Phil Z. wrote:
I’ve never been a huge John Wayne fan. I found him to be more of a characature than a real person. What I find worthy about the archetype is the way it embodies certain longstanding American values: rugged individualism, courage in the face of heavy odds, the sense of manifest destiny — with the limitless possibilities that that phrase suggests. He was always tough and macho, but in a way that protected the women and children. He always knew the right thing to do and he acted swiftly and decisively to do it. What true American would not appreciate these values?
John Wayne, however, is not a man for our times. We are long past the time when we as a country can dictate to the world — unilaterally, and on our terms — how a particular geo-political situation should be handled. Yet the John Wayne mindset seems still to be what prevails in the Republican administration today. Did John Wayne ever ask for help? Did he ever display any uncertainty, vulnerability or weakness?
Might might have made right for John Wayne, but it is an increasingly dangerous and wrong-headed approach to solving global problems today.
Layne Longfellow wrote:
Our love of Wayne (I can’t think of his non-stage name just now) is delightful.
Think of his walk - it’s that of a sissy. It was learned and practiced and perfected, by the way. Consciously and deliberately. Compare it with that of any other classic masculine power figure — Stallone, Willis, Eastwood, whoever.
Now think of the shape of his face, and the twinkle in his eye. Neither were classically masculine-tough.
Androgyny is the key; both men and women could love him comfortably.
But the extra added secret ingredient — his brimming confidence.
The more I think about it, the better I feel about us: John Wayne was a confident androgyne.
Blend the masculine and the feminine, add a little self esteem, and you get a cultural icon we can all embrace, pull close to ourselves, and still expect respect in the morning.
Or is it all hypocrisy? It is, after all, manufactured, calculated, studied, almost as though it were a marketing campaign filtered through focus groups. We been had, and we laid back and enjoyed it, as Bobby Knight enjoined us to do in his immortal recommendation.
Andrew Bard Schmookler wrote:
In the terms that the John Wayne character believes in, he ALWAYS comes through a winner. John Wayne has not been defeated at the end of the film—even the one “The Shootist”—where he ends up dead, engineering his death to defeat his enemy. He demands much of everyone, in a kind of heartless not very kind way; but he also lives up to his own standard, and accomplishes something –winning—that we can respect because it sometimes matters. It matters when you are the kind of character John Wayne plays, leading troops into battle or driving a herd across a long stretch of prairie successfully to market, or bringing down a crippled airplane that looks like it might crash into the Atlantic before it gets to land.
How can one not admire someone with such strength and character?
But, at the same time, there are so many virtues that he is not able to embody because of how he sacrifices aspects of his humanity –the compassionate heart, for example—in order to be the monument of granite into which he’s made himself.
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