Clint Eastwood vs. Spike Lee

[David Ehrenstein]

Great post Roger! Someone please forward to Spike.

Don't bother. He'll ignore it.

[moviscop]

Don't bother. He'll ignore it.

Or turn you in for a hate crime.

[flyonthewall2983]

You know, if he wanted to attack a film, I don't recall any black soldiers at all in Saving Private Ryan. But please prove me wrong if that's the case.

[domino harvey]

Vin Diesel lolz

[moviscop]

You know, if he wanted to attack a film, I don't recall any black soldiers at all in Saving Private Ryan. But please prove me wrong if that's the case.

Tom Sizemore is the blackest mother fucker I have ever seen.

[tavernier]

Stephen Colbert weighed in on the feud on tonight's show--I'm sure there will be video online soon.

[tryavna]

Stephen Colbert weighed in on the feud on tonight's show--I'm sure there will be video online soon.

You can watch his and Stewart's shows virtually entire via their own websites. Here's Colbert's.

[exte]

You know, if he wanted to attack a film, I don't recall any black soldiers at all in Saving Private Ryan. But please prove me wrong if that's the case.

Uh... you don't fuck Steven Spielberg under any circumstances? Or didn't he have shit to say about The Color Purple?

[flyonthewall2983]

Maybe it bought immunity from Spike lol.

[colinr0380]

The problematic thing about Lee's comments is that they do not seem to have been made in a constructive manner but in a more confrontational one. It doesn't seem as if Eastwood is really at fault here, his Iwo Jima films have focused on particular events in the same way a film about the Buffalo Division might be said to have been a subject that only focuses on a specific experience to the exclusion of a wider perspective! Getting upset about what a particular film does and does not show about a historical event suggests that you consider a film to be a definitive statement about a whole conflict - a huge weight for any film to be burdened with and since Eastwood's Flags film is about the co-opting of history for various ends it is ironic that the film itself is being co-opted!

Unless a film is actively taking steps to whitewash events then there is no point in shoehorning in issues just for filmic balance (it would be like adding women into There Will Be Blood, to paraphrase PTA! Or 3 dimensional men into the Sex and the City film!) - it wouldn't do justice to the themes the film was wanting to deal with, and wouldn't do justice to providing balance either since this need for balance would be something imposed and obligatory (therefore seeming more patronising and 'token') rather than coming from a naturally arising set of circumstances.

The thing annoyance should do, and the thing that Lee seems also to have been doing anyway, is to use it as inspiration to make your own films dealing with the stories you want to tell, if you are in a position to get them made.

Anyway, the thing that annoys me about this spat is that it takes the discussion away from the film itself and into a more generalised "this film is/is not racist" debate, in which everyone loses because the discussion should be about something much deeper than being pushed into such a polarising "yes or no" proclamation.

To use a personal example on a different issue, the Guardian interview posted earlier says at one point:

Eastwood knows how to handle controversy. Four years ago, his boxing flick Million Dollar Baby, which garnered him best picture and best director Oscars (giving him five in total, including two for Unforgiven and a premature lifetime achievement gong back in 1995), was attacked by Christian groups. They had objected to the plot's "assisted suicide" of a paralysed athlete. "People who hadn't even seen the movie were saying that it's pro-euthanasia, but it wasn't," Eastwood says. "If you had asked Frankie [his character in the film], 'Do you believe in euthanasia?', he'd have probably said no. But that was the circumstances of the moment. Highly dramatic circumstances."

I really don't like the ending of Million Dollar Baby for the way the theme of euthanasia is handled as a plot device that is forced on the characters through what I would consider to be heavy handed dramatic contrivance and which comes too late in the film to do full justice to what is a difficult and controversial theme.

However that shouldn't mean that by not liking the film I have immediately aligned myself with the anti-euthanasia lobby, or that I believe that Eastwood is suggesting that assisted suicide is always a good idea - that is too simplistic an interpretation to put on it which would not fully understand either what Eastwood was trying to do with his film, or my own criticism being more about the way the issue was handled rather than the issue itself.

To reduce discussion to an opinion on whether you are for or against an issue itself takes the debate away from constructive criticism about the way the subject was handled, which is the problem with this whole racism debate. Saying you wish there was more of a focus on the black experience in Iwo Jima or that the euthanasia issues were handled in a different manner is a very different thing from blunty asserting that the filmmaker is a consciously excluding the black experience through prejudice or is actively promoting euthanasia through their films.

[MichaelB]

Slightly tangentially, this reminded me of a letter that the novelist Ian McEwan wrote in response to a review of one of his books in The Guardian a couple of years ago that concluded:

I sometimes wonder whether these common critical confusions arise unconsciously from a prevailing atmosphere of empowering consumerism - the exaltation of the subjective, the "not in my name" syndrome. It certainly seems odd to me that such simple precepts need pointing up: your not "liking" the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don't have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don't have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.

[Antoine Doinel]

Spielberg Mediated Eastwood/Lee Feud