Our Thunderbolt and Lightfoot month continues with an excellent 2008 essay written by a good friend of the Archive, Steve Saragossi. Like myself, Steve is a native North Londoner, a fact that we discovered some years ago. Separated by only a fistful of miles, we also discovered the mutual love of film and soundtracks had us both searching through the same market stalls in our teenage quest for treasured books, records and film memorabilia. Today, Steve lives in Australia where he continues to write. My sincere thanks Steve for submitting and sharing this piece with the Archive. I should also add that this essay contains some spoilers.
Michael Cimino’s 1974 directorial
debut, the Clint Eastwood crime caper “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” sits very
comfortably in context with the Hollywood cinematic mood of its time.
Capitalising as it does on several popular genres – the road movie, buddy
movie, crime movie and starring Eastwood, who at the time was at the peak of
his popularity, the film was superficially as unthreatening and mainstream as
could be imagined. However, when reading the film
from a psychoanalytical perspective, the film reveals itself as a treatise on
both the Mulvian nature of the conventional heterosexual marriage / conformity
model vs. the male-narcissistic not-marriage model. This is juxtaposed with
idea that the film is also concerned with oedipal rivalry on numerous levels.
Michael Cimino’s brief career is,
by any standards, marked out by films of a highly phallocentric nature. His
films often deal with the spirit of male camaraderie. They mainly eschew the
overt macho bravado of John Milius or Sam Peckinpah, for instance, in favour of
a more thoughtful exploration of the male experience. In “The Deer Hunter”
(1978), “Heaven’s Gate” (1980) and “Year of the Dragon” (1985) female
characters are peripheral and are mainly relegated to the status of onlookers
in the male protagonists journey of self-discovery. His viewpoint may not be
wholly misogynistic, but is nonetheless fairly disdainful, verging on mistrust.
“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”
however presents an almost exclusively male universe wherein the very few
female characters are either the fetishistic object of male desire, or
portrayed as passive, dim-witted, or borderline psychotic. Pointedly, they are
mainly seen to represent the castration fear personified. Of the female
characters represented in the film, all of whom are extremely peripheral to the
action, three are wives, two are independently minded young women, confident in
their sexuality, two are prostitutes, one is a sexually frustrated housewife,
and one is an aggressive feminist. Crucially, only two of these women are
embodiments of the usual female role as described by Mulvey , highlighting the
lack. The others do not provide inspiration for the “hero”, nor do they, as
Mulvey states “…freeze the flow of actions in moments of erotic contemplation”
. Rather, they seem to exist purely as signifiers of the emasculation of their
spouses/tricks/voyeurs. Only the sexually confident secretary of the
construction firm that Thunderbolt secures a job with, and the waitress at a
diner (above), display typical Mulvian attributes in terms of existing purely as the
objects of the male gaze.
Released in 1974, the film
appeared at a point in time where generational gaps in the US were at there
most extreme, punctuated as they were by the Korean and Vietnam wars and Flower
Power. The three main principals represent generational stereotypes, and their
attitudes juxtaposed to these historical benchmarks give rise to the narrative
friction that allow the psychoanalytical
subtext to work in a way that would have been either difficult or clumsy
to accomplish had all the leads been contemporaries of one another. Having
Lightfoot being approximately twelve years Thunderbolts junior, and Thunderbolt
approximately twelve years Leary’s junior allows for an exploration of Oedipal
rivalries that would have been obscured or even non-existent had they all been
around the same age.
The film deals with the robbery
of a bank vault by four rootless characters, three of whom are career
criminals. The film is concerned less with the mechanics of the robbery, than
with character development, and a keen sense of place. Although undeniably
exciting, the film offers much more than the thrills and spills expected of a
genre piece, especially a Clint Eastwood one. Relaxed in pace, it offers a
meditation on friendship, betrayal, and a shrewdly observed sense of the
American Midwest. It portrays an America as it actually was in the early
seventies, not what it once was, a country now blind to the decline of
traditional institutions. The film opens with the depiction of a small church
in the middle of a beautiful but desolate Montana landscape, but this is soon
desecrated by the intrusion of gunfire and the unmasking of Thunderbolt as a
criminal who has been posing a priest (“the wolf shall lie down with the
lamb”). The motif of the schoolhouse is also a target. Being the secret receptacle
of the first robbery’s loot, the films narrative has the building moved in its
entirety from its original location to somewhere out of the way, to make room
for the march of “progress”. These two scenes offer us a symbolic desecration
of traditional values. As a debut, it is as accomplished as Terrence Malick’s
“Badlands” (1973), and as deserving in comparison.
