Change With Age Is Good
Clint Eastwood has come to inhabit the American cowboy ideal earlier rendered by John Wayne and Gary Cooper. But those stars of a previous generation stuck unflinchingly to the solitary, stoical, monosyllabic male ideal even as they stiffened and bulked into middle and late-late-middle age. They never changed.
Eastwood is different.
“I do agree that when you get to a certain stage in life, you change,” Clint Eastwood told psychologist Stuart Fischoff, in a rare selfrevelatory interview. “And you should change.”
In the ‘70s he helped perfect a new archetype of the solitary, coldblooded killer who gets the job done with relish bordering on the sadistic. “Go ahead, make my day” has been enshrined in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations.” Dirty Harry, the signature character of Eastwood’s early midlife acting career, was the cop above the law who used violence to resolve any and all conflicts.
Born in May 1930, Eastwood is now 66. Given his worldwide superstar status, he might have been expected to demand more of the same roles and let the studios worry about his aging: Go ahead, make my passage. But something changed as he crossed into Second Adulthood.
As Eastwood moved through his 50s, he felt free to turn Dirty Harry on his head and expose the human needs and limitations beneath his young-tough code of violence. He seemed to grasp that the old male myths have to be relinquished at a certain stage in order for a man to become something more. “There’s a frailty in mankind that’s very interesting to explore,” he has said.
Most daring of all, Eastwood openly let his signature character grow older. Eastwood resurrected the Dirty Harry persona in 1993 for “In the Line of Fire,” in which he plays an aging Secret Service agent whose young feminist partner challenged him: “What demographics do you represent?”
“White piano-playing heterosexuals over the age of 50.”
As an older man Dirty Harry is increasingly vulnerable, an alienated loner. His independence, which once made him tougher, now renders him weaker, because no man can age well without human companionship.
In real life Clint Eastwood has evolved from beefcake actor to celebrated director, from elective politics (where he felt like a fraud) to social work that centers on children and adolescents. He seems to have figured out how to shape a “new self,” one that integrates both the masculine and feminine principles.
In 1993, at the age of 63, Clint Eastwood became a father again. As usual he is a little ahead of the culture.
A compulsion to procreate often sweeps over men in the late afternoon of life.
Most of us know situations where a man becomes a late-late father and his whole perspective changes. More often than not it’s his younger wife’s idea. Once the blessed event occurs, however, you can be sure this man will show off his baby pictures at every opportunity - almost as proof of potency - inspiring the envy and admiration of his peers. Almost universally, it seems these men do devote much more time and attention to the offspring of their later age than they ever did to the children of an earlier stage.
But these Grand Dads are the exception. Most men in their 60s probably aren’t keen to be tied down again or to take on the awesome burdens of saving for college tuition. The possibility of a second family may never have occurred to them, but many are deeply, touchingly attached to their children’s children, their strongest link to immortality.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate