The boy next door: Transnational identity in Gran Torino

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The boy next door: Transnationalidentity in Gran TorinoMaría Del Mar Azconaa

a University of ZaragozaPublished online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: María Del Mar Azcona (2013) The boy next door: Transnational identity in GranTorino, Transnational Cinemas, 4:1, 25-41

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Keywords

border dynamicsborder crossersurban borders transnational identityspaceClint Eastwood

María del Mar azconaUniversity of Zaragoza

The boy next door:

Transnational identity in

Gran Torino

absTracT

‘I fix things, stuff like that’. With these words Walt Kowalsky (Clint Eastwood) describes himself in Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008). Eastwood’s role as fixer is not new to his star persona (‘fixing things’ was after all what his roles in Sergio Leone’s trilogy and the Dirty Harry franchise were about). What is new in Gran Torino is the nature of the problem to be fixed, since it involves the reconsideration of the character’s own national and cultural identity through his – at the beginning openly reluctant – engagement with the urban borders within his Detroit neighbourhood. The filmic geography of Walt’s neighbourhood is of great importance in the construction of Gran Torino, particularly in its employment of a ‘border dynamic’ in the middle of a quintessentially US space. In this article I explore the articulation of the process of disintegration of borders, traced by the film through an analysis of its spatial dynamics, and the impact of the presence of border crossers and transna-tional citizens on the construction of national identity.

‘I fix things, stuff like that’. With these words Walt Kowalsky (Clint Eastwood) describes himself to Youa (Choua Kue) in Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008) when, on his birthday, he is invited to the party taking place in the basement of his Hmong neighbours’ house. Walt is a retired Ford factory worker who enjoys doing assorted maintenance work inside and outside the house, and mostly

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keeps to himself in the midst of what he considers a hostile environment: his own street, now occupied by ‘foreigners’. He is also alienated from his uncar-ing children and their families. A little earlier, the visit of one of his sons had ended abruptly after the latter’s suggestion that Walt should start thinking of moving to a retirement home. Eastwood’s unobtrusive but expressive visual style underlines the moment: an almost imperceptible wobbly camera zoom-ing in on Walt’s face suggests his increasing anger in between more neutral medium close-ups of Walt’s son and daughter-in-law. This stylistic feature points, on the one hand, to a spiritual instability and anguish in the character that will become central in the narrative and, on the other, to the sheer amount of energy still generated by the old hero’s body. Eastwood’s films of the last two decades have familiarized us with the association between his star persona and old age. This association has been explored from various perspectives in roles in which, as in Gran Torino, he has directed himself, including Unforgiven (1992), Space Cowboys (2000), Blood Work (2002) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) (see Gates 2012). Eastwood’s role as a ‘fixer’ is equally familiar. After all, ‘fixing things’ (even if sometimes for highly questionable reasons or in dubious ways) was what his roles as ‘the man with no name’ were about in Sergio Leone’s tril-ogy (Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars, 1964; Per qualche dollar in più/For a Few Dollars More, 1965; Il buono, ilbrutto, ilcattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), High Plains Drifter (Eastwood, 1973) and Pale Rider (Eastwood, 1985), and, as Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry franchise (Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971); Magnum Force (Siegel, 1973); The Enforcer (Siegel, 1976); Sudden Impact (Eastwood, 1983); The Dead Pool (Van Horn, 1988).

Gran Torino treads familiar territory, the octogenarian actor-director relent-lessly adding to his explorations of the ambivalent decadence of his former cinematic self. Even if his performance as Kowalsky revisits many aspects of his former roles, critics zeroed in on Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ as the most recur-rent referent (Dargis 2008; Zachareck 2008; Stables 2009; Modlesky 2010). Like Callahan, Kowalsky finds the legal system ineffectual and individual action the only possible way to fight the system’s inefficacy. Yet, in this process of revision of the Eastwood persona, Gran Torino adds a new dimension. The problem that the Eastwood-fixer has to deal with this time involves the reconsideration of his own national and cultural identity through his initially reluctant interac-tion with one of the Hmong families that, in Walt’s view, have taken over his own traditional ‘American’ neighbourhood. His spiritual illness, constructed as an aggregate of personal guilt and inability to understand what he regards as social degradation, is finally overcome through his engagement with the border. In the process, the concept of ‘American identity’ undergoes a dras-tic change, one which is all the more remarkable in that it comes from such a powerful icon of contemporary US culture.

The experience and conflicts of life on the border with which the Eastwood persona is already familiar through his roles in, among others, The Outlaw Josey Wales (Eastwood, 1976) or Coogan’s Bluff (Siegel, 1968), are re-enacted here in one of the major urban centres of the American Midwest, where the Eastwood character once again proves himself as the definitive fixer. Ultimately, what appears to be in urgent need of repair in Gran Torino is a national US identity that has become ineffectual and obsolete because it has failed to come to terms with its transnational reality. At the beginning of the film Walt is directly implicated in this process of repression. Yet, as the film develops, the Eastwood-hero, adapting to the new spirit of the times, once again comes to the rescue.


