Kowalski lives in a modest house in a changing neighborhood that used to be his, having retired from an auto industry that used to be ours, and is shocked by a world full of people who didn’t exist in the good old days we used to know. Although he is annoyed and dismayed by the Hmong neighbors next door, his real disappointment is saved for his family. His sons are hapless suburban idiots, driving their spoiled kids around in a foreign-made minivan, who demonstrate their lack of respect by wearing football jerseys and revealing clothing to his wife’s funeral. His clueless grand-daughter makes an immediate appeal for his prized Gran Torino, sitting in the garage, if he should ever, um, kick the bucket.
Walt continues his lonely, disapproving life, drinking domestic beer from a cooler on his porch, his faithful dog at his feet. He sneers at the constant activity of the folks next door (he calls them all kinds of slurs I won’t repeat), but can’t help but notice the commitment to family and respect for the elders that these new Americans practice. When a Hmong gang shows up to enlist the family’s shy son Thao (Bee Vang), Walt chases them off with a shotgun. He might growl, “Get out of my yard,” but he’s protecting his neighborhood too, in spite of the racial distrust he feels for his neighbors. Like John Wayne in The Searchers, he is a very flawed hero who will likely have to face the enemy in himself.
The gang returns and forces Thao into a failed attempt to steal the Gran Torino. The Hmong neighbors, led by spunky daughter Sue (Ahney Her), begin repaying the insult with food and flowers, and forces Thao to work off the crime. Sue dismisses Walt’s slurs and insults, and invites him into their house. Walt responds by teaching Thao about shop tools and talking to girls, the American way of hard work and independent thinking. But the gang is persistent, and will force a showdown for what seems like control of the neighborhood and the fate of everyone in it.
I wasn’t so entranced by Gran Torino that I could overlook some of the awkward acting (and I’m not talking about the untrained actors here), but the point it makes is important enough to carry the whole movie: there’s more to being a good American and a good neighbor than a birth certificate and a common culture. Walt doesn’t respect the local priest, who hasn’t seen much of the pain and horror that makes up the world, but he respects the Hmong holy man who recognizes the lack of happiness in his life. He feels the responsibility of guiding his unlikely neighbor to the path an American would take, one of responsibility and confident assertiveness.
Walt seems irredeemable with his crude insults and his distrust, but he is clearly a symbol of the old America that tried, with varying degrees of success, to absorb every new group. At one point, Walt wonders, “What does everyone want with my Gran Torino?” The answer is, of course, that they want a remnant of the America that would create a muscle car with American steel and sell it for what it was worth. Honesty and integrity, and a little of that undefinable American dream. What everyone who lands on our shores hopes for, and finds to some extent.
The best Americans aren’t always born in America, just as the loudest flag-wavers aren’t the most patriotic. There are sixth- and seventh-generation Americans that will make you hang your head in shame. A pickup covered with bumper stickers and miniature flags will not redeem you if you aren’t worth a damn as a parent and as a citizen. Back in John Wayne’s days, you just looked at the hats to tell the good guys from the bad. For Walt Kowalski, and those like him who still think you could tell “us” from “them” by looking through suspicious, squinty eyes, the reality is that times change, and it’s about time we change as well.
On my birthday this year, a slightly older lady referred to me as a “young pup,” which proves that everything is relative. However young a pup I might be, I fight the urge every day to proclaim that the best days are behind us. It seems that the effort and time required by nearly everything in the past has taken on a golden glow as I look back through the filter of 48 years. All that’s keeping me from geezerhood is the lack of someone who’ll listen to my observations. That’s, in part, why I blog.
The NYT has an article on people who are choosing to eschew air conditioning in these days of living simply and not being able to afford basic utilities. And I feel vindication by its publication. For years, when I’ve mentioned that my apartment — on the top floor of a concrete block building in which the heat rises floor by floor throughout the summer day — tends to get a bit balmy, the response is always, “Don’t you have air conditioning?” And I have to admit that I do, but don’t always use it, which marks me as someone who can’t tell his ass from his elbow. But the AC isn’t much of a solution. It cools only the immediate area around it, and the cool air it creates surrenders to the hot air immediately when it’s turned off. I prefer to let the hot air out the window and camp in front of a fan or two. The AC is expensive to run all day and evening, and when my neighbors all think alike, we tend to knock out the power in the building, and then there’s no fans or AC for anyone.
This summer has been one of the best I’ve ever weathered. The air conditioner pouts in the corner window, unused and no doubt building up extra mildew to serve chilled next year. The humidity is down too, and nearly every day this summer has reminded me of my favorite September afternoons when the breeze comes blowing through the windows to distract me from whatever football game is on.
The folks in the NYT article have discovered the secrets of keeping cool without the relatively recent necessity of air conditioning — drinking a lot of liquids, shades during the sunny hours, not using the stove or oven — all things hard-wired into my brain from life in a house built before central air. But if I think back, there was another solution for hot, humid Wisconsin afternoons when there was no relief.
I remembered this one morning while walking around Lake Harriet. Maybe it was a random sniff of dead fish floating by on the breeze, or the symphonic clanging of metal connectors on the sailboat masts or hearing the far-off chatter of kids climbing into a car, but something took me back to any of a hundred miserable afternoons when, as my bike and I were about roast in the shimmering air of the driveway, my Mom would emerge from the house with a towel and say, “See if anyone wants to go to Summit Lake.” I was off, rounding up those friends lucky enough to be home and free to leave for a few hours.
Summit Lake didn’t have one of those manicured beaches where you could stretch out a towel. There were quite a few broken bottles lying around and the garbage cans were stuffed with 12-pack containers and crushed cans, which meant that there was always a swirl of yellowjackets when you got too close. A raft made of 55-gallon barrels floated 50 yards offshore, which was used by every adult as a quick visual reference that the kids were swimming too far out. Swimming to and climbing onto those weathered planks was a milestone in my early days, although I’d like to forget the day I swam under it and emerged between barrels to see the creepy lifeforms that clung to the bottom.
We swam until we were pruney and the sun had lost nearly all its dominion over us. My Mom took one quick dunk under the water, then called us all in, stuffed us into the back of the pickup, and headed home. The breeze and the smell of the lake on your skin was intoxicating, and you now knew that life could feel at least this good, at least for a moment. When the heat of summer was gone, we missed it. On those rides home from Summit Lake, it was like your soul was refreshed. And air conditioning is a poor substitute for that.
I am sad to learn of Walter Cronkite’s passing this evening. He lived to be 92 — quite an achievement — but he seems like the last of a dying breed. When I was growing up, he was the voice of authority. Hard to imagine in these hyper-partisan days, but he was an anchorman whose outlook you didn’t question — if he said so, it was so. The assassination of President Kennedy was bad enough until Walter took off his glasses to announce his death, then you couldn’t do anything but lose it. Because it was so.
1968 probably changed everything. The riots at the Democratic Convention, then Vietnam, then Nixon, then the country tore apart. In his latter years, I read that conservatives hated Cronkite, and I couldn’t understand. He was the last honest man — I’m sorry that you disagreed with him. It just meant that you were wrong. The proper thing to do was to acknowledge this and move along. But it would never again be the kind of country that could hold two different opinions. You were right and everyone else would be wrong.
Walter Cronkite passed away in a country so unsure of itself that it was always on the attack, always tearing down the other side, condemning the other viewpoint. In the eyes of people who grew up in the broadcast of that reasonable, rational reporting of the news, he was the voice we always hoped would deliver to us the bad news, because we could handle it coming from him. Always friendly, always rational, always suffering alongside us.
RIP Mr. Cronkite.