You know a fighter is finished when her opponents can tell what’s coming next.
And you know an artist is all washed up when the audience is no longer startled, challenged, confused and maybe even a little appalled by what she produces.
There’s scant danger of that fate for Clint Eastwood, whose latest film — “Million Dollar Baby,” a best picture nominee in Sunday’s Oscar competition — continues his exhilarating habit of confounding expectations. Watching Eastwood earlier in his career, when he specialized in taciturn drifters or sneering detectives, who could have predicted that he’d turn into a subtle and insightful filmmaker, restlessly taking on themes such as child sexual abuse and euthanasia?
And Eastwood, 74, has done this at an age from which society has long since ceased to expect innovation and intellectual nimbleness. Too often, critics and audiences relegate daring behavior and convention-busting endeavors to those who seemingly have nothing to lose: the young and obscure.
Eastwood, though, has joined a highly selective group: long-successful artists who continuously tinker with their careers, who make changes in the fundamental nature of their work even at a time when they could safely kick back and relax, endlessly repeating past themes and proven methods.
Artists such as director and actor Eastwood, painter Winslow Homer, composer Johannes Brahms and writer Robert Silverberg could have coasted. But they didn’t.
“Here I am in my 70s,” Eastwood recently told Film Comment magazine, “and I still have ideas and things I want to explore.”
Altering the tenor of one’s art after significant early success is more than an interesting decision. It’s an act of courage. And it crisply defies the standard notion of maturity in the modern world, a place “where aging means old age and bodily fate, not a choice of narratives about time,” as Margaret Morganroth Gullette writes in her book, “Aged by Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
These days, notes Gullette, a resident scholar at Brandeis University, “Aging equals decline, a devastating formula.”
That message is reinforced by advertisers who chase the younger demographic like so many rare butterflies because older people allegedly are “set in their ways” and unlikely to try new products. And advertisers’ ideals control the agenda for the arts world, determining which stories get the go-ahead for commercial consumption.
Career twists
The worth of those stories typically is defined by the calendar: The phrase “new young artist” glides effortlessly off the tongue, in a way that “new old artist” does not.
But that’s what Eastwood is: a new old artist. And that’s what Brahms was, at age 43, when he wrote his first symphony — a risky career move, given the immensity of Beethoven’s shadow — after an eminently successful run as a composer of piano music. That’s what Homer was, at age 37, when he switched to watercolors in the midst of a perfectly respectable career as a painter of oils. That’s what Silverberg was, at age 45, when he left behind the immensely popular sci-fi adventure yarns that had made him rich and famous and opted for a denser, more complex prose style and deeper topics.
The hard way
These aren’t people who changed careers at midlife, an oft-chronicled phenomenon — the accountant who becomes an opera singer at 50, the lawyer who goes to cooking school at 63 — but rather established, highly successful artists who abandoned the ease and comfort of that success and struck out anew.
“Eastwood is clearly maturing as a person, just as Picasso kept changing and reinventing himself,” mused Alan Lightman, author of “A Sense of the Mysterious” (Pantheon, 2005), during a recent visit to Chicago. As for himself, “I’m growing as a writer and learning with every book,” added Lightman, 56, a theoretical physicist whose novels include “Einstein’s Dreams” (Pantheon, 1993) and “Reunion” (Pantheon, 2003).
Yet growth comes at a price, as Silverberg told an interviewer for Science Fiction Weekly: “There were times when I felt almost a hostility from the audience [as he was changing his work] . . . They were saying, `Why don’t you go back to telling the good old space stories that you used to tell?”
The lure of the sure thing has doomed many an artist into spinning the same story, over and over again. That’s what makes the journey of an Eastwood — who, beginning in the 1990s, squinted longer and harder at the world than he’d ever done before, and started wondering what films could make of it — so surprising, so enthralling. The road that leads from “Hang ‘Em High” (1968) to “Million Dollar Baby”? Wildly improbable.
And yet society’s image of the mature, stable person is not that of a risk-taking adventurer. As Gullette said in an interview, “Age is yet another level of oppression.” The expectation is that established artists will simply repeat themselves.
Keep on keeping on
And there may be still more at play than what Gullette calls “age ideology” in our common acceptance of creative decline as the years accumulate. Even in a country as open-minded and forward-thinking as America, in which the social niche of one’s birth is proclaimed as no determinant of adult achievement, there still lingers a faint sense of inevitability about class, about background and origin.
We keep certain aphorisms in play: The past is prologue; if you want to know the future, look to the past. We can’t seem to shake off the idea — whether we’re artists or actuaries or brick masons — that what we’ve done is what we’ll continue to do, that we’ll just keep on keeping on.
We are what we were
Dennis Lehane captures that idea with beautiful brevity in his 2002 novel “Mystic River,” when he introduces his characters according to where they lived as youngsters: “People in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented.”
Eastwood, of course, made a superb film in 2003 out of Lehane’s novel. “Mystic River” suggests that there is an inviolable essence to each person, and while years pass and things happen, that essence lies in wait, like a live round mistakenly left in a discarded gun. We want to believe in the constant possibility of change and free will — it’s the American way — but we’re not quite sure.
“Every tick of the clock is loss, loss, loss,” wrote Tennessee Williams in his introduction to “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which would seem to refute the lessons of Eastwood’s career of late.
But Williams didn’t end the sentence there. He added, ” — unless you devote your heart to its opposition.” And that’s the Eastwood we’re seeing now — a man as stubborn as Frankie Dunn, the character he plays in “Million Dollar Baby.” Scrappy, irascible, deep in the fight of his life.
