For We Have Sinned
Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is symbolic of America’s attempt to gain atonement through an erroneous foreign policy.
By Alexander Congrove
January 23, 2009
Walt Kowalski, played by Clint Eastwood, and Thao, played by Bee Vang, in Gran Torino. (Anthony Michael Rivetti/allmoviephoto.com)Clint Eastwood’s latest film Gran Torino attempts to define what it means to be “American.” The film depicts the bigoted Walt Kowalski (played by Eastwood himself) developing a guardianship relationship with his Hmong neighbors, members an ethic group of refugees from China and Southeast Asian that migrated to the United States after political unrest in the late 1970s. Halfway through the film, the Hmong family’s teenage daughter Sue Lor (Ahney Her) tells Kowalski at a barbeque about her family’s extremely traditional, old-school father who left the family when she was young. Kowalski responds, “I’m old-school.” Lor replies that it’s different for him. “You’re American,” she says.
The rest of the film progresses (spoilers ahead) as an explanation or exploration of multicultural modern America. In Gran Torino, America is a place where Kowalski’s Hmong neighbors are threatened violently by a gang and the dynamics of Kowalski’s intervention becomes an exploration of the cultural and ideological roots behind America’s interventionist foreign policy. Such a policy of intervention dates back to the Spanish-American war in 1898, CIA assassinations of Latin American dictators in the middle of the 1900s, and most recently, the invasion of Iraq.
The Hmong gang is portrayed as a lurking menace and nothing more than one-sided villains. The gang is an evil force to be fought, not reasoned with or understood. The Hmong gang represents ethnocentric-bred fear of strange cultures as virulent and scarred by opponent’s blood. One incidence of violence becomes a catalyst in a never-ending chain of violence. In a single moment of plot complexity, the gang’s leader is a cousin of the Lor family.
Eastwood’s character, a surly, laconic, retired auto-worker and recent widower, slings racial epithets like Eastwood once wielded gleaming silver revolvers in the swirling Western dust. Such behavior becomes symbolic of white America. He is presented as a standard representation of a blue-collar worker who drinks beer on his front porch while watching his American flag dance in the wind and responds to passing Toyota’s with “Would it kill him to buy American?” Kowalski embodies the sect of Americans still clinging to the idea of “manifest destiny” as our divine right. From the 1950s and into the ‘70s, this sentiment would underline the conquest of Southeast Asia under the guise of the Marshall plan and the “Red Menace” of communism.
Along typical plot patterns, Kowalski overcomes his initial reluctance to mingle with his Hmong neighbors and ingratiates himself into their lives as their guardian from the threat of the gang. As he does so, he still wields racial slurs throughout the film. The contradiction inherent in the acceptance of the neighbors while clinging to words of racial intolerance becomes the evidentiary crux of the films meaning. It poses the question: Can Americans ever be tolerant if they still utter such racial insults?
Despite Kowalski’s good intentions, ethnic slurs show a deeply rooted condescension toward his Hmong neighbors. Such a situation is representative of many white Americans’ attitudes toward all other ethnicities. The patronizing condescension, coupled with Kowalski’s desire to protect the family, result in a fierce sense of guardianship over the family. And film’s audience embodies such a paradox as well. At the screening I attended, the audience laughed as the insults, and such laughter became more natural and expected throughout the film. The laughter becomes the audience’s own remnants of deeply rooted racial problems.
Eastwood’s character is driven by the guilt of some mysterious atrocity he committed during his time serving as a solider in Korea. Later in the film, the audience learns that Kowalski shot a young Korean girl in the head during his tour of duty. This anecdote explains his defining character motivation and why he is so intensely devoted to Lor’s protection. His seemingly altruistic intentions are an attempt to atone for the sins of his youth.
Similarly, our current foreign policy and the war in Iraq become America’s attempt at penance for the sins of the My Lai Massacre, Dresden, slavery, and the internment of domestic Japanese citizens and immigrants during WWII. But much like in the film, the altruistic urges are tinged with problematic prejudices.
In his pursuit of atonement, he reduces the Hmong people to a passive role of victims. His authority remains in his guardianship of the Lor family. He reduces his neighbors to 10-year-old Korean girls standing before him, trembling and tearful; he is still in control of their precarious existence. Part of his transfer of guilt was fostered in his own racial ignorance and inability to discriminate between the different Asian cultures. At one point in the film, Sue Lor has to explain the origin of Hmong people to a puzzled Kowalski, a plot point that may have benefited the audience as well.
Gran Torino concludes with Kowalski dying, bullet-ridden and sprawled out, as if he were Christ on the gang’s lawn. The mortal sacrifice becomes his final act of atonement, but his own condescension and perception of their frailty renders him as both the assailant and the victim to his own actions. The Kowalski character becomes an omen for the self-destruction of America in pursuit of a foreign policy hell-bent on “spreading democracy.”
Alexander Congrove is a first year English major at University of California -Santa Barbara.
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