Is This the Dominant Personality Type of Our Time?
Or how we all became Clint Eastwood
Filmmaker Sergio Leone once explained why Clint Eastwood was a perfect actor for his movies. Eastwood’s portrayal of a cowboy, he explained, “only had two expressions: with hat and no hat.”
That might sound like criticism, or even mockery. But Leone needed a hero who presented a mask to the audience. In Eastwood, he found someone who did that naturally—as part of his acting style.
But Leone got lucky.
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At least eight different actors—from Henry Fonda to Steve Reeves—turned down the role of the nameless stranger who destroys an entire Wild West town in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). With no better options, he hired an unproven film actor who possessed an extremely narrow range of facial and vocal expression.
That turned out to be just what he needed. But some people think this is terrible acting.
Talk show guest Ray Liotta left everyone in stunned silence when he said that Clint Eastwood was the most overrated actor of his generation. But Liotta doubled down—turning to the audience and saying: “I don’t give a sh-t.”
Even so, it’s hard to criticize Eastwood—because this flat style of acting became so pervasive in subsequent years. His detached, emotionless on-screen persona has served as a role model for countless heroes and villains.
Just think of all those Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where the dialogue became famous because it was delivered so mechanically. Or consider Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—a performance praised by experts for its authentic portrayal of a psychopath. Or even Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad, who became more emotionless and detached with each passing season.
After Eastwood, this exact same playbook worked for both heroes and villains. An extreme example is Terminator 2—where both the good guy (Schwarzenegger) and bad guy ( a T-1000 killer robot) battle to see who can achieve the most expressionless persona.
But the defining villain of this style remains Darth Vader. Eastwood had a face like a mask, according to Leone, but Darth Vader wears a literal mask. Not only can’t you see his face, but you aren’t even allowed to hear his natural voice—which has been processed to sound as inhuman as possible.
Clint Eastwood, for his part, continued to work variants on this character type—making millions of dollars in the process. In his career-defining Dirty Harry films, he showed that he required no cowboy hat to work this trope—although he repeats the gimmick of using up all six bullets that was so effective in the closing scene of A Fistful of Dollars.
No, Eastwood didn’t invent deadpan acting. But it had originally been done for laughs—most famously by Buster Keaton. In fact, the first use of the word “deadpan” in print (from 1915) refers specifically to Keaton.
Often the deadpan role went to the so-called “straight man” in comic duos—Martin (for Lewis), Abbott (for Costello), Rowan (for Martin), Smothers (for Smothers), etc. But these flat sidekicks were as necessary as the punchline in creating comic effects.
This deadpan demeanor was intrinsically funny, because any person with so little personality is weird, and makes us laugh.
Before Eastwood, we only see a few hints of this style in dramatic or action films, for example James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause or Sean Connery’s James Bond. But they both seem positively giddy compared with Eastwood’s cold and wooden demeanor.
I call this the “Man without Personality”—and it’s almost always a man. When psychologists studied this character type, they identified 126 movie characters of this sort, and only 21 were female.
So let’s give credit to Glenn Close (in Fatal Attraction) and Sharon Stone (in Basic Instinct). But they are far outnumbered by male cinematic psychopaths with flattened personalities—such as Kevin Spacey (in The Usual Suspects) or Daniel Day-Lewis (in The Gangs of New York) or Anthony Hopkins (in The Silence of the Lamb).
Sometimes these characters are actual machines (as in Terminator or RoboCop or 2001: A Space Odyssey). But even when they are made of flesh-and-blood, they retain obvious robotic elements.
“In the course of just 60 years, this unsettling personality type went from the Bates Motel to the CEO suite.”
It’s disturbing how much pop culture has fallen in love with these mechanical figures. But even worse, in the world of Zero Personality, all moral values become irrelevant.
That was true even for Eastwood’s debut as the unnamed stranger back in 1964. He does two good deeds during the course of the film—but at the cost of killing (directly or indirectly) most of the citizenry during the course of 90 macabre minutes.
