His first mentor, Sergio Leone, was a man who single-handedly destroyed a genre to rebuild it on his own terms.
A trait of his work that has been mainly lost on the mainstream press who sees him reliving the “same” part over and over again, seeing only weaknesses in the script rather than subtleties of character and expression (2). He has devoted an entire career to meditate on the reasons: the bigger part of his oeuvre is centered on a re-examination of the iconic “Man With No Name” character he played initially, constantly refining the original outlines of the figure and more often than not with a good deal of irony. The all-American boy who almost accidentally stepped into the spotlight by shooting amoral European low-budget westerns seems to be the person most baffled by his success. “Yes”, he replies, “but which boy ever wants to grow up?”Ĭlint Eastwood has, and for a long time now it’s the reason why talking about him mainly means to clear up misunderstandings. “Every boy dreams of being an Astronaut when he grows up”, says Marcia Gay Harden to Tommy Lee Jones, later on. A plane in the big sky, strangely reminiscent of Firefox (Clint Eastwood, 1982), a couple of young boys, haunted by the voices of old men, engaging in aloof foolishness. Faux black and white: the memory of an echo chamber.
