As Clint Eastwood appearances in politically charged content go, I’d rate this American Crossroads ad substantially above Eastwood’s meandering, bizarre rant to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention and somewhere below the “Halftime in America” spot he cut for Chrysler that aired during this year’s Super Bowl:

Part of it is just that the production values on the “Halftime in America” spot are much more attractive: better lighting, the more dramatic shot of Eastwood in the tunnel, the facade still standing even though the building behind it has been gutted, a diverse array of contemplative faces.

It’s also just much easier to make platitudes sound uplifting than specific but not-very-well substantiated claims about President Obama’s record. It’s easier to sell a car than it is to sell Mitt Romney at this stage in the game.

Last week, I wrote that Clint Eastwood was probably thinking more like a performer than a politician when he gave his rambling, hilarious address to the RNC. Today, Clint Eastwood gave an interview in his local paper, where he explained his thinking at the time. It’s very interesting:

With just an hour before he appeared on stage, it still hadn’t occurred to Eastwood to use an empty chair as a stand-in for the president.

“I got to the convention site just 15 or 20 minutes before I was scheduled to go on,” he said. “That was fine, because everything was very well organized.”

After a quick trip through airport-style security, he was taken to a Green Room, where Archbishop Dolan of New York sought him out to say hello. Then he was taken backstage to wait for his cue. And that was when inspiration struck.

“There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down,” Eastwood said. “When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody.” ….

As he wrapped up his remarks, he was aware his presentation was “very unorthodox,” but that was his intent from the beginning, even if some people weren’t on board.

“They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit,” he said. “I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.”

The whole thing is a fascinating testimony to the way that our self-conceptions shape the way we live our lives. Eastwood thinks of himself as a “crazy actor,” so, even when he was a professional politician, he still gave the kind of “talks” that a crazy actor would give. Even though he was well aware of the fact that his performance wasn’t the thing that someone at a political convention was supposed to do, he felt compelled to do it, because that’s who he is. One could understand Bill Clinton’s speech yesterday in a similar fashion — Clinton went miles off script and overtime to hammer Republicans on policy details because that’s the sort of speech he thinks that he, Bill Clinton, ought to deliver. Indeed, I might bet this need to be true to one’s own self-conception explain why so many people seem to make mistakes when trying out new roles, entertainers stepping in politics being just one sort of example. Sometimes, people choose to take on responsibilities where they need to act differently than they normally would. People that can’t bring themselves to do that have a great deal of integrity, but are also really likely to screw up.

The philosopher Bernard Williams has this wonderful notion of “authenticity” as self-sincerity; being true to our own freely chosen ideals and beliefs in our actions and life choices. Clint Eastwood, it seems clear, was being authentically himself. That was the problem.

By now, you’ve probably already seen or heard about Clint Eastwood’s riveting, surreal address to the Republican National Convention (if you haven’t, here’s a highlight reel and here’s the full thing), ably discussed by Mychal. The easiest way to understand what happened is, in Mike Grunwald’s words, simply that “a rambling old dude with no teleprompter” acted like, well, a rambling old dude with no teleprompter.

But simply dismissing Eastwood’s performance as rambling insanity misses a crucial part of the speech: it was entertaining as all hell. Eastwood’s diatribe about Invisible Obama telling Romney to perform an anatomically impossible act on himself was met with riotous laughter from the delegates, as were most of his jokes. Even his politically importunate lines, like his poke at the futility of the War in Afghanistan, were well-received by the crowd. The speech was terrible politics, sure, but it was a funny stand-up routine — and that’s how the audience appeared to receive it.

One way to see Eastwood’s routine, then, isn’t that he bombed. It’s that he was doing he was doing the wrong kind of performance on the wrong kind of stage. In a certain sense, that shouldn’t be surprising. Though Eastwood isn’t shy about expressing his political views, and was once mayor of a small town in California, he isn’t a politician. First and foremost, Clint Eastwood is an artist and an entertainer. And the two types approach public performance in very different ways.

The qualities that make effective art are the opposites of the ones that make a good campaign spectacle. Art, even (or especially) when it’s political, succeeds by simultaneously entertaining the audience and opening up new avenues for thought. Art that attempts to lecture at you generally fails as art because it forgets what it’s best at doing. Campaign events, by contrast, are about selling one particular narrative as persuasively as possible. You’re supposed to come away from a campaign event or convention convinced that a particular candidate is Best For America, inspired to work for their campaign. It’s about getting you on a team, not getting you to laugh or think. Even humor deployed in a campaign event is carefully crafted to serve the event’s overall message rather than be comedy qua comedy. Political spectacle, while perhaps an art form, isn’t art.

So when the Romney campaign simply just told Eastwood to go talk (which is basically what happened), it was eminently predictable that he wasn’t going to give a campaign speech even if the scale of this particular meltdown was unimaginable. Eastwood has a history of making riveting, somewhat offensive political art; Gran Torino and its racist, cantankerous Jesus-protagonist being only the most recent and best example. When you throw someone with that sort of artistic sensibility in front of an enormous audience without a script or much advance planning, it’s utter folly to expect them to stay “on-message.” Clint Eastwood is a performer. He performed.

It says a lot about how the Republican convention is going that the biggest buzz isn’t over any one speech, but over the possible identity of a mystery speaker slated for Thursday night. The rumors seem to be coalescing around actor Clint Eastwood. And if he takes the stage in Tampa tonight, Eastwood’s appearance will reveal more about the current state of the Republican party than about Eastwood or the man he’s there to endorse.

