A phrase I didn't think I'd ever heard used as a slur turns out to have been slung as slur in the most important movie in the history of this blog.

Remember the post from a few days ago about the lawsuit involving a woman who allegedly bared her chest and said "I bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons." I didn't believe anyone would say that, in part because I didn't recognize "fish head" as a standard slur.

But now I see that I had heard it before, because I'd seen the movie "Gran Torino." Twice. In fact, "Gran Torino" is the most important movie in the history of this blog. Click the tag — "Gran Torino" — and start at the bottom, the earliest post, to relive the movie's interweaving with my life story. 

I've updated the old post now, based on this email from a reader: "In the Clint Eastwood Movie Gran Torino, there is a scene where he is invited to party by the girl he has befriended. The party is next door and everyone (except Eastwood) is Hmong. Eastwood makes a reference to them as 'Fish Heads.'"

Here's the scene:

"In the lawsuit... Rana claimed he was drugged and made a sex slave by Hajdini, who also allegedly made racist claims about him and his wife."

"The most infamous line from the suit was Rana’s claim that Hajdini stripped off her top and said, 'I bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons.' JPMorgan and Hajdini have said from that jump that Rana’s allegations are entirely made up. Both defendants argue that Rana should be forced to either stay in state court — or that the suit be dismissed for good, and that he pay legal fees. Hajdini, who has filed a counterclaim alleging Rana defamed her, said her defamation allegation should be argued out before Rana is allowed to file in any new court."

From "The surprising reason JPMorgan lawyers don’t want Chirayu Rana to drop his bombshell ‘sex slave’ lawsuit" (NY Post).

How does that quote even exist? No one would say that, but no one making up a quote should make up something that no one would say. "Fishwife" is a standard expression, but "fish head wife" isn't. And I'll just stop there. It's so ludicrous that it's incomprehensible as a made up quote.

ADDED: "Fishwife" is a standard expression... it has a Wikipedia article:  "A fishwife, fish-fag or fishlass is a woman who sells fish. She is typically the wife of a fisherman, selling her husband's catch.... Some wives and daughters of fishermen were notoriously loud and foul-mouthed, as noted in the expression to swear like a fishwife, as they sold fish in the marketplace. Among the reasons for their outspokenness were that their wares were highly perishable and lost value if not sold quickly, and the similarity of their product to that of others selling the same thing, with volume of voice or colourful language drawing customer attention. Also, managing alone while their menfolk were away fishing for extended periods made them strong and self-sufficient...."

BUT: A reader emails: "In the Clint Eastwood Movie Gran Torino, there is a scene where he is invited to party by the girl he has befriended. The party is next door and everyone (except Eastwood) is Hmong. Eastwood makes a reference to them as 'Fish Heads.'"

Ah! Gran Torino! The most important movie in the history of this blog.

The quote is: "What?! What the hell are all you fish heads looking at?!" Here's the scene:

"She just said a terrible thing. You know what she said? Shout it out because I don’t want to — OK, you’re not allowed to say..."

"... and I never expect to hear that from you again. She said — I never expect to hear that from you again! — she said he’s a pussy. That’s terrible. Terrible."



For the annals of saying something without saying it. But he said it! No, he didn't. It's the old use-mention distinction.

The use–mention distinction is a foundational concept of analytic philosophy, according to which it is necessary to make a distinction between using a word (or phrase) and mentioning it, and many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention."

Trump even chided the woman... and yet, the chiding was comical. The man who normally denounces political correctness — who says we haven't got time for political correctness —  is scolding a lady for saying Ted Cruz is a "pussy."

So, he got the word out, got his distance from it, displayed some comic chops, and reminded us that political correctness isn't something to be completely thrown out. You transgress it strategically, and you call it back strategically. Keep them guessing. He wants to be unpredictable.

ADDED: Clint Eastwood calls a kid a "pussy" to "man him up a little bit":

"Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all."

