On Thursday, August 30, 2012, the final night of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, the evening’s third-to-last-speaker, Clint Eastwood, the former mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, stood at the podium opposite an empty chair, to which, at the start of his largely improvised address, he gestured, explaining to the thousands in the Tampa Bay Times Forum and the millions watching on television, “I've got Mr. Obama sitting here.”
Later, Eastwood explained that, with his twelve-minute speech—in which he castigated the chair for the administration’s policies on unemployment and foreign policy, and responded with surprise to some apparently off-color interjections from the invisible Obama—he “wanted people to take the idolizing factor out of every contestant.” He continued: “People don't have to kiss up to politicians. No matter what party they're in, you should evaluate their work and make your judgments accordingly. That's the way to do it in life and every other subject, but sometimes in America we get gaga, we look at the wrong values.”
Taking in his public pronouncements and presidential endorsements over the decades, Eastwood is perhaps the archetypal American swing voter, and this belief—that politics is a dirty game, played by untrustworthy people and quite separate from governance itself, serving mostly to mystify average citizens and shield elites from scrutiny—is a common one. It is a theme of his work, which looks with particular contempt upon the many federal- and state-level bureaucracies that stifle and impede the individual style and common-sense solutions of everyone from the police (as in the Dirty Harry films) to pilots (as in Sully, 2016).
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. A preoccupation with accountability animates Eastwood’s Absolute Power (1997), the opening sequence of which inverts his empty chair speech at the 2012 RNC. Rather than an American addressing a president who isn’t there, it shows the behavior of a president in front of an American he doesn’t see. At the RNC, Eastwood implicitly accused the president of deafness to the demands of his people; in Absolute Power, the president assumes his people are blind to his true nature.
In Absolute Power, Eastwood plays Luther Whitney—cat burglar, master of disguise, divorced dad—who, in the course of the robbery that opens the movie, hides himself behind a one-way mirror, and like Kyle McLachlan in Blue Velvet (1986), becomes awakened to a shadow-world of malign decadence as he witnesses the President of the United States (Gene Hackman) murder his mistress (Melora Hardin from The Office, 2005- 2013) during rough sex. Soon identified as a prime suspect, Whitney must elude capture and redirect the investigation, variously working with and against a cast of characters featuring the kinds of hairlines you simply don’t see in movies anymore in this age of inexpensive Turkish hair plugs (in addition to Eastwood and Hackman, the cast includes Ed Harris, Richard Jenkins, Scott Glenn, Kenneth Welsh, and Mark Margolis).
Both the film and the David Baldacci novel from which it’s adapted were released during then-president Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, respectively in November of 1996 and February of 1997, though the liaison did not become common knowledge until January 1998. This is hardly extraordinary prescience, as Clinton was at the time already associated with extramarital sex; but more pertinently, both the novel and film tap into a darker discourse around Clinton, one which has returned to relevance, with even greater fervency, in the past decade—one involving murder.
With the Clintons already mired in the Whitewater scandal, the 1993 suicide by gunshot of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, a longtime friend from their Arkansas days, was fuel for conspiracy theories launched from within an apparatus of wildly speculating alternative media and intense legal scrutiny—what Hillary Clinton later referred to as “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, famously recreated the shooting in his backyard using a cantaloupe for Foster’s head, demonstrating, to his own satisfaction at least, that Foster was killed, a thesis also advanced in the 1997 book The Strange Death of Vince Foster by Christopher Ruddy, now best known as the founder of Newsmax.
Absolute Power taps into the “Clinton Body Count” meme that had by that point already launched a thousand right-wing email forwards; in particular, Judy Davis’s ballbusting portrayal of the White House chief of staff who helps cover up the murder evokes the Machiavellian caricatures of Hillary Clinton that dogged her throughout the 1990s up to her 2016 presidential run, with its accusations of crooked back-channel diplomacy, ritual child sacrifice, and beyond, particularly around the time of the death in police custody of her husband’s close associate Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and prolific sex trafficker to the rich and powerful.
If Eastwood’s brand of straight-shooter libertarianism can shade into a crankish self-satisfaction that overestimates its own wisdom, he is, paradoxically, equally prone to a preoccupation with myth and a sentimentality about Great Men, from outlaws (A Perfect World, 1993) to heads of state (Invictus, 2009). These twinned aspects of the swing voter, the gruffly conspiratorial and the awe at historical grand narratives that transcend petty party politics, were the streams crossed definitively by Oliver Stone’s JFK at the beginning of the 1990s, in which Kennedy was once the target of imperial alphabet-agency nefariousness and a prince of peace, like Martin Luther King or Julius Caesar, above mere policy.
During the Clinton years, marked by the ascent to power across American public life of Baby Boomers for whom the Kennedy assassination was a formative childhood trauma, the presidency in general, and the shadow of JFK in particular, loomed heavy in Hollywood. Aaron Sorkin played off Kennedy’s (and Clinton’s) youthful playboy image with the White House rom-com The American President (subsequently spun off into The West Wing). And in 1993, Eastwood starred in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire, playing a Secret Service agent who failed to prevent the Kennedy assassination and is called back into action to foil the plot of a CIA wetwork contractor gone rogue—an opportunity to heal and redeem himself.
What Luther Whitney sees through the one-way mirror in Absolute Power is surely enough to “take the idolizing factor” out of the film’s Clinton stand-in. Yet the film is nevertheless marked by the same dual consciousness as JFK and In the Line of Fire: its ludicrous realpolitik fever dream of the DC swamp is interrupted by some real reverence for authority, in the person of the elder statesman (no party specified) played by E.G. Marshall, who appears in the narrative as a sort of deus ex machina to restore some dignity to the office of the President. Shades, perhaps, of QAnon dreams of John F. Kennedy’s resurrection—the gooey, nostalgic center around which spins an elaborate web of unspeakable evil.
Made with reliable MOR craftsmanship, Absolute Power has all the formal trappings of mainstream American institutional respectability but is, fundamentally, luridly surreal—like the astonishing televised spectacle of his chair speech. You can learn a lot from listening to a person talking to himself, especially a person like Eastwood, who is just one degree of separation from the beginning of Hollywood itself: the producer who first signed him to a $100/week deal in 1954, Arthur Lubin, was a former silent-movie actor who had appeared in Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928). Accumulated across his eight decades as a star text and auteur, the Eastwood filmography has become a record of American pathologies so voluminous and contradictory that it begins to look suspiciously like wisdom.
Absolute Power screens this evening, August 10, at the Roxy on a 35mm print as part of the series “Fidelio.”