What a bizarre story to tell. And it raises obvious questions:
Where did this personality type come from? And how did it become so popular?
Filmmakers didn’t invent these detached, emotionless people.
Four years before Buster Keaton was described (for the first time) as a “deadpan” comedian, Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler identified the flat personality affect.
This syndrome is associated with emotional coldness, detachment, and indifference. But appearances can be misleading—sometimes these individuals can feel intense emotions, but give no visual signs of it.
It’s no coincidence that Bleuler also coined the words ambivalence, autism, and schizophrenia.
A flattened personality can be a symptom of those conditions—as well as of depression, post-traumatic stress, and brain damage (among other causes).
It’s curious how this got turned into the standard personality of so many pop culture heroes.
But pop culture was late to the game—highbrow literature and philosophy embraced these flat characters first. In fact, the Clint Eastwood persona type is everywhere in European existential novels of the early 20th century (Sartre, Celine, Gide, etc).
Robert Musil laid the ground work for this new character type in The Man Without Qualities—which he started writing in 1921, and continued working on it until his death in 1942. His protagonist Ulrich gets lost in the confused ideologies of the early 20th century, and never finds a center in his life.
And the same year Musil died, Albert Camus created an almost exact prototype for the Clint Eastwood character in his novel The Stranger. As with the unnamed stranger in A Fistful of Dollars, Camus’ title character Meursault unsettles us with his pathological passivity and flatness—the book starts with an account of his total indifference to his mother’s death—until he bursts into murderous violence a few days later.
It’s all too fitting that Sergio Leone initially planned to call his movie The Magnificent Stranger—a title that reminds us of Camus’ disturbing novel. Despite the Wild West setting of the film, the character type is essentially European and modernist.
The people who invented the cowboy genre in fiction and film would never have recognized these flat, depersonalized protagonists. Their heroes are filled romance and idealism. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that Sergio Leone taught Hollywood the glories of psychopathology.
Americans needed decadent Europeans to blaze the trail. We were too optimistic. But they had seen evil, up close and personal. And had stories to tell.
Alfred Hitchcock—an émigré himself—was the only other influential source for this character type in Hollywood films. But Hitchcock turned to psychotics for horror and repulsion, not audience acclaim.
And even Hitchcock knew the European philosophical roots of this personality style. In his underrated masterpiece Rope (1948) he even introduces a Nietzschean professor (played by Jimmy Stewart, of all people!).
He returned to this character type in Psycho (1960)—but, once again, for horror not heroism. And audiences were shocked. Even though there is little graphic violence on screen, the public found this film deeply disturbing—to a degree that Hitchcock himself never matched, before or after.
Then, over the course of just a few years, this murderous psycho went from villain to hero.
By the time we get to Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974)—both starring Leone alums—audiences are actually cheering and clapping when the sadistic and expressionless protagonist commits cold-blooded murder.
And here’s the scariest part of the story.
We’ve all become Clint Eastwood today.
Okay, maybe not everybody. But the main forums of public discourse on social media are filled with flat emotionless people who flare up into anger at the slightest provocation.
None of us saw this coming with the rise of the Internet. At least, I didn’t—nor did I hear anyone else predict the eventual effects back in the mid-1990s.
But maybe we should have anticipated it.
Can you really eliminate flesh-and-blood contact from every sphere of society without causing intense depersonalization? Can you really replace the human, lived world with data on flat screens without causing a comparable flattening of the users?
Probably not.
The full degradation awaiting us didn’t become fully clear until the arrival of (1) social media, and (2) the smartphone. But the rapid ascendancy of those two interacting technologies turned many of us into desocialized and isolated characters—almost identical to those depicted by Albert Camus and Sergio Leone.
Is it a total coincidence that this same personality type now runs Silicon Valley? Just take a look at Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and the others who control the tech agenda today.
Maybe they don’t shoot people like Clint Eastwood, but they have that same detached, unemotional stance. You can even read it in their facial expressions—or, rather, their relative lack of expressiveness in visage and gaze.
