John Wayne and Ideology [1 ed.] 9781443870221, 9781443859059

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John Wayne and Ideology

John Wayne and Ideology

By

Larry A. Van Meter

John Wayne and Ideology, by Larry A. Van Meter This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Larry A. Van Meter All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5905-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5905-9

To Jeffrey Charles Leitner

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Ensuring that “we get to win this time” Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 John Wayne, Mise en Abyme, and Ideology Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 “Let’s Put this Kitten to Bed”: John Wayne and Ideal Masculinity in In Old Oklahoma Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 33 Homophobia and Homoeroticism the John Wayne Way Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49 John Wayne and Tea Party Ideology Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 57 Johns Wayne Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 69 Dukification in the Twenty-first Century Works Cited ............................................................................................... 83 Notes.......................................................................................................... 89

INTRODUCTION ENSURING THAT “WE GET TO WIN THIS TIME”

In a complex and dangerous world, the allure of the simple is addictive. —Ewen and Ewen The subject hallucinates his world. —Lacan

Though nominally about John Wayne, this work is more an examination of post-World War II reactionary politics in the United States, a politics still playing a major role in contemporary American life. During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, American progressives effected an unprecedented number of social reforms—Social Security, the FHA, the FDA, the FDIC, the WPA, the FCC, the GI Bill, and the repeal of Prohibition, to name but a few. But none of these reforms, it should be noted, materialized without stiff opposition from conservatives. Opposition that persists. For example, though American industrialists did not want to be seen as “economic royalists and sweaters of labor,” they nevertheless fought tooth and nail against the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a minimum wage, mandated overtime pay, and outlawed most child labor. Their beef? That “these everlastingly multiplying governmental mandates,” such as the FLSA, were too onerous for businesses earnestly attempting to find solutions to their labor problems (qtd. in Grossman). More than a century of laissez-faire labor policy apparently not being enough time for industrialists to figure out how to avoid chaining children to their workstations. It’s important to consider that despite their failed opposition to the FDR-era reforms, those conservative forces ultimately won. The United States in the postwar era has been marked by conservatism rather than liberalism, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and the 1965 Voters Rights Act notwithstanding. Furthermore, with respect to those reforms, they have been slowly eroding since their enactions: while certainly not as bad as the Separate but Equal era, public schools in America are more segregated now than in the late 1960s1; Roe v. Wade has

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Introduction

been under incessant assault since 1973, its most egregious compromise to date being the 2013 Texas Legislature’s abortion ban; and, also in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Voter Rights Act’s provision to mandate federal approval for states’ proposed voter legislation2. My agenda in this work is to examine how a certain type of cinema, the John Wayne movie being its most eregious example, works hand in glove with that postwar conservatization. Cinema functions, in the words of Kaja Silverman, as a “collective make-believe” (Male Subjectivity 15), and perhaps it’s also appropriate to call cinema a “collective male-believe,” given its recurring obsession with bolstering a putatively weak masculinity. Within the context of mainstream Hollywood cinema, little separates the “make-believe” and the “male-believe,” from its beginning the screen privileging male fantasies. Though Hollywood has an ambivalent—if not to say unwarranted— reputation as a haven of American liberalism 3 , it often serves as an apparatus of conservative ideology. The poster boy for that agenda is John Wayne, who, especially after World War II, proudly, overtly, and unashamedly “figured” conservative politics. He wasn’t the only one, of course: public figures such as Ayn Rand, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Clark Gable, Ward Bond, and Ronald Reagan were among Hollywood’s most aggressive critics of American liberalism. Cinema’s power as a conservative instrument is borne out by the fact that many of them—especially Reagan, Rand, and Disney—remain household names in America, while the Hollywood Ten, those refusing to “name names” during the McCarthy era, do not. Together with Reagan, John Wayne remains the symbol of American right-wing politics, or, to be more specific, the strain of American right-wing politics that has given us Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon and his Plumbers, and the Tea Party. In Paula Cole’s 1997 song “Where Have all the Cowboys Gone?” a heartbroken woman who finds out too late that the man she finds herself with is not the man she thought she was getting, says sarcastically, “I will wash the dishes while you go have a beer.” The key line, though, is when she asks, “Where is my John Wayne?” While the song is critical of men who abandon their families to escape into self-serving male fantasies, the usage of the song is something entirely different: in the twenty-first century, the song has metamorphosed into an anthem for an America pining for the lost masculinity that John Wayne ostensibly embodied 4 . Such is the power of John Wayne, that even the deployment of the name itself manufactures an interpretation counter to the one offered in the lyrics.

Ensuring that “we get to win this time”

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I will discuss it in more detail in Chapter 5, but a famous incident reifying this manufacturing process occurs in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) where, upon being given a covert assignment to find POWs still left in Vietnam, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), who was an Army Special Forces Ranger in Vietnam, asks his former commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Trautman, (Richard Crenna), “Do we get to win this time?” Rambo’s “we” draws the spectator into film’s male fantasy world, a world plagued by a sense of loss and trauma. Furthermore, the Rambo fantasy world is historically marked by what Richard Slotkin calls a “Crisis of Public Myth”: In a healthy society the political and cultural leaders are able to repair and renew that myth by articulating new ideas, initiating strong action in response to crisis or merely projecting an image of heroic of heroic leadership. But leaders are recognized and empowered only in an ideological system whose public myth imagines a place and a role for heroic action. (626)

Certainly Rambo’s “cinematic address” alludes to the United States’ Vietnam War embarrassment, but does so from the white-supremacist perspective that marks the Reagan era, that is, that through a reclaimed white masculinity, “we” can triumph over the forces that stripped “us” of our primacy. The Vietnam War itself, starting as it did in the 1960s, was a reaction to progressive reforms—the civil rights and women’s rights movements specifically—reforms that necessitated, pace Susan Jeffords, a “remasculinization” of American culture. In Masculinity in Vietnam War Narratives (2009), Brenda Boyle suggests that the war materialized because “what was assaulted most by the era’s revolutions was an American sense of a coherent, bounded, or ‘monolithic’ masculinity” (3). The American response to this ostensible loss of masculinity was to manufacture a war, because, as everyone knows, war is the one reliable place where masculinity can be located: The traditional American ethos contends that boys become men through experience in war and that conversion makes them real Americans. American boys are convinced that fighting in a war or participating in its violent counterpart is something they should aspire to do, and men who have not participated in a war are made to think they missed a rite of passage. What it means to be a man, though unspecified in this mythology, is tacitly stated to be white, heterosexual, and able bodied. (Boyle 3)

But we lost, so traditional notions about masculinity, which were tenuous even before Vietnam, were now in a state of panic. But we are loath to

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Introduction

interrogate those notions, so to manage the subsequent crisis in the wake of the Vietnam War loss, American culture has manufactured a litany of scapegoats responsible for that loss: liberals, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, a Democratic Congress, bureaucracy, feminists, “lack of resolve,” the media, abortion, homosexuals, Jane Fonda— suspects that boil down to one thing, a lack/loss of real masculinity. The century-old Masculinity Crisis has never abated; it is still in its Woman Suffrage-era state of panic. This book argues that John Wayne is the form of that panic. Even today, almost 40 years after his death, John Wayne stands for an “ideal” masculinity. A common sentiment goes along the lines of “John Wayne was a great American. A man’s man. He wasn’t perfect, no one is, but he was close enough.”5 But it’s important to acknowledge that this sentiment is from an almost exclusively White American perspective, a panicked perspective reacting to the deconstructions/diagnoses of the white supremacy, homophobia, and misogyny underpinning American history, the three strongest fingers in White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy’s grip on late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century American ideology. In the early twenty-first century, the changes effected by feminism and post-war civil-rights legislation have brought “the chickens home to roost,” so to speak, following the Obama presidency. Right-wing entertainers such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger, and Bill O’Reilly—all of whom frequently cite John Wayne as the embodiment of real American values6 —have, to healthy ratings, ramped up their racism, homophobia, and misogyny following the Obama presidency7. The so-called Tea Party, materializing in the same month as the Obama inauguration, has installed outright racists, homophobes, and misogynists in local, state, and national political offices. While those legislators have made little headway in their battles against the “homosexual agenda,” they not only have leaned hard into decades-old women’s and civil rights reforms, but also set their sights on rolling back FDR-era reforms such as Social Security and the FLSA. That these phenomena are occurring in the second decade of the twenty-first century bears witness to how powerful reactionary politics, for which John Wayne functions as a patron saint, remains in America.

CHAPTER ONE JOHN WAYNE, MISE EN ABYME, AND IDEOLOGY

[T]he structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirrorstructure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning. Which means that all ideology is centred, that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre. —Althusser What a cynic who "believes only his eyes" misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. —Žižek

This work is about how John Wayne, the most famous actor in the history of Hollywood, desires to function as a mirror—or mise en abyme—of postwar American ideology. In Mirror in the Text (Le Récit Spéculaire: Essai sur la Mise en Abyme, 1989), Lucien Dällenbach examines how a text might, within the narrative, produce a small mirror of itself which “brings out the meaning and form of a work.” The term mise en abyme, first used as a literary device by Andre Gide in the late nineteenth century, is from heraldry: it is a small mirror on a shield, which, when held up to another mirror, shows a miniature reflection of itself. As a literary device, a famous example is The Murder of Gonzago, the play within a play in Hamlet, which, like the mirror on the shield, functions as “a miniature replica of itself” (8, Dällenbach’s italics). Dällenbach suggests that these mirrors reveal a textual anxiety, that a text desires that it be interpreted, as Hamlet wants The Murder of Gonzago to be interpreted by Claudius, in a specific way. A text tries to shore up the gaps and slippages—Dällenbach uses the German word leerstellen (“empty places, free places, or, more succinctly, as gaps, blanks, or ellipses” [“Reflexivity” 439])—that threaten its interpretive integrity, to ensure that “signs” match up with “signifiers.” According to Dällenbach, “Every literary text tends to restrict, to a greater or lesser extent, its indeterminacy, its ‘empty places,’ and its

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successiveness by ‘signals’ which appear as constraints and limitations upon the reader’s freedom of invention” (“Reflexivity” 439). Thus the mise en abyme materializes as a signal which functions as an insurance policy against misinterpretation. Were there a deductible on this insurance policy, however, it would be too steep, because the text, as Georg Lukács reminds us, “is a surface riddled with holes” (92), meaning that there are too many indeterminacies, too much leerstellen, to fully guarantee any one interpretation. It’s tempting to use the term fractal to describe this mirroring phenomenon, but a fractal as I understand it is an exact replica of the object within itself, whereas a mise en abyme, though it may try to replicate the object, nevertheless betrays some slippage, some anamorphosis. As is true for any metaphor, the mise en abyme is not an exact replica of the text-as-a-whole. However much the mise en abyme attempts to remove the leerstellen separating “sign” from “signifier”—or, more specifically, “sign” from “desired signifier”—it instead announces the possibility of misinterpretation rather than a guarantee of its opposite. Dällenbach writes, “a work of fiction is an intentional object, always indeterminate because of its very determinacies” (“Reflexivity” 437). The more determinate mise en abyme, then, would one that exploits rather than precludes the leerstellen, such as the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), which from a “straight” perspective appears to be a meaningless blob; however, seen from an angle, or, in the words of Slavoj Žižek, “awry,” it is entirely something else. Žižek writes, “if we look at what appears from the frontal view as an extended, ‘erected’ meaningless spot, from the right perspective we notice the contours of a skull” (Sublime Object 99). The anamorphic object is thus the more “accurate” mise en abyme. In the case of The Ambassadors, the anamorphic skull, a memento mori, functions as a more powerful comment on the hyperbolically focused material in the painting. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty and despair,” the focused material asserts; the memento mori skull—in its anamorphosis— more forcefully deconstructs the material’s arrogance. A cinematic example of this anamorphosis appears in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), where, like Holbein, Hitchcock contrasts the straightforward with the anamorphic 8 . The “straightforward” image in the film is the portrait of General McLaidlaw, the deceased father of the film’s heroine, Lina (John Fontaine). It is a portrait that, like the French ambassadors in Holbein’s painting, is realistic and representational. According to Stephen Heath, the portrait of General McLaidlaw is a painting “that bears with all its Oedipal weight on the whole action of the film” (21). In the same

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house, but in a different room, is a contrasting, anamorphic painting, a “post-cubist, Picasso-like” still life (Heath 23). Two detectives have arrived at Lina’s home to question her about her husband, Johnnie (Cary Grant), who is under suspicion for murder. As the detectives wait to see Lina, the camera concentrates on one of them, Detective Benson (Vernon Downing), intently examining the painting. Both the painting and Detective Benson are in deep focus, the man craning his neck in a gesture signifying his inability to understand it. This inability is reinforced when Downing, in confusion, looks back at the painting one more time as the detectives are being shown into Lina’s room. A delicious touch from Hitchcock. When the detectives are shown in to see Lina, all three sit at a coffee table, and the detectives show her a newspaper story. Rather than read it immediately, though, she moves to a different area of the room, to a seat directly adjacent to the portrait of her father, which, unlike the anamorphic painting, is slightly out of focus. Lina puts on her reading glasses and reads the newspaper story: “ENGLISHMAN FOUND DEAD,” which confirms her (and perhaps the spectator’s own) suspicions about Johnnie. Scooping Lacan by several years, Hitchcock here is showing Lina reading under “the name of the father” (le nom du père), the representational painting of her father signifying both her submission to patriarchy 9 and to her and the detectives’ reasonable or commonsensical interpretation of the evidence against Johnnie. Here we see two examples of mise en abyme: the representational object, which appears to be easily discernible, contrasted with the anamorphic object, which the detective— i.e., one whose job it is to correctly discern the signs—cannot fathom. But Lina and the detectives have misinterpreted the signs. Both have seen the signs, the circumstantial evidence mounting against Johnnie, but insofar as they operate in the shadow of the father, what appears to be true is false. Within the economy of patriarchal power, the “truth” of the evidence has been construed, that is, made true. This contrasting of the anamorphic with the representational is as good an articulation as any of Lacan’s concept of the petit objet a, the distinction between the subject himself and “what falls from the subject”: [T]he scoptophilic drive, in which the subject encounters the world as a spectacle that he possesses. He is thus victim of a lure, through which what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the true petit a, but its complement, the specular image. (“Introduction” 86)

The mise en abyme could also be a reverse image. For example, James Joyce’s “Eveline,” the fourth story in Dubliners, is about a 19-year-old

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woman who must choose between running off with a sailor, Frank, and staying with her father, an incestuous, alcoholic pedophile. Unlike the examples of Holbein and Hitchcock, though, the representational and anamorphic objects in “Eveline” are the same object, a trompe l'oeil. The mise en abyme is an allusion to the opera The Bohemian Girl. Eveline and her lover, Frank, whom Eveline’s father hates, sneak off one night to see The Bohemian Girl, which is about two lovers, Arline (mirroring Eveline) and Thaddeus (mirroring Frank), bucking the odds—most significantly Arline’s disapproving father—to finally live happily ever at story’s end. The Bohemian Girl is a wonderful comic allusion; as I like to tell my students, it’s the only opera with a happy ending. But like the portrait of General McLaidlaw in Suspicion, The Bohemian Girl is a trick. No happily ever after awaits Eveline and Frank: Joyce’s Bohemian Girl leaves Frank in the lurch and goes back to her monstrous father. This story bears the full weight of Lacan’s le nom du père: it denotes “the name of the father,” but when spoken sounds exactly like le non du père, “the ‘no’ of the father.”10 In the Lacanian schema the father is the one who proscribes, the one who “says no.” Though there are lots to choose from, there are few more terrifying fathers in literature than Eveline’s, and such is the power of le nom du père that Eveline can’t escape him. Literally can’t escape, as she is trapped forever in Dubliners, always leaving her lover and returning to the terrifying père. As is also true for most things, in the world of The Ambassadors, Hitchcock, and Joyce, nothing is at it seems. The representational promises the “thing,” Lacan’s petit objet a, to be as it seems. The representational seeks to be, in the words of Žižek, “a pure signifier which designates, and at the same time constitutes, the identity of a given object beyond the variable cluster of its descriptive properties” (Sublime Object 98). A dysfunction of male subjectivity is that there is a gap between who the subject is and what he imagines himself to be. Lacan uses the term agalma—a small statue of a God—to describe the image that the male subject desires his own image to be, “that object which the subject believes that his desire tends toward” (“Introduction” 87). It’s tempting to call the anamorphic the more truthful agalma, but inscribed in agalma is the desperation that it represent the subject, whereas no such fantasy exists with the anamorphic—it seems more accurate to define the anamorphic as a self-conscious announcement of the complication between material reality and truth. Insofar as cinema is primarily visual, it deploys the hero as a type of mise en abyme of male subjectivity. One of the reasons a “regularlooking” actor like James Stewart or Tom Hanks can be a big star is that

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the films he is in imagine themselves as articulating “regular guy” fantasies11. It’s also why so few “regular-looking” women are big stars: Hollywood films are decidedly not about articulating women’s fantasies. An attraction of a film like Transformers or Spider-man or Twister is that it suggests that the “regular guy” can save the day and get the hot girl. The John Wayne film is radically different than the “regular guy” fantasy film. It props up John Wayne as the ideal male subject, not the subject as he is—or, to be more specific, how Hollywood imagines the “regular guy.” The John Wayne film asserts the John-Wayne-in-the-JohnWayne-movie functions as a fractal12 of the film’s diegetic and ideological purposes. As Bonnie Tyler sings in “I Need a Hero,” “He’s gotta be larger than life.” The film desperately desires for the John Wayne to be that which it seems to be, to be, like Hamlet, the subject that “knows not seems.” But there is no to be: the John Wayne, in its overarching earnestness, is only “seems.” John Wayne was neither a cowboy nor a soldier—the roles he mostly played—and, most tellingly, he’s not even John Wayne. He is Marion Morrison, ex-bench-warming football player from Iowa who hated horses and chickened out of military service during World War II. Routine showings of “The Sands of Iwo Jima” at the National Museum of the Marine Corps; a statue of John Wayne at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage museum; his receiving the National Football Foundation’s highest honor, The Gold Medal Award; and, most astonishingly, his receiving the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not only bear witness to the haphazard connection between sign and signifier, but also may even suggest that whatever connection exists between them might be strategically counterfactual. As far as representational mise en abymes go, you’d be hard pressed to deliberately construct anything more distorting than John Wayne. The strategy of the mise en abyme is helpful in an analysis of cinema because a movie often deploys images to manage the spectator’s interpretation. Most movies are exacting in that management. It strikes me that most Hollywood movies are desperate that they be interpreted in a limited way, both in terms of ensuring it gets its points across, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, in ensuring that other interpretations are precluded (more on that later). Welles filmed Citizen Kane in deep focus so that spectators, as they would at a live theater performance, would be forced to construct meaning from the surplus of focused material on screen.

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But who watches Citizen Kane on date night? 13 With respect to managing interpretations, Hollywood movies are deeply conservative. And no movie is more conservative than the John Wayne movie, which, like Hamlet, deploys (the) John Wayne in a similarly desperate fashion, marshaling all its resources to ensure that the “text” be interpreted the way it demands it be interpreted, most specifically that its hero be interpreted as the ideal American Subject: male, white supremacist, heterosexual/ heteronormative, virile, pro-capitalist, patriarchal. The mise en abyme corresponds to how ideology works: a manifestation that, in its overarching drive to preclude misinterpretation, nevertheless reveals a “surface riddled with holes.” Additionally, Anamorphosis and mise en abyme are helpful figures in understanding how ideology works, more specifically how ideological apparatuses work. I want to interrogate the John Wayne movie, but the suspect is uncooperative and arrogant—it has attempted to cover its tracks because its milieu facilitates that covering. It seems possible, perhaps even probable, that narrative cinema itself materializes at the beginning of the twentieth century as a strategy to shore up the gaps extant in other art forms—especially the novel, with all its untethered voices, and painting, with this new guy Picasso, who revels in anamorphosis. Is the John Wayne movie itself a mise en abyme of the narrative film industry, so panicstricken at the modern world that its most diligent work is not in the guarantee of but rather the preclusion of certain interpretations? Anyway, on to ideology. Ideology is spectral, no “there” underpinning our political reality. Althusser defines ideology as “the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (158), and there is no rule that those “ideas and representations” be based on material reality. If we use the extraordinary careers of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne as examples, we see that the “ideas and representations” constructing postwar American ideology are based on the opposite of material reality. Both Reagan and John Wayne are midwesterners (the former an Illinoisan, the latter Iowan) who nevertheless “signify” American West masculinity. And, oh yeah, they’re actors, that is, their power as signifiers stems from their pretending to be someone else. Žižek calls this sort of rupture between the material and the ideological “the construction of a point which effectively does not exist” (Interrogating the Real 27), which is as accurate a description of Reagan and John Wayne as there is. Rambo is no more real than the Reagan imagined in the American conscious as a badass warrior. Insofar as his fictitious credentials are at least based on plausibility, Rambo, as it turns out, is more real than Reagan14.

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Film theory has effectively analyzed the masculinity crisis mapped out so well in Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America (discussed more thoroughly in Chapter Five). Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Tania Modleski, and many others have ushered in a golden age of film analysis, their work concentrating on mainstream cinema’s function as an ideological apparatus supporting White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. There can be no overstating the importance of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to film studies, her famous assertion “Sadism demands a story” seeming a tailor-made description of the John Wayne film, a medium responding all too willingly to the punitive mandates of patriarchy 15 . While readers of this book are perhaps well acquainted with Mulvey’s essay, it may be helpful to revisit it to show how (and how well) it pertains to a study of John Wayne, especially to show how heavily invested John Wayne films are in preserving the homophobic, misogynous, and racist elements of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. I think it important to revisit ”Visual Pleasure” because the generation of reassessments of it (a cottage industry itself) in many ways has distracted from the power of Mulvey’s condemnation of mainstream cinema’s practice of fetishism/misogyny, a practice writ large in John Wayne movies but metamorphosized into a different, though no less misogynous, creature in contemporary mainstream film. I will discuss these reassessments, most targeting Mulvey’s assertions regarding the male body, below. Mulvey’s argument, just as important now as it was in 1975, is that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (6), furthermore that a crucial component of the preservation of patriarchal power is the “castrating” of the woman. What is so vexing is, given the conditions of contemporary cinema— the era of superhero blockbusters—how little has changed since Mulvey’s essay was published 40 years ago. While “Visual Pleasure”’s assertion that the mainstream cinema screen is showing the “male gaze” seems dated given the library of profitable “chick flicks” since 1975. But even those films—e.g., You’ve Got Mail (1998), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), The Princess Diaries (2001), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Amélie (2001), 27 Dresses (2008), Just Like Heaven (2005), Hope Floats (1998), The Notebook (2004), Dirty Dancing (1987), Pretty Woman (1990), Runaway Bride (1999), Ella Enchanted (2004), Sweet Home Alabama (2002), Notting Hill (1999), Maid in Manhattan (2002), How to Lose a

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Guy in 10 Days (2003), While You Were Sleeping (1995), Moonstruck (1987), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), The Prince and Me (2004), Working Girl (1988), Kate and Leopold (2001), The Proposal (2009)—insofar as they are primarily interested in directing the female lead, whose gaze is privileged in the movie, to the arms of the male lead as their “happily ever after,”16 are hardly “daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire,” as Mulvey hoped cinema would (8). Rather those films are appropriating the female gaze to further bind women to the “symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions” (7). Before looking deeper into “Visual Pleasure,” with its coordination of Lacanian and Freudian analyses, it needs to be stressed that Mulvey understands that while both Lacan and Freud are interested in subjectivity, when they say “subject,” they mean “male subject.” Psychoanalysis is historically an apparatus of patriarchy, Freud famously saying to women, “you are yourselves the problem” (141), but Mulvey, in a brilliant move, is able to appropriate its vocabulary—“examining patriarchy with the tools it provides” (7)—to diagnose American mainstream cinema’s function as a key component in “the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (8). “Visual Pleasure” is the ideal lens through which to examine the John Wayne film. In the first place, the John Wayne film is conventional: it is in lockstep with the standard features of classical Hollywood cinema, and, being unashamedly patriarchal, it knows what the male spectator wants, and it delivers the goods every time: John Wayne, 6’4” and 240 pounds, functioning as the “main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify” (8). The persistence of the John Wayne aura suggests that his continuing popularity, even four decades after his death, marks him as the ne plus ultra object of white male identification. The magic of the cinema is that it functions as a space where the male spectator can go to play out his fantasies, fantasies that (re)center and (re)assert the male ego. If we see the advent of the cinema as a reaction to women’s fight for full humanity, full subjectivity, John Wayne seems the perfect “representative of power”—the perfect bully—to duke it out with the ladies. So when the male spectator sees John Wayne, especially John Wayne on the big screen, he sees not only a big, powerful man, he sees his own “screen surrogate”: As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. (Mulvey 13)

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The power of that identification harkens back to the male subject’s mirror stage, where, Lacan asserts, the male subject’s subjectivity materializes: Between six and eighteen months, a child becomes an individual subject when he sees and recognizes himself as a separate entity in a mirror. But the specular image whom he recognizes as himself is not one cursed with “malaise and motor uncoordination of the neonatal months” (Lacan, Ecrits 6), as he most surely is, but rather an ideal surrogate: The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopaedic’ form of its totality – and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the Innenwelt [inner world] to Umwelt [environment] circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits.

