Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West by Lawrence P. Jackson (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West by Lawrence P. Jackson
• Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.

Lawrence P. Jackson, Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2022. 312 pp. Hardcover, $44.95; e-book, $44.95.

At first glance the jacket designer Bea Jackson made a poor selection by using an out-of-focus image of uniformed Black soldiers posing for a photographer. The blurriness, of course, is intentional—by both jacket designer and movie director. The designer borrowed the image from Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and it depicts the only appearance of Black characters—portrayed by uncredited actors—in the film and who merely provide backdrop scenery. For the author Lawrence P. Jackson, Eastwood's decision to dispose the Black presence in Civil War-era Westerns to the background reflected his desire to place them into "a category of serene containment" (108). Eastwood and his film The Outlaw Josey Wales provide the fulcrum around which Jackson examines how Western [End Page 284] films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries blurred the Black presence—elisions of slavery and segregation—in a larger project to reaffirm white paternalism and imperialism during the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war.

Jackson argues that the earlier Westerns of John Ford and John Wayne such as The Searchers (1956), The Alamo (1960), and Sergeant Rutledge (1960) reflected the era's neoliberalism that condemned individual racism yet "insisted on white stewardship" and promoted US postwar imperialism (27). Later at the crest of the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam, Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns offered subversive anticolonial themes that functioned "as a splinter to the hegemony of shared consensus" (76). Eastwood attained iconic status portraying the Man with No Name, and he coopted the insurgency of Leone's films when he directed and starred in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Intended to assuage the white male anxieties of the 1970s, the film conflates the US defeat in Vietnam with the southern defeat during the Civil War. As Jackson explains, "Eastwood is actually suturing the Lost Cause of the Southern Rebels to the crisis of those dismayed by American military defeat and loss of prestige in Vietnam" (82). Eastwood's portrayal of the righteously violent white male and the apparent effectiveness of Black containment created a powerful cinematic touchstone that significantly informed the New Right. By adopting a kind of multiculturalism that obscured the injustices of economic and political inequality, the New Right ascended to power with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency.

Even when they included a significant Black presence, Civil War–era Westerns that followed The Outlaw Josey Wales continued to reinforce "the color-blind logic familiar to neoliberalism" (145). In Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil (1999), for example, Jeffrey Wright plays the enslaved Holt who involuntarily participates in the campaigns of pro-slavery guerillas in wartime Missouri. He is wiser and more capable than his white counterparts, and he quietly projects his dissatisfaction with his status as an owned human. In the end, however, he mourns over the death of his enslaver. This "neoliberal maneuver" (168), Jackson points out, sentimentalizes the Civil War as a southern white tragedy rather than a triumph of Black liberation. In Django Unchained (2012), Quentin Tarantino—an avowed [End Page 285] fan of Sergio Leone and auteur of cinematic violence—employs the insurgency of Django (Jaime Foxx), a formerly enslaved person turned bounty hunter. Django, however, seeks to punish and assume the authority of the enslaver rather than destroy the slave system.

In his methodology, Jackson argues that popular film can significantly influence culture and ideology. As actor, director, and political activist, Eastwood creates "the conceptual space that makes imaginary relations possible. That is the fundamental ideological dimension of his work and its unfolding inevitability, which makes resistance by the viewer so difficult" (20). In Jackson's estimation, this occurs especially in the Western genre, which functions as "the traditional American mass-culture heuristic" that conveys "ideological conflict" to an audience that...