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The film’s action takes place in Detroit, a US city with a rich industrial history, a history of which Walt himself is part. Most of the scenes take place in and around Walt’s house and street. As is usual in Eastwood’s films, the mise-en-scène is carefully constructed and the old working-class street becomes not only a microcosm of the whole city but a carefully drawn map of the United States, crossed by internal borders with important symbolic functions. These internal borders correspond to the imaginary lines drawn by the successive settlements of the multiple immigrant groups that have arrived in the country in the course of its history. This symbolic geography is seamlessly inserted into the narrative and continues to change and evolve as the plot develops, highlighting the notion of the mobility and permeability of apparently inflex-ible borders. In this article I trace the development of the hero’s ‘American’ identity through the film-maker’s deployment of a border dynamic in the middle of a quintessentially US space. As borders visibly shift and disintegrate in Walt’s neighbourhood, the spectator is asked to acknowledge the impact of the presence of border crossers and transnational citizens on the construction of national identity.

Border theory has repeatedly claimed that borders are no longer restricted to the actual demarcating lines dividing two countries but can be found in other, unexpected places. As Gloria Anzaldúa puts it in her foundational text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza:

the borderlands are physically present whenever two or more cultures edge on each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.

([1987] 1999: 19)

Within a broader sociological context, Michel de Certeau also proposes a simi-lar approach to borders and boundaries in his analysis of the ways individuals operate in and organize their daily practices:

From the distinction that separates a subject from its exteriority to the distinctions that localize objects, from the home (constituted on the basis of the wall) to the journey (constituted on the basis of a geographical ‘elsewhere’ or a cosmological ‘beyond’), from the functioning of the urban network to that of the rural landscape, there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers.

(1984: 123)

This critical highlighting of borders does not aim to bypass or dilute the conflicts, the violence and the suffering that have been and continue to be inherent to many material borders. Rather, by emphasizing borders and boundaries and making border experiences more widespread, it gives them greater visibility and relevance in an attempt to make border consciousness an essential ingredient of our social reality and one no longer relegated to some specific areas usually removed from most people’s daily lives. As Saskia Sassen puts it: ‘Where the historic frontier was in the far stretches of colonial empires, today’s frontier zone is in our large cities’ (2007).

Some borders seem to be extremely ‘mobile’ and follow their border cross-ers wherever they go, as happens with the transnational Hmong community that has settled down in Walt’s neighbourhood in Gran Torino. An ethnic


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group from the mountainous regions of China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, the Hmong were a transnational community even before some of them had to leave the territories where they had lived for centuries, mostly for politi-cal reasons, in a series of migratory movements that gave way to the Hmong diaspora. Nowadays, the Hmong are scattered mainly across the United States, Australia, Argentina, France and Canada (see Schein 1998). The case of the Hmong in the United States (and in other parts of the world) is just an example of the many, and ever increasing, diasporas and migrant individuals and groups that are labelled as transnational because of their sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of affiliation and identity formation spanning nation states (Vertovec 2009: 2).

The historical importance of diasporas and the proliferation in our time of migrants and other types of border crossers has led cultural critics, as well as historians, policy-makers and many observers, to question the ongoing validity of the traditional concepts of the nation and the national. The debates originated by what we could call, generalizing a great deal, the crisis of the national, have inevitably included the meanings and scope of transnational-ism today (Appadurai 1996; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Vertovec 1999, 2009; Beck 2003). What transpires from these debates is that the transnational and the national are neither oppositional nor self-excluding concepts. Rather, they are interlocked and mutually constituting. The transnational is anchored in the national: even the word ‘transnational’ includes the term ‘national’. The national defines the experiences and activities that are labelled as transna-tional and, therefore, up to a certain extent, defines it. National identity is at the core of a transnational identity that incorporates several national identities. At the same time, the coexistence of several national identities in one single individual or in a group of people redefines and transforms the national in crucial ways. When immigrants adopt the national identity of their new coun-tries without abandoning their old one(s), they become transnational citizens, but the ways in which they represent both nationalities change the meanings of these national identities. In being both at the same time they make these two identities evolve in new directions. In turn, this process makes the citi-zens with whom they interact reimagine their own traditional concepts and open themselves up to a world crossed by all types of borders. At no point, however, do national identities disappear. This capacity to both transcend and transform the national, without erasing it, appears to be at the core of tran-snationalism. In the movie, as in contemporary US studies, this configura-tion of national identity is compared with the more traditional ‘melting pot’ discourse, as we shall see later on.