Eastwood endorsed Romney at an Idaho fundraiser in early August, citing the claim, later proven false, that Olympians’ medals would be taxed (their cash prizes are taxed as income), and saying “He’s going to restore a decent tax system that we need badly so that there is a fairness and people are not pitted against one another of whose paying taxes and who isn’t.”

Taxes and regulations have long been touchstone issues for Eastwood. When he ran of Carmel-By-The-Sea in 1986, his campaign was in part inspired by his fights with the town over building permits, and he was backed by small business owners irritated by the city’s regulations intended to make sure Carmel wasn’t overrun by tourists. In statewide California politics, Eastwood backed term limits. And during President Regan’s 1985 budget fight, United Press International reported that “Sen. William Armstrong, R-Colo., presented Reagan with a blue sweatshirt inscribed with the phrase ”Make My Day,” which Reagan borrowed from actor Clint Eastwood to dramatize his intention to veto any tax increases.”

But it’s not as if the actor’s politics are a perfect fit for a Romney administration. In an interview with GQ last fall, Eastwood cited the importance of issues like global warming and described his political evolution and support for equal marriage rights:

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War. And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, Let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone. These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage? I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.

He’s never been particularly pro-life either, saying in the eighties that the extreme rhetoric that contributed to clinic bombings made him nervous (and for extremists in the Republican Party today, when actress Sondra Locke sued Eastwood for palimony in 1989, she accused him of encouraging to have two abortions and a tubal ligation). Eastwood endorsed John McCain in 2008 on the grounds that his experience in Vietnam would better equip him to handle the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though he celebrated the breakthrough that Obama’s election represented even as he expressed skepticism of the younger man’s experience. Eastwood’s always been clear that he doesn’t fit comfortably into one party, though the one he seems most inclined to accomodate himself to is the GOP.

But if Eastwood takes the stage at the RNC tonight, he’ll be behaving exactly the way conservatives wish movie stars would behave: putting the self-interest created by his wealth over his opinions on social issues. Some day, there will be a reckoning between the wing of the Republican party that espouse limiting government’s influence in business and the one that wants to increase federal limitations on Americans’ sexual and reproductive lives. But as long as the people who believe in the former and oppose the latter aren’t willing to prioritize the freedom of women and gay people along with their freedom from taxes, that day will be pushed off a little further.

Jeff Parker, who writes Hulk for Marvel, reports that the book will switch focus and tell the story of Red She-Hulk, the super-powered version of Betty Ross-Banner, Bruce’s love interest. And his take on it, and on the book as an opportunity to bring in new female audiences for comics, sounds phenomenal:

I thought why not dive in with a woman lead, AND tap the very roots of Hulk? Originally he always walked the line between menace and hero. Even if Hulk liked you, that still didn’t guarantee you were safe around him once he started raging, it was like being friends with a category 4 hurricane. As the newest of the Hulks, Betty is still formative and unknown- in a perfect position to be that kind of Hulk to the world.

Though you may only know my superhero stories, I am far from someone who thinks that genre IS comics, and I know that others may fit female readers more naturally. But I don’t think we should abandon trying, because despite conventional wisdom, many do want stories about powerful women in big action- did Buffy the Vampire Slayer teach us nothing? This gender does have daydreams about throwing cars around and flattening fools with a backhand swat. The superhero model appeals to something fundamental in us- that we feel, despite appearances, we have untapped power that could break out in the right circumstances.

The HULK myth goes further- and somewhat scarier- because it acknowledges our rage. The feeling that deep inside, whether from personal history or even wilder remnants still left from our ancestors, we harbor something devastating. Feelings we have to work at constantly because in the real world, letting that out doesn’t end well. But to be Hulk is to let that wave roll right out and wash away everything in your way. If you don’t think the ladies can relate to that, you haven’t talked to any lately.

Y’all know that I absolutely adore Jennifer Walters, and have long banged the drum for a She-Hulk television show as a companion to the Marvel movies. But if I can’t have that, a feminist take on Red She-Hulk—perhaps in less fetish-wear-y costumes than in the past, folks?—makes me very, very happy indeed.

It seems obvious to me that fantasies about physical power, and fear about our rage and anger (I mean, seriously, have folks read Little Women) are not exclusive to men. But we don’t get a lot of mass culture that addresses that. Characters like Black Widow and Catwoman are often confronted with the limitations of their physical power, rather than the idea that we could go too far and do damage verbal or physical damage to both someone else and ourselves. As I wrote last week, I absolutely adore the feminism of early She-Hulk comics, and the way they demolished the idea that anger about gender discrimination makes people incoherent or overly personal, putting She-Hulk up against institutions and even powerful superheroes like Tony Stark who fundamentally misjudged her. Parker’s said on Twitter that “I think of it as a Clint Eastwood western starring her. It’s one woman against the world.” A Red She-Hulk With No Name is a pretty amazing place to start from.

I’ve always found Leonardo DiCaprio a somewhat rigid actor, but that’s a quality that should serve him well playing J. Edgar Hoover, in what looks to be a handsome biopic directed by Clint Eastwood.

It looks like Eastwood is going with the interpretation that Clyde Tolson was Hoover’s lover, or at least the emotional center of his life, and planning to explore the impact of Hoover’s closetedness on his spying on people like Eleanor Roosevelt in hopes he’d be able to exploit fears similar to his own and blackmail them. But one hopes, especially given that Eastwood is going around talking about what a libertarian he is, that the movie mounts a broad-based critique of Hoover’s violations of civil liberties and chilling influence on American life. It’s really not enough to say that J. Edgar Hoover spied on us because his mother was mean to him. And it’s important to remind viewers that there is this authoritarian strain in American life, that domestic surveillance is a recurring tendency we need to consistently resist.