Thematically, it bears strong
comparisons with Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” but whereas Penn’s film
offered a similar dynamic with its protagonists, it nonetheless offered a more
balanced Mulvian viewpoint in terms of the marriage vs. not-marriage model. The
Barrow gang were seen as a socially functioning “family”, wherein the females
had roles sympathetic with the notion of integration. Also the conflicts
between the four main protagonists and other characters were less polarised
than Cimino’s film.
In any discussion of this film
one cannot ignore the oft-cited argument regarding “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”
as to its supposed gay subtext . It’s certainly true that Lightfoot, and by
extension the audience, are invited to gaze upon Thunderbolt as an erotic
object (the shoulder re-location scene is especially fetishistic in its
execution, and seems to be in the film purely as an exercise in homoerotic
sado-masochism). This could understandably lead to a reading of the film in
terms of repressed homosexual voyeurism. But Michael Cimino, in conversation
with this author emphatically claims
this to not to be the case, either consciously or unconsciously. This may be
so, but there is no doubting the existence of much symbolism in the text to
support an opposing viewpoint. Lightfoot’s adoration of Thunderbolt spills over
into homoerotic wish-fulfilment on many occasions: when Eastwood re-appears in
his car after apparently leaving for good, he remarks, in a lewd voice “people
will talk…where there’s smoke there’s fire you know?”. Lightfoot is perhaps a
little too at home when he has to dress up and act like a woman, falling easily
into the role of the object of fetishistic desire. Cimino also slyly makes much
use of cross cutting between Lightfoot, in drag, bending over in a short skirt,
with Thunderbolt assembling a huge, extremely phallic cannon. Other factors,
such as the films vernacular, which makes much use of the word “cock” in many
situations, and its overall depiction of the a male world where females are
sidelined could support a “gay subtext” reading. Ultimately though, this all
serves to underestimate the richness, complexity and subtlety of the
unconscious motivations and Mulvian interpretations, which offer greater
rewards to the viewer, and furthermore withstand more robust examination. In
his article “Tightass and Cocksucker” , journalist Peter Biskind posits the
film as purely a repressed homosexual parable, citing the narrative as being a
“…thinly disguised metaphor for the sexual tensions between the two principal
characters.” This is an easy reading, but rather too superficial to stand up to
close scrutiny, and ultimately the article resorts to disdainful remarks about
the film as a whole rather than reinforcing his position. The piece does at
least recognise the fact that all heterosexual characters apart from
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot are humiliated – but he draws no conclusions from
this.
“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” takes
its time to introduce its four main characters, giving the audience time to
invest an interest and build an understanding of the main leads.
Clint Eastwood’s John Doherty
(Thunderbolt) is a Korean and Vietnam vet emotionally and physically scarred by
the conflict. His leg is in a brace and he bears the scars of battle over his
body. He is wary of relationships, and in true Eastwoodian style is emotionally
detached and reacts to situations rather than instigates them. His character
acts as a bridge morally between the repressed, almost fascistic Leary, and the
freewheeling, naïve Lightfoot, arousing as he does almost childlike adoration
in both men. Thunderbolt is shown to be the most mature, well rounded character
in the film - in control, omnipotent. He is the character around whom all the
others display their needs and wants. He is representational of the idealised
ego, and a patriarchal figure for Lightfoot and Leary.
George Kennedy’s “Red” Leary is
an older Korean War veteran with and is strongly repressed sexually. He is
portrayed as sexually impotent. His
violent tendencies are implicit, overt and a natural expression of his psyche.