Were it not for the final coda – the reading of Walt’s will and the shot of Thao (Bee Vang) driving Walt’s Gran Torino – the film would be bookended by two funerals: those of Walt’s wife, Dorothy, and Walt himself. The similari-ties and differences between both scenes are more than obvious and reflect the hero’s evolution and the centrality of the family institution in this process. The most striking contrast is articulated between the two communities attend-ing each service. If in the opening scene the only ‘exotic’ element was Walt’s granddaughter’s navel ring – visible enough to elicit a growl from her grand-father – in the second one, the prominent presence of several members of the Hmong community and, especially, Thao and Sue (Ahney Her) in what look like traditional Hmong ceremonial attires, shows the extent of the changes in Walt’s identity and in the world around him that his evolution has helped bring about. This second funeral scene also conveys the drastic reshaping of


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his space, a space that, in spite of his absence, will now become the centre of a new national consciousness, one indelibly marked by its engagement with the transnational other. This transition is more visibly effected through the substitution of a surrogate family for Walt’s blood family.

Finding a surrogate family when blood relationships are flawed is also a recurrent topic in Eastwood’s career as actor and director. It happens in A Perfect World (Eastwood, 1993) and in an even more obvious way in Million Dollar Baby. In the latter, boxing coach and manager Frank Dunne (Eastwood) finds a surrogate daughter in Maggie (Hilary Swank), which partly makes up for his non-existent relationship with a daughter whom he has not seen in years and who returns all his letters unopened. Similarly, Walt, deeply disap-pointed with his ‘real’ children, finds a surrogate son in Thao, a relationship that, additionally, helps him appease his conscience after his medal-winning war experience in Korea. Yet, if in Million Dollar Baby Dunne has to shed his prejudices against female boxers before he becomes entitled to his new ‘family’, in Gran Torino Walter is forced to fight and revise his racial preju-dices through his reluctant contact with the Hmong family next door, a proc-ess which is represented in this film through a series of border crossings.

The first shot of Walt’s neighbourhood after Dorothy’s funeral shows their well-kept house and the neighbours’ run-down one on opposite sides of the frame, the screen split into two sides and separated by a white pole, which literally marks the boundaries between two different worlds, even though they exist next to one another in the same apparently homogeneous street. From this all-too-obvious demarcation of limits, of which Walt is an avid preserver and defender, the film gradually shifts to a more permeable space where the two households will almost literally end up dissolving into one. Yet, this blurring of boundaries is different from the ‘melting pot’ mentality traditionally used to describe the integrations of immigrants into US culture. As will be argued, the process of acculturation that takes place in Gran Torino is not the assimilation of the non-dominant ethno-cultural group (Berry 2011: 2.3) into the dominant US white culture but results in the development of what Steven Vertovec calls a transnational consciousness, that is, one characterized by dual or multiple identifications across national or cultural borders (Vertovec 1999: 449), or as Ulrich Beck puts it, one that replaces the ‘the “either/or” logic of nationality’ with its own ‘this-as-well-as-that’ paradigm (Beck 2003: 20).

The first direct contact between the two worlds takes place on the day of Dorothy’s funeral when Thao rings Walt’s bell asking for jumper cables. Thao’s

Figure 1: Urban borders in Detroit.


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ill-timed border crossing is met with several racist remarks from Walt, who refuses to help his neighbour – we see him using jumper cables to start the car of one of his guests almost immediately – and summarily throws him out of his sacrosanct property. The second ‘invasion’ of Walt’s space takes place when Thao is forced by a Hmong gang to break into his neighbour’s garage and steal his 1972 Gran Torino. The noise coming from the garage wakes up the always-alert Walt, who is all too quick to grab his rifle to defend his house against the anonymous assailant (this time he does not recognize Thao, who manages to escape unharmed). Their next meeting takes place when Thao is troubled again by the members of the same gang and Walt, armed with the same weapon, confronts the ‘foreign’ trespassers: ‘Get off my lawn’, he threatens Dirty Harry style, while pointing his rifle at the Hmong teenagers with utter concentration. Although still trying to protect his property, he also saves Thao from the Hmong gang, which prompts the ‘food and flower inva-sion’ of the morning after when several members of the Hmong community start leaving gifts at his front door. Trying to keep them off his small world and still obsessed with protecting its boundaries, he throws the presents away and denies his role in saving Thao: ‘I didn’t save anybody. I kept a bunch of gooks off my lawn’. The border between two adjoining houses in the Detroit neighbourhood of Gran Torino may not be as potentially dangerous as other demarcating lines that we hear about all too often in the media. And yet, most of the features of some ‘real’ borders between countries – the vigilantism, the racial hatred and the fear, and, as will be seen, the curiosity and attraction for what lies on the other side of the border – are re-enacted in an apparently continuous and innocuous patch of land. In Walt’s strong but hysterical reac-tion one can sense his powerlessness at maintaining the purity of his Euro American national identity and to prevent the permeability of borders, even in the heart of a city far away from any official borders. It is as if the ‘invading hordes’ keep gaining ground as the defenders of national identity continue to defend their ever-shrinking piece of land, reduced here to the small space of a lower middle class house.

