Tag: Clint Eastwood

No worries about commodification

Perhaps one reason we have yet to enumerate the benefits of work done outside the job market, in the name of family or association, is that people fear the commodification of services meant to be done in loving care. A pecuniary take on the expense of raising a child or caring for an elderly parent or time devoted to helping a loved one fight an addiction, feels crass. An overt utilitarian calculation of every moment of every life sucks the soul out of good intentions.

Try to quell those fears with this thought. The impact of an individual is of no import in group dynamics. Value at an institutional level is the sum of the work over the whole group- hence there is no individual slicing and dicing of dollars to devotion.

Let me explain. If only one parental coupling in a school district tries to initiate a PTA there will be little value in it. These types of community investments only occur when a sizeable number of (individually motivated) decide to participate. So it really doesn’t matter if it is so-and-so’s mom or the Jones or the grandparent of Tommy, Johnny, or Sue. The institution of parental support within a school will be generated after a certain number of family members show up and give of their time and expertise.

Sometimes it does not matter who the individual is as no one can predict when the need for a community response will arise. The best way to deter crime is to stop it in the moment. Call the authorities, be a witness, and pull together a watch group. The act of doing any one of these things is not priced out individually, it only matters what the capacity of the group is to voluntarily respond, as needed, to crime prevention.

Watch Clint Eastwood in Grand Torino. He did not commodify himself. His contribution was calculated at the margin, and the return was significant.

A Few More Dollars- movie review

This 1965 Clint Eastwood western is a power drink of machismo. Produced by Sergio Leone, an Italian producer and script writer, and shot for the most part in southern Spain, it is a replica of life in the wild west which didn’t even make it to American viewers until 1967.

The plot is simple. Very simple. You might start to question the time you are devoting to the film if the cinematography didn’t excite your visual senses to the point of telling the rest of you to sit back and relax. And then there’s Clint. I mean, who can wear a poncho and look that exquisite.

The man competitions are relentless. It starts simple, shoot’em up type of scoring. (*warning* lots and lots of bodies punctured by bullet holes in this film!) But then it gets a little more complicated. There are hat shooting tricks and duels on deserted dusty main streets under big skies. There are poker games in the saloon. And then even more complicated, the bounty hunters start to collude. And then they don’t. And the bandits collude, and then they don’t.

But the economic incentives at the heart of the movie are spelt out for the audience right after the opening credits in white lettering on a red backdrop:

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price.
That is why the bounty killers appeared.

There are only two women in the movie. A hotelier, an uncharacteristically coarse figure who drools at the sight of Eastwood, appears briefly towards the beginning of the film. And a beautiful young woman who, years before, had robbed the ruthless convict Indio of his manhood by shooting herself while he was raping her. He carries her musical locket to antagonize his agony again and again.

And in this tale of chasing dollars from a bank vault or the bounty for fourteen gangsters, we find out that for some, it is not about the money at all.

Well worth a watch. Did I mention that Clint was in his early 30’s and….?