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Go Ahead, Get Off My Lawn: The Korean War, The Gift of Freedom, and Guarding the Home/front in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino

Sat, November 19, 8:00 to 9:45am, HYATT REGENCY AT COLORADO CONVENTION CTR, Floor: Level 3, Mineral Hall G

Abstract

The main character in Clint Eastwood’s 2009 film Gran Torino, Walt Kowalksi (played by Eastwood), is a recently-widowed former Ford auto worker living alone with his dog Daisy in a working-class suburb of deindustrialized Detroit. The film’s narrative focuses on his relationship with his Hmong American neighbors, whom he initially despises as “swamp rat” foreign invaders, and in particular, his relationship with Thao, a Hmong American teen harassed by Hmong gangbangers and mentored into proper American manhood by the gruff, tool-wielding, rifle-slinging Kowalksi. While most analyses of the film have centered either on Walt’s character as a sacrificial “Christ-like” figure (Corkery) or the reductive representation of Hmong men as “perpetual warriors” (Schein, Thog, Vang, and Jalao), none of these analyses fully attend to the ways in which Walt, and the spatial politics of the film, are profoundly shaped by the Korean War. Indeed, this inattention to America’s “forgotten war” is all the more puzzling considering that signs of the Korean War surface again and again throughout the film, from the film’s opening scene of Walt’s grandchildren rifling through his boxes to reveal old photos from the war, to his constant references to the war’s violent wreckage as a clear indication of its haunting force, to the 1st Division Cavalry insignia emblazoned on his lighter that triggers his climatic sacrifice to protect Thao’s family. In fact, the secret that motivates Walt’s anguished veteran subjectivity, Walt’s guardianship of Thao and his family, and the unfolding of subsequent events that lead to Walt’s heroic death—his wartime murder of an unarmed Korean boy whom Thao resembles—is directly tied to the Korean War.

This paper addresses this occlusion, and the Trans-Pacific circulation of Korean War and Cold War security practices that shape the slash between “home” and “not home,” by reading Walt as a “border guard.” That is, I argue that Walt’s vigilant defense of the borders of his white picket fenced-home, reluctant expansion to include Thao’s family’s besieged home within his borders, and cultivation of an autonomous, possessive masculinity in Thao through fixing other dilapidated homes within the neighborhood, is rooted/routed in the containment doctrine justified as what Jodi Kim calls the “gift of freedom”—the promise of modern liberal personhood to those deemed in need of receiving its transformative force, and in the process, keeping them perpetually indebted to the terms set by its guarantors. But in order for the gift of freedom to be fully-realized, Walt himself must undergo a transformation from a solitary, anti-Asian racist into a tolerant guardian—a shift that mirrors what Jodi Melamed traces as the decisive postwar shift from a white supremacist modernity to an “antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity articulated under conditions of US global supremacy.” Thus, my paper uses Korean War and Cold War logics that shape Gran Torino to understand how the retrofitting of a global American home required an uneven, interlocking transformation of all of its dwellers.

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