Yet, not even Walt’s racial prejudices towards his neighbours can prevent him from intervening when he sees Thao’s sister, Sue, and a friend being harassed by a black gang in a dangerous area of the city later on. He confronts and scares away the assaulters and drives Sue home. This scene could be read in a number of ways: it could be seen as an illustration of blatant racism in which the character of Sue is an excuse to offer an unjustified negative view of African Americans; or it could be interpreted as a white man’s fantasy of self-redemption by saving the Asian girl from the clutches of the dangerous black men. However, in the context of the film’s narrative, the scene becomes part of a carefully drawn process of evolution of the film’s main character, process that is aimed at exposing the limitations of a traditional Anglo-American sense of identity. In the ensuing conversation in his truck, one still peppered with frequent racist insults towards Asian people, Walt starts showing a slight inter-est in his neighbours (‘Where the hell is Humong, I mean, Hmong, anyway?’ he asks her) and even ends up admitting to Sue that he has enjoyed talking to her and that he likes her: the closest to a compliment that we have seen from his character so far in the narrative. This brief encounter starts making a small dent in the protagonist’s opinion of the Hmong family next door. He then also begins to see Thao in a different light when he witnesses a scene in which the young man helps a common neighbour, Mrs V, with her shopping. Yet, as I will argue below, the recognition of shared values in his neighbours


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is not the first stage of an assimilation process of the racial Other, or to put it differently, an ‘Americanization’ of Thao since the acculturation process that takes place in Gran Torino affects Walt more than his neighbours.

Walt’s first tentative crossing of the border into the space of his neigh-bours takes place on the day of his birthday. However reluctantly and out of necessity – he has run out of beer –, he accepts Sue’s invitation to the celebra-tion that is taking place next door. He crosses over, enjoys the food, has his aura read by the family shaman and, to his astonishment, suddenly realizes that he may have more in common with the Hmongs next door than with his own family. Having tried and enjoyed the Hmong food at the party, he no longer refuses the home-cooked dishes that the members of the commu-nity are still bringing to his door, becoming a practitioner of what Beck refers to as ‘banal cosmopolitanism’, that is, the unconscious redefinition of one’s identity, as cosmopolitan in this case, by means of mundane activities (2003: 21–22). It may be ‘banal’ but it is also an important step for Walt, who shows his potential to appreciate what is outside the so far airtight sanctity of his lawn. In slowly opening up to his ‘exotic’ neighbours, learning to see them as part of his world and appreciating their beneficial influence in his life, he is transforming the geography of the place where he lives, converting it, in the terms proposed by de Certeau, into a lived space now characterized by border consciousness. This lived space becomes, in the film’s ideology, the index of a revised national identity, a revision which is all the more poignant because it is carried out, as it were, on the body of one of the most powerful icons of recent American culture. The process, however, is still in its opening stages and much more is to come.

Much closer interaction with the other starts when Thao’s family forces Walt to take the teenager in his service for a week in order to make amends for his attempted burglary. Walt’s brief incursions into the other’s world have been satisfactory so far but he is not ready yet to allow Thao on his property. When he is forced to agree to the deal, he initially thinks of several useless tasks for Thao before putting him at the service of the whole neighbourhood. In the montage sequence that follows, we see the young Hmong-American doing all kinds of labour and manual work in all kinds of weather conditions. We also see Walt’s more than satisfied look when he sees the smooth and unproblematic way in which Thao begins to embody what he regards as the old traditional ‘American’ values of hard work, tenacity and discipline that he can no longer find in the young Anglo generations. The dissolves between the shots of Thao doing the sort of maintenance job, through which Walt has defined himself, and those of Walt looking at him visually, convey the merg-ing process between these two identities that is about to start.

Yet, this merging process is not the melting pot model, which would have just erased and discarded Thao’s cultural and ethnic difference and turned him into a ‘good American’. The term made popular by Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908) gave a name to the process by which immigrants were supposed to melt their identity into an existing ‘American’ nationality. Yet, this celebratory metaphor evades ‘the power differentials, the coercion, the tensions, and the conflict that have characterized the American social order since the era of European settlement’ (Jacobson 2000: 180). From those who considered the melting pot as a more or less direct form of race suicide, such as Edward A. Ross in his 1914 essay The Old World and the New, to those for whom the suppression of difference that the model implied was at odds with the country’s emphasis on the pursuit of democracy and democratic values


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(see, for instance, Horace Kallen’s 1915 article ‘Democracy versus the melting pot’) the task of ‘Americanizing’ new immigrants was never as successful and unproblematic as the term made it appear. As shown by Randolph Bourne’s famous essay ‘A trans-national America’, as early as 1916, some voices were already claiming for the recognition of difference that was the country’s very reason for being and envisioned the United States as ‘a transnationality of all the nations’ (even though Bourne’s ideal of a transnational America does not seem to include non-European nations). Gran Torino is aware of the heteroge-neous national, cultural and ethnic make-up that, once conveniently trained, modelled and transformed, developed into a strong sense of national iden-tity in the United States. The film’s emphasis on Kowalsky’s Polish roots – and the Italian and Irish ancestry of some of his lifelong friends – points to some of the shortcomings of the melting pot paradigm and adds to the film’s more general exploration of the futility and the limitations of any attempt to define a pure sense of national identity. As the story develops, both the protagonist and the viewer addressed by the text have to come to terms with a different way to construct US identity.

With the only exception of the Hmong party, the border crossings analysed above always took place in the same direction: from the side of the Hmong family to that of the white Anglo-American, suggesting, to a certain extent, the subordination of the non-dominant ethno-cultural group to the ‘official’ dominant culture. Yet, the definitive border crossing in Gran Torino takes place in the opposite direction when Walt, out of his own initiative, crosses the invisible border to ask for help. As he knocks on Thao’s door we see Walt’s shadow reflected on the doorglass, his black silhouette a vivid reflec-tion of the lone gunslinger Eastwood has so often embodied as if threaten-ingly entering the saloon of a classical western. When Thao goes to open the door and we see him through the glass, Walt’s blank outline is suddenly filled in by the face of the Hmong-American teenager. The two characters become not mirror images of each other but one single body, a composite entity made up of formerly irreconcilable opposites. Rather than Thao’s assimilation – and, therefore, erasure and invisibility – into the dominant white culture, this unobtrusive framing strategy, very much in keeping with Eastwood’s ‘classical’ style, suggests the need for the dominant culture to be filled by the transna-tional Other in order to give way to a newly formed identity: one marked by a transnational experience taking place in an urban neighbourhood, far away from border patrols and exclusionary walls.

Figure 2: Hmong cowboy: Clint Eastwood finds an unexpected heir.


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Critical theorization of the border has emphasized its intrinsic paradoxical nature. Dividing lines are always created by contact and, therefore, the points through which two bodies, cultures or countries are separated automatically become what they have in common. Conjunction and disjunction are insepa-rable drives (de Certeau 1984: 127). It is not that any border can easily be opened and turned into a crossing, but rather that ‘delimitation itself is the bridge that opens to the other’ (de Certeau 1984: 127). The border is always already a bridge, at least a potential one. That border/bridge becomes a war zone when protection of one’s territory and oneself from the other prevails. This is the starting point for Walt since his Hmong neighbours remind him of his war experience in Korea and, more generally, of his lifelong definition of self in opposition to the threatening Other. But the border is also a contact zone, which Anzaldúa, to distinguish it from the border as a dividing line, refers to as a borderland: a positive and fruitful space of interaction between several cultures; in sum, the place where transnational encounters occur. Walt evolves from border patroller to citizen of the borderland when he opens himself to the Hmong culture next door and his inherent ‘Americanness’ starts to be incorporated and to be transformed by the transnational Other. We must not forget, however, that this transnational Other is already also ‘American’, an alternative form of national identity of which perhaps the hero, in spite of his Polish origins, had not been aware before. His neighbours are not exactly newcomers, but US citizens who have already carved their own niche in the discourse of ‘Americanness’, however difficult they may have found this process to be. They are, after all, the dominant ethnic group in Walt’s Detroit neighbourhood. It is this proximity and even inevitability of the transnational within the national that, initially, produces Walt’s aggressive assertion of traditional nationalism.

This process can be linked to Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s discus-sion of transnational cinema. Ezra and Rowden relate the proliferation of both transnational cinema and filmic narratives dealing with transnational experi-ences to the decline of the power of nation states as regulatory forces in a global world (2006: 1). Yet, unlike Arjun Appadurai (1996), they do not see this as the harbinger of a postnational political order, but rather as the frequent cause of a resurgence of nationalist feelings. As they put it: ‘nationalism is a canny dialogical partner whose voice often seems to be growing stronger at the very moment that its substance is fading away’ (Appadurai 1996: 4). A similar process has been noticed by Manuel Castells in his analysis of contem-porary identity in the renewed social order that he labels the ‘network society’. In a world characterized by increasing globalization, he claims, the revival of nationalism and certain forms of communitarianism – such as religious funda-mentalism – is one of the most obvious reactions against the anxiety gener-ated by the precarious position in which people find themselves in a global world (Castells [1997] 2004: 9). As traditional ways of understanding identity are diluted by transnational encounters and globalizing forces, individuals try to recuperate their old ways of conceptualizing the world. Traditional national identities continue to be one of the most convenient and accessible ways of achieving a stable sense of self in a network society governed by transnational encounters.

