Reflections on Mortality: The Imagery of Mirrors in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino

ABSTRACT

Like much of Clint Eastwood’s late work, Gran Torino is a film that directly addresses themes and images of old age. It is also a film about mortality. This article discusses the imagery of mirrors and reflections in the film and way they are used symbolically and structurally to highlight and explore issues of aging, entropy, and death. Drawing on Kathleen Woodward’s notion of a mirror stage of old age, it argues that Walt moves from rejection of the aging self to a form of acceptance, albeit one that uses the heroic persona to effectively bypass natural mortality.

Keywords:

• Action star
• aging
• Clint Eastwood
• mortality
• mirror stage

NOTES

Notes

1. Indeed, Eastwood’s best-known roles include heroes with powers that appear close to, if not actually, supernatural—particularly in High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973) and Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985), two films which, incidentally, are reprised in the plot and ambience of Gran Torino.

2. For example Russell Crowe, who has always alternated action leads with character roles.

3. Born in 1930, Eastwood is some fifteen years senior to Ford, Stallone, and Schwarzenegger, and twenty-five years older than Willis.

4. Unforgiven has frequently been discussed as a deconstruction of the Western. However several of the films that follow, particularly those directed by Eastwood, have similar tendencies.

5. See Corliss (63); Torres (66); and Kurashige.

6. Itself a reworking of High Plains Drifter.

7. The film thus reprises a theme that seems to run through all Eastwood’s late films: that of the bad father who seeks to make amends either through reestablishing a relationship with his actual children or by forming a familial bond with substitute “children.”

8. The significance of mirrors in film noir generally is explored by Place and Peterson in their 1974 article on the genre.

9. Holmlund (145) attributes the original idea to Charlotte Herfray in La Vieillesse: Une interprétation psycho analytique, Desclée de Brouwer, EPI, 1988.

10. Referencing Freud’s 1919 essay on The Uncanny.

11. Smith argues for a more nuanced “structure of sympathy” in the relationship between spectator and text (34).

12. Eastwood was almost eighty when he made the film.

13. A more fitting heir than Walt’s own sons, with their white-collar jobs and foreign-made cars.

14. See Hornaday; Roche and Hösle.

15. As well as being Walt’s finale, this scene was initially heralded as Eastwood’s (not least by himself; see Jamieson). However, he went on to star in Trouble with the Curve (Robert Lorenz, 2012) and The Mule (2018), which he directed himself, as well as making a Hitchcockian uncredited appearance in American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014). He may yet surprise us with further performances as he enters his tenth decade.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christa van Raalte

Christa van Raalte is Deputy Dean for Education and Professional Practice in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. She joined Bournemouth from Teesside University in 2013 and held the post of Head of Department for Media Production until 2018. Before taking up full-time employment in higher education, Christa worked in a variety of roles within theater, community arts, and education. She gained her BA in English language and literature from Oxford and her MA in cultural and textual studies from Sunderland, where she also completed her PhD with a thesis on Women and Guns in the Post-War Hollywood Western. Her principal research interests are narrative and representation in film and television, with an emphasis on gender. She also researches media education and employability in the media industries.