WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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It’s Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and you’re listening to Interchange on WFHB.
Okay, so, this is a repeat airing of a program that appeared BTD or Before The Donald, in what seems decades ago, August of 2015. Tonight, while we chew our nails and continually refresh our favorite likely partisan election results site on our phones, we can still be entertained, right? To help with this, we offer Mixed Nuts: Clint Eastwood’s Life in the Movies. Now, if you’re a regular listener of Interchange over the past seven years you might guess that the decision to play this show tonight has meaning – as Melville would say of the whale, this is the key to it all…well, I wouldn’t go that far. But to me, Clint Eastwood typifies something we need to be rid of as an example of masculinity. I would only suggest you watch an Eastwood movie if you want to learn the worldview that has brought the very planet to the brink of collapse and catastrophe – this is “the American way” – the materialization of the small-minded assertions of individualism and manifest destiny for only one type of human…the monoculture man with a gun. This American, Clint Eastwood, has been giving us life (or rather death) lessons for half a century.
That may be heavy-handed, but really, we all know there’s a better way.
In a 2002 interview, today’s guest, Patrick McGilligan said of Clint Eastwood, “I think he’s a lazy actor and a lazy director. He’s a great image. This book is about how the image and the reality complement each other. There’s a false morality about Clint, the false morality of his life, which becomes the false morality of his films. It’s a disgusting reality, it’s all right to get revenge and kill people in nasty ways. It’s OK to triumph in comic book fashion over people as long as they’re evil. The message of his films in human and moral terms is that Clint wins, Clint survives, and good triumphs over evil because he’s always defined as good despite how many people he shoots…”
For “Mixed Nuts” we talk with McGilligan about Clint Eastwood’s life and look specifically at a few representative films: Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, and American Sniper.
Our opening songs, plural, are “Gran Torino” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” both performed by Clint Eastwood, about 50 years apart.
GUEST
Film historian and writer, Patrick McGillian. His unauthorized biography of Clint Eastwood, Clint: The Life and Legend, first published in 1999, was re-issued and updated by O/R [or] Books and released in 2015. His biography on Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light was a finalist for the Edgar Award. in addition to Hitchcock and Eastwood, he has written biographies on Robert Altman, James Cagney, George Cukor, Fritz Lang, Oscar Micheaux, Jack Nicholson, and Nicholas Ray. He is also an editor of Backstory, which features interviews of Hollywood screenwriters and is published by the University of California Press.
RELATED
Eastwood settles over wife-beating allegations
The Man With No Name BBC 1977 Documentary
At Home with Clint Eastwood (1970)
MUSIC
Intro: “Gran Torino” (theme) mixed with “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” performed by Clint Eastwood
First Break: “Don’t Fence Me In,” performed by Clint Eastwood
Second Break: “Barroom Buddies,” performed by Merle Haggard and Clint Eastwood
Outro: “No Sweater Cheater Than You,” performed by Clint Eastwood
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Live Audio Engineer: Jonathan Richardson
Mix: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