We're talking about "bizarrely low-key bacteria have been found in sediments 100 feet below the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean" — at least 1,000 and maybe millions of years old:

Their metabolism is dialed down to almost nothing, an adaptive advantage in a place with so few resources. The bacteria that survive are the ones that can satisfy themselves with minute traces of oxygen and a parsimonious diet of organic material laid down millions of years ago....

This made me think of the Beatles lyric: "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" Nowhere bacteria, please listen/You don't know what you're missin'...

“These organisms live so slowly that when we look at it at our own time scale, it’s like suspended animation,” said Danish scientist Hans Roy, a biologist at Aarhus University and the lead author of the study. “The main lesson here is that we need to stop looking at life at our own time scale.”

Yes. Exactly! I'm going to readjust to this bacteria point of view. It's a strategy....

"The reckless fiscal policies of the past have left us in a very deep hole."

"And digging our way out of it will take time, patience and some tough choices."

Obama has such a wry sense of humor!

IN THE COMMENTS: Knox says:

This is exactly the sort of statement I was referring to in another thread: immature and unPresidential. Grow up, you big pussy. You wanted the job, now quit whining and do it.

(Sorry for the language, I just watched Gran Torino last night.)

And Sy said:

I guess Obama have not heard the old adage ...if you are in a hole, stop digging.

Yeah. How do you dig your way out of a hole?

Reel Geezers talk about "Gran Torino."

There's a big difference between Walt Kowalski and Archie Bunker — "Gran Torino" is not "All in the Family."

Moviegoers today enjoy the Walt Kowalski character in "Gran Torino," who spits epithets — and spits — at his Hmong neighbors and at some young black men. Why is this amusing us? I remember when the same questions were asked about the Archie Bunker character on the 1970s TV sitcom, "All in the Family." Back then, some people said it's terrible to make a racist lovable. It was bad to show this hateful man in a family of good people. Decent people should shun someone like that. One answer was that the storyline was always to prove Archie wrong. The black people next door were better than him: George Jefferson was an industrious entrepreneur and his son was a diligent student. The family that surrounded Archie continually modeled better values, and prodded the stubborn man along the path to a colorblind society of shared values.

Walt Kowalski, by contrast, has been shunned by his family. They minimalize their contact with him and don't have any enlightened values to push on him anyway. He lives alone in his old neighborhood, where he is the only white person left. And it's not as if everything would work out fine if he'd just wake up and quit being a racist. The nonwhite residents have actually ruined his neighborhood. There are no responsible adult males, just violent gangs. His is the only neat green lawn, and his is the only house that isn't dilapidated. His son and daughter think he should give up and move out. So his racism is of a piece with his stubborn refusal to move out, and when he takes action it is to bring his values of hard work and respect for property to the nonwhite residents.

Archie Bunker's racism was delusional, and his problems could be solved by changing his thinking. Walt Kowalski's racism is partly reality-based, and the part that is not reality-based, but Archie Bunker-like, has kept him in the place where he is able to do something about the problems that the other white people have fled.

ADDED: Please note that when I say "Walt Kowalski's racism is partly reality-based," I am referring to the reality depicted in the movie. By the same token, "Archie Bunker's racism was delusional" in the reality of the sit-com, where George Jefferson was an industrious entrepreneur and so forth. We're comparing 2 characters in 2 contexts — and all of it is fictional and the degree of distortion of reality is a separate question.

"The Althouse delinquents, unable to grasp more than one thing at a time, are convinced this has solved the question of racist language."

Lean Left thinks you're not getting it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage says:

I managed to get about one-third of the way through.

That’s exactly the kind of sophomoric and prolix crap that tempts a survey course grader to take the stack of bluebooks and simply toss them down the stairs.

Ha ha. Now, I've got to link to Daniel Solove's great old post demonstrating the down-the-stairs method of grading.

AND: Oh, look, Glenn Kenney is reacting to us:

[T]here seems to be some theory afoot that the oft-played-for-laughs deployment of racial epithets in the picture, when considered in tandem with a years-old video of England's Prince Harry, now makes it okay for one to refer to, say, one's Jewish friend as a "kike" to his face....

