The auto-mobility of Gran Torino’s American immigrant dream: cars, class and whiteness in Detroit’s post-industrial cityscape

Abstract

This article argues that Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Gran Torino presents a regeneration of the myth of the American Immigrant Dream through the trope of auto-mobility, a conceptual shorthand for self-reliance and class mobility. Rather than reading the film as an embrace of multicultural America, as many of its reviewers do, the author argues that the film operates to redeploy the idea of collective American immigrant identity through a reaffirmation in the ‘possessive investment in whiteness’. In particular, an analysis of the mobility implied between non-white centre city and the white Detroit suburban periphery, ultimately suggests that the typical paradigm of the American Dream – job, car, house – is possible for immigrants and people of colour, but only through a literal departure from the poor, inner city, which is represented as simultaneously pathological and non-white.