A widower’s bitterness at changing society and lingering guilt over his experience in war charge a vinegary comedy that lands in a sad climax suggestive of spiritual redemption
[Edits done 4/19/13.]
Subsections in this entry:
Quickie preliminary note: The issue of guns
A portrait of a “dear old dad”—from funeral-serious to drinking his Pabst
Walt, no intellectual, in terms of his psychological burdens
The Hmong characters: How do they figure, and how well are they portrayed?
Walt’s centrality in the film’s story, and Walt as a comic figure
Walt’s burden due to his stage of life
Walt starting Thao’s career with baby steps, in a practical man’s way
The film’s sloppiness could be said to add to its charm
Leave aside the plenty of comments about Clint Eastwood’s flatulent performance at the Republican National Convention in late August. This film, directed by him, is among the series of films late in his career that have garnered praise for their mature themes and performances, and/or daring choices, that cumulatively represent a seeming way to come to terms with the issue of violence in (and waged overseas by) American society, whether justified or not, which had seemed a cornerstone element of more pandering, rather low-minded entertainments earlier in his career.
Recent films that he directed fit his “late, redemption” period: Mystic River (2003, not starring him; and which I saw a few times and liked, especially for Sean Penn’s gripping performance; it was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, but did not win); Million-Dollar Baby (2004; with Hilary Swank in a touching, Oscar-winning role, along with Eastwood—I saw and liked it too; it was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, and did win both); and two World War II–themed films, made in coordination, Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006; the latter receiving special praise; I did not see either of these).
Such films seem to want to deal as maturely as possible with either violence or the way certain types of violent elements have tended to alloy themselves to certain matters of achievement/self-realization among ordinary citizens in the U.S. (such as boxing), with a thematic eye to religious concerns. (Whether or not you agree with the Roman Catholic elements in such films as Million Dollar Baby, you have to respect them at least for how they inform the story.)
Even if you have qualms over the ways some aspects of these films can be technically a bit sloppy or (on the story level) not well enough thought-through, per Eastwood’s preference to produce them quickly (see his Wikipedia bio, subsection “Directing style”), you have to give him credit for producing these kinds of works at all, in a decade that has seemed to have much more than its share of shallow entertainments, whether by major directors or not. If Eastwood feels that his age and, perhaps, his thoughts of what his career overall amounts to position him to be thusly more mature, this certainly lends itself to a readiness to address adult themes that can outweigh the lesser features of his late works, and Gran Torino (2008), which seems to straddle self-parody and a more serious, somber work, fits this tradition of his, perhaps most self-consciously.
His career started with a role in the TV western Rawhide (1959-66), and he got his first roles of long-lasting note in spaghetti westerns such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967 in the U.S.
His career could stretch toward the silly with Every Which Way But Loose (1978), which “co-starred” an orangutan, and had a sequel; yet he eventually reached the heights of Oscar respectability with the western Unforgiven (1992), which he directed and which won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, and for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Gene Hackman.
All this is to sketch Eastwood as an actor and sometime director of not only long duration and variety of work, but a large, famed set of images and dispositions that, if nothing else, have made him into a sort of Hollywood “man’s man,” with whatever positives and negatives that implies. His Wikipedia bio is quite long and prodigiously end-noted; I am not much of an expert on him, but Eastwood is (to me) like certain features of sports (which I also don’t truly follow much), which you can’t help but know something about because the area is so pervasively and “indelibly” worked into U.S. Mystic River U.S.
Also, Gran Torino grossed $270 million worldwide, making it his financially most successful film, per the Wikipedia article on the movie. So we are well-positioned to take an appreciative look at this movie. But because it also deals with a range of sides of aging (from serious things we can address via concepts from psychological theorist Erik Erikson, to things riper for playful humor), as well as what it means to be a war veteran, the use of guns in the U.S., attitudes toward burgeoning populations of minorities, and so on, I will change my tone to include a fair amount of humor, partly to lighten discussion of this potentially wearying bundle of issues.
Quickie preliminary note: The issue of guns
This movie seems a case in point for those who decry Hollywood’s use of gun imagery as something that may help stimulate the trouble posed by the prevalence of guns and the state of gun laws in the U.S., not least because Gran Torino makes ready use of the main character’s being willing enough to use guns (having been trained in them in the military), and it features local gang members with guns, etc. (and you can sort of see where the plot would be going). I am not a guns person; for purposes of defending against two-legged and four-legged threats in my home county, I am a “mano a mano” person: I prefer a baseball bat and pepper spray (fortunately I haven’t had to use them on anyone or anything, yet).