His worldview is as simple as it is cruel. He persecutes the gullible Goody at
every turn, and even though he appears to want to kill Thunderbolt, once the
“climax” of the opportunity to do so has passed, he reverts to a kind of
hero-worship of him, and a hatred of Lightfoot, who he sees as an
interloper. Leary, read from a Freudian
perspective, is best seen as the father who has been beaten by the son
(Thunderbolt), who absconded with the money, which could be read as the
forbidden matriarchal object of desire. Leary, now beaten, is consequently
rendered impotent. In an expository sequence, it is intimated that Leary may
have been the gang leader in the original heist, setting up, prior to the
films’ start, the Leary/Thunderbolt dynamic as a father/son model. This theory
is manifested in an early sequence wherein Leary finally catches up with
Thunderbolt after apparently years of chasing him, and they begin a physical
fight in which Leary is quickly reduced to a gasping, wheezing heap, compared
to the powerful, in-control Thunderbolt. This final humiliation, coupled with
Lightfoots’ arrival on the scene triggers a shift in the protagonists’ dynamic
whereby Leary defensively displaces his anger to Lightfoot, the other son
figure. Lightfoot’s appearance on the scene enrages Leary, who now sees himself
a rival with Lightfoot for Thunderbolt, having now lost the Oedipal battle, and
is now relegated to a sibling role, in competition for the place of favoured
son. Lightfoot’s own history pitches him in trajectory to view Thunderbolt also
in terms as a father figure, so the scene is then set for a metaphorical
showdown, with Thunderbolt as the “prize” which in turn fulfils Thunderbolt’s
omnipotent fantasy and reinforces his phallic narcissism.
From Leary’s perspective though,
Lightfoot can be seen as weaker son, a lesser rival, with whom, when
challenged, Leary determines never to be beaten again, at any cost. Leary wishes to kill Thunderbolt, the new
father figure, for having overthrown him in an oedipal battle, and for being a
rival for the matriarchal, hidden cash. It is a quest that has been with Leary
for many years, and when he finally has the opportunity to slay the “son” who
challenged him, and claim his “mother”, he cannot.
Leary has never developed a human
being, and his character in the film displays all the responses one would
expect from the beaten father, now emasculated and impotent. He is shown to be in awe of the female,
but unable to interact with them on a mature level. He is the voyeur, risking
identification and capture during the heist scene when he comes across the bank
managers daughter naked, having intercourse with her boyfriend. He can do
nothing but stare in awe at the tableau in front of him, and is starkly
reminded of his own inability to perform. When Lightfoot recalls an incident
when a housewife appears nude at a window in front of him, Leary’s response is
childlike and awestruck “did’ya…did’ya see…y’know..everything?”. During a scene
when Leary and Goody are posing as Ice-cream vendors, his response to an
irritating lad who berates Leary for not being on the right street at the right
time is typical from one child to a peer “Hey…why don’t you go fuck a duck”.
The outburst is initially shocking, as a mature adult, even a criminal one,
would not talk to a small child in this way, but seen in view of his stunted
worldview, the response is wholly appropriate.
In fact, Leary’s rhetoric is
littered with phallic references (“drop your cocks and reach for your socks”).
For Leary, the female genital, the threat, has remained intact and rampant, and
his development has remained forever stunted by the fact his desire for the
money, the hidden, has never been resolved. His violence, toward everyone in
the abstract, and Lightfoot in particular, is a manifestation of masturbatory
catharsis, his only recourse. His pathological tendencies are a result of his
unresolved repressed attitudes. Having been familiar with this film for many
years, and now reading the narrative from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, I am
satisfied that the concepts Freud introduced have validity in this film, and
either consciously or subconsciously Cimino has written a character that
follows a typical Freudian arc.
The catalyst of the films
narrative is Jeff Bridges’ Lightfoot. A young rootless drifter for whom crime
is just another means of coming by some money, he is portrayed as sexually
ambiguous not so much in deed, but in terms of his being a male drifter in his
early in his early twenties in the US in 1974. In the film he is searching
indirectly for an absent father figure. Symbolically this is manifested in many
ways. Whether stealing a large overtly phallic car from under the nose of a patriarchal
car dealer, with which he destroys Dunlop, a former gang-member of
Thunderbolt’s group; or his obvious delight at Thunderbolts’ return to his car
after apparently leaving for good, we see in Lightfoot a need to reconcile with
a father figure. Lightfoot also displays Oedipal tendencies in his relationship
with Thunderbolt. He is more socially and morally aware than Leary, but still
sees in Thunderbolt a father figure. There is passing reference to Lightfoot’s
past where he relates to Thunderbolt that he was removed from home very early
on to a boarding school, and was subsequently taken in by a much older woman
who apparently introduced the naïve youngster to sex. This may go some way in
explaining Lightfoots’ unresolved issues surrounding a mother figure, and a
need to ally closely with Thunderbolts’ patriarchal figure. In an early scene,
Lightfoot is seen to fail in his Oedipal task of throwing Thunderbolt free of
his stolen “phallic” car, and thus defeated, falls into the role of attempting,
for the remainder of the film, to identify with the patriarchal aggressor.