The power of the cinema, with its obsessive privileging of the male ego, is that it functions as the ideal site where that “inexhaustible squaring” plays out. John Wayne, the “ego ideal” who year after year, generation after generation, compensates for the “organic inadequacy of [the subject’s] natural reality” (Lacan 6). This screen surrogate “can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination” (Mulvey 12). Where Freud figures most prominently in “Visual Pleasure” is in Mulvey’s discussion of castration anxiety. In the movies, the woman is on screen, to be sure, “displayed for the gaze and pleasure of men”—for her to-be-looked-at-ness, using Mulvey’s famous term. This can be seen in any number of scenes in the John Wayne catalog, but I will choose a remarkable scene from Angel and the Badman, where the gutshot Quirt is nursed back to health by a young Quaker woman, Penelope Worth (played by Gail Russell). Worth/Russell is in the film, of course, for her to-belooked-at-ness, both for Evans/John Wayne and for the male spectator. The film authorizes this to-be-looked-at-ness when, after Penelope dresses Quirt’s wounds, she turns away from him, walks a few steps and bends down towards a wash basin. The camera shows a close-up of Quirt looking at Penelope’s bottom, his expression registering sexual stimulation, though quickly changing to sheepish embarrassment. I choose this scene because it seems remarkably postmodern: it simultaneously authorizes the objectifying male gaze while at the same time disingenuously chastising it, wagging a grandmotherly finger, so to speak, at the rascally badman. Boys will be boys.

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Chapter One

The male spectator’s pleasure in looking—scopophilia—at the fetishized woman, however, is mediated by the knowledge that the woman lacks a penis. According to Freud, the subject experiences a psychic trauma when confronted with this knowledge: Before the child came under the domination of the castration complex, at the time when he still held the woman at her full value, he began to manifest an intensive desire to look as an erotic activity of his impulse. He wished to see the genitals of other persons, originally probably because he wished to compare them with his own. The erotic attraction which emanated from the person of his mother soon reached its height in the longing to see her genital which he believed to be a penis. With the cognition acquired only later that the woman has no penis, this longing often becomes transformed into its opposite and gives place to disgust, which in the years of puberty may become the cause of psychic impotence, of misogyny and of lasting homosexuality[!]. (Leonardo da Vinci 57-58)

Thus when the subject sees a woman, he is reminded of that trauma. “[I]n psychoanalytic terms,” writes Mulvey, “the female figure poses a deeper problem[:] her lack of a of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (13). On screen, then, the spectacle of the woman presents a bind: how does that fetishistic scopophilia square with the castration anxiety? The woman, “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified” (13). Insofar as the mainstream cinema is for pleasure rather than unpleasure— pace Christian Metz, “cinema is attended out of desire, not reluctance, in the hope that the film will please rather than displease” (19)—the threat of unpleasure must be neutralized. Mulvey cracks this code by noting that those two affects, fetishistic scopophilia and castration anxiety, arise from separate drives. Fetishistic scopophilia, “aris[ing] from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation,” is a function of the libido, and castration anxiety, “com[ing] from identification with the image seen,” is a component of ego formulation. Narrative cinema is an ideal representational system to manage these contradictory elements because it “seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary phantasy world” (10-11). Castration anxiety trumps the sexual stimulation, so the drama unfolds in the following way: the narrative film presents the woman to trigger sexual desire, but, ultimately, because “the meaning of woman is sexual difference” (13), the film punishes her to neutralize the castration anxiety. Thus the male subject can have his cake and eat it, too.

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This scenario strikes me as a kind of reverse fort-da game, Freud’s famous diagnosis of psychic resolution. Freud’s one-year-old grandson, using a reel attached to a string, “plays” the loss and return of his mother with the toy: holding the string, he says “fort” (the German word for “gone”) when he tosses the reel away from him, then “da” (“there”) when he brings it back. Freud writes, The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. (Standard Edition, Vol. 18, 14-15)

Because “the child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable,” the “pleasurable ending” of the game is the return of the toy. Perhaps the internal logic of the cinema mandates that the object—the sexualized woman—be presented (da), then subsequently punished (fort). It bears repeating that in the da aspect of the game, the subject finds the return of the mother “agreeable.” At that moment of his cultural development, he sincerely desires the mother’s presence. The reverse fortda game occurs because there has been a radical change in the subject in the years between infancy and adolescence: the abjection of the mother. In Desire in Language (1980), Julia Kristeva argues that in order for the subject to enter the “symbolic order,” the world of language, he breaks from the mother via “abjection,” that is, making her vile and wretched. In other words, the most profound love the subject ever knows—the oneness he experiences as an infant with his mother—must be disavowed. The fortda game appears to be a process in that abjection: The da element of the game “works” in infancy because although the subject genuinely desires his mother to return, the fort element “plays” with the possibility of separation: Kristeva says, “Even before things for him are—hence before they are signifiable—he drives them out” (Powers of Horror 6). By adolescence, however psychically he may yearn for his mother’s return, he has abjected her and, at the risk social stigmatization (“Mama’s boy”), entered the symbolic order. Within the economy of American mainstream cinema, which rarely interrogates the mandates of the Oedipal Contract17, this abjection of the feminine or the womanly results in what must seem the most satisfying power of the “screen surrogate”: his control and punishment of women, goods and services provided all too eagerly in the John Wayne film.

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Chapter One

I will discuss two examples of this Discipline and Punish phenomenon at length in later chapters—In Old Oklahoma and McLintock!—but, to be brief, in both films, the to-be-looked-at women are disciplined in order that they comply with culturally mandated, historically specific roles: domestic, subservient, compliant, subordinate. In In Old Oklahoma (1943), set at the turn of the twentieth century, John Wayne trains a historically specific “New Woman,” Cathy Allen (played by Martha Scott), that newfangled ideas about independence and agency have no place in the American frontier. In McLintock! (1963), also set at the turn of the twentieth century, cattle baron George Washington McLintock (John Wayne) uses physical violence to keep his estranged wife, Katherine (Maureen O’Hara), on the ranch. Though both films have turn-of-the-century concerns regarding women, they double their disciplining agenda insofar as they are aligned with contemporary prescriptions for women’s behaviors: the films can correct women both in the past and in the present. But these corrections grow more sadistic as John Wayne grows older—an important consideration for this book insofar as it seeks to demonstrate how John Wayne films evolve. In Old Oklahoma was made during World War II and, as such, heavily invested in making sure women stay eager helpmeets—good for the war effort. Though the war necessitated that millions of American women enter the work force, Hollywood movies reminded them that their “natural” or “proper” condition was subordinate. McLintock!, set at the same historical moment as In Old Oklahoma though filmed 20 years later, is a panic-stricken response to post-World War II women’s subjectivity. Whereas In Old Oklahoma’s Cathy Allen could be taught her role as domestic subordinate, which she at film’s end eagerly accepts, McLintock!’s Katherine McLintock must be physically punished to return to that same role. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that, given the radical changes in American sexual politics between 1943 and 1963, the World War II-era film might use a “lighter touch” in its management of women’s behaviors. By 1963, however, more corrective measures were required; at the end of McLintock! the townsfolk have had enough of G.W.’s being pussy-whipped. Exasperated by G.W.’s inability to rein in Katherine’s behaviors, the local merchant, Birnbaum, and G.W.’s major domo, Drago, urge their friend to be more heavy-handed in his domestic affaris: Birnbaum: How long, G.W.? McLintock: How long what? Drago: She’s been ridin’ herd on your for two years now. Birnbaum: I’m a peaceable man, but my father used to say, “You raise your voice, it doesn’t do any good, it’s time to raise your hand.”

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Though set at the beginning of the twentieth century, McLintock!’s obsessions are specific to postwar male hysteria. What are we going to do about these uppity dames! The John Wayne film, so heavily invested in the “squaring of the ego’s audits,” adapts to confront historically specific anxieties about women. However transhistorical Mulvey’s argument appears to be regarding male subjectivity, the apparatuses culture deploys to manage that subjectivity are historically specific. In The Woman at the Keyhole, Judith Mayne notes that the advent of cinema coincides with the advent of psychoanalysis, making it “seem as though the cinema had some manifest destiny to embody voyeurism and fetishism—and needless to say, to embody them for the ideal male subject of culture theorized by psychoanalysis” (5). This “ideal male subject” is not ahistorical: he cannot be excised from the era marked by masculinity anxieties, most prominently the overarching desire to return to a “traditional” (i.e., prewoman suffrage-era) masculinity. A problem with “Visual Pleasure,” however, concerns the male body. Mulvey argues that the male body cannot “bear the burden” of objectification reserved for the female body: “According to the principles of the ruling ideology, and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (12). Subsequent scholars, though, such as Peter Lehman, Steve Neale, D.N. Rodowick, Paul Willemen, and Cynthia Fuchs, have challenged this assertion, arguing that the cinematic white male hero, who functions as the “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego,” is displayed on screen for the visual pleasure of the presumed male spectator. Furthermore that there is a homosexual component to that pleasure. John Wayne is projected on screen primarily for the male gaze. It’s not that the male spectator “is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like,” but rather that he is reluctant to confess that gaze. To be fair to “Visual Pleasure,” Mulvey’s assertions regarding the male body are within the context of understanding how patriarchy deploys the mainstream film industry to subordinate women. The persistent objectification and fetishization of the female body, one of most important calling cards of American mainstream cinema, has the twin “benefits” of titillating the male spectator and legitimating men’s control of the woman’s body. In Running Scared (2007), Lehman writes that in the mid1970s, Mulvey and other feminist film theorists were not overly concerned with film representation of the male body because they

18

Chapter One prioritized understanding the alienating ways in which women’s bodies were controlled in representation via such devices as fragmentation and fetishism. Politically it was much more important to understand and change the ways in which patriarchy, and primarily men within patriarchy, structured oppressive representations of women’s bodies than it was to worry about how the same patriarchal ideology structured men’s bodies. (4-5)

One can certainly understand that the potentially destabilizing effects of the erotic male body is not so much of a priority for a feminism concerned with how the representation of women’s bodies factors into the buttressing of patriarchal power. However, the representation of the male body is no less an assertion of male dominance. According to Lehman, “the silence surrounding the sexual representation of the male body is itself totally in the service of traditional patriarchy” (5). In the early days of Hollywood cinema, the images of the male body did present a potentially destabilizing threat to traditional masculinity. The male body was there on screen for its to-be-looked-at-ness, especially inasmuch as that display was designed to bear witness to men’s sufficiency, power, virility, and potency; but the body’s sexiness—e.g., the long-running convention of showing the male lead’s bared chest or Johnny Weismuller’s near full nudity in his Tarzan movies (1932-1948)— presented a containment crisis: inasmuch as homosexuality was(/is) proscribed in the culture to which cinema serviced, the homoerotic attractiveness of the male body was disavowed. As I will discuss further in Chapter Three, the Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, materialized at the onset of sound pictures to contain this crisis. The Hays Code “disappeared” homosexuality from the movies, thereby liberating filmmakers to be less restrained in their representations of the male body: it can’t be gay if gay is not permitted. John Wayne’s position as the ubermensch of American cinema is a post-World War II phenomenon. Beginning in 1947, one or more of his movies appeared in each year’s top-ten highest grossing films for 27 out of the following 28 years, an unprecedented run of success, especially considering that, though he had been an A-list actor for 17 years before 1947, he had appeared in only one film landing in the annual top ten box office successes, The Big Trail (1930)18. His primacy is a reaction to the radical changes brought on by, using Kaja Silverman’s term, the “historical trauma” of World War II, a time when "the male subject's aspirations to mastery and sufficiency are undermined from many directions" (52).

