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When Legend Becomes Fact: John Wayne and the American Identity
By: Dan Muszynski

"I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I expect the same from them."

“We are entangled in [John Wayne’s] story, by the dreams
he shaped or inhibited, in us or in others, by the things he validated and those he scorned, by the particular definition he gave to ‘being American.’”

John Wayne may be the prototypical American man. His career in film spanned fifty years, and in that time he starred in nearly two hundred movies. Two decades after his death, he topped a Harris poll of America’s favourite film stars (Campbell 466). References to his persona and work appear in all media, and his likeness is recognized across the globe. But, John Wayne was not born, he was socially constructed. The John Wayne personality is constituted by Marion Robert Morrison, a former college football player and prop boy, as a representation of the ideal image of what the American man ought to be. “I’ve played the kinda man I’d like to have been,” he once remarked (Candelaria 12). Then, after the Wayne representation was constituted, it informed the discourse of the American experience, both inside and outside the United States. Morrison’s representation of the American experience in Wayne shaped our perceptions. Wayne represents the ideal of masculinity, self-sufficiency, strength, justice, and liberty; and we act in accordance with that shared knowledge. In order to understand the significance of John Wayne, and the discourse which is informed by him, we should investigate how Wayne was constituted of Morrison’s experiences through his life, and also how the Wayne persona acts upon our discourse.

Marion Robert Morrison was born in 1907, in Winterset Iowa. He was not the favoured child of the family. Until he was five years old he was called by his middle name; but in 1912, his younger brother was born and his name was usurped and given to his mother’s favourite son. Marion Morrison never liked his name, and instead went by the nickname Duke, which was what friends called him for the rest of his life. Duke’s family was poor, and he helped out by working various jobs to contribute to the family income – a contribution his mother resented. He forgave his father’s failure to provide adequately for his family, and resolved to never share that failure (Candelaria 6).
He tended to prefer the fraternal company of men over that of women. He was a member of the Boy Scouts, active in the YMCA, and joined the Masonic youth organization DeMolay. It was in DeMolay that he was exposed to extreme anti-communism for the first time, the discussions of which revolved around the Bolshevik Revolution (Candelaria 6). After an injury to his shoulder ended his football scholarship at the University of Southern California, he found employment in the film industry. Once noticed by directors, he became a leading man in various second rate western movies (Candelaria 7). During this time, he crafted the Wayne personality: the walk, the voice, the stance. “Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much,” was his explanation for his approach to acting (Candelaria 5). After his breakout role as the Ringo Kid in 1939’s Stagecoach, John Wayne became a big star, and the personality that Morrison had constructed began to influence American culture.

Wayne’s influence is particularly significant on the American conservative perspective, but is certainly not limited to it. Pat Buchanan rallied voters in 1996 with a line from The Sands of Iowa Jima, “Saddle up. Lock and load.” The same quote was used in the movie Star Trek: Insurrection. Buddy Holly took Wayne’s line from The Searchers, “That’ll be the day,” and turned it into a rock and roll anthem known to an entire generation. When Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, he asked to see only two things: Disneyland and John Wayne (Campbell 466). When the two met, Khrushchev revealed that both Stalin and Mao Zedong had sought to assassinate him, because they thought he represented the ideal of American Democracy (Munn 74). While the Duke was near death in 1979, Congress and the president awarded his with a special medal. After Congressional hearings on the matter, it was decided that the medal would read simply “John Wayne, American” (Candelaria 11).
In the next few papers, I will be investigating the various ways that Morrison’s representation of his experience in John Wayne has implicated itself in the discourse of American culture, government, and history. I believe that such an investigation can help us to comprehend not only how various actors understand America and its values, but therefore how those actors interact with America and Americans. I will be utilizing the perspectives of critical theory, world systems theory, green politics, and the feminist theory of international relations.

The Duke and Critical Theory: John Wayne as Hegemonic Discourse

Of paramount importance to critical theory’s reading of realism is the concept of the hegemonic discourse. For a critical theorist, a hegemonic discourse is one that has become so prevalent and entrenched that it has become orthodoxy. One cannot argue effectively against a hegemonic discourse, because the hegemonic discourse may always defend itself by appealing to its own authority. From the perspective of critical theory, realism has become such a discourse. However, the John Wayne identity is so inexorably intertwined with the realist theory of international relations that there are instances in which the discourse of John Wayne is pure realist discourse, and is therefore subject to all of the same points of criticism as any other hegemonic discourse. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the 1968 film The Green Berets.

