Watching Gran Torino for a second time after taking this class, the film felt a bit like all the tropes and narratives we’ve been discussing this semester thrown into a blender (with a shot of Clint Eastwood-style Western mixed in). I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s various observations about the film!
Moving on from my mixed metaphor, what really struck me on this viewing was the film’s attention to the transfer of resources from Walt to Tao. Even before Walt leaves Tao the Gran Torino that his granddaughter expected to receive, their relationship develops through a series of “property relations.” Their relationship begins with the potential theft of Walt’s car, then grows through Tao’s unpaid labor for Walt and the food gifts Walt’s neighbors offer him, and their friendship is fully achieved when Walt decides to give Tao’s family his refrigerator (it’s old, but it “runs like a clock"). Although Tao pays for the refrigerator, Walt sells it so cheaply that he essentially “gifts” it to Tao, and he then uses his connection to get Tao a job and gives him a set of tools. I think I could argue that, through the depiction of these gifts, the film is advocating for a transference of influence and resources from white or more established immigrant groups (the film constantly reminds us of Walt’s “Polish” descent) to these apparently “newer” American immigrant groups like the Hmong. The film strongly critiques the materialism and greed of Walt’s biological family while suggesting that his “adopted” Hmong family “deserves” his legacy, an idea affirmed in Walt’s final gesture of willing his Gran Torino to Tao.
For me, this film recalled the structure of multiple “inheritance” or “true heir” novels, in which the question of who can rightfully inherit a property becomes a question of the fate of a nation or ideology; for example, in E.M Forster’s Howards End, the battle over who will inherit the estate comes to represent a larger conflict over who will “inherit” England---the business-minded Wilcoxes or the romantic Schlegels. I think Walt’s Gran Torino has a similar function in the film, introducing the question of who is the “worthy” or “true” heir of Walt’s legacy.
So what does the Gran Torino represent? We learn that the car is strongly associated with Walt’s long-term career in a blue-collar job at the GM factory: the car seems to represent American technical skill, innovation, and the kinds of jobs that are actually disappearing from America through outsourcing. Strangely, the film seems to offer a critique of “foreign” labor and the consumption of foreign products---Walt growls, “Buy American!”---while also suggesting that the legacy of American labor and innovation belongs to new immigrant groups. So what Tao seems to be inheriting is the ideology of the “American dream,” an ideology that can no longer be the property of Walt’s successful and apparently “decadent" family. While the film’s final shot of Tao driving off into the sunset in Walt’s Gran Torino seems to suggest that America’s “future” belongs to these new immigrant groups, Tao’s vehicle is also an emblem of nostalgia for a family’s and nation’s past. The film figures the Hmong as both a “return” to a time of shared cultural values and as the nation’s potential future.
As Walt’s description of his old refrigerator as running “like a clock” suggests, the film’s depiction of Walt’s neighborhood is deeply concerned with producing an oddly-nostalgic vision of America’s past (considering the film’s potential critique of the Korean War and Walt's racism) to advocate for a particular kind of national future, a future that is perhaps equally exclusionary. As Walt demands of Tao: “I leave my 1972 Gran Torino on the condition that you don't choptop the roof like a damned spick, don't paint any idiotic flames on it like some white-trash hillbilly and don't put a big gay spoiler on the rear-end like you see on all the other zipper heads' cars.” At the same time, the name of the car---"Gran Torino"---also references America’s history of non-white populations; was Walt merely a temporary and unstable “holder” of the American dream? Is the "dream" itself transformed in its passage from Walt to Tao?
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