John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

1. The Emergence of “John Wayne”: Red River, Global Masculinity, and Wayne’s Romantic Anxieties

chaPter one The Emergenceof “JohnWayne” Red RiveR, global masculinity, anD Wayne’s romantic anxieties In a belgian Poster aDvertising hoWarD haWks’s Red River (1948), two visions of John Wayne are displayed in a spectacular colorful image. To the left stands Wayne as Tom Dunson with Fen (Coleen Gray), his love interest, who early in the film is murdered by a band of Indians.Wayne stares deeply and romantically into her eyes as he slips a bracelet onto her wrist. In the film, this is the same bracelet he would later give to his adopted son, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), who in the poster is taking a hard blow to the face from the other Wayne in the lower right. This other Wayne offers a frantic and frenzied vision of violence, his mouth wide open and screaming, suggesting a release of anger and a loss of control not often seen in representations of Wayne, who is usually taciturn and cool in his violence. All thewhile, a flaming arrowdarts across the poster, hinting at the racialized threat that Native Americans pose to the men and their desperate attempts to keep their cattle enterprise afloat. This doubling of Wayne in the poster reflects the central problem of the film: the choice between, on one hand, the lure and necessityof heterosexual romantic love and, on the other, a homosocial professional sphere in which men must create and sustain relationships with one another in the context of highly dangerous labor. Of course, the poster attempts to repress this dilemma, implying that the male-male violence between Dunson and Matt is perhaps competitive violence over a woman. But for those familiar with the film, it is clear that the violence and frenzied rageonWayne’s faceexpresses not a desire todefeat Matt for the love of a woman but rather reveals Dunson’s repressed need to replace Fen with Matt, to find some way of expressing his love and intimacy with Matt while recognizing the cultural pressures to embrace heterosexual coupling and romantic love. In essence, Dunson’s love for Garth in both the poster and film can beexpressed only through a hypermasculinized violence and only when the 17 | The Emergence of “John Wayne”: Red River specterof heterosexual coupling looms (literally, in the poster) above this emotional display. Like the film, the poster is fraught with contradictions and dilemmas , attempting to reconcile two visions of John Wayne and modern masculinity . But it can do so only in a way that foregrounds the disjunctures between the kinds of male-male intimacy increasingly prominent in a gender-segregated workforce in the 1950s and the modern institutions of romantic love and the nuclear family that have come to dominate modern conceptions of individuality and subjectivity. The masculine dilemmas on display in both the poster and film, which are figure 1.1. Belgian poster advertising Red River (La Rivière Rouge, 1948). Source: Heritage Auction Galleries. 18 | John Wayne’s World central to the global cultural appeal of John Wayne in this period, have their roots in Red River. It is in Red River, afterall, that Wayneestablished the parameters of his star text, which would remain relatively consistent throughout his career. The typical narrative of Wayne’s rise to stardom in Wayne mythology starts with Stagecoach (1939), but it was not until Red River that Wayne first appeared on the list of Hollywood’s top 10 box-office draws. Indeed, John Ford noted that he began toofferWayne starring roles in the films that would cement Wayne’s stardom, such as Rio Grande (1950) or The Searchers (1956), only after he saw Wayne’s performance in Red River. While Stagecoach rescued Wayne from his roles in the low-budget B westerns that dominated his career in the 1930s, Wayne remained a low-level star throughout the 1940s, often appearing alongside and sharing billing with other stars (Marlene Dietrich, for example) rather than carrying a film by himself. But Red River’s immense success propelled Wayne to international popularity and laid the groundwork for the John Wayne star persona that would define the rest of his career.Wayne’s role in the film, therefore, is a particularly important site for investigating the emergence of John Wayne as a global star as well as the emergence of the idea of “John Wayne” in the cultural imagination, establishing the key ideas, anxieties, and ideological contradictions that would mark the John Wayne star text...