Throughout his directorial career, Clint Eastwood's movies have presented sympathetic narratives of characters enduring personal trauma as they turn to violence to survive calamity or sustain social order--a choice that leaves them marginalized rather than redeemed.
In this collection of new essays, contributors examine his films--from
The Outlaw Josey Wales
to
Sully
--as studies on PTSD that expose the social conditions that tolerate or trigger traumatization and (in his more recent work) imagine a way through individual and collective trauma.