Meanwhile, the film can use an electrifying image of Eastwood’s Walt ratcheting a shell into the chamber of a shotgun, or fiercely aiming a handgun at street punks’ faces, showing he’s loaded for bear and ready to deal. I would suggest the film both raises moral questions about such gun-ready attitudes and yet exploits them for dramatic purposes. I think on the one hand the film is a way for Eastwood to, somewhat, expiate for his “Dirty Harry” pro-guns image of the past, similarly to how Robert De Niro pillories his past mobster-character image with the comic likes of Analyze This (1999), while on the other hand, Eastwood is offering something of a complex examination of the meaning of gun-apt violence, with respect to Walt’s conscience. Even so, Eastwood seems to show an ambiguity about this that doesn’t bother him; I would suggest we leave aside the pro- or anti-guns debate while appreciating this movie for its other pluses and minuses.
A portrait of a “dear old dad”—from funeral-serious to drinking his Pabst
The film sets its tone and agenda right away with a funeral: an old man’s wife is being laid to rest. His two fairly-young-looking but 40-ish sons are there. And their irreverent kids are there too, including curly-haired granddaughter with midriff showing and a body piercing. The old man glowers and/or grumbles in disapproval at some of the inappropriate shows of behavior of some of the youth, at least of the granddaughter.
Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired auto-factory worker who had also served in the Army during the Korean War. His Michigan neighborhood of old-time, multi-story houses close together no longer contains so many white faces: enough Orientals have come into the area that such a family has moved in next-door, and Walt grumbles, “How many swamp rats can you get into one room?”
The film moves between a fairly salty comedy and a more serious drama (the story is by David Johannson and Nick Schenk, with screenplay by the latter). Sometimes in its comedy it teeters between a fairly edgy study of a racist old man and self-parody. It’s been some time since the character Archie Bunker was the center of newly made episodes of All in the Family (1971-79). It’s amusing today that in the Wikipedia article on Archie Bunker, an attempt is made—obviously by an “enlightened” young writer—to attribute Archie’s darker sides of personality to having been abused when young—though as I recall quite well, reflecting that corporal punishment used not to be frowned upon, it was a component of showing what a different generation he was from, as well as his not-highly-educated quality, that he pointed out to “Meathead” that his father beat him when he was young to teach him to “do good.”
Archie Bunker was a means, one would presume from creator Norman Lear’s intelligent way of articulating his shows’ premises through their characters, for society to come to terms with what it was having trouble with. Times were changing—the youth culture was calling a lot of shots; Blacks were pressing for, and getting, redress for long-entrenched wrongs; the disastrous Vietnam War was winding down. Men who earnestly went off to war and did good in “Double-u Double-u Two—the big one,” as I think Archie called the war, were appalled to see what was happening. What happened to tradition and a sense of decency? Archie with his racist, and homophobe, and male-chauvinist remarks—aiming at every target he could think of, and not sparing his “Pollack” son-in-law-to-be, Mike Stivic (“Meathead”)—was a way for the show to pillory (in Archie) old-time close-minded attitudes, and provide an “open ground,” with each episode providing an apropos situation, on which highly charged controversial issues could be addressed in nationwide TV comedy. Ironically, though Archie was held up rather tendentiously as “an example of what NOT to be,” there were some audience members (presumably rather like him) who saw him as the hero, and Meathead as the villain.
In recent years, I’ve toyed with including a tongue-in-cheek “marketing character” on my blog called “Bunker2012,” to try to update the old Norman Lear character. What would an Archie Bunker be like today? Not that I would agree with him, but he seems a fitting “tool” to bring out to deal, for playfully rhetorical purposes, with what unsettles us, angers us, today: times are changing in a big way again. The economy, the Internet, represent upheaval…and the old standards, which some of us fought for or forged our little lives in concert with, seem swept away like yesterday’s cheesy party decorations. In their wake are irreverent, snide, seemingly decency-flouting little brats, or some whose value orientation we can’t figure out for a cent. For those who are racially oriented in the U.S. , there are plenty of new members of our society, of various colors, that could get under an Archie’s white skin: Hispanics (who take plenty of the laborious jobs young whites don’t want today), various from parts of Asia (with difference levels of education, sometimes advanced), and so on.
