I’ve been thinking about John Wayne, lately. Or thinking about how my thinking about John Wayne has shifted over the years.
Had you asked me, when I was 18 years old, what I thought of the man I’d likely have said, “He’s a joke,” or if I was feeling ornery, “A sick joke.”
That was 1983, and I was watching Ronald Reagan play nuclear brinksmanship with the U.S.S.R. The POTUS was CLEARLY doing a bad impression of the late actor, and the people who’d voted him in were licking it up with a spoon. I was still a kid. It didn’t seem right. I wanted a more reasonable world than the one I was just developing a picture of. This was politics as B-grade cinema. Wayne was emblematic of the problem — hence, I felt hostility to the man himself.
As I and the world survived a few years longer I read several short accounts of the man, written by people whose politics were fairly similar to my own — Roger Ebert and Joan Didion. I expected a savaging. I read two singular accounts of two very smart and erudite individuals who’d been thoroughly charmed by The Duke.
Reading Ebert and Didion I had to conclude that had I been present at the same table there was a real possibility I too might have swooned. More, it was impressed upon me that this was a possibility not to be ruthlessly quashed, even with people whose politics I considered abhorrent — it’s not like Ebert and Didion left the table having changed their minds about Vietnam.
Ebert and Didion’s affection for the man nudged me toward a more generous stance. Wayne’s work was worthy of consideration and even respect, as was the man himself. Be critical, but take care with it. There may be an element of humanity in all this that catches you by surprise.
John Wayne would not do well in the current environment. Hell, he didn’t do well in his own environment. His convictions re: Vietnam and “Women’s Lib” were wildly out-of-step with the broader culture even in an era as saturated in pitiless violence and reflexive misogyny as 1970s America. But his movies got made, and even lefties could admit to the emotional sway in a send-off flick like The Shootist.
*****
John Wayne’s grandson, Brendan Wayne, works on The Mandalorian. To nearly all intents and purposes he IS the Mandalorian. He has a lovely story about a moment when Billy Dee Williams, curiously enough, channeled the Duke and got the boy moving the way he was meant to.
I haven’t seen so much as a Mandalorian GIF (true say). But everything I’ve read about the show indicates it’s right in my wheelhouse. From '77 to the present I’ve maintained the most compelling elements in the SWU are, in descending order:
- The cynical pirate and his trusty, hairy mate
- The bounty hunters
- The Empire
- The Rebels
- The Jedi
- The Ewoks
It very much sounds like Jon Favreau and company came to a similar conclusion and got the mix right.
It also sounds like Gina Carano was a significant element in this mix.
To be clear, Gina Carano is no John Wayne.
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| Though I've no doubt she'd be every bit as fetching in this outfit. |
For all his political grandstanding and incorrect opinion-spouting, at the end of the day Wayne made it clear he was finally an actor, and if you needed an actor, of all people, to reassure you of your own political convictions you were that much the lesser for it.
Carano on the other hand is a fighter first, and an actor ... well, being an actor is somewhat further down her list of priorities. Indications point to her spoiling for a fight with the Mouse. And the Mouse don’t fight — the Mouse makes situations disappear.
So Carano has had a short and limited role in a show I will never see. And still I’m sad. It sounded like a good role with real potential. The only thing I’ve seen her act in is Haywire, and I thought she was terrific. It sounds like she was terrific in this. From here on out her projects are likely to be on the same level as the Baldwin Brothers. I think we’ve all lost something here. And it doesn’t feel necessary.
11 comments:
Largely with you on this one--all the way down the line. I too have never seen the Mandalorian. I too find the premise intriguing. I too have mixed feelings about John Wayne. I too... etc.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for Gina Carano. It sounds like her tweets were incredibly stupid, if nothing else. (I don't think she's genuinely anti-Semitic so much as stupid--she can't understand the limits of analogy.) But I do worry about where cancel culture is going to lead us.
This guy https://youtu.be/-vRGguUJIx8 has a good video on how Youtube's policy of suppressing anything remotely controversial makes it hard to talk about history on the platform.
On the other hand, one wonders how much of this is new, and how much of this is same old.
The Mouse never liked controversy, even back in the Walt's days. Just ask Tommy Kirk or Bobby Driscoll. And Disney would never have gone near that Green Berets movie that even back in the old days.
I think Disney's statement of release was a mealy-mouthed PR blunder. And toy companies pulling her character off the shelves ... WTF?? But aside from this the fault of Carano getting shit-canned is entirely hers to bear alone. She wanted the fight more than the job. This reveals a lamentable lack of vision, I think -- the role was an aspirational figure on several levels, and it meant less to Carano than did this particular round of ideological AM radio warfare. A showbiz figure who can't see the potential in their assigned role is someone who isn't aspiring to be an actor, period.
Thanks for sharing Cipher's video. I was aware of much of what he raises, but he pulls it all together so well. Very troubling, needless to say.