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Silverman’s essay “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity” (1992) sets Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” into a historical context, which is important in understanding how the crisis in masculinity metamorphoses. A potential problem with a psychological reading of movies is that insofar they seek a “unified theory” of film analysis, they may seem ahistorical, but films are of a particular time. The crisis in masculinity can be easily enough detected throughout the history of mainstream cinema, which, pace Molly Haskell, tells “The Big Lie” that women are inferior to men. But it is a crisis taking different forms depending on when it appears. The emergence of John Wayne as the ego ideal signifies a sea change in how “The Big Lie” is told, the kid gloves coming off, a more assertive man stepping into the ring. That John Wayne’s privileged status doesn’t occur until after World War II speaks to a increasing sense of panic. By 1945, John Wayne had already filmed two-thirds of his career, his a bankable, easily recognized name, but he wasn’t a household name—certainly not on par with Clark Gable, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, or Mickey Rooney19. His transition from actor to icon is specifically related to the trauma of the war. “Historical Trauma” focuses on three films that show a wounded male subjectivity, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Best Years begins with close-ups of three combat veterans (Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Harold Russell—an Army veteran who had lost both hands during the war20)— flying home from the war, each suffering from psychological and/or physical wounds from the war. As their plane nears its landing, the film cuts to an aerial shot of hundreds of abandoned warplanes littering the landscape. These planes function as a mise en abyme of the sense of castration experienced by the postwar American male. In her discussion of The Guilt of Janet Ames, Silverman writes that the film attributes male insufficiency not only to the war, but to the collapse of traditional gender divisions on the home front demanded by the war effort—a collapse for which it holds the female subject responsible. It moves relentlessly toward the reaffirmation of the sexual status quo, but the machinery of that reaffirmation is rusty, and its workings "show." The Guilt of Janet Ames thus renders unusually transparent the defensive mechanisms necessary for the construction of an "exemplary" masculinity. (53-54)

It’s a tricky business, though, to show men in the vulnerable conditions we see in Wonderful Life, Janet Ames, and Best Years. That screened vulnerability, after all, opens up the possibility that men can be vulnerable. Lacan points out that subjectivity itself is founded on lack, that “what

20

Chapter One

everything starts from is imaginary castration” (Seminar X), but it is a castration that traditionally is disavowed. While mainstream cinema, part and parcel of the Dominant Fiction (discussed in more detail in Chapter Five), normally and normatively conceals this castration-that-is-notcastration, many postwar American films show a hero who “returns from World War II with a physical or psychic wound which marks him as somehow deficient” (53). This wound is potentially destabilizing to a fiction so heavily invested in male adequacy, especially insofar as that a key component of that sense of adequacy is that it is impervious to injury. Though its etiology is lack, the male ego has marshaled all its resources to protect itself from that knowledge, including the acknowledgment of vulnerability. For Silverman, the presentation of the traumatized male subject in the postwar film signals a disintegrating of the Dominant Fiction, that is, that though the heroes in Wonderful Life, Janet Ames, and Best Years triumph over the threats to masculinity, the threat that they might not overrides the sense of closure played out in the films. However, the films described by Silverman are radically different than the John Wayne variety, which desires to put the genie back in the bottle. The secret to John Wayne’s iconicity is that he promises an impervious masculinity. In the American consciousness, John Wayne precludes inadequacy, precludes vulnerability, precludes castration. And, if anything, that desperate will to contain ostensible threats to masculinity has only intensified in the decades since John Wayne’s death. We are still in the John Wayne era. Silverman notes that Althusser “provides the basis for elaborating the relation between a society’s mode of production and its symbolic order” (15). In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), Althusser writes that, within any social formation, “no production is possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the material conditions of production: the reproduction of the means of production” (128). From a Marxist perspective, that is, it’s not enough that the social formation must provide labor for material production; what also must occur is that “the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology” (128). The state thus deploys certain “Ideological State Apparatuses” to preserve its power. While Althusser lists certain obvious ISAs such as religion, the law, and education, he also lists two that are crucial to this study: “the family ISA” and “the cultural ISA.” “The family” is a crucial ideological site insofar as, according to Silverman, “our ‘dominant fiction’ 21 or ideological ‘reality’ solicits our

John Wayne, Mise en Abyme, and Ideology

21

faith above all else in the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject” (15-16). If the family is perceived to be under threat, other ISAs are deployed to protect it. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, the “New Woman”—who wanted, among other things, the right to vote, the right to earn fair wages, and autonomy of her own body—was perceived as a threat to the American family. For example, in an 1895 article in The American Naturalist entitled “The Effect of Female Suffrage,” James Weir writes, Woman is a creature of the emotions, of impulses, of sentiment, and of feeling; in her the logical faculty is subordinate. She is influenced by the object immediately in view, and does not hesitate to form a judgment, which is based on no other grounds save those of intuition. Logical men look beyond the immediate effects of an action and predicate its results on posterity. (821-22)

For the anthropologist Weir, woman suffrage would be “the first step toward that abyss of immoral horrors so repugnant to our cultivated ethical tastes—the matriarchate” (825). More bluntly, Gary Naler, in The Curse of 1920, asserts, “This is what has taken place in this nation by giving women the right to vote—we have been taken into a bondage that has destroyed the American family” (19). Naler wrote that in 2007. Cinema, more specifically, Hollywood mainstream cinema, traditionally works as a “cultural ISA” doggedly fighting to preserve the dominant fiction, women’s autonomy being one of its most dangerous threats. Though Althusser asserts that the most powerful ISA is education, I suspect that cultural apparatuses such as cinema and television have grown more powerful since 1970, at least in America. In “Animating Youth: The Disneyfication of Children’s Culture,” Henry Giroux asserts that “films inspire at least as much cultural authority and legitimacy for teaching specific roles, values, and ideals than more traditional sites of learning such as public schools, religious institutions, and the family” (25). The foundations of western subjectivity—homophobia, white supremacy, and misogyny—are old and durable, but their protectors have spent over a century fantasizing that they’re on their last legs, a tenuous condition requiring ever more vigilant policing. John Wayne’s career and continued popularity bear witness to the virulence of that policing; however, an interesting aspect of that policing is that it plays out in the past. Even when John Wayne was alive, his cinematic popularity, based primarily on his cowboy roles, was rooted in nostalgia. That his cowboys are always in the past serves as a proleptic device, that is, an attempt to neutralize homosexuality, race, and gender anxieties by presenting heterosexual

22

Chapter One

white male supremacy as an uninterrogated “fact” of the American past. Part of the magic of John Wayne cinema is to position its homophobic/racist/misogynous elements in the historical past so a) that the film can seem outside of contemporary politics, and b) that those homophobic/racist/misogynous elements appear to make sense within the context of the film’s diegesis. And furthermore, there are all sorts of problems with having, of all “people,” John Wayne signify ideal masculinity. I’ve put “people” in quotes because it’s not clear whether John Wayne was an actual person: there’s no “there” there. As I’m fond of saying, not even John Wayne was John Wayne—he was Marion Morrison, an actor from Iowa. And though his cowboy and soldier personas are used as templates for ideal American masculinity, there are no facts underpinning those personas. He was neither a soldier nor a cowboy. But such assertions about the relative realness of John Wayne miss the point—ideology is not based on the real. But then again that absence of credentials might work in his favor, especially in light of the 2004 Presidential election, when Vietnam War veteran John Kerrey was trounced by George Bush, who used his parents’ connections to get out of Vietnam. Military veterans nonetheless voted overwhelmingly for Bush, 57%-41%22. While America seems to desire a real hero, actually electing one seems more difficult than it should. Does America prefer the Subject who is so far from “I know not seems” that he is more “I know only seems”? Silverman accounts for this credibility gap, suggesting that “ideology can so fully invade unconscious desire that it may come to define the psychic reality even of a subject who at a conscious level remains morally or ironically detached from it” (Male Subjectivity 23). John Wayne seems to be cinema’s “Absolute Subject,” which Althusser defines as specular, certainly in terms of the mirror image contemporary men desire; but also in terms of speculation, that is, something conjectured. Hollywood Mainstream Cinema especially serves as an arena where masculinity seeks to reclaim its dominance. Cinema and the Masculinity Crisis appear simultaneously.

CHAPTER TWO “LET’S PUT THIS KITTEN TO BED”: JOHN WAYNE AND IDEAL MASCULINITY IN IN OLD OKLAHOMA*

At one point in Bradley Beesley’s terrific film Okie Noodling (2001), one of the noodlers—fishermen who use their bare hands to pull catfish out of rivers and lakes23—submits to an interview as he sits in a lawn chair, the American flag waving behind him. Fair enough, Oklahomans are famously proud Americans. But what underscores Beesley’s mise en scène is that this noodler’s American flag has a portrait of John Wayne superimposed across the flag’s stripes, the brim of Wayne’s hat concealing a couple of (not sufficiently patriotic?) stars. This flag is a powerful image, and underlines how, four decades after his death, John Wayne still casts a long shadow. Though Will Rogers is perhaps Oklahoma’s favorite son— portraying the folksy, commonsensical subjectivity that Oklahoma imagines itself embodying—John Wayne is Oklahoma’s patron saint, always above us, always there, always watching. The film scholar Katherine Kinney calls John Wayne “the model by which young American men accept duty and responsibility” (12), an assertion that seems just as true now as it did in the second half of the twentieth century. Though most of John Wayne’s cowboy films seem located in an indeterminate American “West,” he did star in an Oklahoma-specific film, In Old Oklahoma (1943)24. The film was directed by a real-life Oklahoman, Albert S. Rogell, and it tells a story of Oklahoma’s most famous substance, oil. But that’s where verisimilitude ends. Indeed, the film has a shocking ignorance of Oklahoma history and geography. But, really, that’s beside the point. The real point of the film is to prescribe American subjectivity during World War II, with John Wayne projecting an ideal wartime masculinity, especially how that masculinity relates to the single biggest internal threat to the American way of life: American women. In



* An earlier version of Chapter Two originally appeared in Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies (Oklahoma City: Forty-sixth Star Press, 2009).

