Gran Torino: Dan Neil Nails It

There’s a reason why the Pulitzer Prize committee gave Dan Neil kudos, and it ain’t ’cause his hair stylist saw Eraserhead a few times too many. The LA Times carmudgeon’s eco-friendly posture can be a bit of a bore. And there are times when Neil geeks out but good. But there are columns where Neil drops it like he’s hot. His commentary on the symbolism of the 1972 Gran Turino in the movie Gran Torino is a prose poem that will, Samuel Johnson-like, stand the test of time (unlike the POS upon which the column and movie are based). “1972 was in many ways an inflection point for the U.S. automakers, the year that Detroit’s mighty cylinders began to seize. The Big Three would never again be as comfortable, and arrogant, and solipsistic, as they were then. The following year’s OPEC oil embargo sent them reeling. It was this generation of cars, which almost seemed to radiate contempt for their buyers, that drove Americans into the embrace of Japanese automakers when they came. It was this generation of carmakers, and indeed the one that came after, that failed to answer the challenges of an increasingly competitive global market. That failure took Detroit — a once-beautiful city of broad avenues and majestic public spaces — straight to hell.” Make the jump for Neil’s Talking Heads-style conclusion.

“So to say Walt Kowalski’s Gran Torino is a cinematic metaphor doesn’t really do it justice. The car — to whatever extent it is fractionally responsible for Detroit’s undoing — is an agent of the film’s action, a prime mover, an original sin. And Walt, a retired Ford autoworker, is an original sinner. One day in 1972 Walt is wrenching away on a Ford assembly line, stuffing a steering box into a shiny Gran Torino before going home to a comfortable middle-class home on a quiet street in Highland Park. Thirty-six years later, he raises the blinds of that same house to discover the world he knew is gone. The jobs have vanished, the factories closed, the prosperity replaced with desperation. How did he get here?”