Dialogue with an Empty Chair: Clint Eastwood and ‘Cry Macho’

Few public figures understand their own iconography better than Clint Eastwood. Setting aside that weird thing where he talked to a chair, Eastwood’s film work over the last 30 years has masterfully played on his own celebrity in a way that few actors or directors have been able to do. Eastwood’s latest, Cry Macho, continues the thread begun by Eastwood’s masterpiece, 1992’s Unforgiven.

It’s hard to overstate the gut-punch of Unforgiven. Even three decades ago, Eastwood was playing retired gunslinger William Munny, a shadow of men like the one with no name, reformed and raising a family and yet drawn in, as the old standard goes, by one last score. The result is a complete upending of any sense of conventional morality, especially as encoded on the western genre.

Unforgiven can in some ways be stripped down to the conflict between two men (who scarcely even meet in the film): Eastwood’s brutal (yet reformed) outlaw William Munny and Gene Hackman’s upstanding (yet brutal in his own right) sheriff Little Bill Daggett. Munny eventually kills Daggett, who cries out that he doesn’t deserve death, and just as the audience is left to ponder the morality, Munny offers up the immortal line “deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it” before executing Daggett.

And with that line, the amorality of the film — of the western itself — becomes clear as day. Munny, Daggett, Ned Logan, English Bob, et al are neither villains or heroes. Eastwood and screenwriter David Peoples (of Blade Runner note) succeed in telling a story that completely abandons any sense of moral mapping. Whereas in Blade Runner, morality is poisonously inverted, Peoples’ script for Unforgiven takes this a step further: there is no morality to be found at all. In reality the only morality is to walk out of the tale altogether.

This, of course, has resonances with the classical western, which Unforgiven demolishes. The John Wayne model of heroism, as filtered through an existing neo-western star in the form of Eastwood, is shown to be smoke and mirrors, a tale distorted in the telling and retelling. That’s why there are so many references to inaccurate stories, be they W.W. Beauchamp’s tall tales of “The Duke of Death”, a young would-be outlaw lying about his body count, or the exaggerated mutilation of the woman whose assault begets the entire violent saga. Even then, reality is more brutal than the stories because of its raw flesh and permanence.

Now, in 2021, Clint Eastwood gives us a spiritual sequel to Unforgiven called Cry Macho. Whereas Unforgiven tackled masculinity and violence in a very nineties way — by amping up that violence while judging the audience for enjoying it — Cry Macho is a sparse character study involving little to no violence. Just as the western genre (and Eastwood himself) has aged, so too has the period caught up, at least to 1971: the year, incidentally, of Play Misty for Me, Eastwood’s directorial debut. Unforgiven cast aspersions on the violent vision of masculinity practiced by the western and society at large; Cry Macho wants us to know that masculinity need not be that of William Munny or Little Bill Daggett.

Eastwood’s age is apparent in his performance in Cry Macho; his movements are slow, deliberate, and achy. But in many ways Eastwood defies the Hollywood age film model by decentering the processes and decays of time. This is not a film about aging and it’s certainly not a film about dying, as so many films featuring elderly actors are (the ones that don’t use older people as horror movie props, that is). The film could have starred someone in their fifties, but then, at the same time it could only star Clint Eastwood.

Unlike William Munny, who violently explodes in the finale of Unforgiven, we are given only hints of a wild past for Mike Milo, retired rodeo star and horse wrangler. Clearly Milo is beyond all that, and unlike the genre-driven Unforgiven, there’s no pulling him back in. He’s settled into a simple life, and eventually over the course of the film will settle into a new one. Cry Macho is quiet in all the places Unforgiven is loud.

I’ve reached the conclusion that Cry Macho is less good than crucial in the evolution of the western and the project and persona of Eastwood himself, and for that reason it’s worth a (probably single) viewing before rewatching Unforgiven or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Oh yeah, and that one time he talked to a chair.