Walt’s racial prejudices and his staunch defence of what he understands as traditional US values and identity can be partly understood and explained in this context. Global changes, and their local cultural consequences, are begin-ning to make him feel alienated in a familiar place. Not only does he feel out


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of touch with his own family, who consider him a relic from the past, but the make-up of his ‘natural environment’ is also changing: his son drives a Japanese car, his old doctor has been replaced by a foreigner and the traditions and lifestyle of the Hmong community are altering the look of his traditional working-class neighbourhood. For Walter, a well-known place is becom-ing an unfamiliar, alien space, a process that he tries to fight through a wide repertoire of racist slang in order to hold on to his old ways of understand-ing his country and the world. In this case, this process of de-familiarization is to a great extent a consequence of a migratory movement rooted in a very specific historical moment. As Sue explains to Walt when he gives her a lift back home, some Hmong people fought together with the US army in the Vietnam War. When the US troops left, their only hope for survival was to flee their own country, a migratory movement that proves, as Sassen claims, that, contrary to common belief, immigration-receiving countries are crucial partners to any process of immigration: ‘International migrations stand at the intersection of a number of economic and geopolitical processes that link the countries involved; they are not simply the outcome of individuals in search of better opportunities’ (1999: 1).

The consequences of that historical moment can now be seen in the composition of Walt’s neighbourhood in Detroit. As Castells claims, social and historical processes ‘influence space by acting on the built environment inher-ited from previous socio-spatial structures’ ([1996] 2000: 441). A traditional working-class area of Detroit is now home to the Hmong. Walt’s neighbour-hood is miles away from the dynamics of the constant transnational interac-tions that Castells has theorized as the ‘space of flows’ ([1996] 2000: 407–59). Yet, space is the expression of society and, therefore, any social process has an effect on (its) spatial configurations. Michel de Certeau has argued that stories are ‘spatial trajectories’: ‘They traverse and organize places; they select and link them together, they make sentences and itineraries out of them’ (1984: 115). In Gran Torino, a street in a Detroit neighbourhood becomes the incarna-tion of the transnational arena through the experiences of its inhabitants. Through the Hmong massive migration to the United States after the Vietnam War, Vietnam and Laos are now a visible part of Detroit. Thao and Sue, two Hmong-Americans born and raised in this transnational soil, show clear alle-giances to their two native cultures, showing that contemporary US identity, increasingly informed as it is by multiple border narratives, can only continue to be feasible if it incorporates the transnational at its very heart.

The evolution of Walt’s 1972 Gran Torino in the narrative is a mise en abyme of the film’s call for the need to come to terms with the presence of the transnational element in contemporary US identity. As the film develops, the car becomes the recipient of a plethora of meanings, each depending on the ‘eyes of the beholder’. Whereas, for Walt’s granddaughter it is just a ‘vintage car’ that she likes because of its retro look and is devoid of any further meaning, for Walt his precious car is an embodiment of the tradi-tional ‘American’ values that he can no longer see in the younger generations. Those waning values are not limited to the private sphere – the family and the community – but include a different conception of industrial and manu-facturing processes as well. As Walt explains to Thao, he built the car on the Ford assembly line almost with his own hands. His insistence on maintaining it in a pristine condition reflects both his emotional involvement with some-thing he once felt a part of and his desire to keep those values intact. As has repeatedly been claimed, Walt’s Gran Torino is the emblem of the ‘Good Old


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Days’ of both the city of Detroit as the leader of US automotive industry and of the United States of America as an uncontested global power (Dargis 2008, Beard 2011: 40). In fact, as a reviewer on the Consumer Guide Automotive puts it, the choice of the 1972 Gran Torino for Eastwood’s film is a ‘pitch-perfect job of automotive casting’ (Bell 2009). Not being an especially rare, exotic or valuable car, the 1972 model heralded the end of Detroit’s unques-tioned supremacy on the automotive industry: ‘Motown’s high-horsepower big-block beasts were suddenly a dying breed, thanks to new emission regu-lations, spiralling insurance costs, and a changing social climate’ (Bell 2009).

The evident feeling of nostalgia for a glorious past evoked by Walt’s car undergoes a process of deconstruction and reconstruction similar to Walt’s own narrative evolution. As W. Beard has pointed out, the film is marked by two reference dates: 1952, the year of the Korea War, and 1972, the year of Walt’s Gran Torino. Walt’s experience in Korea was a traumatic one, the sense of guilt still haunting him more than 50 years later and fuelling his open hatred of Asian races. Yet, the year 1972 does not fare much better in Beard’s analysis. The date is directly linked to the US defeat in the Vietnam War. Although the US military involvement in Vietnam ended officially in 1973, by 1972 ‘nobody could avoid any more the recognition that the war was officially lost’ (Beard 2011: 40). Seen in this light, the glorious past embodied in Walt’s gleaming car is, as Beard claims, only a mirage: ‘The nostalgia for a more stable and comforting time that’s inscribed all over the incidentals of Walt Kowalki’s life, habits and environment is a nostalgia for something that never existed’ (2011: 41). Closely linked to this ideal of a glorious national past, Walt’s sense of national identity is revealed as a mirage as well: Walt’s culturally pure Euro American nation is and has always been transnational. Yet, the fact that the United States’ glorious past and pure Euro-American identity are revealed as a construction does not make them less powerful when it comes to explaining the way individuals make sense of themselves and their national identity on a daily basis. Walt’s insistence in preserving his 1972 Gran Torino in pristine condition becomes then not a desperate attempt to keep the glories and the values of the past from the passing of time, but a reflection of his urgent need to hold on to and believe in the myth that conforms his identity.