Geoffrey Lewis’ character Goody,
would appear to exist as a stooge for Leary, and a safe vent for his toothless
rages (he resorts to the cheap shot of firing his gun in impotent anger in the
air after failing to capture Thunderbolt, causing Goody, who was taking the
opportunity of reliving himself, to urinate all over himself). Goody seems to
be comfortable in his role as the receptacle of jokes/anger/badly aimed
punches, and emerges as an affable, but ineffectual member of the gang.
The film is unusual in that
within the growing relationship that develops between Thunderbolt and
Lightfoot, it is Thunderbolt who emerges as the fetishistic object of
Lightfoot’s gaze. This then leads to both the audiences unusually scopophilic identification with the Eastwood
character (typical of the persona he had cultivated up to that point) and
Lightfoots’ more narcissistic identification, as there are sexual elements
rooted in his regard of Thunderbolt.
As in most of his heroic,
mythical roles the Eastwood character is the bearer of the audiences look. He
is the protagonist who will propel the narrative, and is certainly the most
powerful ego on screen. In fact, as Mulvey states, Eastwood, when playing the
hero, is powerful and omnipotent to an extraordinary degree . However, there is
a dichotomy at play in this particular film. For though, as spectators, we are
not fully subjecting Eastwood to the sexual objectification that is so often
the case with female characters, we are nonetheless invited to partially
objectify Eastwood as a sexual animal. As Neale states in his article
“Masculinity as Spectacle” when referring to John Ellis’ “Visible Fictions” –
“…identification is mobile, fluid, constantly transgressing identities,
positions, and roles. Identifications are multiple, fluid, at points even
contradictory.” In several key moments, we are shown lingering shots of
Eastwood slowly removing the belt form his trousers (always in service of the
plot – either to form a harness to re-locate his dislocated shoulder, or to use
the buckle as an improvised screwdriver), or he is lovingly shot from a low
angle against the wide Montana sky. Lightfoot is often shown admiring Eastwood
from a distance, and we as the audience are invited also to objectify him. When
referring to Freud’s dream theory, our ego’s are fooled by the “normal”
depiction of male movie star objectification, and the truer nature of our (and
Lightfoot’s) repressed desires slips by un-noticed on a conscious level.
This dichotomy befell a handful
of stars in the 60’s and 70’s. Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Steve
McQueen typically had their obligatory “shirt-off” scenes. They uniquely
managed to maintain their positioning in narcissistic identification roles,
controlling events, whist muddying the water as being the erotic object,
significantly without eroding their “omnipotence”. Few stars have been able to
display this – John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin for instance would not
instil this dichotomy in the spectator. This dichotomy appeared during the post
war years. Certainly no male star beforehand inspired this type of ambiguity in
the audience response. Marlon Brando was perhaps the first to display this, but
it was the above mentioned stars who took it further. The Reagan-era stars such
as Schwarzenegger and Stallone displayed a rather more Nietzschian hero ideal,
and the audiences objectification has nothing to do with sexual politics but
rather owes more to a narcissistic super-egocentric version of the mirror image
ideal.
So, in “Thunderbolt and
Lightfoot”, accustomed as we are to the partial objectification of a typical
Eastwoodian character, the audience is not aware on a conscious level of the
potential castration-fear inherent in such objectivity.
The film also goes to great
lengths to underline its position of the Mulvian marriage vs. not-marriage
position. All throughout the narrative we are shown conventional male/female
couples wherein the male is portrayed as totally emasculated and powerless – a
direct result of their embracing the socially integrated conformist
heterosexual marriage model. They are
seen as jealous of the direct opposite embodied by Thunderbolt and Lightfoot –
i.e. the phallic,omnipotent, non-conformist, empowered, free “not-marriage”
model. Cimino’s position in this regard would appear to be unequivocally in
favour of the not-marriage role, for although ultimately Thunderbolt ends up no
better off than the beginning of the film – his narcissism is intact, but all
his friends and colleagues end up dead, the overriding sense is that of the
“not-marriage” option being by far the most attractive.
The film has several scenes
wherein Thunderbolt and Lightfoot come across married couples on their travels.
