John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

4. John Wayne’s Body: Technicolor and 3-D Anxieties in Hondo and The Searchers

chaPter four JohnWayne’s Body technicolor anD 3-D anxieties in HOndO anD tHe SeaRcHeRS In the miDDle of HOndO, Wayne’s character engages in a ritualized knife fight with an Apache warrior on a cliff overlooking theexpanses of the southwestern desert. Exploiting thevisual pleasures of the film’s 3-D and Warnercolor technologies, the scene displays colorfully costumed bodies rhythmically confronting each other and rolling across the dusty precipice, as well as close-ups of knives thrusting straight toward the camera.1 In this way, the scene clearly signifies a particular vision of the white male body: able, kinetic, efficient, and ultimately superior to the raced body of its Native American opponent. Using the new technologies of an increasingly global Hollywood to fetishize both the physical laborof the male bodyengaged in brutal yet graceful action and the open, competitive spaces of the western frontier that necessitates such violence, Hondo projects across national borders a vision of hardened, physical, and mobile masculinity. Exemplifying Wayne’s star text in the fifties, the scene revels in the nimble agility of Wayne’s large frame performing acts of raced violence while using color and 3-D technologies to construct a sense of borderlessness that is, like the cliff Wayne battles on, spectacular and rife with possibility, but also dangerous and precipitous. The colorful, vibrant, and tense confrontation between the two bodies, therefore, offers a particular set of sensations about male bodies, movement, violence, and the open spaces of the frontier. The 3-D scene seeks to viscerally and bodily engage the audience of such spectacles, to make them jump and experience the textures and tensions of the world on the screen. The scene offers a sweaty and intense set of feelings and sensibilities about male bodies engaged in a kind of intimate violence, an immersion into the conflict itself as the bodies reach out toward the audience. Moreover, the sweaty display of Wayne’s body hard at work in intense competition provides a sense of labor, toil, and mobility that mirrors the sensations of men’s labor within capitalism.The scene not only 88 | John Wayne’s World evokes a sense of power and dominance through identification with Wayne’s body, but also creates feelings of labor and exhaustion, the sensations of competition and exertion. At the same time, the images of bodies moving quickly on a cliff overlooking an expansive space offer a sense of mobility and freedom, even if such freedom means navigating violent confrontations. So at a historical moment when the spread of global capitalism and modernization were radically altering the scale and scope of labor and identity around the world, the spectacleof Wayne as evidenced in this scene provided not just an image but a set of sensational fantasies about how the male body survives and labors in a borderless and exploitative world. The scene expresses and negotiates the dualities and contradictions of labor within global capitalism, reflecting the brutal physical competition of the global labor market while offering a fantasy of physicality for those whose labor was becoming increasingly white collar. Hondoexalts the mobilityand movement of the white male body in space while expressing the dangerous and violent realities of mobility inherent in labor migrations.Wayne’s vision of masculinity here explores the gendered tensions of a system of global capitalism of which the United States is only one part, indicating the centrality of John Wayne’s body to the articulation of a modern masculinity in the midst of global capitalism. figure 4.1. Wayne defeating his Apache foe as Vittorio, the Apache chief, looks on in admiration in Hondo (Batjac/Warner Bros., 1953). 89 | Wayne’s Body: Hondo and The Searchers This chapter explores the significance and resonance of John Wayne’s body within the shifting constructions ofa globalizing masculinity in the 1950s.Using Wayne’s two mid-decade hits, Hondo (1953) and The Searchers (1956), I demonstrate here how Wayne’s body dramatized and sensationalized the changing values of masculinity and labor, offering a powerful, embodied fantasy of a modern male identity within global capitalism. In particular, Wayne’s body expressed the emerging importance of enduring wage labor and the centrality of mobility to constructions of masculinity around the world in this period. Hondo and The Searchers prove significant in this respect. Both films explicitly dramatize a series of tensions surrounding labor, movement, gender, and race. Hondo, for example, tells the story of Hondo...