Walt, no intellectual, in terms of his psychological burdens
Walt Kowalski went off to serve his country when called, and then he worked steadily for decades, helping build cars. He has raised a family…and now his wife of decades is gone. If he was never terribly well disposed to embrace people of all ethnicities, now he seems to have the last barriers within him to spouting racist epithets gone, as his world seems under siege: Orientals—who he later finds are of the Hmong ethnic group, when he starts to interact constructively with them—have moved in next-door, as well as elsewhere in his neighborhood. At a careless glance, they are just like the Koreans he fought in the early 1950s. One could well imagine him asking, did his military service and years of being an average citizen add up to no more than having such people overrun his neighborhood, even trampling on his lawn?
We can look at Walt on a number of levels, in a movie that has an interesting premise and some interesting character development, but is sloppy and inadequately developed in some ways. It is primarily a movie about Walt, with nearly all other characters relegated to a sort of two-dimensional (if that) supporting-player status, with the only other fairly rounded ones being Thao and Sue, the young Hmong brother and sister who, initially accidentally, start to inject some last seeds for growth in him in his twilight years. Walt’s issues have a number of dimensions:
* Walt is a man in grief—which naturally, at least in the near term, can bring up a storm of old anger, unsettled emotions, regardless of one’s background as to whether or not he or she had served in battle or endured an extreme episode of war-like violence.
* Walt can be looked at along the lines of psychologist James Marcia, with his theories on one’s sense of time as shaped by presence or absence of past life struggles; in particular, the person who has achieved identity through struggle ends up with the most balanced sense of time, accommodating a sense of the past as well as of the future, and having a strength to deal with the present. End note 1 (further end notes will be numbered in brackets). [Further explanation of this idea, based on reference material from an old newspaper clipping, is given in "Pentimento pause 1," a blog entry in 2013.]
* Walt can be looked at as if showing symptoms of PTSD, as Army veterans are now commonly “measured” for, as seen in many instances of vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan
* Walt can also be considered along the lines of Erik Erikson’s concepts of how the elderly aim toward “ego integrity” in terms of how life stage interrelates to Erikson’s concept of the ego and life structure as being central (as opposed to Freud’s interpreting man’s life as the result of accidents arising from the interaction of Id, Ego, and Superego). More on this later.
The Hmong characters: How do they figure, and how well are they portrayed?
Interestingly, the Hmong characters in the movie are not looked at as possible sufferers of some war-related damage in their own right. The Hmong are an ethnic group, not bound to any one country, from Southeast Asia . Sue, the main female character in the film, says they are from Laos , Thailand , and China U.S. in its war in Vietnam U.S.
A little aside, on the issue of war-based trauma: A four-volume set of books comprising academic essays by multiple authors, The Psychology of Terrorism (Westport , Conn.
Gran Torino does not make any story issue of the Hmong on hand as having experienced societal disaster leading to psychological trauma; the worst “baggage” they bring, in a sense, is a traditionalism, as explained by character Sue, that leads to some demands being made on Walt’s life (to his grumpy reaction that we read as comic). So these new neighbors can be presumed to be Hmong who are merely resettled in the U.S.
Another issue regarding the Hmong can be found in the Wikipedia article on the film, which notes a number of inaccuracies on cultural usages and beliefs among the Hmong, as the film presents “as if to educate.” I don’t know much about the Hmong, so I defer to others who have seen fit to make their objections, and refer the reader to the Wikipedia page just noted and wherever else there may be good authority on this. I would argue, to put things in perspective, that while Gran Torino may be a “white man’s” film in terms of giving short shrift to representing Hmong culture, the film is not meant to be an artifact of cultural anthropology on the Hmong, but to include them as a sort of reference point for bringing Walt’s racism and sense of “being beleaguered by changing times” to the front for thematic treatment.
There isn’t too much here that is different from how Apocalypse Now may distort aspects of the Vietnam War or of the Vietnamese themselves—both Gran Torino and that 1979 “dinosaur” shows the “ethnocentric” perspective along which they define their stories, when familiar disparaging words like “gook” and “slope” show the white characters’ extent of sympathy with Southeast Asians. For those interested in the relevant Southeast Asian culture, there are other sources to check out; but for white Americans coming to terms with their ambiguous behaviors as having impacted, or otherwise been entangled with, certain Asian ethnic groups, the films draw the Oriental characters adequately to serve the “white conscience-examining” story’s objectives from a rather ethnoncentric esthetic viewpoint, and no further. Some may disagree with this.