I kept Haywire in mind after you wrote about it, and at some point in the following year or so watched it. Memory’s fuzzy, but I liked it. Expect I’d watch it again, given leisure to watch an action flick by myself — rare these days.
Somehow did not put it together, when this stuff about a Trump-right personality getting booted from Mandalorian (which naturally I too am not watching, having neither time nor Disney) reached me amid comics & cartooning chatter, that this was the same person. And I hear you, yeah. Another prick of the recent stupid-&-unnecessary, it feels like, from the consumer angle at least.
There’s something interesting to be said probably about independent-minded, not-Fox-&-Friends-hostess-material women of elevated public profile who take up the cause of demented patriotics, so much of what drives it being plainly contrary to independent-mindedness in women and gender-type-defiance generally.
Never saw this pic of Wayne before! There’s an occasion to pause and reflect, pilgrim.
I read Didion’s Wayne piece with the Slouching collection in college — a ‘contemporary American lit’ intro, late in 7-year undergrad ramble. As with so much else I was taking in, even at that point I was coming with much too little by way of which to see her writing of the period (or anyone else’s) in its own place. Frustrating, then and now.
It's a great shot, no? I first encountered it in the pages of Spy magazine, where they chortled over The Duke's "blowsy outfit." But Garry Wills later re-used it in earnest for John Wayne's America: The Politics Of Celebrity. It shows Wayne's natural affinity for Michelangelo's Contrapposto -- a posture the young William Shatner also often adopted (and quickly abandoned once the gut showed up to stay). The viewer imagines Michelangelo would not have protested too vigorously over Wayne's choice of swimwear.
Not exactly on topic here, but by coincidence I’ve found my attention drawn this week to Jesus & John Wayne, by Kristin Du Mez, who’s at Joel’s alma mater (if I remember right), Calvin. This hit some months ago — you may be well familiar with it — but one way or another (last year being what it was), had pretty much slipped my notice until now. Funny.
I wasn’t aware of Will’s book at all, by the way. Read the intro (‘prologue’) on Scribd the other night. Would be nice to have time to read the whole thing!
* Wills’
I heard about du Mez via The Christian Humanists. The link between The John Wayne Fantasy and Evangelical (male) leaders with masculinity issues struck me as so obvious it probably did not rate an entire book's worth of consideration. I gave Victoria Farmer's interview with du Mez a listen, though, and was impressed. And now the book is lighting up one "Best Books Of The Year" list after another. It sounds like something I'd enjoy reading, given the reflexive suspicion I regard publishers with -- a suspicion that set in during my Ass Ed days at the Mennonite rag. Every month we received a box of free books from CBW or some similar outfit, sent with the hopes one or two titles might make it to our reviews section in the back pages. They were so of a piece I suspected there might only be one or two actual writers banging out this shit on a shared Selectric. Professor du Mez actually read this garbage, and pretty much confirms it is so. And it's just the tip of a foul iceberg.
Anyhoo, I shall certainly keep the book in mind. Currently there's other stuff to wade through, however.
Wills' book is good, btw -- not great, but certainly good. Once I start critiquing Wills, though, I get into trouble. Most of his flaws and blindspots are also my own.
I listened to the du Mez interview episode late last week sometime. Brain’s kind of drained right now, so impressions from the listening are fuzzy. At any rate, don’t recall anything striking an especially false note.
I’ve been mildly curious whether du Mez refers anywhere to the Gaither song in talking about the book — a song I’d never encountered before searching the book by title last week — released between the time when she describes conceiving of the project and the period when it coalesced as this book. If she does, it didn’t come up in that interview, of course.
Anyhow, over the weekend, needing a little stimulus while working, I happened to light on the latest item from Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg’s steady stream of fanboy chats to watch/listen to. A fine coincidence! I’ve never read the Preacher books — never glanced at a copy that I didn’t find it off-putting and move on quickly. I had no idea of the Jesus-and-John-Wayne device into this thing evidently turns on. Very weird to discover this only in the last week, just after becoming acquainted with du Mez’s material. Now I’m more curious whether du Mez finds occasion to refer to Ennis somewhere than whether she does to Gaither. Have to wonder for that matter whether whoever penned the song for the Gaithers isn’t quietly an irony-inclined Ennis fan.
Yikes -- those Gaither cliches have been reheated so many times they've passed from jerky to shoe-leather. And the less said about their resident cowboy, the better. Amazing to think they'd get cheers for something so hackneyed in '08, but there you go.
On the happier side of your comment: it amuses me to no end to think that one or possibly both of us might pull the trigger (so to speak) on du Mez's book just to do a deep-dive to see if she references Ennis at all (I somehow doubt it). Preacher should have appealed to me, but I think the artwork threw me. Anyhow in this day of digital catch-up, a mere 75 issues is catnip. There may yet be post on the matter -- I'll see after I view Piskor/Rugg.
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