John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

Conclusion. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Nostalgia for John Wayne’s World

Conclusion tHe man WHO SHOt LiBeRty vaLance anD nostalgia for john Wayne’s WorlD After fourteen years as an international superstar defined by dynamic body movement, an uncanny skill and speed with a weapon (despite his aging body), and a rugged masculinity capable of enduring hardships and torment, John Wayne’s emergence in The ManWho Shot LibertyValance (1962) charted new territory for the star.The first we see of his character, Tom Doniphon, is the simple wooden coffin that contains his dead body. The film opens with Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), a former governor, senator, and U.S. ambassador, and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), arriving by train in the small western town of Shinbone, where they met. They tell the local newspaper that they have come for the funeral of Tom Doniphon, an old, poor rancher whom the reporters have never heard of.When pressed by the local newspaper editor about why such a prominent politician would come all the way from Washington for the funeral of an inconsequential rancher, Stoddard relates the storyof his arrival in Shinbonedecades earlierand his relationship to Doniphon, the flashback that forms the bulk of the film. In the frame story, we never see Doniphon’s body, only the coffin, but his presence haunts Stoddard, Hallie, and the other characters who knew the role he played in Stoddard’s rise to power and the creation of law, government, and modernity in Shinbone. In a narrative that explicitly takes on the role of the nation-state in matters ofopen space, individual mobility, and theeconomics of borderlessness,Wayne takes on a role much different from those seen in Red River, Fort Apache, Hondo, Rio Bravo, or his other popular westerns. Instead of a triumphant masculinity heroically succeeding in the competitive spaces of the frontier, in The ManWho Shot Liberty Valance Wayne becomes a nostalgic throwback to a time gone by, an out-of-date masculinity yearned for by those in the present. It is in this film that Wayne’s star text begins to chart a new direction, shiftingWayne’s articula- 179 | Conclusion: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance tion of a modern masculinity away from an active celebration of a mobile, capitalist manhood and toward the nostalgic invocation of a rugged individualism incompatible with the changing culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Liberty Valance is the perfect vehicle to initiate that transition because the film explicitly takes on the chronology of modernization rather than simply dwelling on the pleasures and spectacle of an uneven modernity stretched across the landscape. The flashback not only narrates the relationship between Stoddard, Hallie, and Doniphon but also dramatizes the events that led to the modernization of the town and the institutionalization of government in the territory. The flashback begins with Stoddard, a young man fresh from law school, traveling to Shinbone by stagecoach.The coach is robbed, and Stoddard is brutally beaten and left for dead by the psychopathic outlaw Liberty Valance (who carries a silver-tipped whip and is played with a certain camp sensibility by Lee Marvin). Tom Doniphon finds Stoddard in the desert and takes him to Shinbone to be cared for by Hallie, the beautiful and illiterate daughter of the local immigrants who run the town’s restaurant. Everyone assumes that Hallie and Tom will marry, and Tom is even building an addition onto his house for Hallie, but he has yet to propose. Stoddard vows to use the law to put Liberty Valance in jail, but Doniphon insists that only a gun and violence will stop Valance , especially since the town is presided over by the cowardly and timid marshal Link Appleyard (Andy Devine). Stoddard begins working for the town newspaper and running a school, where he teaches Hallie to read and write and teaches the citizens of Shinbone about the merits of law and democracy. Valance has been hired by powerful ranchers to the north of town who want to keep the territory from becoming a state (and thus keep the space open for the cattle range). When Stoddard is elected delegate to the territorial convention, where he plans to fight for statehood,Valance confronts Stoddard. Rather than running away, Stoddard faces Valance in the dark streets of Shinbone and miraculously shoots and kills him despite having no real skills with a gun, a feat that makes him a local hero and leads to his nomination as representative for the territory. Later at the territorial convention, Stoddard finds out that Doniphon , who was...