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Chapter Two

Old Oklahoma is in many ways the total package of cinematic sadism: homophobia, racism, fetishism, historical amnesia, and—most significant for this chapter—misogyny. The project of the film, responding to contemporary developments in the American wartime economy, is to keep women in their place. In 1943, John Wayne was 36 years old and an A-list Hollywood star. By then he had played the lead in over 75 movies, most of them 1930s oaters where his characters dished out vigilante justice, roles that provide early evidence of his conservative bona fides. Westerners, so heavily freighted with law enforcement anxieties, are convenient vehicles for articulating conservative fantasies, one of the most significant being the lone gunman as key to the settlement of the West (see above comments on Angel and the Badman). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) is a clear example of that fantasy. In the movie, the apron-wearing liberal attorney, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), gains political power at film’s end due to his fraudulently claiming credit for killing the town bully, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Of course, it was the aging cowboy, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who is “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” the implication being that though liberals may claim that law and order conquered the West, that claim conceals the fact that law and order was effected via the gun, or, to deploy the words of NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” John Wayne, though popular, would not become an American icon until after World War II, a time when white men were plagued by fears of disempowerment. In Old Oklahoma is a standard Love Triangle story where two oilmen, Daniel Somers (John Wayne) and Jim Gardner (Albert Dekker), vie for the attentions of Catherine Allen (Martha Scott). The movie begins in 1904 Cleburne, Texas, where, at the train station, Catherine is breaking off her engagement with a local mama’s boy named Walter Ames (Richard Graham). Walter’s mother thoroughly disapproves of Catherine and is also there at the train station—along with her society friends—to hector Catherine. Catherine, it turns out, has recently authored a book, A Woman Dares, which has scandalized the proper ladies in Cleburne. It’s likely that 1943 audiences would have instantly recognized Catherine as a “New Woman,” that is, one of the generation of late-nineteenth/early twentiethcentury women who rejected the long-standing “Cult of True Womanhood” (aka, “The Angel in the House”). These “New Women” were getting newfangled ideas about independence, rights, agency, and—gulp!— suffrage. After telling the women “I’m going where people know it’s the

John Wayne and Ideal Masculinity in In Old Oklahoma



25

twentieth century, where there are broad minds and broad horizons. I’m going to stand on my own feet and be free,” Catherine leaves on the train, desiring to go to Kansas City, where “I can experience some of the things I’ve been writing about.” I say “Cleburne,” because Cleburne, Texas at the turn of the twentieth century was a stop on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad connecting Galveston to Kansas City, but when Mother pronounces “Cleburne,” it sounds more like “Cleveland.” This is a deliberate garble, because, as I will argue later, one of the agenda items in the film is to teach the uppity Eastern woman her proper place in the West. Kansas City is actually 550 miles northeast of Cleburne, and having a woman move from west to east to learn a valuable frontier lesson might be a little confusing to spectators who a) don’t know where Cleburne is, or b) do know where Cleburne is. Unable to find a seat on the train, Catherine is rescued by Jim Gardner, who owns the luxury car at the back of the train. Jim as it turns out is one of the new Oklahoma millionaires, having struck it rich in the oil fields in Sapulpa. He’s also a cad, clear to everyone except this “New Woman.” Gardner takes a shine to Catherine, gives her the nickname “Kitten,” and invites her to get off the train with him in Sapulpa. Now, maybe Albert Rogell wasn’t paying attention during this scene, or maybe he had forgotten his Oklahoma geography, but the train from Cleveland to Kansas City doesn’t stop in Sapulpa. But maybe this is Oklahoma’s fate in the American cinema, an indeterminate place somewhere on the American map25. Just as things are heating up for Catherine and Jim, nine minutes into the film, Daniel Somers enters the car. It seems his horse has just died, so he hopped onto the train, hoping to make his way back West, to either “punch cattle again or wait till my money run out.” Here the love triangle begins. If Catherine were looking for independence, she got on the wrong train: she is now the object of exchange between two alpha males. And, indeed, what follows in the film’s story line is a standard scenario where she can’t decide between the slick millionaire and the decent-butimpoverished cowboy. It’s not a real choice, of course—her fate has been decided in advance. But what is interesting about In Old Oklahoma’s love triangle is that this film does something different. In most love triangle narratives, the woman is a negligible presence. This phenomenon should not be surprising because, for most of human history, women have functioned as commodities in male-male transactions. As Claude Levi-Strauss says in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the woman within the triangle

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exchange “figures only as one of the objects in the exchange [between men], not as one of the partners” (115). For example, in another 1943 film, Crash Dive, two Navy officers (Tyrone Power and Dana Andrews) are competing for the same woman (Ann Baxter). How Ann Baxter’s character feels about the rivalry is of no interest to the film: it is the rivalry between the two men that “counts.” When Andrews dies in the movie, it is assured that Power has “won” the woman. In In Old Oklahoma, on the other hand, Catherine is important in the exchange, but only to the degree that the film is interested in placing her back into her proper role: away from “New Woman”-hood and back to “True Woman”-hood. “Oklahoma” in the context of this film therefore signifies more than a geographical location (wherever it may be); it is a site where white men can reclaim their dominance. And what better dominator than John Wayne, the pre-eminent figure in the history of American mainstream cinema? Beginning with Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail in 1930 and ending with The Shootist in 1976, Wayne played the lead in over 150 films, most of them westerners and war films, two genres obsessed with asserting masculinity. More specifically, those genres’ primary obsession is recovering a masculinity lost to modernity: on the battlefield or in the Old West function as arenas where real masculinity can be located. Think of The Cowboys (1972)—perhaps the sine qua non of westerner-as-social-prescription—where a rag-tag group of unwieldy, unclean, unmannerly, and undisciplined boys has to become men. What are we going to do with kids these days? Fortunately for them, and for cinema-going audiences fanning away the marijuana fumes from Woodstock, John Wayne enters, transforming those boys into proper American men. Can there be a more powerful validation for a redblooded American—man, woman, or child—than when John Wayne says to the now-transformed boys, “I’m proud of you. All of you. Every man wants his children to be better than he was. You are”? With respect to women and women’s behaviors, John Wayne is an even stricter disciplinarian. A crucial component of proving masculinity in the westerner is making sure women know their role: subordinate, obedient, and domestic. The 1940s John Wayne westerners aren’t as overtly sadistic as his late-50s/early 60s films. Nevertheless, Dan Somers’ role in In Old Oklahoma is to make sure that what A Woman Dares is not too daring. Furthermore, In Old Oklahoma doubles John Wayne’s masculine power: he is both a cowboy and a soldier, returning home after serving in Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. That’s some serious mojo. Indeed Dan Somers’ training of Catherine begins almost immediately after he arrives in Jim’s railroad car, where he picks up and, not knowing

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who this “New Woman” in Jim’s embrace is, starts reading a copy of Catherine’s book. Unlike the proper ladies back in Cleburne/Cleveland, Dan is not scandalized by the book. Instead, he finds it an object of ridicule, reading aloud a particularly absurd passage. “I can’t stand any more of this,” he finally says about half way through the book, “I bet whoever wrote that book is some dried up old maid.” I confess that until this moment, I had actually been fooled into believing that the film was on Catherine’s side. Her to-to-toe confrontation with the Cleveland/Cleburne ladies had led me to believe that she was being presented as a courageous, admirable person. But as it turns out, the film itself is on the Cleburne/Cleveland ladies’ side: as she exists in Cleveland/Cleburne, according to the film’s internal logic, she really is a threat, certainly not somebody you’d want married to your son. But within the context of “The City” (which is perhaps what Cleburne/Cleveland signifies in the film), a woman like Catherine does pose a threat to traditional American values. She must be taken out West to learn her lesson. Coincidentally, another 1943 film starring John Wayne incorporates this same theme of the “New Woman” going out West, A Lady Takes a Chance (eerily similar to the title of Catherine Allen’s book, by the way). In this film, Molly Truesdale (Jean Arthur), an office worker in New York City, goes out West to escape her not-so-manly suitors (read: g-a-y). In Colorado she finds Duke Hudkins (John Wayne), whose assertive masculinity reorients her to her proper subordinate role. Of course, it really isn’t a coincidence that The Lady Takes a Chance and In Old Oklahoma, two films about modern women rediscovering themselves in the West, were made in 1943. Like the more overtly propagandistic war films of that time, World War II-era westerners were just as concerned with male and female behaviors. While the ideal “girls back home” in the war movies were keeping “the home fires burning,” their Western sisters across the studio lots were also modeling an idealized subordination. Perhaps even more important were the proscribed roles in both genres: the slutty girl who jilts her GI, or the high-maintenance woman who stands between the cowboy and justice. The agenda motivating these negative models was clear: these women are dangerous. These roles were perceived as crucial to the war effort, crucial to strengthening America’s wartime resolve. Meanwhile, back in Oklahoma, as soon as Catherine arrives in Sapulpa, she is immediately ushered to one of Jim’s oil well sites (it’s the first thing anyone does in Oklahoma, right?), and she gets to witness a “gusher.” The over-the-top phallic imagery of the gushing oil well was perhaps too tempting for the screenwriters (Ethel Hill and Eleanore

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Griffith), who penned the following passage, Hays Code be damned: Jim (to foreman): You better shut her in. Foreman (to crew): All right men, let’s put this kitten to bed! Catherine (to Daniel): He’s turning this into a throbbing new world.

While this dialog would seem more appropriate to Airplane or The Naked Gun, it does underline why Catherine stays in Sapulpa rather than moving on to Kansas City: Oklahoma turns her on. But in the westerner, this is what happens to women escaping from the stultifying confines of the Big City—they like it26. The only task now is to find her place in this new world. No worries, John Wayne is there to show her the ropes. The first thing, of course, is to get her away from the oil well. Like the battlefield, the oilfield is for men only. Wearing one of the weirdest getups in the history of American cinema, Catherine looks like a cross between Joan Crawford and Malificent from Sleeping Beauty, a sartorial signal underlining her fish-out-of-water condition in the film. She must be redirected to a more suitable place: a hotel room. At the Palace Hotel, Catherine meets the hotel’s “proprietress” (read: “madame”), Bessie Baxter (Marjorie Rambeau), who mistakes Catherine for a prostitute: Bessie: How’d you get started, dearie? Catherine: I was bored I guess. Bessie: That’ll do it, every time.

When Catherine assures Bessie that she has not yet slept with Jim—she may be “New,” but not that new—and has no intention of doing so outside of marriage, she gains Bessie’s respect. And the spectator’s respect as well. Insofar as she is the prize for the idealized male subject in the film (surely no one by this point fears she’ll run off with the wrong guy), she must be presented as virginal. This sexual politics is perfectly aligned with the complicated sexual mores of World War II-era America. At that time “good girls” were caught in a double bind: they must, for the purposes of bolstering military morale, be sexually desirable for “our boys,” but not sexually available to them—at least not openly. The penalty for crossing that ambiguous line was harsh: scandal and stigma in the mildest of cases, prosecution in the more severe27. This anxiety can be easily gauged in Catherine, who is a modern woman with modern notions of freedom, independence, and agency. But those ostensibly modern notions do not extend to her body. That body is reserved for the pleasure of the film’s winner, who, by the way, must also disencumber her of those other modern notions as well. Daniel at one point says to Catherine, “My granny

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always says that next to eatin’ with a sharp knife, there’s nothing so risky as a pretty girl tryin’ to look out for herself.” And there’s still an hour to go in the movie! While that final hour is primarily concerned with Daniel’s transformation from soldier/cowboy to oilman (in one sequence, he even steals Jim’s clothes), the film also traces Catherine’s transformation as well. During that time, she learns that if she is to survive in the West, it must be as the helper to the working men. Book learning and fancy ideas about independence might get you noticed back East, but out here in the wilderness, you need to have practical skills to help the men folk. That is, specifically for Catherine, cooking and sewing. While Daniel and Jim compete for the oil rights on Indian land, the only space available for Catherine is within the strict confines of traditional gender roles. In the last third of the film, Catherine (who by this point has figured out that Daniel is the good guy and Jim is a “playa,” but there’s been a misunderstanding between Catherine and Daniel and blah blah blah) and Bessie spend most of their energy providing food and drinks for Daniel’s rag-tag oil crew, desperately trying to get their Indian land oil to Tulsa before the President-Roosevelt-imposed deadline (otherwise the contracts will default to Jim, natch). It should also be noted that in this final third of the film, Catherine’s wardrobe has transformed. No longer looking like Satan’s suffragist, Catherine is now dressed more appropriate to her helper role: polka dot blouse (though saucily tied at the midriff!), ankle-length skirt, and cowboy boots. It is a wardrobe change that mirrors her surrender to the gender mandates of the West. And if the spectator has not fully detected Catherine’s submission, the film ensures it by including an actual nursing scene, Catherine tenderly wrapping Daniel’s injured arm. More than a scene solidifying the romantic bond between Catherine and Daniel, it signals Catherine’s full transformation from Eastern Femme Fatale to Western Lady. What follows is the film’s most famous scene. Because Jim has bought the oil pipeline between Sapulpa to Tulsa, Daniel’s crew is forced to load their barrels of oil onto horse-drawn wagons. They then race this wagon train across the prairie to the Tulsa depot. Several film commentators have suggested that this scene functions as a reference to the Oklahoma Land Run. That may be so, but as I watch it, I can’t help thinking that it seems like every other famous movie about Oklahoma’s past: it’s not actually in Oklahoma. In Old Oklahoma was filmed In Old Utah, so those sweeping vistas, however thrilling they may have been to cinema audiences, just rub me the wrong way. “Oklahoma” might be perfunctorily interesting thematically to the film, but not nearly interesting enough to send a film