In each case the wife is seen as sexually unattractive, in control, oblivious
to Eastwood’s superego, and domineering of their spouse. In contrast, the
husbands are meek, emasculated, and in awe of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. In the
final schoolhouse scene, simply their wordless, non-threatening presence is
sufficient to reduce one such husband to gibbering subservience, handing over
his belongings and cash when nothing was further from Thunderbolt and
Lightfoot’s mind, whilst the wife looks on in disgust. Although played for
laughs, this vignette exemplifies the contradiction between what Steve Neale
refers to as “narcissism and the law, between an image of narcissistic
authority on one hand and an image of social authority on the other”. The film
is quite constant in ridiculing this portrayal of the socially integrated
symbolic whilst extolling the virtues of nostalgic narcissism inherent in the
main characters, extending to Leary and even the child-like Goody. Although
many films, typically westerns, portray the “hero” in the “not-marriage”
position, it is rare to find a film that wholly ridicules the “marriage” model
to such an extent. This, I believe, is tied in with Cimino’s phallocentric
viewpoint, wherein males and male camaraderie is the desired option and males
who are “tainted” by association with the castration-fear object of the female
are weak and ineffectual. 
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s
interaction with two prostitutes (right) weakens their omnipotence, and reveals their
insecurities. It also shows their inability to interact meaningfully as
socially integrated people. The encounter for Thunderbolt serves no “purpose”
for him, and is perfunctory at best for Gloria. Seen as a Venn diagram, this
and other crossovers with integrated society serve mainly as reminders for
Thunderbolt why he chooses to be as removed as he is from this model. For
Lightfoot too, the encounter is far less satisfactory emotionally for him
(“Redheads are always bad luck, man”) than being in Thunderbolt’s shadow. In fact any time Thunderbolt,
Lightfoot, Leary or Goody come into contact with anyone representing social
integration the result is usually the repelling of one group by the other.
The only scene which offers a
glimpse of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s position in a possibly greater milieu
than simply marriage vs. not-marriage is their encounter with Bill McKinney’s
unhinged bunny killer. This surreal incident is treated for uneasy laughs, but
shows clearly that although Thunderbolt and Lightfoot are obviously personifications of the not-marriage model by
virtue of their resistance to social standards and responsibilities, they are
however infinitely more integrated than McKinney who has departed so far from
social integration as to be barely functioning. The scene, which depicts
McKinney and his car, and its contents, portray his character in an even
earlier stage of fixation than either Thunderbolt or Lightfoot. He displays
what Freud refers to as anally expulsive, chaotic characteristics (the gibbering, the cars’ exhaust piped into
the interior of the car, the caged defecating racoon) which portray McKinney in
a regressive state that even consciously the audience recognises Thunderbolt
and Lightfoot will not sink to. The film attempts to show here that ultimately,
however appealing the trappings of not-marriage may be, the ultimate price paid
is total abstention from any point on the moral compass. Thunderbolt and
Lightfoot’s quest for the cash however, when thought through, serves to further
an argument in favour of a more integrated position in society. Lightfoot, for
instance, wants nothing more than to purchase a brand new Cadillac, i.e. obtain
the trappings of society, to become a part of it.
The film is rich with symbolism,
and one which is deserving of mention, as it occurs many times in the course of
the film, is the constant placing of the protagonists near clear fresh water –
lakes, rivers, etc. Water in symbolic terms can be seen to represent many
things – the unconscious, emotions etc. But although the considerably high
number of scenes featuring fresh water would seem to indicate a deeper meaning,
it is perhaps, a visual aesthetic at work only and nothing more.
“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” ends
with the destruction of Leary and Lightfoot (and incidentally, the hapless
Goody), both of whom fail to resolve their Oedipal desires (though neither dies
at the hands of Thunderbolt). For Lightfoot, the signs were never good.
Thunderbolt had given clear messages throughout the film that although he was
clearly comfortable in Lightfoot's company, there was never going to be a
lasting relationship between them, Thunderbolt intending them all to split up
and go their separate ways after the successful heist. For Leary, his
trajectory was never in doubt, his rage was never going to find catharsis (apart
from perhaps in killing Lightfoot). For Thunderbolt, the future looks equally
bleak, the loneliness of the narcissist has been restored, his
inability/unwillingness to maintain a relationship underlined by the
dénouement, left to drive alone through a nihilistic landscape.
Ultimately then, the film offers
a rich and fertile ground to examine and test various psychoanalytical
suppositions, and I think, for the most part, the theories, especially Mulvey’s
emerge with much credence.
(Left, Michael Cimino with Clint in 2015)
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