Gran Torino

To my mind, one of the indicators of a superior motion picture is the final shot of the movie. If the last thing you see turns out to be not only informative, but essential to the narrative in a way that illuminates everything before it, then it is a sign that the writer, director, and cinematographer were all collaborating in the right way to tell the story.

I thought about this while driving home on Sunday afternoon from Leominster, having just seen Gran Torino. The last shot shows one of the characters at the wheel of the automobile to which the title of the movie refers. It is the character who must be at the wheel, according to the Aristotlean dictates of narrative.

Moreover it was a scene I personally recognized, as would many people in the Detroit area, where the film was set. The car is moving north on Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan (map). It is a sunny day, and the blue waters of Lake Saint Clair are glistening beside the shore. In the distance, we can see the outline of the Grosse Pointe Shores Yacht Club.

This is the wealthiest part of the entire Detroit Metropolitan area. The significance is that it is a completely different world from every other scene in the movie. To place this particular character there, driving that car, at the end of the movie speaks of a transformation at the heart of the theme of the movie. It is arguably the same genre of transformation as at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, but one that is, I believe, more artistically powerful because of its subtlety and its narrative necessity.

The exact image of that final scene had been burned into my brain a little over four years ago, when I drove up that same road, on a cloudier afternoon. It was in the midst of the 2004 election, and I was on my way west across the country, taking my time exploring places I had never seen. I was not, however, at the wheel of a mint condition Gran Torino but an aging but still decent Dodge Dynasty that had once belonged to my ex-wife's parents. Along the way I was stopping many times a day to take digital photographs that I would later upload into Wikipedia. At the time many places in the U.S. had no photographs in their articles, and I felt like the Johnny Appleseed of photo uploading. It is understatement to say that it became somewhat of an obsession.

I had just spent a rainy, dreary morning in downtown Detroit trying to get decent shots of the skyline there. Photographically, it was one of the low points of the trip, especially since I had to pay for parking in a garage. Things had brightened up a little bit by the time I got to the middle class suburb of Grosse Pointe (not be confused with Grosse Pointe Shores or Grosse Pointe Woods), where I took this photograph that I put in the Wikipedia article for Swing State.

My plan for that afternoon was simple: to get a decent shot of Lake St. Clair, the little "sixth" great lake, that is just north of Detroit. I figured it would be a piece of cake, since the map indicated that the road ran right along the lake shore.

Boy, was I ever wrong. Indeed the road ran where the map said it did, but getting a shot of the lake turned out to be a mighty challenge. This was because not only were there no places to park along the road---none at all that were not right in the flow of traffic---but there were multiple signs forbidding one from even contemplating the idea of parking anywhere near there, unless you were a resident. I couldn't even take a shot out the window, since the lake was on the passenger side.

The shot at the end of Gran Torino was where I experienced maximum frustration. It would have been so beautiful to get a shot of the pier of that yacht club in the distance, but it was just impossible. It stuck in my craw as one of the big disappointments of the trip.

I was finally able to get a shot of the lake in St.Clair Shores, which is a middle class town north of the yacht club. There was a little lakeside park, called Memorial Park where I could pull over and walk one block down the to lake shore (map). There was a sign indicating that the beach park was for residents only, but it was deserted and I ignored it for a few minutes, snapping this shot of an empty lifeguard chair that became part of the Wikipedia article for the lake. With my prize in hand, I turned my car west across the lower peninsula of Michigan.

The whole experience left in me an impression of Lake St. Clair as a huge restricted zone. Its waters were reserved for residents in a way that spoke of the entrenched divisions of class and wealth in American society. Of course much of this restriction was based on historical racism. The white folk along the shore did not want the black people in Detroit to be hanging out on their lake beaches. Even in 2004, the fact that I could trespass for a few moments without fear was because I was white.

The idea of Lake St. Clair as a zone of privilege is consciously invoked in Gran Torino, not only in the final shot, but throughout the movie. Inside his basement, Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), the aging retired auto worker, has a framed map of the lake, which we see in the background in multiple scenes. The basement is actually a sacred space in many ways, since it is where Walt keeps his treasures and trophies, one of which he will bestow upon a younger character at a crucial moment. It is this younger character who will driving along the lake in the final shot. Thus the map on the wall turns out to be, in a sense, a type of treasure map that the character will eventually follow.

Thinking about this on the way home from the movie on Sunday made me realize that whether the filmmakers intended it or not, the movie had a strong subtext involving freemasonry. Back in 2004, I thought it was ironic that the street where I finally stopped in St. Clair Shores was called Masonic Boulevard. One of the impressions I had of Detroit, as well as all of northern Ohio and southern Michigan, was of the heavy influence of Freemasonry in the early white settlement of the region. The first American governor of the Northwest Territory, ironically named Arthur St. Clair, was perhaps the greatest proponent in early America of building a government based on freemasonry. In every city I visited, there seemed to be some historical marker that spoke of the early Masonic settlers. Detroit, as it happens, is home to the largest masonic temple in the world.

The more I thought about it, the more the Masonic subtext of the movie emerged to me. Walt is the master craftsman. His garage is full of tools acquired over his lifetime, as if in the stages of progress of his craft. His mint-condition car is one that he helped build with his own hands.

But there is a problem: he has not been able to transfer his knowledge and his craft on to a new generation. The Masonic civilization of the old Northwest Territories in crumbling and in decay. Here we have the essential problem of America today, woven deeply into our culture: we are in danger of losing everything that has been built, because of the failure of the older generation to pass their knowledge on to the new, and the failure of the new to appreciate and learn from the old. Walt is classicism incarnate---there is a way to do things, and to accomplish anything meaningful in life, one must be learn those rules.

Part of Walt's barrier to transferring his craft is partly due to his racism. Yet it is not a deep racism, but a lingering one of habit, and also one that is an encoded form of male bonding. Just as Freemasonry is supposedly open to all men of any race, so Walt must make the leap to overcome his lingering racism to bring a dark-skinned youth into the fraternity of his craft. It is his only option to continuing the line of his craft.

What he offers to the youth is an essential male initiation, one that can only be given by a older man, who is wholly American, as one of the female Hmong characters states. He must literally be granted the tools, starting with the measuring tape and a belt (highly Masonic in symbolism here), and be taken in as an apprentice at a construction site. He must be taught the encrypted lingo that allows one to enter the door of the foreman's trailer. Just as Masonic must learn the secret rituals and oaths, so the young man in Gran Torino must learn how to speak the correct phrases as he walks in the door of a barber shop, another vestibule of the impromptu Masonic lodge.

That Walt is finally able to initiate an apprentice to take his place is what allows him, in narrative terms, to understand Divinity, and to make his peace with God. It allows him to achieve the state of transcendence of the personal ego, which he finally does at the end of the movie. What happens at the end of the movie is exactly what needs to happen, what must happen, to resolve the conflicts. Yet it is obvious only afterward. This is what makes for great storytelling.

To say this was a superior movie is a gross understatement. I had never really embraced Unforgiven (1992) as much as other folk, and after seeing Mystic River (2005), I had come to discount Eastwood as overly indulgent in sentimental storytelling, but Gran Torino is a flatout masterpiece. It may not be the best movie of the year (I haven't decided yet), but if there is one single movie that captures a defining portrait of America in the year 2008, it is this one.

It made me glad that I never got that photograph of the yacht club from the angle along Lake Shore Road, because otherwise the frustration of the emotional experience would not have been burned into my brain so fiercely, and the last shot of the movie would probably not have been such a revelation.