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crew. What’s even more irksome is that there are places in Oklahoma that really do look like the Wagon Train Run scenery: the Glass Mountains (pronounced “Gloss,” Yankees) in northwest Oklahoma is remarkably similar terrain. But perhaps Oklahomans are supposed to be happy enough that their beloved state is named in the film’s title28. You no doubt guessed it: The Wagon Train makes it to the depot just in time, allowing the good oil speculators to triumph over the evil oil speculators. More importantly, Catherine winds up in Daniel’s arms, gushing “You Darling.” Like legions of other mainstream American films during the War, she has been transformed from feminist threat to ideal domestic servant. To be blunt, In Old Oklahoma is a dreadful movie. Nevertheless, it does warrant further study. While this chapter is primarily interested in how the film manages the threat that women pose to World War II-era masculinity, there are several other interesting themes in In Old Oklahoma that should be explored: most notably homophobia and Native American historiography. There are hints that Jim Gardner is bisexual: in the first third of the film, Jim’s bodyguard is an Indian named “Cherokee” (a white actor in blackface, Paul Fix, a staple in many John Wayne movies 29 ). While we might be unsure about Jim’s sexual orientation, Cherokee is clearly coded as gay—at one point he washes Jim as he takes a bath, at another, seeing Daniel wearing Jim’s duds, he says “Hey, take ‘em off clothes. Hey you, take ‘em off clothes.” Cherokee is just one of several Indians in the film, the primary subplot being oil speculation on Indian land. When Jim goes to negotiate with the Indians, the Indian chief, Little Sun (played by Charles Bates in an uncredited role), instead offers the land lease to Daniel (who has at this point supplanted Cherokee as Jim’s bodyguard), whom Little Sun intuitively recognizes as honest and trustworthy. To borrow a famous phrase from Roland Barthes, this scene is a “festival of affects,” that is, overloaded with dysfunction. It is certainly a scene that demands more careful inspection, especially inasmuch as it bears witness to—and simultaneously disavows—one of Oklahoma’s most brutal historical legacies: the exploitation of Native Americans. Appearing before Congress in 1980 to petition for Wayne to receive the Medal of Freedom, Maureen O’Hara famously said, “John Wayne is America.” O’Hara was the actress in McLintock! (1963) who in its climactic scene was stripped to her underwear, covered in molasses, and spanked by a coal shovel, all to the delight of the assembled townsfolk. John Wayne was her disciplinarian, “acting out” male fantasies of domination that had grown more virulent and sadistic after World War II.

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The World War II-era John Wayne was no slouch either in that department, however “kinder and gentler” he might seem in comparison. But is he “America”? More specifically, is he “Oklahoma”? We’ll flag that for further analysis.

CHAPTER THREE HOMOPHOBIA AND HOMOEROTICISM THE JOHN WAYNE WAY

Are we then dealing here with competition among males to determine who is the “real man”? Is effeminacy the worst imaginable shame? —Klaus Theweleit [T]orture scenes do work remarkably well in allowing the majority of men in the audience to contemplate the male bodies on the screen without questioning their heterosexuality. —Jeffrey Brown

One of the primary obsessions of the mainstream cinema is compulsory heterosexuality, which traditionally is policed on screen by asserting the male subject’s attraction to women and by purging homosexuality from the environment. I’d like to look at three John Wayne movies—two from the forties and one from the sixties—which deal with the intersection of homosexual panic and homoeroticism: The Spoilers (1942), In Old Oklahoma (1943), and McLintock! (1963). Seen from a Foucauldian perspective, these films, basically representative of the John Wayne oeuvre, bear witness to an obsessive policing of sexuality. What I will argue in this chapter is that the classic westerner in general, and the John Wayne movie in specific, manages the simultaneous energies of malemale attraction and homosexual panic in two ways: 1) it stigmatizes and proscribes homosexuality, and 2) it responds to the fear of homosexuality with physical violence, a violence that strikes me as remarkably homoerotic. In many ways this chapter was conceived in the spring of 2007— March 12, 2007 to be precise. That was the first Monday after the opening weekend of the film 300. The film premiered on Friday, March 9, and had by Monday set two box office records: largest opening day gross for a March release (28.1 million dollars), and largest weekend gross for a March release (70.8 million dollars). To date it is the seventh highestgrossing R-rated movie of all time, earning over a quarter of a billion

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dollars. Thirty-five of those dollars had been spent by one of my composition students, a young man who had gone to see the movie five times over the course of the weekend, never alone, always with at least one guy friend. And on that Monday, he boasted that he would be seeing it again at the first available opportunity. This attraction warranted investigation. What I found is that 300 is both very gay and very homophobic: gay in the sense of privileging male-on-male intimacy, and homophobic in the sense of disavowing a sexual component to that intimacy. Of course, I’m being coy here—the movie is homophobic in the sense that it’s overtly homophobic: within the first ten minutes of 300, the film’s Spartan protagonist, Leonidas, pejoratively refers to the neighboring Athenians as “philosophers and boy lovers.” As absurd as that line is, given Sparta’s well-documented history of pederasty, it is most certainly not to be interpreted as absurd, but rather as an assertion to the presumed male spectator that these Spartan heroes are straight. So there on screen are hundreds of sweating, semi-naked men, working in the (almost) closest possible proximity, their diegetic function to proscribe homosexuality. It’s a weird movie. But an even weirder aspect of 300, because it’s a post-Hays Code movie, is its non-acknowledgment of the implications of the on screen images. There appears to be a tacit agreement between the film and its target demographic that the spectator must view it as “straight.” Though I am being shown explicit images of male power, virility, and potency, I am being compelled to not acknowledge that there’s a homoerotic element to what I’m seeing. The 300 spectator must not have a willing suspension of disbelief, but rather a willful suspension of disbelief, to gaze at the film with a pure, unalloyed nostalgia. This strategy of non-acknowledgment leads me to believe that 300 is a film that pines for the Hays Code, that is, for a “cinematic time” when homosexuality and homoeroticism could be connoted on screen, but presented in such a way that the disavowal of the implications of those erotically charged images was guaranteed. It was not that there was no “there” there, but that the “there” could not be acknowledged. This leads me to John Wayne, because, like the movie 300, with its surrogate Johns Wayne, the 300 Spartans, John Wayne-as-prescription for ideal masculinity in World War II and post-World War II America is obsessed with stigmatizing and punishing homosexuality. But there’s a contradiction to John Wayne-qua-homophobe: his role as moral policeman seems to be at odds with his role as male spectacle. The 6’4” John Wayne with his signature walk and hypermasculinity was an erotic spectacle, just

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as much for the visual pleasure of the male spectator as for the female. However, insofar as John Wayne reifies homosexual panic on screen, male attraction to him must not be acknowledged. A “guy movie,” such as those featuring John Wayne or 300 Spartans, seeks to purge homosexual longing, but that purging must occur within the close quarters of male-only groups, that is, those groups which constitute the target demographic of the film. However much these narratives “fix” the problems that threaten male unity (most often women), any fixing that happens occurs, according to Fuchs, “between the representational poles of homoeroticism and homophobia” (195). Though these movies privilege the relationship “between men,” what materializes on screen, as in classical fetishism, is an attraction simultaneously presented and disavowed. In contemporary cinema, this disavowal consists of assertions of the heterosexual bona fides of the male “couple,” e.g. Martin Lawrence’s being married and Will Smith’s being a Casanova in Bad Boys (1995). But that’s contemporary cinema. During Hollywood’s Golden Age, homosexual panic was managed with a more oblique instrument: the Motion Picture Production Code. This code, better known as the Hays Code, was Hollywood’s selfimposed censoring program, in effect from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. As is true for many endeavors, the Code’s primary obsession was sex. Item 4 under the heading “Sex” forbids “Sex perversion or any inference [sic] to it.” “Sex perversion,” as everyone knew, meant “homosexuality.” In The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo notes that from its inception, the film industry was “under tremendous pressure from the Catholic Church and other civic and religious groups” to remove immoral content from its product (31). Chief among those groups’ concerns was the depiction of “sissies” and “pansies” on screen, figures that before the Code denoted homosexuality. The most famous of these hitherto-denoted/ henceforth-connoted homosexuals were William Haines, Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett Horton, and Grady Sutton. As early as 1909, editorials were calling out Hollywood for its myriad perversions. The Chicago News cried that movies were showing “features of life that should not be mentioned even in a whisper in the presence of decent people.”30 Getting more to the (gay) point, The Hoboken Observer claimed that “There is slowly creeping into the business a tendency to use pictures which tend to degrade the morals of those who see them,” the most shocking tendency being “to corrupt, strike the weakest point in human character—that of natural tendency” (33, italics mine). The advent of talking pictures, which added those gay figures’ voice signifiers to the denotation (e.g., a lisp to augment the actors’ hitherto .

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exaggerated pantomime), threw various groups into full-spectrum homosexual panic. In Behind the Screen (2001), William J. Mann describes an early talkie that fueled that panic: In his 1930 comedy Way Out West31, William Haines played a ranch hand working for Leila Hyams. In one scene, Hyams mistakes him for her maid, calling him “Pansy.” At this, Haines can’t resist a knowing little smile. He waits a beat, looks quickly into the camera, and replies: “I’m the wildest pansy you ever picked.” (121)

A “knowing little smile” in the silent film era was one thing; adding a vocal signifier to the mix, writes Mann, “only made everything far more real.” To neutralize the panic, the Catholic Church formed an Orwellian organization, The Legion of Decency, which asserted that “The pesthole that infects the entire country with its obscene and lascivious moving pictures must be cleaned and disinfected” (qtd. in Spring 89). The Code materializes to neutralize that panic. With respect to Haines, we see just how quickly the Code worked. The openly gay Haines was named by the Quigley Poll as Hollywood’s top box office attraction in 1930. However, upon the advent of the Code, Haines refused to conceal or disavow his homosexuality, a stance that resulted, at age 35, in his being out of the movies by 193532. Cinema as a signifying system is, using the famous words of Roland Barthes, a “festival of affects,” 33 that is, a site of dysfunction. The obsession to transfer homosexuality from the denotative to the connotative constitutes a major performer in that festival. Though nominally about making sure movies were family-friendly, the Code was rather a designifying strategy, seeking to preserve films as instruments of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. In his terrific essay “Anal Rope” (1990), D.A. Miller argues that connotation is “the dominant signifying practice of homophobia” (125). Miller uses Hitchcock’s famous 1948 film as an example of how culture deploys connotation to erase homosexuality from public discourse: On one hand connotation enjoys, or suffers from, an abiding deniability. To refuse the evidence for a merely connotated meaning, is as simple— and as frequent—as uttering the words “But isn’t it just. . .?” before retorting the denotation. On the other, this maneuver is so far betrayed by the spirit of irritation, willfulness, and triumphalism in which it is infallibly performed, that it ends up attesting not just to the excesses of connotation but also to the impossibility of ever really eliminating them from signifying practice. (124)