We've been talking about whether the film may make some people think it's okay, not that it actually makes it okay. (And, Glenn, the character's name is Thao, not Bee. Bee is the actor's first name.)

"Hey, I just saw 'Gran Torino' — is there some place safe to talk about it without worrying about spoilage?"

Asks chickenlittle. The answer is yes, here.

I'm live-blogging The Golden Globes.

6:00: Come hang out with me. I'm watching Nancy O'Dell on the red carpet interviewing the Jonas Brothers. They seem like nice young men, but boring. I guess they don't need to be interesting, as they are obviously loved for whatever it is they do — which I've never experienced. 

6:05: Commenting on her success, Miley Cyrus says she's not a big planner, but "God has a plan." She looks pretty there in her very long drapey white dress, with her dad who's flat-ironed his hair as much as a man possibly can. 

6:15: Steve Carrell bows down to Ricky Gervais. 

6:27: Gah! I screwed up the title line. Fixed. Sorry. The red carpet stuff is made less glamorous by the presence of TV folk, who seem especially interested in getting camera time. Meanwhile, we see Kate Winslet lurking over there, looking splendid. 

6:29: Vanessa Hudgens's hair doesn't just look like a wig, it looks like a play wig. Jessica Lange is escorting Drew Barrymore. They are holding hands. I love Drew's hair — it seems to be inspired by Marilyn Monroe after a long night of drinking. Blah! Now it's Jeremy Piven whining about his ailment that no one believes he has.

6:41: Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio together again. This time he's the one who looks ever so slightly bloated. She's wearing a black dress and looks so good wearing red lipstick that maybe all of us women will be wearing red lipstick tomorrow.

6:47: Is that Tom Cruise's phone ringing? He's moved off to the side so Nancy O'Dell can get to Robert Downey Jr. — who's wearing dark sunglasses and looks very unkempt, yet brags about his sobriety — and then Sting — who's very red and bloated and bearded. He needs to go on Tom Cruise's diet, because Tom looks radically rejuvenated, all sharp edges.

6:50: Marisa Tomei promotes her movie — "The Wrestler" — which she says is "very verité."

7:01: Jennifer Lopez is handing out the Best Supporting Actress movie award. And it's... Kate Winslet. She's acting flustered, which she attributes to her "habit of not winning things." She's glistening with sweat. And maybe the rest of us women will try to be glistening with sweat tomorrow. She's thanking the movie makeup people for "making me look so old." [LATER: Ricky Gervais says he told her if she did a Holocaust film she'd win. This is a reference to the first episode of "Extras," where Winslet plays herself as an actress who is doing a Holocaust film in order to win an Oscar.]

7:07: Best Song. I was going to say I don't care, but then I see that the "Gran Torino" song is up. And there's Bruce Springsteen, who bellyached his way through a typical Bruce Springsteen song for "The Wrestler." And damned if he doesn't win. "This is the only time I'm going to be in competition with Clint Eastwood. That's for sure."

7:19: Supporting TV Actor. I guess Ben Franklin will win. Yeah. Tom Wilkinson. One of these days I'll finish watching the episodes of "John Adams." It wasn't my favorite sort of thing, but Wilkinson was good in it. He's acting quite geezerly now.

7:22: Supporting TV Actress. The only one I know is Laura Dern from "Recount." And she wins. She played Kathrine Harris — very amusingly. Oh, now, she's blabbering about the election and looking forward to "amazing change in this country." I hope that doesn't make anyone else think now would be a good time to talk politics. At least, her little TV movie was about a presidential election.

7:31: Best TV Actor is Gabriel Byrne, but he's not there. So on to Best TV Actress. Anna Paquin wins for "True Blood." Remember how cute she when she won an Oscar -- as a little girl? By the way, the presenters are the 2 young actors who are playing Captain Kirk and Spock in some new "Star Trek" project. They look interestingly like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy — but handsomer — younger and handsomer.