Walt is not the only one for whom the Gran Torino is the embodiment of a glorious national past – at least at the beginning. The members of a Hmong gang force a reluctant Thao to steal Walt’s Gran Torino, an initiation rite that represents a direct attack on past US supremacy and its consequences, a sort of symbolic retaliation for the events that led to the massive emigration of the Hmongs from their countries of origin. This attack, as well as Walt’s unbear-able guilt for what he did in Korea, proves that, as William Faulkner famously put it in Requiem for a Nun ([1953] 1960: 81): ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past’. Walt’s only way of appeasing his conscience is by coming to terms with his past, which, in his case, means his acceptance of his experience in Korea. As Salman Rushdie puts it, ‘to cross a frontier is to be transformed’ (2003: 411). Once crossed, there is no possibility of uncrossing and the fron-tier experience becomes an inherent part of the border crosser: ‘We become the frontiers we cross’ (Rushdie 2003: 412). Walt’s internal malaise and excru-ciating sense of guilt, based as it is on a staunch defence of a constructed ideal of a ‘pure’ national identity, can only be cured by facing and accepting the transnational Other and the transnational in himself.

This process of opening up and being transformed by the racial Other is mirrored by the outcome of Walt’s Gran Torino. The heir of the Gran Torino


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is Thao who, by the end of the film, shares with Walt a set of values that, like the borderlands, cut across different nations, races and cultures. And yet, Thao does not simply become another ‘American’, at least not an illustra-tion of the melting pot mentality. His merging with Walt and integration in US society is inseparable from his preservation of his own distinct cultural identity. The fact that Sue and Thao are shown wearing Hmong ceremonial clothes at Walt’s funeral has been criticized by some reviewers and scholars, who see this cultural inaccuracy as part of the film’s general lack of inter-est in Hmong culture, since Hmong people do not wear Hmong clothes to funerals (Schein and Thoj 2009; Jalao 2010). Yet, this type of cultural inaccu-racy becomes, in an audio-visual medium like the cinema, a potent and at the same time unobtrusive way of showing the allegiance towards both cultures of these two proud citizens of the borderlands.

Walt’s funeral is also a rebirth. His sacrifice allows Thao a future and, at the same time, ensures the continuity of the values represented by Walt. The film’s anti-climactic shoot-out, a reversal of many of the final showdowns Eastwood has played throughout his career, ends with a crane shot of Walt lying on the street after being gunned down by the Hmong gang. This framing could be seen as a powerful visual representation of persistent fears of white Americans being erased by Asians in their own country, fears that are quickly turned into racial prejudice against the other. Critics, on the other hand, have repeatedly related the shot to the pose of Christ crucified: the self-sacrificial nature of Walt’s death leading to Thao and Sue’s salvation (Hornaday 2008;

Figure 3: Citizens of the borderlands.

Figure 4: Beyond crucifixion, the xoanon shot.


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Modlesky 2010: 149; Beard 2011: 42; Corkery 2011). Some have criticized what they see as an excessive emphasis on the redemption of the white char-acter through this act: the Hmong teenagers being mere means to this end (Jalao 2010; Schein 2010). This would make sense as the culmination of a journey of white restoration that had already been initiated by Walt’s earlier rescue of Sue from the clutches of the African American youths. It would also fit within a larger process of Eastwood’s gradual ideological recuperation of his contemporary star persona away from the openly conservative meanings of his earlier movies, a process which, in view of his rather bland appearance at the 2012 Republican Convention, may not be as air-tight and as consistent it was thought (see, for instance, Rinne 2012). Apart from the well-known dangers of the intentional fallacy, it is also risky to see a film-maker’s career as a consistent narrative leading towards some epiphanic climax or happy ending. While, as I have argued before, it is useful to relate the meanings of Gran Torino to those of Eastwood’s earlier movies, the film is primarily a cultural text of its own time, reflecting preoccupations with the issue of American identity that cannot be reduced to a film star’s image. The crane shot of Walt lying dead can be interpreted differently.