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That is, that the overarching will to deny “the evidence” is a carapace that fails. Rope is a film about two gay murderers, but because homosexuality is forbidden, its signifiers are mobilized in an elaborate cat and mouse game where connotation is first presented, then disavowed. For example, one of the gay men, Brandon (John Dall), tells a woman that his telephone is in the bedroom, to which she replies, knowingly, “How cozy,” implying, according to Miller, “that more than one person, of no more than one sex, must sleep there” (124). However, this connotation is later retracted when the men’s housekeeper tells a guest that the telephone “is in the first bedroom,” implying that there must be a second bedroom34. Where the carapace fails is that however desperately this or any other film tries to transfer homosexuality from the denotative to the connotative, the elaborate methods of “constructing an essentially insubstantial homosexuality” have the opposite effect of “rais[ing] this ghost all over the place” (125), that is, that no matter how desperately a film tries to consign connotation from “meaning” to “not meaning,” the signifiers are nevertheless everywhere. Pretending the signifiers are absent is the rhetorical work of the Hays Code. This pretending or feigning procedure “worked” in Hollywood because 1) the Hays Code does not explicitly identify homosexuality: the term the Code uses to define homosexuality, “sex perversion,” like the term sodomy, has just enough “abiding deniability” to it to simultaneously mean and not mean the thing it’s supposed to define; and 2) homosexuality, as Vito Russo writes in The Celluloid Closet, “does not officially exist” (32). Insofar as homosexuality is the love that dare not speak its name, the word for it can not even be written in the censorship program designed specifically to forbid it. Thus, getting back to the clearly eroticized male body on screen, when the male body is projected for the enjoyment of the male spectator, it cannot be “inferred” or inferred as a homosexual object because homosexuality is proscribed by the Hays Code. It can’t be gay if gay doesn’t exist, right? The Hays Code therefore worked as a containment strategy for four decades, the decades, coincidentally, featuring John Wayne in all his splendor. The Code worked to contain homosexual panic—the fear not only that movies might be queer but also that they might be making me gay35—rendering the male body as exclusively denoting heteronormativity. The John Wayne film is different than Rope, of course. There are enough triggers in Rope to suggest a slippage between denotation and connotation, but whereas Hitchcock seems to be self-consciously, even playfully exploring the poles separating “daring” and “not daring” to speak

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the name of homosexuality, the John Wayne film—especially the postwar John Wayne film—polices (homo)sexuality in a far more disciplinary way. Inasmuch as the John Wayne film is self-righteously in the business of compulsory heterosexuality, it more strictly manages “this ghost.” How to deal with the “problem” of homosexuality presented a double bind for the mainstream cinema industry during the Hays Code era: though it’s easy to cinematically proscribe adultery, bank robbery, murder, and various other social evils, how does one proscribe homosexuality if it is expressly (sort of) forbidden from being on screen? The negotiation of that double bind materializes in many John Wayne movies. For example, in Big Jim McLain (1952), John Wayne plays the titular character, a House Un-American Activities Committee investigator who travels to Hawaii with his partner, Mal Baxter (James Arness), to bust up a communist ring36. Made years before the proper “Buddy Movies” of the 1980s and ‘90s37, Big Jim McLain follows the two tall (John Wayne 6’4”, Arness 6’7”), beefy, handsome Americans with a certain degree of anxiety. There are several shots of the two strapping heroes as they stride through the streets of Honolulu, shots indicating that the film is reveling in its displays of hyper-masculinity; but the homoerotic connotations of those displays mandate compensatory elements to neutralize any suspicions the spectator might have about the agents. They are, after all, “a couple.” To neutralize homosexual panic, Big Jim McLain testifies to the heterosexual bona fides of the two leads. Mal has a wife and family back home, and Jim, perhaps unaware of its hitherto existence, finds his own heterosexuality in the exotic climes of Hawaii, romancing a beautiful war widow, Nancy Vallon (Nancy Olson). But the most insidious way the film manages homosexual panic is the tried and true method: make the bad guy gay. The bad guy in Big Jim McLain is Sturak, played by Alan Napier, best known as Batman’s butler in the 1960s TV series. “Sturak” is a commonenough Russian last name, but it was likely chosen because it rhymes with “Durak” (ɞɭɪɚɤ), meaning “idiot.” Sturak is queered in the film via his lispy British accent and fastidiousness. Here Big Jim McLain links not only crime but also anti-Americanism with homosexuality, a convention materializing during the Cold War as a component of communist hysteria. According to William J. Mann, “For many, sexual perversion and political subversion became interchangeable. The Right linked homosexuality with sedition, equating it with moral weakness and conflating it with Communism” (Behind the Screen 287). In 1950, for example, Republican National Chairman Guy George Gabrielson wrote in a newsletter that

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“Perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government” (qtd. in Gross and Woods 355). Even the commonly used pejorative Pinko, meaning communist sympathizer (i.e., not quite Red), has the connotation of queer. Insofar as homosexuality had been consigned to the connotation closet, it was easy pickings for right-wing cinema during the Hays Code era: homosexuality could be stigmatized with impunity because, though showing homosexuality was proscribed, implying homosexuality was authorized as long it was “clearly” (as clearly as it could be given that it’s “not really there”) being frowned upon. In other words, homosexuality, as long as it was projected as bad, could be there and not there simultaneously. According to Russo, homosexuals, however tenuously they materialized in movies, could only be “pathological, predatory and dangerous; villains and fools, but never heroes” (122). Prime examples of the threatening variety are the homosexual panic-inducing threesome of Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook in The Maltese Falcon (1941); Clifton Webb in Laura (1944), and lesbian assassin Rosa Klebb (Lotta Lenye) in From Russia with Love (1963).38 The John Wayne film McLintock! (1963), discussed below, features the “fools” variety, the eastcoast college boy Matt Douglas, jr. (Jerry Van Dyke). Rather than “reluctant,” the male spectator has always enjoyed gazing at the male body, on screen or otherwise. The problem, though, is that that scopophilia is proscribed: it dare not speak its name. However, the movie theater offers him a space where all forms of scopophilia can be concealed. In “The Imaginary Signifier” (1975), Christian Metz argues that the emergence of the movie theater is an important psychological/pathological moment, liberating spectators to engage in the voyeurism they worked so diligently to conceal in broad daylight, the darkened space of the movie theater being “very suitable for handling ‘erotic scenes’ which depend on direct, non-sublimated voyeurism” (62). Roland Barthes (1989) describes the filmgoer as a kind of hypnotic: [H]e goes to movies as a response to idleness, leisure, free time. It's as if, even before he went into the theater, the classic condition of hypnosis were in force: vacancy, want of occupation, lethargy; it's not in front of the film and because of the film that he dreams of—it's without knowing it, even before he becomes a spectator. There is a ‘cinema situation,’ and this situation is pre-hypnotic. According to a true metonymy, the darkness of the theater is prefigured by the ‘twilight reverie’ (a prerequisite for hypnosis, according to Breuer-Freud) which precedes it and leads him from street to street, from poster to poster, finally burying himself in a dim, anonymous, indifferent cube where that festival of affects known as a film will be presented. (345-346)

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Soon after Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure,” film scholars took note of the tobe-looked-at-ness of the on-screen hero, though, early on, this noting often involved a certain amount of restraint, for example, Rodowick (1982) observing that “sexual aims may be directed toward the male figure” (8), and Neale (1983) that “the male image can involve an eroticism” (13). These may be directeds and can involves bespeak a historically specific hesitancy to “out” the male spectator attracted to screened male bodies. It might seem that I’m neglecting the scopophilic experience of 50% of the movie audience, that is, women, but, insofar as the mainstream cinema industry is almost entirely controlled by white men, it seems evident that the industry’s consideration of women spectators is, to be generous, limited. If, as Pam Cook and Claire Johnston (1974) assert, that women in the cinema are reduced “to images and tokens functioning in a circuit of signs, the values of which have been determined by and for men” (qtd. in Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity 25), then it stands to reason women are considered this way as spectators as well. Furthermore, the profitability of women’s pleasure in looking at the screened male body is an accidental benefit in mainstream cinema’s controlling interest in compulsory heterosexuality: licensed with the suspicion that women too enjoy gazing at the male body, the cinema industry is under no constraint, lest its product be interpreted as anything other than heteronormative, to temper its presentation of beefcake. A deeper complication is that, to the degree that women’s visual pleasure is even considered in the presentation of the male body, mainstream cinema may assume mistakenly that women spectators gaze at men in the same objectifying manner as men spectators. Further complicating things is the degree to which any non-white-heterosexualmale spectator’s visual pleasure is considered in Hollywood cinema production. Hollywood’s “consideration” of the female spectator has traditionally been infantilizing, insulting, and patronizing. I’m reminded of Joan Crawford’s famous assertion that the success of her movies was directly proportional to the number of gowns she wore in them, an implication diagnosing the certain tendency of Hollywood cinema to presume that the way to get women to come to the movies is to feature lots of glamorous stuff. Not much has changed: the truth of Crawford’s assertion is borne out in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a film which tries to argue that the fashion industry is dysfunctional and toxic; but this argument is compromised by the film’s goggle-eyed, fetishistic fawning over the dresses, shoes, and handbags jam-packed into almost every frame. According to The New York Times, Prada’s costume designer, Patricia Field, was given access to over one million dollars in designer materiel. If

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anything, the movie is a two-hour commercial for the major players of an industry it ostensibly condemns39. Peter Lehman’s reassessment of “Visual Pleasure” in Running Scared (2007), justly interrogates Mulvey’s assertion that the male body cannot bear the burden of objectification40. Marsha Kinder also takes Mulvey to task for discounting the women’s visual pleasure, noting “examples within Hollywood cinema of men functioning as the erotic object of the female gaze—not just Valentino in The Sheik or Gary Cooper in Morocco, but even John Wayne in Stagecoach” (201). The problem with these positions is that they assume that women’s visual pleasure is factored into mainstream cinema’s representation of the human body. Women’s enjoyment of screened men’s bodies conceals the fact that those bodies are for the enjoyment of the male spectator. A certain type of cinema emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s, that is, postHays Code, as a result of that awareness of the forbidden pleasure, the jouissance, of the male subject as object of erotic gaze—the subject as object. The emergence of this cinema has problematized film spectatorship. The early scholarship of this phenomenon posited that masochism feminized the male, which gets to the root of Mulvey’s assertion that the screened male cannot bear the burden of objectification: Mulvey and her 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s contemporaries, rooted in Freud’s conclusions that sadism is a masculine trait/masochism a feminine, assumed that erotic presentations of the male body in cinema threaten to place the male in a passive, therefore feminized, position. That is certainly a burden the male spectator—to say nothing of the on screen hero—is loath to bear. Silverman notes that the male ego “cannot avow feminine masochism without calling into question his identification with the masculine position” (190). Interestingly, the ‘70s and ‘80s analyses of on screen male bodies was coincident with an explosion of Hollywood movies presenting physically tortured male bodies, an explosion that would become dwarfed by 1990s and twenty-first-century cinematic violence against the male body. But what is missing from these and contemporary analyses of male bodies is a discussion of the role the Hays Code played in the manner in which the eroticized male body is represented. Perhaps that is what is different: the Hays Code “disappeared” the homosexual element of the on screen male, a disappearance brought into sharp relief in the John Wayne movie. The Hays Code as containment strategy had consigned homosexuality to the connotation closet; but once the code was abandoned in the late 1960s, the “insubstantial homosexuality” described by Miller threatened to emerge from the closet. As it could during the Hays Code era, the male

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body could be presented afterwards in an erotic way, but that way was a serious problem for a cinema industry so heavily invested in compulsory heterosexuality. Neale writes, “[I]n a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed” (14). In the world of mainstream cinema, the Hays Code worked as the most important element in that repression, but once the Code was abandoned, the repression took a different form, masochism. Masochism has replaced the Hays Code as Hollywood’s primary containment against homosexuality. Since the 1970s, Hollywood movies have exercised far less restraint in representing the eroticized male body on screen, but in the absence of the Hays Code, with its built-in homosexuality disqualifier—it can’t be gay because that would be against the rules, and, it goes without saying, gay is not a thing—those on screen images become fraught with an ever increasing homosexual panic. Think of Conan the Barbarian (1982) or Lethal Weapon (1987), which feature the eroticized bodies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson in a fetishistic way similar to classic Hollywood representations of the female body. Aren’t Schwarzenegger’s and Gibson’s bodies, like Marilyn Monroe’s and Sophia Loren’s, on screen for their to-be-looked-at-ness? The action movie, a genre gaining immense popularity post-Hays Code, functions as the primary site of this masochistic trend. It is a genre obsessed with displays of the male body, but those displays are ambivalent, because while the action movie functions as a proving ground of “true masculinity”—the spectacular male body being a major part of that assertion of masculinity—the display of the body “raises the ghost” of homosexuality ostensibly exorcised by the Hays Code. Fuchs discusses this tension, noting that “buddy movies,” a subgenre within action cinema, are caught “between the representational poles of homoeroticism and homophobia, in love with their self-displays and at odds with their implications” (195), that is, that the display of those bodies—e.g., the famous shower scene between Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone in Tango & Cash (1989)—has a homosexual element, but that homosexuality must at all costs be disavowed. For example, the bond between Riggs and his partner, Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), in the Lethal Weapon franchise, has a homoerotic tension the movie franchise cannot bear, so the franchise manufactured a buffoonish gay character, Leo Getz (Joe Pesci), in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) to neutralize that tension—“Getz” being a fratboy pun on “gets.” Like Matt Douglas in McLintock!, he is another of the “fools” described by Russo.