7:40: "Wall-E" wins for animated movie, and the guy accepting the award thanks his kids and says they inspire every emotion he tries to capture on film. That sounds nice until you think about it for about 2 seconds.

7:45: Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical goes to Sally Hawkins, and I'm sorry I didn't see "Happy-Go-Lucky." She beat Meryl Streep, who detains her on the way to the stage. Bow to the Streep. She beat Emma Thompson too. And Frances MacDormond. That's some major ass-kicking.

7:56: Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore are still holding hands. They're presenting the Best TV Mini-Series or Movie. Unsurprisingly, "John Adams" wins. Surprisingly, the award is accepted by Tom Hanks. He could use some makeup.

8:01: Best Supporting Actor in a movie. Heath Ledger wins. He's not there to accept the award... needless to say. The director Christopher Nolan accepts the award. They show the "You complete me" clip.

8:05: Here's a list of all the nominees, in case you're wondering who the losers are. Now, here's Tom Brokaw. Why? Oh, he's introducing the clips for "Frost/Nixon." Funnily spoofed on "SNL" last night as "Frost/Other People."

8:09: Best Foreign Film. Oh! Israel won. "Waltz with Bashir." The producer accepts and says he hopes when his kids watch the film some day, the war it depicts will be something from the past.

8:13: Actress in a TV Mini-Series/Movie goes to Laura Linney — Abigail Adams — and it's no surprise. She's wearing an ugly dress and that hairstyle that mainly consists of not brushing.

8:22: Movie Screenplay. "Slumdog Millionaire." Excellent! 8:24: Best TV Actor. Alec Baldwin. I don't watch his show, but maybe I should.

8:33: Actor in a TV Mini-Series/Movie. Of course, it will be Paul Giamatti, right? Yes.

8:38: Best TV Comedy series. Obviously, it will be "30 Rock." I've never watched it. Heard it's good.

8:45: Original Movie Score. Gotta be "Slumdog." Yeah. A lot of movie music is just background emotional mainipulation, but "Slumdog" had some really exciting stuff. The composer thanks the "billion people from India."

8:48: Everyone seems to know that Tina Fey will win Best TV Actress, and she does. She's got a dress cut all the way down to the waistband, but don't get nervous. It's clearly glued on. She's bitching about the internet. She's telling specific bloggers — I think they're bloggers, they sound like bloggers — they can "suck it." It's nice to know the celebs read what the bloggers say about them and that it can bug them.

9:03: I'm not interested in watching the honoring of Steven Speilberg. It's not about this year's movies. It's such a drag. I hate all the shots of actresses faces — all that admiration. I imagine them all thinking about whether they look pretty giving the impression of caring.

9:15: A big one: Best Director. I say out loud: Danny Boyle. And that's right. It's Danny Boyle. I loved "Slumdog Millionaire" — saw it twice. Apparently, everyone in India is watching. That would be 1 billion people. Maybe some of them are watching TVs in shop windows, like the people in "Slumdog."

9:21: Colin Farrell wins the Best Actor in a Comedy/Musical. He says things like "Ignorance is nemesis."

9:32: Sacha Baron Cohen is riffing on the subject of economic hard times. "Even Madonna has had to get rid of one of her personal assistants. Our thoughts go out to you, Guy Ritchie." The audience sighs with disapproval... and also laughs. The award he's presenting is Best Musical/Comedy. Ah! "Vicki, Christina, Barcelona." Nice to see a Woody Allen movie win.

9:40: Best Drama Actress. This is the one where the GG website seemed to reveal that Anne Hathaway had won. But no! It's Kate Winslet!!!! Our Kate! She's won twice! "Okay. Gather." "I want to thank my beautiful agents."

9:46: Best TV Drama: "Mad Men."

