Parental Guidance Suggested: "Tightrope"
When we think “erotic thriller,” we think the movies TV Guide used to list without a plot description, only that magic phrase “sexual situations.” They tended to star people like Shannon Tweed or Andrew Stevens, and often one of them is a psychiatrist or radio call-in show host who inevitably gets tangled up with the wrong person (and when I say “tangled up,” I mean their genitals). Often that person turns out to be a murderer, though sometimes they’re not, either way you’re assured of several sweaty, graphic sex scenes, usually set to shrieking saxophone music.
Every once in a while, however, Hollywood liked to throw a curveball by casting actual A-list actors and classing things up a bit. If Body Heat and The Postman Always Rings Twice were any indication, it was possible to make a well-crafted, interesting movie with a lot of fucking, or at least, heavily implied fucking, in it. Even Clint Eastwood dipped his toe (among other parts) into it, with 1984’s Tightrope.
One suspects that if someone were to ask Eastwood about Tightrope now, he’d glare at them so hard that blood vessels would burst in his eyes. Like Mark Wahlberg expressing shame and regret over playing a porn star in Boogie Nights (even though it’s by far his best film), one gets the impression that Eastwood would prefer to focus on his more recent work, competently made but dull-as-dirt stories about stolid Americans serving a country that often doesn’t appreciate their sacrifice. The thing is, Tightrope isn’t a bad movie, not at all. It just presents a version of Clint Eastwood audiences weren’t accustomed to, one who was sexual, and a little menacing. One who gets a handy-j with a vibrator. One who gets an oiled up nude scene (or at least, his stand-in did). Compared to the doddering grandpa Clint Eastwood who lectured an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, it’s a bit jarring.
Tightrope isn’t a Dirty Harry movie, it just looks like one, initially at least, set in New Orleans instead of San Francisco. Though not directed by Eastwood, it has the hallmarks of his 70s and 80s era films, right down to the opening and closing crane shots and the jazzy score. Here, he plays Wes Block, a spiritual brother to Harry Callahan in that they’re both police detectives and are more scowl than men. Wes is investigating a series of murders, where the victims are sex workers. The investigation takes Wes into the seamy underbelly of Bourbon Street, a place, we soon discover, he already knows very well.
Wes like handcuffing women during sex. This is a kink that, compared to today, when you’re considered suspicious if you don’t have a fetish you’re loud and proud about, seems amusingly quaint. If Tightrope was released now, he’d have Tinder and all his problems would be solved. But back then, a fetish, any kind of fetish, was either played for broad laughs (see High Anxiety and Motel Hell), or a glaring red flag for a very troubled person. Here, Wes struggles with compartmentalizing that side of him away from his life as an upstanding single dad to two daughters, who wants to be in a relationship with a “normal” woman but might be a little intimidated by them as well. Trying to balance those worlds suddenly becomes a lot harder when the killer starts picking off women who are all too familiar to Wes.
The murder mystery in Tightrope, on its own merits, is pretty silly. The twist of the killer, a former cop, seeking revenge on Wes for arresting him for an earlier crime, only makes sense if he somehow knew in advance that Wes would be assigned to investigate the murders. The killer seems to have a near-supernatural ability to figure out in advance where Wes is going to be at all times, even dressing up like a balloon-vending clown so he can stalk his kids at a carnival. This also means that Wes is, at times (more specifically, when it’s convenient to the plot), a shockingly unobservant police detective, as illustrated in one scene where the killer, wearing some sort of devil mask, is standing immediately behind him.
What makes Tightrope interesting is that Wes, while troubled about his proclivities, doesn’t appear to pass judgment about the people who help him engage in them. He doesn’t treat them with disrespect, nor does he ever imply that they deserve whatever fate befalls them. They’re providing him with a service, one he assumes a woman who isn’t a professional sex worker would be unwilling to let him do. It’s not an unreasonable assumption, certainly not for a middle-aged man in early 80s America, where it was still shocking and unseemly for a woman to admit she enjoyed sex, let alone bondage. We were still in the era when leaving the lights on was as crazy as many couples were willing to get.
With the exception of his masterful performance in Unforgiven, Eastwood has spent much of the latter years of his acting career playing characters who find expressing emotion as challenging as passing a kidney stone. He’s not doing particularly great work here, and it’s hilarious to hear him say the line “I’m thinking about licking the sweat off your body” with all the passion of someone saying they’re thinking about what to have for lunch tomorrow. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to see Eastwood step out of his comfort zone in a way few actors were willing to do then. Wes could have easily been played as a seedy anti-hero, particularly when his visits to prostitutes are shot in shadow and red light, as if he’s literally descending into Hell to get his rocks off.
Instead, there’s some surprising nuance. Wes is just a dude who’s trying to let his freak flag fly privately in peace, until some scumbag makes it impossible for him to keep going. There’s no suggestion that Wes being into BDSM makes him a bad parent, or a bad cop, and it isn’t a problem until those worlds overlap. Erotic thrillers often aligned with horror films in the message of “you fuck, you die” (or come close, at least). In Tightrope, Wes is never presented as being guilty of or at fault for anything (which is good, because he isn’t, other than maybe being a not so great cop). The killer, like an evil Gladys Kravitz in Bewitched, refuses to mind his own business and uses Wes’s kink as a weapon against him. Any audience perception that Wes deserves what happens to him and his family is merely projecting their own hang-ups onto him.