In any event, after Walt has spent considerable time issuing insults and grumbling about Thao, the young man he nicknames “Toad” (especially as Thao has tried to steal his old Gran Torino), Walt ends up helping Thao almost as if he is a new son in the old man’s twilight years. And Sue is invested enough in as a character that, when she turns up late in the movie with appalling signs of having been violently treated by Hmong gang members, we fully understand why Walt goes into action to make his final battle effort, on behalf of his new Hmong friends.
Walt’s centrality in the film’s story, and Walt as a comic figure
So the film is mainly, when it comes to psychology, about Walt; and because no explicit points are made about PTSD or anything else “clinically specific,” we are left with a portrait, pungent enough, of an elderly man whose guilt and bad memories arising from wartime experience from 50+ years ago color his experience of things today, possibly as exacerbated by his grief. The change in his community as shaped by an influx of, among others, Hmong, including Hmong gangs, tend to reconstitute his willingness to “be ready to shoot a gook” as he was trained to be in the early 1950s.
This, along with a certain very American readiness to “defend what’s mine and what’s right” with a solid cache of guns and ammo, primes Walt to be ready to strike a virulent pose, not at all joking, where he aims a shotgun with cinematic drama in a Hmong youth’s face and sneers, “We used to stack f**ks like you five feet high in Korea, [and] use you for sandbags.” When told he should go back inside, he gets across that he would “blow a hole in your face, then go back inside. And sleep like a baby. You can count on it.” At such a point, Walt may not conform with everyone’s idea of a gentle church elder administering the youth church-school program, or a keynote speaker at a Hillel House public-interest event. No one would mistake him for the fun brother of Bob McAllister, the “wack-a-doo”–singing host of the old TV show Wonderama.
What to make of Walt? When he’s calm, he sits on his porch in his retirement, sipping coffee in the pleasant company of his neat, lolling-tongue dog, or appearing like a product endorsement for Pabst Blue Ribbon. Skin colored like leather and hair steel-gray, he sometimes has all the shining charisma of a cigar Indian, yet you know he’s the real deal who helped built some of those Detroit
Walt is like anyone’s “old man,” the one who always held court in that old recliner in the living room, which now has the perma-dent from his butt, the surface “schmutz with no name,” and the cat-clawed back that looks like a kind of textured fabric no one ever saw before. His idea of a fun joke was to say “Pull my finger,” and you know the rest. At night he would lambaste Walter Cronkite as “that pinko.” (This expands fairly, I think, on the concept of Walt; these tidbits aren’t depicted in the film.)
Definitely in the film, Walt’s elder son Mitch, for a living, indulges in the apostasy of selling Japanese cars. And in a more concrete episode, there is a tossed-off scene in which his son Mitch and his daughter-in-law try to sell him on the merits of moving to a retirement home, complete with glib brochures. The younger actors do a sort of one-take wonder in sounding like slick TV commercial stooges, leading to Eastwood doing one of his more cartoonish moves—face filling the screen—in showing volcanically welling-up rage. Next shot, the chastened middle-agers are quickly leaving the house, redolent of the “Well, we tried” kind of mood. Broad comedy aside, this is a good reflection of a very common experience today. Some elders would no sooner opt for living in a senior community, after their many years of standard living in their paid-for home, than they would go, in Walt’s idea of hell, to live with a mess of “fish heads” in an equatorial community whose center of the universe seems to be rice paddies.
The film rolls on in a relaxed enough pace, to suit its subject. Any film that starts with a funeral is not a CGI creature-riot meant for kids. And, rather like an old man who’s old enough—and a little embittered enough—not to care anymore, for who does he have to please?, it is on target with its salty humor some of the time, and lapses into self-parody at other times. I think it spends a little too much time—blame this on script editing—with Walt spewing insults and seeming, over days, not to forgive Thao quickly enough for being persuaded, as a gang initiation, to try to steal Walt’s 1972 Gran Torino. But when the plot picks up its thread again, it is worth following to its rather surprising end.
Walt poses the problem that any character would where the objective is to give the audience cause to regard his racism with irony, and yet barb the character’s expressions enough to get a suitable rise (and/or laughing-despite-ourselves) out of the audience, almost as if the film wants to indulge in racism (somewhat mischievously) as much as pillory it. When you measure this against the film’s strain of being realistic, you think it is a minor miracle that there is such tolerance for Walt by two Hmong youth, with the docile Thao played by newcomer Bee Vang, born in 1991, and his older sister, the well-spoken, girlishly plucky Sue, played by Ahney Her, a stage name for another newcomer, born in 1992.
