Clint Eastwood's Cinema of Trauma

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.