Clint Eastwood and Mass Culture

On the movies of Clint Eastwood, by The New Yorker:

“Mass culture is a machine for showing desire,” Roland Barthesnwrote. It’s also a machine for expressing resentment, a frustrationnof desire. Harry Callahan is lonely, hard, intolerant. Eastwood became npopular, in part, because he allowed people to dream that they couldnbe effective without being nice.

What does our mass culture desire today? Winning arguments and passingnjudgment according to cable news and reality television…