These young siblings from the house next to Walt’s seem to show infinite patience with his grumpiness and sour mouth, and probably that’s right, somewhat in accord with (in real life) East Asians’ tending to be less jaggedly expressive than, and sometimes downright deferential to, American whites, anyway. And more pointedly it is in accord with how (in the story) these kids seem to see that Walt is a fair enough soul at heart, and that his anger and bitterness are something of a shield he puts up in facing with multiple “dark clouds on the horizon.”
Walt’s burden due to his stage of life
Despite his long life of hard, honest work, all that seems as to have been not enough; the country he knew still seems threatened with weird, broad change, not least in the same Mongoloid-featured people filling up local homes that he fought coldheartedly (for whatever state-sanctioned reason) decades before. (As he says to a local priest whose youth he isn’t afraid to scorn, “The thing that haunts the man a most is what [the man in war] isn’t ordered to do.”) And his loss of his wife, coupled with his guilt over some of his war actions, leave him asking what is the meaning of his life.
The questions come on varied and thick. He also finds himself lacking, or so he feels, in how distant he’s been with his own children. Relatively late in the film he remarks, after coughing up blood at a house party of his Hmong neighbors (this may paraphrase), “I have more in common with these gooks than with my own spoiled, rotten family.” It is about this time that he really resolves to do what he can to help Thao, which includes getting him a job.
Erik Erikson’s theory of human psychological life and development developed from the starting point of the determinism of Freud, aiming toward a more purpose-directed and socially oriented concept of personality. It adapted Freud’s idea of the “ego” to issues of personal development over time and essential interrelation with aspects of society, through career and other means. His theory had this to say about the objective of personal psychological health in old age:
In the aging person who has taken care of things and people and has adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointments of being, by necessity, the originator of others and the generator of things and ideas—only in him the fruit of the seven stages [of the life cycle] gradually ripens. I know of no better word for it than integrity. Lacking a clear definition, I shall point to a few attributes of this stage of mind. It is the ego’s accrued assurance of its proclivity for order and meaning—an emotional integration faithful to the image-bearers of the past and ready to take, and eventually to renounce, leadership in the present. It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions. [4]
Though obviously Walt could be said to aim toward the objective of achieving “ego integrity”—and, in the process, addressing his sense of alienation from Oriental people—in an intuitive, not terribly conscious way, he definitely heads in the right direction by being a father figure to Thao in his own gruff way. Then, it’s the film’s vision of there being not just the challenge of Walt to make amends for his own psychological and spiritual purposes and to help the “fatherless” Thao, but there also being the challenge of a gang element in the local community. How should Walt deal with this “threat to the fabric of the country”? This is obviously more than a personal, or neighbor-to-neighbor, issue.
Walt could be said to find a need to become more open-minded to the likes of Thao for another reason: he doesn’t just have the elderly’s issue of achieving “ego integrity”; but perhaps his own Protestant-seeming self-disciplining, “self-made” quality has left him a little lacking in a certain area of his personality. (This though, as a Polish character, he is a lapsed Catholic.) As Erikson said in another source, on the issue of how (in the life-cycle stage for those in full adulthood involving the issue of “generation versus stagnation”) some take on the role of an “invalid” (which is not Walt’s issue, of course):
Individuals...often begin to indulge themselves as if they were their own...one and only child; and where conditions favor it, early invalidism, physical or psychological, becomes the vehicle of self-concern. The mere fact of having or even wanting children, however, does not “achieve” generativity. ... The reasons [for failure to develop this stage] are often to be found in [among other factors] ...excessive self-love based on a too strenuously self-made personality.... [5]
Of course, Walt seems like a man who would do anything but take on the “invalid” role, but his continued harboring of bitterness suggests a certain “purist” stance that is not unlike the “purism” of perpetual invalidism. But even while he finds he is sick—with what we assume is tobacco-induced cancer, from hints given as the movie progresses—he is the sort who won’t stop, like a new kind of marginalized sort, to engage in elaborate drawing-room talk and mutual-support-type socializing based on the consciousness of being ill. That would be for pussies. While he has time left, he will help Thao, in the crude ways he knows.