So, in the course of just 60 years, this unsettling personality type went from the Bates Motel to the CEO suite.
That unsettling fact deserves more attention than it has gotten.
Can we really be surprised when these same tech leaders want us to be controlled by AI, robots, and other dehumanized forms of intelligence?
Not in the least. That’s the obvious next step in the process.
Like all creators, they make their creations in their own image. And, like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, they might kill off the whole town. But then they simply move on to a sequel—and another payday.
In both instances it deserves the same title: For a Few Dollars More.
An artist would be horrified by this. But the last tech leader who acted like an artist was Steve Jobs. We now have Schwarzenegger types in the executive suite. So, of course, they want to fill our world with Skynet and Terminators.
Their Terminator act will start with terminating our jobs (via AI). And we will be lucky if that’s the only thing they destroy.
We don’t need to live this way.
There’s no law requiring us to hand over every sphere of human life to the technocracy for their Dirty Harry routine. They can strut around the office all they want, saying Go ahead, punk, make my day….but we are not obliged to applaud, or even participate.
And, in case you haven’t noticed, their track record is pretty dismal. Everything they’ve touched with their depersonalized, desensitized tech has been degraded by their involvement—especially schools and youngsters.
By my reckoning, they’ve used up all their bullets, and we shouldn’t give them a chance to reload.
We deserve something better.
But we won’t get it until we stop letting Clint Eastwood wannabes run the show. And that means more than just celebrating humanism and creativity and imagination and ethical principles and spirituality and the arts—which we really must do, needless to say—but actually incorporating those invaluable ingredients into spheres of power where decisions are made, and destinies determined.
Is that even possible?
Maybe I should be pessimistic. But I’m not.
A huge shift is happening. Even in just the last 12-18 months, the cultural tone has started to change. This backlash against the Dirty Harry ethos started on the fringes, but has now gone mainstream with extraordinary speed.
People don’t trust the technocracy. They don’t want to be ruled by AI. They don’t want their doctor or boss or coworker replaced by a bot—or their job, or their spouse. They don’t even want to deal with bots in customer service or low-level situations.
They’re fed up.
You can even hear it on the phone—when people shout back at the machine: Please, just let me talk to a human being!
We’re saying that more and more often nowadays.
At a certain point, people won’t take any more. We are close to that tipping point right now.
I’ve predicted elsewhere that this rebellion will resemble, in many ways, the Romanticist movement that pushed back on the cold rationalist overreaching of the Industrial Revolution at the dawn of the 19th century.
It’s worth noting that the Romanticists didn’t get rid of the factories. But they restrained the dehumanizing excesses—gradually pushing back against child labor, slavery, unsafe conditions, excessive hours, and other abuses.
The eventual result was a taming of business by humanism. The change was so enormous that factory work is now seen as a good job in most countries.
We now need to restrain tech the same way our ancestors reformed the factories. And that means putting the breaks on our tech leaders—who are the immediate source of our Clint Eastwood problems.
Okay, maybe there’s a place for Dirty Harry or Anton Chigurh or killer T-1000 robots in our movies and stories. But we don’t want them in our lives. And we certainly don’t want them in the CEO’s office calling all the shots.
So we may be starting this new Romanticist movement at the grass roots level. But the ultimate sign of its success will be changes at the top. And the sooner that happens, the better.
I once came across a roadside sign that read:
I have a pet termite.
I named him Clint.
Clint Eats Wood.
🤭
A new movement, that then creates a political party to implement its values, needs to take material form. A movement with the protection of human dignity at its heart. We are now at the point where we need to consciously create 'space to be a full human being' via boundaries of law and norms.
For example, if your business model depends on surreptitiously spying on people and aggregating their data, and then selling it, and you are using manipulative algorithms to addict them to your product--then you need a new business model. It should not be legal. We don't reward crack dealers with social capital and we shouldn't reward digital crack dealers either.