The Green Berets is the only film to have been released in the United States about the Vietnam War while the conflict was still being fought. As such, it was written and produced in the face of growing discontent with the war as an attempt to offer a counterpoint to the antiwar message. Specifically, The Green Berets is an instance of the use of a particular rhetoric to justify American interventionist foreign policy (Dionisopoulos 176). The power of the rhetoric is significantly magnified by the deployment of John Wayne as its standard bearer. He was, fundamentally, a political being. It’s been observed that it would take a very narrow definition of politics to deny the political significance of John Wayne and his influence (Goldzwig and Sullivan 176-7). Further, Wayne himself later agreed with the characterization that the film functioned as propaganda (Dionisopoulos 196).

The foreign policy that the film can be said to propagandise is containment. Containment as a practice resulted from the search for a middle ground between two competing strategies for dealing with the problem of the rise of the Soviet Union: the US could withdraw from the emerging conflict, or it could attempt an all out assault on the Soviet threat. Under this strategy, the US would allow the Soviets to have a sphere of influence, but would prevent the expansion by any means necessary, including military force (Hook 37). Containment was also supported by the use of the domino theory, which argues that the victory of a dangerous ideology in one country will trigger a succession of addition victories in neighbouring countries (Hook 45).

However, despite the fact that the notion of containment in foreign policy is socially constructed, the realist John Wayne discourse of The Green Berets attempts to naturalize the Vietnam War as the single, obvious and morally correct solution to the security problem in southeast Asia. It depicts the indoctrination of a reporter sent to cover the war, who arrives sceptical about the value and justice of the war effort, but upon seeing the heroism of the American soldiers, is convinced not only of the war’s moral rectitude, but also of the inevitability of American victory. In this way, the film’s discourse is undeniably ideological. It is an effort to “help make the war comprehensible.” It employs a narrative form in order to more effectively persuade an engaged audience in the moral rectitude of its own way of thinking (Dionisopoulos 176).
In taking this position, the John Wayne discourse is articulating an advocacy that corresponds to defensive realism. It holds that the security dilemma is the intractable nature of the international anarchy, that structural modifiers like offence/defence balance influence the severity of the security dilemma between states, that material power is interpreted through the perceptions of leaders, and that domestic politics can limit the efficiency of a state’s response to the international anarchy (Taliaferro 131). The Green Berets takes the intractability of the security dilemma as its foundational premise, and relies on justifications like domino theory in order to articulate a threat to the offence/defence balance between the US and the Soviet Union. It is motivated by an ever-growing movement against American involvement in Vietnam, which defensive realism argues has the capability to impede effective response to security threats. In naturalizing the foreign policy outcomes of this realism, the John Wayne discourse becomes hegemonic.

Because of the particular influence of John Wayne on notions of American identity, it is important to understand how the discourse of John Wayne effects our socialization. The films he made are not free of agenda. A critical analysis of the discourse of these films can allow us to examine not only the ways in which we think about our own historical time and place, but also to understand the historical dynamics that brought about the conditions of those times and places (Devetak 142). One such historical dynamic is the hegemonic discourse of realist worldviews, and the discourse of John Wayne is a particularly promising topic for the critical analysis of how such discourse can be masked and transmitted without making its function entirely overt.

The Duke and World Systems: Economic Imperialism in Red River

As one flips idly through the channels on a Sunday afternoon and comes across the 1948 film Red River, it seems innocuous enough at first glance. It tells the story of Tom Dunson (John Wayne), a Texas man trying to secure rights to land so that he may raise cattle to send off on the new railroad to markets back east. However, when viewed from the perspective of world systems theory, Red River is part of a powerful ideological rhetoric that aims at continually legitimising American hegemony for purely economic reasons. In this section, I will investigate the ways in which the discourse of John Wayne approaches economic issues, and how that discourse seeks the naturalization of economic conditions that are entirely manufactured.

