There is perhaps no
manlier icon in Hollywood history than John Wayne. More than 40 years after his
last film, he remains the cinematic apotheosis of the rugged, principled, red-blooded,
tough-as-nails, frontier-conquering, patriotic American male. Not even Steve
McQueen or Clint Eastwood can measure up to The Duke. But was Wayne’s masculine
image a sham, and even worse, an ideal that no man could ever live up to?
The Atlantic’s Stephen Metcalf would
like you to think so. In his recent “How
John Wayne Became a Hollow Masculine Icon,”
Metcalf writes about Nancy Schoenberger’s book Wayne and Ford: The Films,
the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, which explores the creative partnership of John Wayne and director
John Ford. The dynamic duo made 23 pictures together, including Stagecoach
(1939), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), which Metcalf concedes are among the best and most important Hollywood
films ever made.
Schoenberger, an
English professor at William & Mary, wrote that “the two men succeeded in
defining an ideal of American masculinity that dominated for nearly half a
century.” She argues that that masculine ideal “is still salvageable, honorable
even,” writes Metcalf. “Stoic, humble, gallant, self-sufficient, loyal—put that
way, who could disagree?”
Stephen Metcalf,
that’s who. He claims that the oversensitive Ford, whom he implies was gay, “was
terrified of his own feminine side, so he foisted a longed-for masculinity” on a
supposedly reluctant Wayne, molding his hypermasculine image. Rather than be
inspired by that image, Metcalf dismisses it contemptuously: “[M]asculinity (like
the Western) is a by-product of nostalgia, a maudlin elegy for something that
never existed—or worse, a masquerade that allows no man, not even John Wayne,
to be comfortable in his own skin.”
Metcalf declares
that Ford turned Wayne into “a paragon no man could live up to.” But this is
just pure cynicism on Metcalf’s part. Men in all places and times have shown,
and continue to show, their capacity for being stellar examples of manhood. No
man, however, is perfect, but that is no reason to invalidate the ideal. An
ideal is by definition the highest possible standard, something to strive for
but not necessarily attain. When a man strives but falls short, it does not
discredit either him or the ideal.
Masculinity, or at
least moral masculinity, is not a status you achieve and then cannot be
deprived of, like academic tenure. Being a good man is a process that men must
renew each day, an ideal that men must pursue; and like all ideals, sometimes
we fall short of it because we are human, because the default state of humanity
is moral weakness, selfishness, and sloth.
It wasn’t enough
for Metcalf, a former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and a contributor to the
far left outlets Slate and The Nation,
to dismiss Wayne as a symbol of masculinity; he had to attack Wayne as a symbol
of political conservatism as well. He complains that the actor was an
ultra-patriotic, “unyielding anticommunist” – as if there were something wrong
with that:
He was the
apotheosis of a Cold War type—unsentimental, hard, brutal if necessary, proudly
anachronistic, a rebuke to the softness of postwar affluence. He was turning,
in other words, from an artist into a political symbol.
Would Metcalf have
complained if Wayne’s politics were more aligned with his own? If he were a
symbol of Progressive, anti-anti-Communism? If he were less of a rugged
individual and more of a pro-state collectivist?
Metcalf is contemptuous
of the men who admired, and still admire, the “proudly anachronistic” – i.e. traditionally masculine – Wayne: “To
the extent that any actor becomes an icon, he is bigger than his role, and John
Wayne the icon has always appealed to men who are smaller than they think they
deserve to be.”
Wow. What an
insulting generalization. I suspect Wayne makes Metcalf feel smaller than he thinks he deserves to be. The truth is
that John Wayne the icon has always appealed to men who want to be better than
they are, or manlier than the modern world often gives them the opportunity to
be.
Wayne and Ford author Nancy Schoenberger
was right: the masculine ideal John Wayne represented “is still salvageable,
honorable even.” Regardless of how Wayne’s image may or may not have differed
from the man (and only Wayne himself could ever know the truth about that), the
ideal he represents is still valuable. Especially today, when traditional
manhood is so often decried as “toxic,” men need symbols of moral masculinity
to inspire them to be better men. As much as he might sneer at that, Stephen
Metcalf will never be big enough to diminish The Duke.
From Acculturated, 12/8/17
