The Burden of Heroes

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Absolutely. It almost takes that out of the equation. It puts us in the horrible position where in order to defend against cowardly deeds, you have to behave in what has always been seen as a cowardly way yourself. You're at some checkpoint, and you see a bunch of women in a vehicle, and then all of a sudden, some guy's there with a rifle shooting away, or he blows the whole vehicle up. So what do you do? What do you do? I was never one of those who were excited about going into Iraq. But you're there, so how the hell do you work your way out of it?

Let me change the subject a little bit. You've played a lot of heroes in movies. But can you name anywhere you played an entirely unambiguous hero?

No.

Why not?

Several reasons. Mostly because I felt that heroes a lot of times are disturbed people. But I think a lot of people who do extraordinary heroic things sometimes have got some sort of a little insanity thing. So I've always played heroic people as slightly flawed, slightly haunted by something else. In Unforgiven, William Munny is definitely a flawed guy, and he only becomes heroic at the end because he's just kind of gone crazy.

Does Dirty Harry go crazy?

The background of that story was he was a lonely person--very lost, very lonely. His wife was killed in an accident, and his hate for the bureaucracy made him a renegade. But he truly was obsessed with the plight of the victim, which was his noble side. So, within a story like that, it was easy in those days for people who didn't want to think too much about it to say, "Oh, that's just a guy that's a crazy." But, you know, I just felt there are people like that.

You're really a postwar movie star.

I think you're right--we're looking at a postwar mentality and maybe just a different generation. It's not like High Noon, where the guy's a wonderful sheriff. Everybody loved him. He had saved the town. And the town deserts him when he needs them. I love that picture--but that hero does not exist in me. I don't see heroes that way.

So is there any conceivable possibility in the modern world for the assertion of conventional heroism?

I don't see it right now. I certainly don't see any politician that's a hero in any party anywhere. I think John McCain did something that I don't know if I could do and I don't think many men can look in the mirror and say they'd do: give up a chance to get out of prison because his dad was an admiral and the Vietnamese were going to let him go. I mean that took cojones, donating another 3 1/2 to four years of his life to stay in prison rather than be the one guy who gets to walk away: "Hey, fellas. I'll say hello to everybody." Pat Tillman, giving up his NFL career to fight--and die--for his country is like that for me too. But most of the political structure I get so disappointed at. We're reduced to a society that is sitting here arguing about who used the N word 30 years ago. You see grown men doing this stuff in order to get into a power position, and it's really kind of disgraceful.

But all that said, is there a hunger among Americans for heroic behavior? I think there is a hunger. I think that most people would love to see a heroic figure step forward. I can almost sound like one of those Christian-right guys: Where is the Messiah? •