Red River presents a narrative of economic outcomes that should emerge if the core terms of national identity are accepted (Corkin 71). These core terms of American national identity are all based in the belief that the capitalist order represents a natural and inevitable form of organization. Therefore, the expansion of the state into formerly frontier areas is also natural and inevitable. As the need for the economic interests of the state to be protected increases, so too does the state’s need to extract materials from the frontier. However, world systems theorists reject the naturalization of the economic order, and instead suggest that these outcomes are the result not of destiny, but of policy decisions (Sterling-Folker 204). To support this claim, world systems theorists rely on accounts of the historical transitions from one economic order to another, such as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in sixteenth century Europe (Sterling-Folker 204).

From this perspective, it becomes possible to critique the notions of national identity the John Wayne discourse proffers as natural in the film (Corkin 71). For instance, such a critique could investigate the reasons why the dominant capitalist discourse quashes any questions about whether or not the periphery should be incorporated into the convalescing global capitalist order in order to focus solely on the issue of how best to accomplish such an incorporation. When John Wayne claims the land to establish his cattle ranch, he defends his ownership of it by saying he conquered the land just as the King of Spain had before him. The intended message is clear – the capitalist system is digesting this space into the global order, and you are powerless to stop it. Wayne sees the expansion of the capitalist order, and that knowledge drives his actions. His character is presented as a hero who emerges at a key moment of economic transition and performs morally desirable actions that establish industry. Further, it is implicitly held that the meritocratic system that rewards the hero for his actions is not only natural, but desirable.

But from the perspective of WST, the situation looks very different. Rather than seeing an individual hero who triumphs over nature because he sides with the power of capitalism to properly order the world, world system theory reveals a complex project which continually works to legitimise its own power. The capitalist order must expand into the periphery in order to sustain itself, but that does not make this outcome a natural or inevitable one. Wayne’s character is just as free to choose to raise cattle for subsistence as he is to raise cattle for export to non-regional markets. He chooses to produce more of a product that the regional market can use. He chooses to reinvest the capital he accumulates into the continued expansion of his own enterprise, just as WST theorists would have predicted (Corkin 85). The American expansion into the western frontier was not manifest destiny – it was the outcome of an economic policy, exactly as the Cold War was not a natural arrangement, but the result of American attempts to remain the dominant force in the global economy (Corkin 75).

The John Wayne discourse presents the expansion of the state as just as natural as the expansion of the capitalist order, and WST rejects this presentation as well. Within the film, the offers of statehood being made of western territories represent not a policy of the American government to attempt to solidify its hold on an economic asset in the periphery, but instead as the people’s best option in a world where their own marginalisation is inevitable. The federal government dangles statehood as a carrot in from of frontier populations exactly as it did to prospective NATO members after World War Two. By giving in to the federal government, the people will ostensibly win more than they will lose (McCormick 48). The inclusion of these specific themes and the film’s specific treatment of them allow Red River to serve as a particularly effective reaffirmation of American foreign policy in the post-war timeframe (Corkin 79).
From even this briefest of forays into a single text, we can see that the discourse of John Wayne does advocate a specific preference for economic organization, and that the discourse seeks the naturalization of this concept of economic relations. That is, it presents a system of economic identity as the ideal such system. Further, we can see that a historical account of how this system came to be naturalized can help us to understand the world system as a whole. From the perspective of world system theory, Red River is a text that attempts to justify American hegemony by invoking this naturalized notion of economic organization and valorising those who actively work in furtherance of it.

The Duke and Green Politics: Anthropocentrism in Hatari

The 1962 John Wayne film Hatari presents the story of Sean Mercer, a professional poacher catching wild animals in Africa for western zoos. While this may seem like simple fodder for a light-hearted adventure comedy, when approached from a perspective of green politics the picture abruptly changes. It is possible to construct a compelling argument against the ways the John Wayne discourse naturalizes an anthropocentric ethical framework for political decision-making and rejects the ecocentrist notion of animal liberation. In this section, I will elucidate the ways in which Hatari presents an unsatisfactory model of inter-species relations and why discourse legitimising such anthropocentric systems affects intra-species relations in the international system.

