John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

Introduction. Reexamining John Wayne

Introduction reexamining john Wayne DesPite some formal similarities, the french and U.S. posters advertising the 1953 classic western Hondo offer radically different visions of John Wayne. In the French version, Wayne stands centered in the poster in “Warnercolor” splendor, rifle in one hand and pistol in the other, amid the empty frontier in a moment of indecision, yet poised for action. Over one shoulder, Indians charge on the warpath, and over the other armed cowboys creep out from behind a craggy outcrop. But in the foreground stands Geraldine Page, hand on hip, beckoning Wayne’s character , Hondo Lane, to a life of domestic and paternal responsibilities. In the U.S. poster, on the other hand, that colorful backdrop is erased: Wayne is simply put against a white background as he draws near to Page, anticipating a romantic interlude. In the French poster, Wayne’s body is tensed, on the verge of heroic action but also caught in the dilemma dramatized in the film between, on the one hand, the pull of domesticity, fatherhood, and daily labor and, on the other, the lure of violent, nomadic roaming that “l’homme du desert” (the man of the desert) has grown accustomed to. But in the U.S. poster, rather than positioning Wayne between the mortal danger of the open, competitive spaces of the frontier and the appeal of a domestic existence, he is simply the rugged object of Page’s gaze, an interpretation supported by the poster’s text, which describes Hondo as “hot blooded with the heat of the plains.” The poster notes of Page’s character: “First she was afraid he’d stay—then she was afraid he wouldn’t.” In the French poster,Wayne is a figure caught tensely in the middle not onlyof the violent competition for a heterogeneous frontier but also of competing visions of masculinity (and in fact it is not even really Wayne, but a sketch, an imagined construction of a heroic but troubled masculinity). But in the U.S. poster that colorful and anxious context is missing, offering instead a much smaller 2 | John Wayne’s World and relaxed Wayne, stripped of his guns, limited to his role within the gendered discourses of romance. This literal erasure of the colorful and revealing material context offered by the French poster mirrors the process of obfuscation that has narrowly defined the cultural significance of John Wayne in the United States. Thirty years after his death, we continue to see Wayne in simplified terms: as a nostalgic icon of right-wing, white American masculinity. Wayne has become a cultural myth more than a movie star, a name invoked to signify an ideal, patriotic, conservative manhood. In part because of his association with the western genre (a genre widely connected with mythologies of U.S. national identity and U.S. colonialism), in part because of his associations with Hollywood’s anticommunist crusade in the 1950s (he served for several terms as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, Hollywood’s primary anticommunist organization), and in part because of Wayne’s very public support of the Vietnam War both on- and offscreen, his “star text”— the range of meanings circulated in the culture pertaining to Wayne—is dominated by a relatively narrow set of meanings tied to ideas about patriotism and conservatism. As a teacher, I often poll my students about the Wayne movies they have seen and what they know about John Wayne. Despite the fact that only two or three students have usually seen a JohnWayne film (thanks to their film profesfigures i.1 anD i.2. French and U.S. posters advertising Hondo (1953). Source: Heritage Auction Galleries. 3 | Introduction sors showing them The Searchers or their grandparents making them watch McLintock !), every student is able to explain clearly the values that Wayne represents : toughness, patriotism, militarism. Although most of these students know next to nothing about Wayne’s films, the specter of John Wayne continues to linger in their imaginations as the pinnacle of American masculinity, the flawed and outmoded yardstick that remains a potent force in their definitions of masculinity and U.S. values. These seemingly self-evident conceptions of Wayne are perhaps why film scholarship and the culture at large have been so reluctant to closely examine the complexities of Wayne and his global cultural significance. As Jonathan Lethem points out, “thinking about his politics...