9:53: Best Drama Actor. Mickey Rourke! I'm glad he won over Sean Penn simply because he's there and Sean is not. He gets a big, enthusiastic standing ovation. He looks really cool — sleazy cool — with stringy, highlighted hair, a mustache, light sunglasses, dark spray-on tan, dark satin lapels, and a dark sequined scarf. It shows that he really wanted it. He's touchingly pleased and genuinely humble.

10:00. Tom Cruise is here to give the Best Drama award, and I think we know it's going to be... it is... "Slumdog Millionaire."

10:03: The producer accepting the award, getting rushed to wrap up, says "Oh, fuck!" and the audio is removed. So we know it was tape delayed, and I wonder if this will affect the Supreme Court's "fleeting expletives" case. See? It's not hard to snip out the fleeting expletive. And here it is so conspicuously demonstrated. (And now, I can put the "law" tag on this post.)

10:07: Ah, finally, it's over. Highlights: Kate winning twice. Mickey Rourke. All the kudos to "Slumdog."

"Who would have thought it? Prince Harry is just a normal bloke in spite of the weird circumstances of his upbringing."

"Sure, I am all for abominating racism like any other form of odious collectivism... but this hypersensitivity to any politically incorrect use of language is really annoying."

***

I loved the part where Harry's spoofing a phone conversation with the Queen:

"Granny I've got to go, send my love to the Corgis and Grandpa.... I've got to go, got to go, bye. God Save You ... yeah, that's great."

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt says:

A royal Kowalski!

Walt Kowalski is the Clint Eastwood character in "Gran Torino," the movie we've been talking about over here. I'd written:

Does the movie legitimatize racial epithets? We have our snarling but lovable geezer spitting a hundred racist slurs — especially to refer to Asians — over the course of the movie. And, in trying to teach his young mentee how to man up — and not be a pussy — he encourages him to banter playfully using words like "wop," "mick," and so forth. You might want to say it's a hilarious slap in the face of political correctness. But I think the movie is pretty effective in selling plain old-fashioned racial talk.

Freeman now says:

I think you're right about Gran Torino making a case for racial language in general. Having the character talk like that to everyone, people he liked and didn't like, people of his own race and not, sort of popped the bubble that these words should have special, almost magical, powers to offend. Especially with the juxtaposition of the racial insults against the real insults. The times you felt he was really cutting were the times when he called young men "pussies" because they deserved it.

Clint Eastwood, admitting he voted Republican, said "but Republicans are supposed to be libertarians, aren't they?"

He said it to Randy Barnett, who's back posting at Volokh Conspiracy — with the comments turned off. Barnett does not detail the circumstance under which he met Eastwood and got the chance to interrogate him about his politics. I'm picturing something along the lines of...



Anyway, Randy's post bounces off my post about the new Clint Eastwood movie "Gran Torino." He writes that the character Walt Kowalski is basically the same as Harry Callahan ("Dirty Harry"):

[I]n Gran Torino he treats the character with complete respect--without a hint of self-parody--thereby respecting and satisfying those who always liked the character. Anyone who enjoyed this character then, like Ann ("a guilty pleasure for us peace-and-love hippies"), will enjoy him now all the more. The big difference is the critical hype that Eastwood gets today, that he never got back then, thus permitting those who despised Harry to buy Walt. OK, I admit that Eastwood has grown over the years as an actor though, like John Wayne, he was always far better than the critics would admit.

Do you remember back when Pauline Kael was reviewing movies and she deplored Dirty Harry for his "fascism"? I can't find her old review on line, but I did find this 2005 article by Christopher Orr which reads "Million Dollar Baby" as Eastwood's attempt "to make amends for his early career, when he became famous as the vengeful loner, the angel of violent retribution, the Man with a Gun":

Eastwood is the rare artist who has gone from being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the left to being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the right. The former charge was leveled in 1971, when the New Yorker's Pauline Kael described "Dirty Harry" as "fascist medievalism"; the latter, earlier this month, when Ted Baehr, the head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, declared "Million Dollar Baby" to be a "neo-Nazi movie." The particulars of the accusations have little in common: Kael was objecting to "Dirty Harry's" enthusiasm for vigilante justice, Baehr to "Million Dollar Baby's" perceived support of euthanasia....

