This article argues that Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Gran Torino presents a regeneration of the myth of the American Immigrant Dream through the trope of auto-mobility, a conceptual shorthand for self-reliance and class mobility. Rather than reading the film as an embrace of multicultural America, as many of its reviewers do, the author argues that the film operates to redeploy the idea of collective American immigrant identity through a reaffirmation in the ‘possessive investment in whiteness’. In particular, an analysis of the mobility implied between non-white centre city and the white Detroit suburban periphery, ultimately suggests that the typical paradigm of the American Dream – job, car, house – is possible for immigrants and people of colour, but only through a literal departure from the poor, inner city, which is represented as simultaneously pathological and non-white.
LabatonStephenHerszenhornDavid M., ‘White House ready to aid auto industry’, New York Times (12December2008). This was one of the last major fiscal decisions that the Bush White House made as a lame duck. According to a later New York Times article (19December2008) by LabatonHerzenhorn, ‘Bush aids Detroit, but hard choices wait for Obama’; by mid-January 2009, 13.4 billion dollars would be injected into the auto industry.
JacobsonMatthew Frye, Roots Too: white ethnic revival in post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2006).
5.
Ibid., p. 7.
6.
While the film’s writer, Nick Schenck, wrote the screenplay in Minnesota and set it in Minnesota, Eastwood’s production team decided to move the location both in terms of actual filming and setting to Detroit, according to http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/01/08/nick_schenk/. The moving of the film setting from Minnesota to Detroit serves to perpetuate the idea that Detroit has long served as an archetypal post-industrial city and that many of the tropes that Eastwood’s Gran Torino engages with link to a larger cultural imaginary of the post post-industrial Midwest.
LipsitzGeorge, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1998).
9.
AvilaEric, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: fear and fantasy in suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2004).
10.
EspirituYen Le, Home Bound (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2003), p. 4.
11.
Jacobson, op. cit., p. 7.
12.
WatersMary, Ethnic Options: choosing identities in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990).
13.
The idea of the ‘1.5 generation’ typically refers to the cohort of immigrants who emigrated when they were children.
14.
ScheinLouisaThojVa-Meng, ‘Gran Torino’s boys and men with guns: Hmong perspectives’, Hmong Studies Journal (Vol. 10), pp. 1–52.
15.
Ibid., p. 28.
16.
See, for example, MulveyLaura, Visual and Other Pleasures (2nd Edition) (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
17.
KoltykJo Ann, New Pioneers in the Heartland: Hmong life in Wisconsin (Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1998), p. 3. The Hmong were, ‘recruited by the U.S. Army as a special force of guerilla fighters to control the mountainous border regions between Laos and North Vietnam and to block the movement of Communist forces and supplies. Funds from the Central Intelligence Agency supplied arms, ammunition, and food to the Hmong for their alliance and support’.
18.
VangChia Youyee, Hmong in Minnesota (St. Paul, MN, Minnesota Historical Society, 2008), p. 1.
19.
RumbautRubén G., ‘Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian American’, in ZhouMinGatewoodJames V., eds, Contemporary Asian America: a multidisciplinary reader (New York, New York University Press, 2000), p. 178.
20.
Koltyk, op. cit., pp. 3–4.
21.
Rumbaut, op. cit., p. 178.
22.
See, for example, VeraHernánGordonAndrew M., Screen Saviors: Hollywood fictions of whiteness (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
23.
This term is used in the film credits to describe the groups of young men of colour in the film: ‘Latino gangbanger 1, Hmong gangbanger 2’.
The name of the role in the film credits, played by Chee Thao.
26.
WebsterStephen, ‘Elegy for the white man’, American Renaissance (September2009), pp. 10–12.
27.
Critical race and ethnic studies scholars have long established the relationship between race, citizenship, and gender to property in the United States. See, for example, HarrisCheryl, ‘Whiteness as property’, Harvard Law Review (Vol. 106, no. 8, June1993); Lipsitz, op. cit.; and HongGrace Kyungwon, The Ruptures of American Capital: women of color feminism and the culture of immigrant labor (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2006). As critical legal scholar Cheryl Harris so eloquently outlines, race becomes a historical dividing line between the ability to own property and the ability to be property, effectually making the argument that whiteness in and of itself becomes a form of property. Harris, op. cit. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro link slavery with historical government policy barring African Americans from citizenship and occupations, and contemporary welfare state policies that discourage wealth accumulation. OliverMelvin L.ShapiroThomas M., Black Wealth/White Wealth: a new perspective on racial inequality (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 4.
28.
Up until the early 1900s, home ownership was typically situated between the merchant and wealthy class primarily due to the funding structure in place that necessitated the purchase of homes outright. As access to financing and to credit shifted, more people were able to purchase homes. This shift in the funding structure for home ownership emerged, as historian Lendol Calder notes, through a shift in the acceptance of the idea of ‘credit’ in American culture beginning with the extension of store credit, to the car note, and finally to the home mortgage.
29.
‘Wigger’ is commonly used as shorthand for ‘white nigger’ or the presentation of white youth who mimic a representative style commonly associated with black urban youth. Nicola Rehling cites David Roediger’s research, ‘exploring early usages of the term “wigger” in Detroit, where it functioned as a derogative term for whites that were “overly” influenced by black culture, a meaning it has accrued elsewhere in the U.S. The term has also been deployed as a classist slur from white suburban kids to white working-class Detroiters. Yet “wigger,” Roediger notes, has also become a term of affection from blacks towards whites who seriously embrace black culture rather than being mere wannabes’, in RehlingNicola, Extra-Ordinary Men (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2009), p. 194, note 2.
30.
Dargis, op. cit.
31.
Another sub-story of the film is Walt’s terminal illness, which he keeps as a secret from his family, but which Sue and Thao both have knowledge of.
32.
JalaoLy Chong Thong, ‘Looking Gran Torino in the eye: a review’, Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement (Vol. 5, 2010).
33.
She is barely on screen in this scene as the camera never directly captures her face and she utters no dialogue.
34.
See, for example, RodriguezRobyn MagalitGonzalezVernadette Vicuña, ‘Asian American auto/biographies: the gendered limits of consumer citizenship in import subcultures’, in NguyenMimi ThiTuThuy Linh Nguyen, eds, Alien Encounters: popular culture in Asian America (Durham, MD, Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 247–70.
FordEdsel, only son of Clara Bryant Ford and Henry Ford. In 1919, at the age of 25, he became President of the Ford Motor Company. Edsel and Eleanor Ford’s Lake Shore Drive home was designed by famed architect Albert Kahn and is currently a privately run historical site.
