Having cultivated over the years a profound admiration for John Wayne myself, I’ve decided to draw my focus on Gary Willis’ piece “John Wayne’s America.”
In his prologue, Willis starts with analyzing the factors that usually built up stardom for a specific male character and his persona. He points out that the male figures that would usually establish a high and powerful stardom status where individuals who had a certain intellect or had other tastes in cult objects. “Their pop icons are figures enlarged by special dooms. These idols tend to die young or violently” a perfect example for this would be Rudolf Valentino, who was seen as a troubled but talented soul carrying a pleasantly looking esthetic, or James Dean even, who is remembered as a cultural icon of a teenage disillusionment and social estrangement. Willis underlines that these individuals were fascinating thanks to “their vulnerabilities or their defiance of social norms. They are murkily erotic object to their devotees.”
He observes that most of these notorious icons and cult figures would all die young; only a few made it to their old age. To this point he also highlights that whoever was lucky enough to grow older and managed to prevent Hollywood to destroy them, became either “caricatures of their rebellious selves” as Bette Davis who started to discover that a source of profitability for her was imitating her imitators; or “they become the things that symbolized them” as Charlie Chaplin who is remembered for having being swallowed up in the tramp. However, with John Wayne, it was a whole different and unique story.
John Wayne wasn’t a troubled teenager or an attractive olive-skin man. But Wayne was indeed a legend of a different kind, he actually didn’t become famous before he got to forty years old but remained a superstar until his death. However, there was something about Wayne that made him incredibly charming but not in the same way that male stars were before him. He wasn’t a figure of desire, but a figure that people would look up to. “The whole of America wanted to be like Wayne – his way of being a man. For decades John Wayne hunted the dream of Americans.” He was a figure of “authority of the normative” if not the normal. Although, Wills questions, “what kind of country accepts as its norm an old man whose principal screen activity was shooting other people or punching them out?”
Willis observes that usually male stars in movies were “glamorously pitted against authority,” but not Wayne. He was somehow always on the Sheriff side. “When he was called The American, it was a statement of what his fans wanted America to be.” They saw in him as an ideal of American culture that was slowly but rightly fading away, where “men were men.” Wayne wasn’t born like this, he had to create himself, and he had to create his persona. For example, he soon realized that his “size and strength were always important - it was not just the bulk of Wayne’s body but the way he used it that gave his motions and poses such authority.” He was very well aware of his stage presence; in fact, he kept striking Michelangelo’s David poses. His body purposely spoke a strong language of “manliness of self-reliant authority.” Willis notices that this is a dangerous idea to foster, as it is “manly in a way that has rightly become suspect.”
Personally, I thought the reason why I was so fond of John Wayne was due to the fact that I was so blown away by his powerful acting. In every movie he’s in, the actors who have a scene with him are inevitably overshadowed by his imposing aura. It was interesting to discover while reading this article, that maybe what I was admiring wasn’t his acting skills, but the idea he was selling to the viewer. Willis points out he embodied a politics of “gender masculine, ideology patriotism, and character self-reliance.”
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