Clayton Vozzella - Core Post 2

Clayton Vozzella

CTCS 412

Tara McPherson

Core Post 2

            I thought about the relationship between our current president and John Wayne after reading Gary Wills’ John Wayne’s America, and how media and the repetition of messages and images can influence our understanding of truth. Both of these men, though in very different ways, represent American ideology. This piece talks a lot about John Wayne’s embodiment of American masculinity, but it also talks about his ability to ebb and flow from a man of the people to magnificent star. Earlier in the semester we discussed this phenomenon as being one of the key elements to maintaining popularity with the public. Wills writes that John Wayne “stood for an America people felt was disappearing or had disappeared, for a time ‘when men were men’” (14). So though he was and continues to be one of the most revered and famous movie stars of all time, he still held a quality to which every day people thought they could either relate or aspire. Similarly, Donald Trump’s followers have repeatedly been on record as saying they support him because he stands for and represents every day people, even though he is allegedly worth billions of dollars and shits in a toilet made of actual gold.

            This idea of returning America to better times obviously prompted me to think about “Make America Great Again.” On John Wayne, Wills writes: “He was a figure of authority, of the normative if not the normal. Yet what kind of country accepts as its norm an old man whose principal screen activity was shooting other people, or punching them out” (13)? Though it’s virtually impossible to argue against the fact that John Wayne was a much more highly respectable person than our current president, it still remains true that both of these men spoke to the American people despite repeatedly saying or doing things antithetical to traditional family values or to the American people themselves. Wills states, “Wayne hated horses, was more accustomed to suits and ties than to jeans when he went into the movies, and had to remind himself to say ‘ain’t’… Wayne was not born Wayne. He had to be invented” (15). He did not naturally embody the everyday American. And of course he didn’t. He was a world famous movie star. Ultimately, people must remember that stars are rarely just like us.