The posture of Walt’s body in this shot is also that of the Greek xoana, mobile statuettes used to mark out boundaries. According to de Certeau, the xoana are usually attributed to Daedalus:

[T]hey are crafty like Daedalus and mark out limits only by moving themselves (and the limits). These straight-line indicators put emphasis on the curves and movements of space. Their distributive work is thus completely different from that of the divisions established by poles, pick-ets or stable columns which, planted in the earth, cut up and compose an order of places.

(1984: 129)

Seen in this light, the overhead shot that shows Walt lying on the ground, together with the low-key lighting that has also become a marker of Eastwood’s visual style, evokes a new conceptualization of space that is diametri-cally opposed to Walt’s former insistence on border control and boundary marking. This scene represents the culmination of the series of border cross-ings analysed above. While Walt’s previous encounters with the racial Other had been gradual one-to-one exchanges, this nocturnal scene shows Walt’s xoanon-like movement around the once traditional space of fixed boundaries and his full immersion into an alien space that is at the same time uncannily familiar both because of its location and because of the way it revisits Walt’s role and encounter with the racial Other in Korea. To the non-diegetic sound of a military drumroll, Walt’s experience in Korea is re-enacted – in reverse – in the streets of Detroit, showing that borders, as spatial configurations, can be recreated – or erased – in any place and at any time regardless of the actual demarcation limits between countries. Whereas the recurrent use of high angle shots in Gran Torino mirrors Walt’s obsessive concern with the demarcation and preservation of spatial boundaries, in this crane shot the former vigilante and border patroller becomes the icon of a new type of border that is by defi-nition mobile and emphasizes border exchanges and cultural commingling as the only possible way to make sense of national identities in contempo-rary transnational societies, even if, as this scene reminds us, the violence and suffering of borders are never far away. Like a Greek xoanon Walt becomes the


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marker of a border in need of urgent redefinition and reconsideration, a claim that becomes all the more significant since it comes from a country that, even before Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis – and in spite of its many detractors – has always seen the frontier as one of the markers of its ‘national character’. As Rushdie claims, it is ‘time, perhaps, to propose a new thesis of the post-frontier: to assert that the emergence, in the age of mass migration, mass displacement, globalized finances and industries, of this new, permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times’ (2003: 425).

Gran Torino does not end with Walt’s death, not even with his funeral. The film’s coda shows Thao driving Walt’s Gran Torino into the distance with Walt’s Golden Labrador, Daisy, in the passenger seat. The process of merg-ing of the two identities that has taken place throughout the film culminates here. The careful arrangement of mise-en-scène elements chosen to convey the sense of continuity and regeneration brought about by the character of Thao is mirrored by the song played over the final credits in which the broken vocals of Eastwood give way to the raw-edged, both invigorating and peaceful, voice of the British singer of Anglo-Burmese origin, Jamie Cullum. The nasal quality of Cullum’s voice elongates the final chords of each line mirroring, in a way, the way in which Walt’s existence is perpetuated in Thao. The Hmong teen-ager becomes the recipient of Walt’s precious Gran Torino and, at the same time, the unexpected cinematic heir of such an iconic figure of US identity as Eastwood. In Gran Torino, Eastwood, the fixer, sets out, however unwill-ingly at the beginning, to repair a US identity that is ineffective and obsolete because it has failed to embrace the transnational. In this final shot, the image of Eastwood as the cultural icon of a traditional ‘American’ has suddenly changed to embody a type of US contemporary identity in which the frontier, so often traversed by Eastwood’s characters, has become the central compo-nent. If, in the xoanon shot, Walt has replaced his traditional conception of spatial exclusion by a more complex and inclusionary perception of space, in the coda it is Thao’s turn to embody the ‘American’ experience of the road. As in the shot of the two characters merging at Thao’s door analysed above, the two characters become unlikely mirror images of each other, but now from the opposite side of the fence. In crossing the border and becoming the other, Walt and Thao become powerful embodiments of a complex spatial construc-tion of national identity that seeks to atone for a long history of border patrol-ling and racial discrimination, of which Eastwood’s star persona was once a distinguished icon. It may well be too late for Eastwood, but young Thao holds the future in his hands.

acKnowledgeMenTs

Research towards this article was carried out with the help of research project No. FFI2010-15312 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the DGA research project No. H12. I would also like to thank Celestino Deleyto and the editors of Transnational Cinema for their help with earlier versions of this article.

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suggesTed ciTaTion

Azcona, M. d. M. (2013), ‘The boy next door: Transnational identity in Gran Torino’, Transnational Cinemas 4: 1, pp. 25–41, doi: 10.1386/trac.4.1.25_1

conTribuTor deTails

María del Mar Azcona is a lecturer at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She is the author of The Multi-Protagonist Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and the co-author, with Celestino Deleyto, of Alejandro González Iñárritu (University of Illinois Press, 2010).

Contact: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain.E-mail: [email protected]

María del Mar Azcona has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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The boy next door: Transnational identity in Gran Torino