Clint Eastwood’s House of Horrors

Clint Eastwood, his movies and the characters in them often have an ambiguous or ambivalent relationship to violence. For every Dirty Harry taking the law into this own hands, there is a Walt Kowalski who offers up his own life. Eastwood’s filmography is a maze of conflicting characters and political stances – a house with many doors. And this video essay shows us what is behind them.

 

In this effort for MUBI, prolific video essay maker Luís Azevedo turns the oeuvre of Eastwood into a memory palace. The man himself (or at least, one of his cowboy personae) silently strolls through a house, gun at the ready. Behind every door he opens is another fragment of his long career, each one documenting his fraught and often fishy affinity for violence. It’s a creative way to make the viewer (and Clint Eastwood) ponder the violent streak in the work of this often frustrating, often brilliant filmmaker.