Clint Eastwood and Joseph Campbell: Movies, myth and melodrama

"Melodrama is the conflict between good and evil; drama is the conflict between good and good."

So wrote George Bernard Shaw. That's why he gives the longest, most compelling speech in St. Joan to the Inquisitor. Joan’s chief adversary is no Sauron or Darth Vader; he is a logical, educated, well-meaning individual. But he is also the product of his age, matched against a heroine who, in Shaw's view, heralds the future.

Shaw’s maxim popped into my head when I read (in Salon and elsewhere) that many conservatives had turned against Clint Eastwood, whose Dirty Harry character they had once embraced. Rightists love the image of Clint as a vigilante, torturing information out of the demonic Scorpio killer. They don't like the kind of director Eastwood has become. (Or rather, they don't like some of the scripts he has chosen; most people have little idea what a director actually does.) They don't care for films like Unforgiven and Mystic River, in which the protagonist is not necessarily the good guy and the antagonist is not necessarily the bad guy.

Ask yourself: In the entire history of storytelling (movies, novels, the stage), has any denizen of the political right ever managed to compile a resume filled with dramas -- true dramas, as Shaw defined the term?

If we confine that inquiry to Hollywood, one can name Clint Eastwood and...well, who else? John Ford made excellent dramas -- but, even though some have called him a conservative, I can't believe that the man who directed How Green Was My Valley and The Grapes of Wrath would have had any use for the likes of Ann Coulter. By contrast, C.B. DeMille, who wallowed in melodrama of the most ludicrous sort, probably would have loved Coulter. Orson Welles, an old-school liberal, felt that "every villain has his reasons" -- thus, the corrupt cop in Touch of Evil remains oddly likable, and Charles Foster Kane is both victim and victimizer.

Now ask yourself the next question: Why does the right hate drama? Why do they hate any reminder that life is a complex, morally messy business?

I found an answer of sorts while flipping through Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By. Surprisingly, Campbell blames the Old Testament.

In a chapter entitled "Mythologies of War and Peace," he writes: "The late Bronze and early Iron Age Greeks were becoming masters of the ancient Aegean just about when the Amorites, Maobites, and earliest Habiru or Hebrews were overrunning Cannaan." These two conquering peoples recorded their triumphs in very different war-songs. The Iliad shows enormous respect for the Trojans: "The noble Trojan champion Hector is the leading spiritual hero of the piece. Achilles, beside him, is a thug."

Or consider that magnificent tragedy of Aeschylus, The Persians: What an extraordinary production to have been presented in a Greek city hardly twenty years after Aeschylus himself had fought the invading Persians at Salamis! The setting is in Persia, with the Queen of Persia and her court discussing the return of their defeated king Xerxes from that battle. It is written from a Persian point of view and shows with what respect and great capacity for empathy the ancient Greeks could regard even their most threatening enemy of that time.

(Can you imagine the uproar if any American film-maker dared to suggest that General Giap might have had a few admirable qualities?)

Campbell contrasts the civilized attitude of the Greeks with the one found in Deuteronomy and Joshua, which I consider the most vile scriptures ever labeled holy. In these works, a bloodthirsty tribal deity demands genocide against an enemy innocent of any crime, aside from occupying some beachfront property the Hebrews want for themselves. The orders to kill encompass "all that breathe": Men and women, the elderly and the newborn, even the livestock. The enemy is considered subhuman -- "life unworthy of life," as Hitler might have put it.

Of course, a gracious attitude came more easily to the Greeks because they won more of their wars. Much of the Old Testament was compiled during the Babylonian exile. Enslaved people rarely develop an appreciation for moral complexity; a slave wants to hear nothing beyond "We are right; they are wrong." I can understand why the Jewish and Greek worldviews differed.

What I can not understand is why our nation -- a nation of victors, not of slaves -- has turned against its classical inheritance.

America was born of the Enlightenment, which derived from the Renaissance, which derived from the Greeks. When I was young, nearly everyone who passed high school understood this history, just as nearly everyone viewed the more barbaric books of the Old Testament as relics from an age of savagery. Today, millions of modern fundamentalists view Deuteronomy and Joshua as holy, as inspired works with contemporary relevance.

By refusing to acknowledge the humanity of his adversary, the reactionary exiles himself to a fantasyland in which he is ever right. Compromise becomes weakness, self-doubt is seen as a form of neurosis, and propaganda trumps debate. Reactionary religion reduces all existence to cheap melodrama. That's why Bronze Age throwbacks will never understand drama: One might as well ask an Amazonian tribesman to tell you how a Kray supercomputer works.

Yet Clint Eastwood, oddly enough, has become one of our most lauded dramatists. His politics, so far as I know, still veer rightwards, even as the rightists veer away from him.

They prefer Mel Gibson, maker of melodramas, who serves 'em up grisly and brutal. Gibson, I hear, will soon make a film derived from the books of Macabbees, those ancient chronicles of the conflict between the Jews and the Greeks. I read those books many years ago, and the side I rooted for was probably not the one intended by the authors. I may skip the film version. But I look forward to Clint Eastwood's latest.