Animal rights groups and ecocentrists have argued for years that zoos are monstrously cruel institutions that imprison animals for no justifiable purpose. To defend themselves, zoos have traditionally articulated that there are three areas in which they can play an important role in the modern world: conservation, research, and education (Miller 41). However, it is more likely that it is impossible for a traditional zoo to beneficially play any of these roles. A zoo can only be an effective agent of conservation if capturing animals and removing them from their natural habitats is a conservation effort. It can only effectively research if it is possible to learn something meaningful about animals while they are divorced from their natural habitats. It can only effectively educate if we want to disseminate distorted ideas about the animals the zoos stock.

The ecocentrist position holds that because there are no criteria upon which we can make reliable distinctions between humans and non-humans, we ought to engage in an emancipatory project to free all those creatures that are currently the victims of a system in which they do not have any standing whatsoever (Patterson 238-9). While I can empathize with someone who finds this position outlandish, there is a strong case to be made that it is not possible to prove a meaningful difference between a human being and another animal. In order to properly evaluate it, we have to first understand a logical construction called the fallacy of accent. The fallacy of accent, which is sometimes called the anthropocentric or naturalistic fallacy, is invoked when an argument places a restrictive qualification on its conclusion that does not flow logically from any of its premises. For example, Plato observed that rain fell from the sky and that the rain watered the plants. From these premises, he concluded that the purpose of rain is to water plants. This argument invokes the fallacy of accent because the idea of the rain having a specific purpose does not flow logically from any of Plato’s premises (Weigel 46).

Ecocentrism argues that the fallacy of accent is invoked in order to justify the practice of assuming that human beings are meaningfully different from other animals. We are socialized to believe that human beings have special capabilities – cognition, consciousness, intelligence – and that these capabilities make us meaningfully different from all other living things. But this argument trivializes the capabilities of other creatures that human beings do not possess, and has effects that are obviously destructive. Human cognition conceit, as Van B. Weigel terms it, denigrates and otherizes everything which is not human, and treats nature as something which is to be dominated (Weigel 31-32). It is our belief that we are fundamentally different from everything else that endows humanity with such an insatiable drive to conquer nature itself.

The discourse of the zoo is one of the most powerful agents for the socialization of species relations in modern western culture, but because they perpetuate the separation between the observer and the observed, they continually preserve and enhance the false duality between human and nonhuman (Fox 63). From the ecocentrist perspective, the zoo is a site of ontological violence, where animals are subjugated to anthropocentric victimization. The discourse of the zoo orders knowledge of the natural world according to its own design and reifies the imperial actions of the human species (Malamud 171).

In Hatari, the John Wayne discourse takes a definitive stand on these issues by positing an anthropocentric order as being natural. The film continually upholds the notion that human beings are distinct from and superior to the rest of nature. A running plot point in the film has a female character caring for a baby elephant who was orphaned because of human action. She is presented as being better able to care for the orphaned creatures despite the unspoken fact that as herd animals, orphaned elephants would be cared for by other family members (Toledo Zoo par 6). The entire film valorises the project of taking animals from their natural habitat in order to service humanity’s desire to be entertained by their displacement.

To counter the anthropocentrism of the present system, ecocentrists propose that we replace existing notions of conservation, animal rights, and species identity with a more emancipatory discourse (Patterson 239). They argue that an emancipatory model of species interaction would allow humanity to empathize with non-humans, overcome our cognition conceit (Fox and Morris 82). In fact, they argue that a specific progressive act, like the decision to emancipate non-human animals, would permanently bring down the wall between human observers and the non-human observed. Further this can be achieved without giving animals the right to vote of drive a car, all we would need to do is admit that they should be entitled to fundamental legal protections (Dolins 91).

From this short look, we can already see that there is ample available ground from which one could construct an ecocentrist criticism of the anthropocentric posture of the John Wayne discourse in Hatari. Such criticism can provide valuable insight not only on the specific model of species relations this discourse endorses, but also the ways in which prevalent discourses continually socialize us to accept that model of species relations as natural and good.

The Duke and Feminism: Dimensions of Difference in Rio Bravo

Given John Wayne’s role as the patriarch-in-chief of modern American culture, feminist analyses of his influence on gender discourse both here and abroad have much to offer. In this essay, I will examine a feminist account of identity and explore how the discourse of John Wayne could come to be understood through a feminist lens. Specifically, I will look at the transformative experiences of the main protagonist characters in the 1958 John Wayne film Rio Bravo and discuss how these experiences illustrate dimensions of difference and the particular stand the John Wayne discourse takes on gender norms. Then, I will briefly investigate the ability of such analyses to inform our understanding of gendered interactions in international politics.