Walt starting Thao’s career with baby steps, in a practical man’s way
A little bit of practical wisdom seeps out of the film, as Thao is in a general mode of wondering what he will do for a career. (By the way, Thao has thought of becoming a salesman, but he would need money to attend college to do that. Walt, thus, points out he can work to earn money, and a start at that, for Thao, would be construction.)
When Thao voices feeling daunted at the amount of tools Walt has accumulated over 50 years (implying, how would Thao ever start a career with his lack of resources?), Walt relents and gives him a starter set: a pair of vise grips, some WD-40, and a roll of duct tape. Walt says that will be all a fellow needs to do half of household chores.
And one can elaborate (just to be whimsical), add to these items a six of beer, a condom, and an aspirin, and an average handy guy can be pretty usefully occupied and kept out of most kinds of trouble for a solid weekend. If heads of state could apply this in a broad policy, they could perhaps avoid revolution and widespread social unrest.
This is a joke, but it is not silly to understand that even the slimmest start of equipping a future generation to provide for itself is part of the way to enfranchise young people.
The film’s sloppiness could be said to add to its charm
Eastwood, as I said, has made a practice of producing his films quickly, and he apparently also rarely story-boards (see subsection on his directing style in the Wikipedia page on him), so it is a minor miracle his scenes have that important structure that makes them accessible, which could compensate for a scene’s technically not being carefully enough shot.
An early scene where Walt intercedes in a small group of Black youths on the street menacing Sue and her momentary white boyfriend seems to work quite well—even when Sue utters defiant lines that seem a bit wordy—with Ms. Her’s being a novice actor adding to the risk. The whole thing seems to come off, with roving camera, because what invigorates the scene is the circling, tentative action and the sense of threat. Any technical sloppiness is excused here.
But in a late scene where Walt brings Thao to a barber shop to help “man him up” and try to teach him to talk in a familiar, abusive-male, racist-and-edgy manner, things seem to degenerate to sloppy self-parody, like a badly handled scene in a sitcom. (More positively, in facilitating Thao’s taking a local girl on a date, Walt muses he has to take the “carbon off the valve” with Thao.) We tend to excuse such lapses in a movie where Walt, all in all, seems to have a lot of little moments of excess, like any salty-tongued old man, because we figure that when the time comes to stand tall, Walt will have his ducks in a row just like the old soldier and factory worker he once was.
I won’t divulge the ending, which seems to fit squarely within Eastwood’s rather tragic late corpus of work including Mystic River
Gran Torino seems to open up possibilities for looking at Walt’s predicament from so many angles that we wonder why the film didn’t do more to address these. But the film is rather like Walt—it lurches along, getting its thing done, trying to do well by us in the end; and if it trampled on some people or issues in the process, well, what more do you expect from an old auto worker whose days are clearly numbered? Let the “fish heads” and “zipper heads” who are inheriting the Earth deal in their own honest way with the niceties that Walt didn’t have the education or the time to deal with while he assiduously strode the planet.
End notes
1. Marcia is a theorist on whom I have just cursory knowledge (who seems to have been a theoretic disciple of Erik Erikson, on whom I know more, as suggested below). Marcia theorized about four general states of being with relation to how one stood to sense of life-history time, shaped by (following more of an Eriksonian set of concepts) one’s disposition of ego with respect to working through problems in life. Marcia’s four states are: foreclosure, identity diffusion, moratorium, and identity achievement. In the last category, “identity achievement,” in which one has built a sense of identity through struggle, one has the best sense of time, incorporating past as well as a sense of future. (I have a New York Times clipping bearing on this, but currently can’t find it. [I did find it, months later. See "Pentimento pause 1."]) In Walt’s case, one supposes, his sense of personal life-history time is disrupted because there is something majorly unresolved within where he stands in terms of having worked his way to where he is through struggle, presumably tied to his guilt about his war activities. It’s not hard to hypothesize that his being currently in mourning stirs up this unresolved, longer-term sense.
2. I had a large chunk of material to offer on PTSD, but due to space constraints and the fact that PTSD is so familiar today, I’ll leave it out.
3. This is to judge from a pre-publication typescript, whose main substance probably survives between my version and the published version, thus supporting my point.
4. Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968), p. 139. There is a very similar passage in Childhood and Society (see next end note), p. 268.
5. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1950/1963), p. 267.
Coming soon, a memoir-type entry:
A Salute to Seniors, 2: Living with Mrs. Conover when I was in VISTA
