highlights the modern conditions surrounding many aspects of intercultural communications. Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowolski whose wife just died and who is a Korean War veteran. He has a difficult time getting along with people do not hold the same views or values that he does. He lives in an era that he doesn’t understand and lives close to many Hmong immigrants and in a neighborhood with a lot of violence and gangs.
Since his wife died he has no other option but to communicate with the people around him (neighbors mostly). As the book says this is considered his cultural space. “One significant type of cultural space that emerged in U.S. cities is the neighborhood, a living area defined by its own cultural identity, especially an ethnic or racial one” (Pg 190). He has a very difficult time with this at first but as the movie goes on you can see him progressively become more comfortable with this. I think the obvious reason he isn’t comfortable communicating with his neighbors is the fact that he once fought and killed these people on the battlegrounds of Korea. The two conflicts we see throughout this movie are racial/ethnic conflicts and gender conflicts.
The main conflict throughout the film would have to be the racial and ethnic conflicts which Walt seems to have to deal with on a daily basis. As we see in the movie Walt’s conflicts come from an interpersonal level, which the book states is “the perceived or real incompatibility of goals, values, or expectations between two parties from different cultures.” We see throughout the movie that Walt has many internal conflicts with people who are not of the same culture as he