Critical feminism takes on the task of shifting our focus to the concept of gender and its influence on decisions made by people in positions of power. Conceived in broad terms, the field of international relations is simply the study of power; and it is the role of critical perspectives on international relations to open up our conceptions of power. That is, they expand our notion of power from one that is grounded solely on military strength to one that can include both interpersonal and international types of power. Beyond that, they explore how human interactions allow power of different flavours to be gained or lost (D’Amico 268). In this way, critical feminism can be described as a reaction to liberal feminist thought, which tends to focus on gender as a descriptor like age or height (D’Amico 269).

Critical feminist thinkers conceptualise international relations as a nexus of constantly intersecting power hierarchies. These hierarchies are not accidental; instead, they are constructed and maintained in order to be able to privilege those who are in positions of power and to marginalize those who are not. Such hierarchies are termed dimensions of difference (D’Amico 269). Of particular note is the fact that within this nexus of hierarchies, an individual can occupy a position that is privileged in one dimension but marginal in another.
This is the case because of the nature of difference as an epistemological construction. Framing the concept in sociological terms, difference can be described as the relationships in which groups “stand to one another” (Bottero and Irwin 465). That is, differences are not objective representations of the nature of various groups’ or individuals’ values or behaviours. Feminist scholars problematise the defining dichotomies of interpersonal relationships which are continuously reified and re-entrenched through their association with the masculine/feminine meta-dichotomy. Therefore, gender differences are not just about relationships between the masculine and the feminine – they are about the political nature of knowledge (True 229). This approach to analysing dimensions of difference has the potential to help us to understand the diversity within and between cultures (Barth 12).

John Wayne mobilized his particular construction of the idealized American masculine identity in ways that can facilitate illustrations of the interaction of these dimensions of difference. Consider the character development in the film Rio Bravo. The plot centres on a frontier town sheriff (Wayne), who must stand up against an organized group who are trying to liberate a murderer from his jail. To help him, Wayne has only his three deputies: an elderly cripple named Stumpy (Walter Brennan), an untested boy named Colorado (Ricky Nelson) and a helpless laughingstock named Dude (Dean Martin), who is mockingly called by the derisive nickname Borrachon, a Spanish term reported to mean “drunk.” Matters are complicated by the arrival of a mysterious woman known only as Feathers (Angie Dickinson). Each of these supporting characters undergoes a transformative experience over the course of the film, one in which they are emancipated from their displaced gender roles in order to reclaim gender-normalized status.

The character of Feathers, for example, is a beautiful woman who makes her living as a professional gambler. At the onset of the film, she is presented in very masculine terms: she is independent, intelligent, strong, assertive, and opinionated. Put another way, she is a token: a female character that has few traditionally female characteristics besides her sex itself (D’Amico 270). However, through her interactions with Wayne’s character, she is (re)feminised. She gives up her life and livelihood as a gambler (a man’s lifestyle) and takes a job tending bar in town. She shifts from a state of independence -- emotional independence, physical independence, ontological independence – to a state of dependence. This transformation culminates in a scene at the end of the film where Wayne comes to see her at her room in the hotel. Feathers is preparing to perform a song at the tavern downstairs, and Wayne intervenes, telling her that if she goes downstairs in her very revealing outfit that he would have her arrested for indecency. It is at this point that we see that Feathers never had any intention to perform so attired; instead, she was giving Wayne a chance to prove his affection by stopping her. Feathers is surrendering her independence and accepting a submissive position in the relationship. In this way, she sheds the last remnants of the masculine characteristics she began with and is fully (re)feminised.

Stumpy, Colorado and Dude each undergo analogous processes of (re)masculinisation. Each begins the film with a feminised identity. Stumpy is older than the other characters in the movie, has a game leg, and has a job which is primarily care-giving in nature: he is in charge with watching the jail and tending to the prisoners. This is a gender-traditional female role (D’Amico 271). Further, because he is physically handicapped, he can’t move around very fast. Therefore, Wayne treats him as a person in need of defence rather than as a person capable of participating in his own defence. Colorado is skilled with a gun, but young and inexperienced. He has potential, but has not yet come to grips with his talent. He is reluctant to put his life on the line for the furtherance of justice. He has not yet been fully delivered from his childhood, and therefore can’t participate in his own defence despite his physical abilities. Dude’s condition is comparable. The film opens with Wayne intervening to stop a bar fight between the desperate drunkard and the film’s primary antagonist. Dude is a person to be protected. He is irrational, helpless, and governed by emotion: scorned by a woman and unable the cope or think straight, he drinks away his sorrows.

