The theatrical brilliance of Eastwood's empty chair

One of the clearest tidbits recalled from my playwright studies was a device that effectively made a murder victim present on the stage. On a set of his house, during an interview scene with family members, the script called for the actor playing a detective to lean his hand on the dead character’s favorite rocking chair and “inadvertently” set it in motion.

What Clint Eastwood emphasized, with his seemingly improvised chat with the invisible Obama was the absurd notion of having a man-to-man talk with the Vogue-interviewee president. Eastwood was a real celebrity expressing common-man ideas to a celebrity commander in chief.

Even more, Eastwood’s fame is founded in his being a character actor whose chief characteristic is to cut through nonsense. Tough and real; doing what needs to be done.