˂폴링 다운˃과 ˂그랜 토리노˃에 나타난 탈냉전과 교외/거주공간의 재해석

Abstract

This essay attempts to examine the ways in which Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993) and Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008) reconsider American ways of family life glorified in the early Cold War years, especially the lifestyle most often associated with “sitcom suburbs” idealized as the model living space of white middle-class family. White male protagonists of each film, now living in the uncertain era of post-Cold War that they believe is plagued by lawlessness and multicultural invasion of the American way of life, struggle to maintain conservative values about national identity, gender, race, and family life formulated in their younger years at the height of the Cold War. In his violent and elegiac journey across various sub/urban localities in and around Los Angeles, Falling Down’s D-Fens changes from a deeply disappointed, angry, and racist cold warrior into a more humane tragic hero who valorizes traditional family values. Similarly, in Gran Torino, Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran and diehard Cold War patriarch, becomes more tolerant toward his Asian immigrant neighborhood. This paper argues that these transformations are the result of re-appropriating, not abandoning, some familiar Cold War populist discourses such as consumer patriotism and Cold War orientalism.