However, over the course of the film, all three men recover the masculinity that they lacked in the opening scenes. As Stumpy’s discontent with the limited scope of his contributions grows, he actively seeks about a more expansive role. In the film’s climactic scene, Wayne and the others are pinned down by gunfire, when shots ring out from the distance. It’s Stumpy, whom Wayne refers to with a smile as “the man I left behind.” He has defied his orders to stay at the jail and ventured out to come to the rescue. After this, Stumpy has fully recovered his lost masculine status. He is no longer a passive personality defined by his role as a caretaker. He is an independent thinker: rational, proactive, and strong.

Colorado undergoes a transformative emancipation from the feminised status of his lingering immaturity to his place as a fully masculine agent. At the film’s opening, he arrives in town as a new hand on a cattle drive. But, when his boss is murdered for offering to help Wayne defend himself, his transformation begins. He starts to think more strategically, to actively participate in the defence of justice, and generally to take on those characteristics which John Wayne’s character exemplifies. Colorado’s story is one of the deliverance from an immature state to a mature one, from a position of inexperience to one of experience. When we first see Colorado, he is a child, but when the film ends, he is a man.

Dude also undergoes a transformative process to recover the masculine status he lacks in the film’s opening scene. As he dries out, he is portrayed as slowly recovering the rational capacity he lost when he turned to the bottle. “His mind’s just starting to work again, and he sees what he’s done to himself,” Stumpy remarks to Wayne at one point. “Don’t let him cry on your shoulder” is Wayne’s reply. “Be nice to him, and he’ll fall apart in small pieces,” he explains. In his feminised status, Dude is someone to be rescued – exactly as Wayne rescues him in the opening scene. But, as he starts to sober up, and he begins to recover his rational capacity, he may no longer be helped – he has to leave his passivity behind and learn to stand on his own again. At the movie’s end, he has done exactly that, and can therefore be said to have completed a process of (re)masculinisation.

These transformative experiences effectively illustrate the mutability of the dimensions of difference as explained by critical feminism. The positions of all three of these supporting characters exemplify the peculiar status of being in a position of marginalisation in one degree and privilege in another. This is possible because of the nexus of predetermined power hierarchies and the intersection of those hierarchies within that nexus. “Gender is just one of the perceived differences among people that society says ‘makes a difference,’ that is, that determines who gets valorised or victimized” (D’Amico 269). This means that these transformative experiences of gender-trait adjustment should be able to tell us something about which traits the specific model of gender relations contained within the discourse of John Wayne deems worthy of accolade or of denouncement.

Stumpy’s transformation highlights the dichotomies of caretaker/war-fighter and ability/disability. Colorado’s illustrates inexperience/experience and immaturity/maturity. Dude’s highlights those of rational/irrational, responsible/irresponsible, and productive/unproductive. Feathers’ focuses on domination/submission, and outside/inside. All three characters begin with ostensibly gender-inappropriate positions in these dichotomies, and are restored to their proper statuses as a result of their transformative or emancipatory experiences.

These depictions are not without wider implication and do not exist in a vacuum. The first and most obvious such implication is that the discourse of John Wayne in Rio Bravo is one in which strict gender norms are constructed and reified. In each of the oppositional dyads the character transformations illustrate, there is one member that is clearly masculine and one that is clearly feminine. The male characters are expected to personify those male characteristics if they are to uphold the gender norms. Deviation is not acceptable. It is no more socially permissible in John Wayne’s universe for Feathers to be independent and unemotional than it is for Dude to be irrational and emotional. Therefore, the film clearly transmits a carefully crafted message about appropriate gender norms.

