Exactly!

I saw “Gran Torino” cold; other than it was a Clint Eastwood movie (and I’m not a particular fan) I knew nothing about it.

Perusing some online reviews afterward, there were two major types of reviews:

A) “old racist white dude gets what’s coming to him”

and

B) Eastwood fans who were angry Clint didn’t clean up the ‘hood like a combination of Judge Dredd and Rambo

I got the strong impression that most viewers had already decided what the movie was going to be about before they walked in, and only bothered to watch (or remember) the bits that supported that.

Oddly, the movie seemed to be immensely popular in Pakistan, even though some of the backstory was a mystery to some viewers. I wound up writing a lengthy post on one forum filling in the gaps; the shield emblem on his cigarette lighter and what happened to the First Cavalry in Korea, how Korean War vets got shafted by the Fed, Polish Catholic neighborhoods in Detroit, how even acknowledging what we now call “PTSD” wasn’t something a man from Kowalski’s culture would have done, the decline of Detroit from the 1970s, that last doctor visit, why he bought a new suit near the end… and me (an athiest) trying to explain to a mostly-Muslim forum about the difference between absolution and redemption, and how Vatican II, “progress”, and age had isolated him from the faith he had grown up in, and the difference between sacrifice and suicide… (practicing Catholics reading that probably needed more hands for adequate facepalm, but I gave it my best shot), and no, that being the exact rifle he had carried in Korea was Hollywood, but he could have bought an identical replacement with no paperwork at all before 1968, and only a 4473 afterward. A rifle was like a lawnmower; most households had at least one, and veterans tend to favor what they’re familiar with. And how the USA took in large mumbers of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, something which seems to be almost unknown outside the US.

I was writing for foreigners, but it was sobering to find, later, that a lot of Americans I talked to were surprised; things outside of their background, like Kowalski’s visit to the tailor. It made me wonder how much *I* had missed…

Walt Kowalski had lost his friends and his wife. His family, church, and country had left *him*, mutating into things he no longer identified with. So he sat on his porch and worked on his thousand-yard stare, watching the world turn to shit. Waiting to die.

And then he came to the conclusion if nobody going to act, then it was *his* job. A job too big for an 86 year old man with terminal cancer to finish, but sometimes victory isn’t an option; you do what you can, and lead the way for others to follow. Ōishi Kuranosuke Yoshio had forty-six ronin at his back; Walt Kowalski was alone. And he failed; or at least the results were ambiguous, but that wasn’t the *point*.

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”