[W]hile it's true that Eastwood's work, as an actor and especially as a director, has espoused a vague political philosophy -- and one that has evolved over time -- it has never been nearly as programmatic as either his admirers or his detractors imagine. The films he made early in his career were never as "conservative" as their reputation, and even his most prominent revisionist works -- "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby" -- are not as "liberal" as theirs. Both the fascist medievalist of the 1970s and the neo-Nazi eugenicist of today have been largely the projections of his accusers' own political nightmares.

Or maybe he's a libertarian!

IN THE COMMENTS: Chuck b. writes:

Clint Eastwood should play Tim Gunn in the movie version of Project Runway. He can sing too, so make it a musical.

"That's a lot of look. Make my day!"

"I'm not sure about this marabou trim. Don't bore Nina." [pulls back his jacket to reveal holstered Colt .45]

"In this world there's two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who pick carefully and wisely from the Blue-fly accessories wall."

"I know what you're thinking. Do you need six zippers on that pleather skirt, or only five?"

"I suppose they heard there would be a lot of ham" is the kind of script line that seems to dare critics to make it into an insult.

But Clint Eastwood says it early on in "Gran Torino." His character is explaining why so many people showed up at the house after his wife's funeral. And maybe there was a lot of ham — nearly all of it from Eastwood — but it was delicious ham. I loved this movie. The only thing that would have made me love it more would be if the other actors had been capable of serving up the same kind of ham. But the 2 actors who play the Hmong brother and sister who live next door are not well-seasoned, so there is a bit of a flaw. They're okay though. Anyway, I laughed, I cried — a great movie experience.

Some random thoughts:

1. I've complained about the movie cliché of having a character in the bathtub, but it mainly annoys me when it's used as a way to get young actresses naked. So I was amused by the twist of having the old geezer in the tub.

2. Eastwood smokes a lot in the movie, and smoking is important for more than one plot point — in a movie with a clockwork plot — but at the very end of the credits we are assured that no one connected with the movie accepted any product placement money from tobacco companies.

3. The last movie I'd seen was "Doubt," so this was the second movie in a row with an important priest character. The priest plays a nice counterpoint to Eastwood's character. He's young. Eastwood's old, and they are at odds over religion. It's an excellent religion movie, as we see both Catholicism and the religious practices of the Hmong. Not only is there a priest, there's a shaman, and they both get criticism and respect.

4. Much as I'd love to go to the café after the movie and have a long conversation about religion, I have another discussion question: Does the movie legitimatize racial epithets? We have our snarling but lovable geezer spitting a hundred racist slurs — especially to refer to Asians — over the course of the movie. And, in trying to teach his young mentee how to man up — and not be a pussy — he encourages him to banter playfully using words like "wop," "mick," and so forth. You might want to say it's a hilarious slap in the face of political correctness. But I think the movie is pretty effective in selling plain old-fashioned racial talk.

5. This is a good movie for people who like cars and guns and tools. There's also a lot of drinking and, as I said, smoking. And a military medal, a lawnmower, and a dog. All the manly things. With lots of manliness on top.

6. The old man teaches his mentee about tools. He starts him off with the 3 items with which — he says — you can do half of the jobs you need to do. These items are: WD-40, a vise-grip, and duct tape.

7. American flags, American flags, American flags. You want to see American flags? I'd say they appear in half the shots.

8. This was one of the very few movies I've seen where I never looked at my watch. I was never even tempted to look at my watch. It had a nice, crisp story arc. I appreciate that.

9. Driving home, I was thinking: Clint Eastwood is the best Hollywood guy ever.

10. I remember when Clint Eastwood was the cute guy on "Rawhide." I saw "Dirty Harry" when it first came out in the theater, when enjoying it was considered a guilty pleasure for us peace-and-love hippies. That was long ago, and a ton of respect for Eastwood has accumulated over the years. That's cool.