The inherently social and political nature of a motion picture only further magnifies the significance. The film was written and produced for an audience; it was an intentional creation. It is a tool of socialization. Put another way, just as the John Wayne persona was socially constructed by Marion Morrison based on his interactions with the world in order to represent an idealized version of the American man, the Wayne discourse seeks to affect the construction of other identities through their experience with the film’s (re)presentation of gender norms. To say the effort has been successful would be an understatement. Entire generations of people have been socialized in the shadow of John Wayne both in the United States and abroad.

James Burns notes that in African cultures, “American Westerns (referred to locally as ‘cowboy’ movies) became the most popular films and were so widely shown that, by the end of the Second World War, for many African moviegoers the ‘cowboy’ and the cinema had become synonymous” (Burns 103). As urbanization continues to develop on the African continent, the number of people in cinema audiences there increases, and so does the market for Westerns. Additionally, “the Western remains popular in the region today. Urban entrepreneurs still make a living renting old cowboy films and showing them in 16 mm projectors in remote areas” (Burns 117). Therefore, discourses like the one in Rio Bravo are still influencing the identity formulation of not only American youth, but of people across the globe.

It is these same people whose personal identities were constructed under the influence of socialization agents like John Wayne and his system of gender norms who are responsible for the construction of group and national identities which must interact with each other in the international system. How will these proposed gender norms affect the systems of power in the developing world? Consider as an early example the rise to power of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia and Africa’s first female head of state. While her election is certainly a watershed moment in the social development of her nation, the question of whether or not she is (in D’Amico’s terms) a token remains open. To whit, she is often portrayed in specifically masculine terms. Her nickname is the “Iron Lady” (BBC News par 1). She pushed for American military intervention to put down an ongoing rebellion in 2003 (Blombield par 2). She went to school at Harvard – the absolute pinnacle of American masculine intellectual privilege (BBC News par 5).

Comparing her to token women in American politics, however, noteworthy differences come to light. Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and Condoleeza Rice are both probably tokens because in their performance of their duties they have no obvious feminine characteristics beyond their biology. They are both strong figures, in positions of obvious strength in the government and who therefore play by men’s rules in a man’s game. Johnson-Sirleaf, however, has been able to retain some of the matriarchal characteristics that these American tokens seem to lack. Deep commitments to cooperation over competition and to peace-building over conflict are two of these characteristics. Coming into office at the close of a fourteen year period of civil war, she has been defined in part by her empathic care-giving politics. “Civilized nations must not be indifferent to any conflict – internal or external – regardless of the factors that fuel it,” she said in an address at Georgetown University (Georgetown Office of Communications par 8).

Dimensional differences can help us to understand how women in these positions are constructed as standing apart from men in similar positions. Johnson-Sirleaf holds a position of extreme privilege in one dimension as the head of state for her country. However, she holds a position of marginalisation as not only a woman, but a woman of colour. She is not opposed to the use of force when other options fail, which casts her in a masculine and favoured light. But, at the same time, she campaigns in favour of humanitarian causes, which are generally feminised topics. Are discourses like that of John Wayne in Rio Bravo contributing factors to this sort of development? The answer is likely to be some form of a qualified yes. Clearly the same norms that Rio Bravo attempts to naturalize are being struggled with elsewhere, too.

Gendered discourses exist all around us, often escaping our notice despite their prevalence. These gendered discourses are constructed in order to portray the world in sets of oppositional dyads of purportedly masculine and feminine characteristics. The discourse of John Wayne in Rio Bravo represents an excellent site for the discussion of dimensions of difference and gender norms, and how to navigate these issues. It’s depictions of transformative (re) socialization processes can serve as very telling illustrations of how perspectives are favoured or disfavoured within a group, and how a given subject’s position within the marginalized side of an dichotomy can be transcended through an emancipative process allowing them to regain a more favoured status.

Conclusion

Because of the extremely influential position John Wayne’s legacy holds in American culture, it is an important undertaking to investigate the ontological assumptions that the discourse of John Wayne attempts to naturalize. In these pages, I think I have demonstrated that this discourse does take particular stands on the proper ideals for security norms, for economic norms, for ecological norms, and for gender norms. Further, I’ve shown that there is much insight to be gained from a critical engagement with this discourse. Because of the unique role the discourse of John Wayne and other comparable discourses have had on the political socialization of generations of Americans, and because of the unique position of the United States to leverage those discourses to change the arrangements of the international system, these discourses are important topics for analysis.

References

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