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Masochism functions as the post-Hays Code strategy for managing homosexual panic. So as to neutralize it, many Hollywood movies contrive to purge suspicions of homosexuality by brutally torturing the to-belooked-at male bodies. One of the earliest examples is the famous scene in A Man Called Horse (1970) where British aristocrat John Morgan (Richard Harris) submits to the Lakota ritual of suspending the warrior initiate from the lodge ceiling with ropes skewered into his pecs41. It is a shockingly explicit scene, even by contemporary standards, which positions the hero into traditionally feminine condition of submission. However, the white supremacist context of the movie trumps this “threat”: this Great White Hunter can take any punishment doled out by the “savages.” By the 1980s, torture had become a de rigeur context for presentations of the male body. In Conan the Barbarian (1982), Conan is crucified to a tree; in Lethal Weapon (1987), an Asian assassin (Al Leong)—evoking the Vietnam humiliation—uses an electrically charged probe resembling a giant penis to torment a shirtless Riggs. Similar scenes appear in Papillon (1973), Rocky (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Scarface (1983), The Princess Bride (1987), Silverado (1985), The Punisher (1989), First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part Two (1985), Die Hard (1982), and the Missing in Actions (1984, 1985, and 1988). Since the 1990s, this will to punish has ramped up, contemporary cinema increasing the severity of the masochism, e.g., Braveheart (1995), Payback (1999), Conspiracy Theory (1997), Syriana (2005), The Passion of the Christ (2004)42, Reservoir Dogs (1992), Casino Royale (2006), The Last King of Scotland (2006), the Hostel and Saw franchises, and, most grotesquely, 300 (2006). Silverman’s etiology of this phenomenon in Male Subjectivity at the Margins examines the contradictory element of masochism, which, at its most basic level, is “the introduction of large quantities of excitation into the psychic economy” (47). Attempting to negotiate this problem of masochism—that though it is a traditionally feminine affect, it nevertheless materializes as a type of masculinity proof—she posits a “reflexive masochism,” which not only maps two very different desiring positions at the level of the unconscious, but fosters the production of two contrary images of self— the image of the one who pleasurably inflicts on behalf of the exalted standard which it purports to be, and that of the one who pleasurably suffers that pain. (325, my italics)

This reflexive masochism, according to Silverman, involves “an intrinsically homosexual beating fantasmatic” (9), which, as it pertains to film

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spectatorship, suspends the male spectator’s confrontation with his internal drives. The humiliation/mutilation of the tortured body seals off the male spectator’s suspicions about his viewing the on screen male body. Cinematic tortures function then as a type of visual prolepsis, that is, in rhetoric, an anticipation of a possible objection: that there might be an erotic component to that body, so the film desires, is neutralized by the fact that the body is suffering. The suffering of the eroticized white male body creates a context where the homoeroticism is concealed. The new Hays Code. And built into action cinema are other prolepses as well, one being that, well, those tortures are simply part of the film’s storyline. Another is that torture scenes attest to the durability and toughness of the white male body, Tania Modleski (2007) suggesting that on screen torture is “counterphobic,” showing “the ‘phallic’ toughguy able to withstand the most intense horror and pain [thus] enabling the spectator to go out to meet, to face down, and to survive his very worst fears” (62). Underlining just how true Barthes’ assertion is that mainstream cinema is a “festival affects,” the tortures furthermore articulate the historically specific fantasy that white masculinity is under attack43. Torture and martyrdom. Again, a “squaring of the ego’s audits”: the presentation of the eroticized object followed, for the purpose of neutralizing homosexual panic, by its abjection. Getting back to the subject of John Wayne, there is no less “gay” in the representation of John Wayne’s body than in post-Hays Code movies; insofar as John Wayne as a figure desires to denote ideal male subjectivity, his body is a significant part of the overall package—not only his imposing, muscular body, of course, but also his signature walk and commanding voice, what Krin Gabbard and William Luhr (2008) call “a highly mannered assemblage” (7). The physical John Wayne is a carefully manufactured construction to denote virility, power, and dominance—an audio-visual cocktail of male primacy chiefly for the male spectator, especially the post-World War II man living in a condition of trauma. As mentioned earlier, the proscription against presenting or implying homosexuality did not prevent homosexuality from being implied. From here, I’d like to look at three John Wayne films where homosexuality is being implied within the context—it’s inaccurate to say constraint insofar as the films are not interesting in constraining its connotations—of the Hays Code. The first example is from the 1943 film In Old Oklahoma directed by Albert Rogell, which is a standard “between men”-style love triangle involving Dan Somers (John Wayne) as a cowboy transplanted to a turn-

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of-the-twentieth-century oil boomtown in Oklahoma. His rival is cityslicker oil tycoon Jim Gardner (Albert Dekker). The object of their affection is Catherine Allen (Martha Scott). In Old Oklahoma offers an early example of how the homosexuality proscription works in the John Wayne movie. Soon after the rivalry between Jim and Dan has been established, the men coincidentally find themselves in the same bathhouse, taking baths in adjacent tubs. The scene seems risqué for 1940s cinema, so, to neutralize any homosexual panic the spectator might experience at the sight of two naked men in such close proximity, the film has John Wayne loudly and comically sing “Red Wing,”44 a popular song from 1907, the hope being that this humor will distract the spectator from the implications of this meeting. Moments into the scene, Jim’s manservant “Cherokee” (Paul Fix in blackface), enters the room delivering towels and grooming products. Jim orders Cherokee to wash his back, whereupon Dan says, “Oh, he does that, too?” It’s an interest comment, and heavily freighted with homosexual tension. But it’s a comment with just enough “abiding deniability” to it to seem as if it might be something other than what it is, an implied homosexual relationship between Jim and Cherokee. This deniability is complicated by a double take that Cherokee gives to Dan, signaling that he “gets” the implication of homosexuality. Furthermore this scene marks John Wayne as the moral figure who both roots out and stigmatizes the homosexuality which might or might not be being connoted. What we see here is that intersection between the “poles of homoeroticism and homophobia”: the homoerotic display of the two male leads’ bodies and, as if the film acknowledges the implication of that display, an immediate policing of sexuality. This scene is similar to contemporary proscriptions against homosexuality, where a male will describe something that might have a certain homosexual/homoerotic implication, but then ostensibly slam the door on the implication by saying, “No homo,” thereby asserting his own heterosexual bona fides, especially with respect to an immunity to homosexuality. As in, “John and I went to the strip club last night. No homo.” As the scene progresses, we will see the John Wayne template for how homosexual panic is managed: homosexuality is implied—Hays Code be damned—but its presence creates a tension that must be neutralized. To adapt Mulvey to this discussion, I sense that it is a tension “the film cannot bear”: soon after this homoerotically charged bath occurs, an act of physical violence follows—Dan knocks out Cherokee with one punch. There is an insidious racism to the bathhouse scene as well, the stigma

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of homosexuality transferred to the minority figure—where it is apparently authorized to rest. Compare this scene with the famous dance sequence from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), where the sexual ambivalence of the scene (that is, “dancing” as a device to assert heterosexuality) is putatively mitigated by the boys-will-be-boys fight scene immediately afterward. This compulsion to “punch out” homosexuality also materializes in another John Wayne film, The Spoilers (1942). Like In Old Oklahoma, The Spoilers involves a love triangle, this time involving Roy Glennister (John Wayne), Alexander McNamara (Randolph Scott), and Cherry Malotte (Marlene Dietrich). I suspect that these Hays Code-era love triangle films function as precursors to the contemporary buddy movie: pace Eve Sedgwick, these stories seem to be dealing with the attraction “Between Men,” the woman trapped in the triangle a negligible presence, merely the exchange object, perhaps even a canard meant to divert attention from the implications of the rival males’ relationship. Anyway, in The Spoilers, the relationship between good guy Glennister and bad guy McNamara has reached its climax. As McNamara attempts to rape Cherry, a heaving Glennister bursts into the bedroom, and the inevitable fight is consummated. Glennister jumps onto McNamara and they land on Cherry’s bed. The first time I saw this movie, I couldn’t believe my eyes: two men, in clear violation of the Hays Code, jumping on a bed together! But whereas In Old Oklahoma takes its time neutralizing homosexual panic, The Spoilers overdrives the violence mandate: the fight scene between Wayne and Scott is immediate and is over four and a half minutes long— the longest fight scene I’ve ever seen in a movie, perhaps its length meant to make the spectator forget about the whole two-men-on-a-bed thing. The third movie I’d like to look at is McLintock! (1963). I will discuss the film in more detail in the next chapter, but, briefly, McLintock! attempts to deal with post-World War II masculine anxieties by urging men to reclaim their dominance. Pretending to be a Western Taming of the Shrew, McLintock eliminates the ambiguity of the “of” in Shakespeare’s title (who tames whom?) by sadistically punishing the story’s shrew. The film argues that what these uppity women need—and secretly desire—is to be dominated by their men. But McLintock! is an equal opportunity employer: though primarily interested in punishing women, the film also addresses other problems threatening white male dominance, namely liberalism, big government, minorities, and, of course, homosexuality. As in In Old Oklahoma, McLintock! locates homosexuality onto a Monstrous Other, this time not onto the Native American, but rather onto

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one of the most reliable hobby horses of the Westerner: “Back East.” In the world of the westerner, the west is the location where ideal masculinity is proven; on the other hand, “Back East,” that is, those states on the east coast north of the Mason-Dixon line, represents stagnation, claustrophobia, intellectualism, the “New Woman,” and homosexuality. McLintock!’s homosexual is Matt Douglas, jr. (Jerry Van Dyke), a hometown boy who has recently returned after graduating from Harvard College. Suspicions about Matt’s orientation are borne out in the Founder’s Day dance scene, where McLintock’s major domo, Drago (Chill Wills), is forced by McLintock’s uppity wife, Katie (Maureen O’Hara), to formally introduce Matt Douglas, who “will bring you folks the latest terpsichorean dance steps [. . .] directly from New York City.” Matt then prances on the dance platform, much to the delight of the gathered women. It’s clear that Matt’s literally limp-wristed dance codes him as gay, the dance itself of course, but also that it’s from New York, and also from the cuts to the discomfited reactions by the men, who shake their heads and drink their beers. This scene serves a dual function: it articulates the threat that “Back East,” with its newfangled ideas and behaviors, meaning “gay,” presents to the community; and, furthermore, given their ecstatic response to Matt’s dance, women’s collusion with this “gay agenda.” As you no doubt have guessed, this scene is immediately followed by a fist fight, once again the film responding to homosexual panic with violence, a violence that locates the film in the context of the Hays Code. While the film does not take Matt “behind the woodshed,” that is, the frontier-style method of beating up the suspected homosexual to set him straight—notably used in the pistol-whipping death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998—the violence in such close proximity to the gay connotation appears to be a sadistic reaction to the perceived threat homosexuality poses to the community. Upon the long-overdue death of the Hays Code, that violent reaction to homosexuality would metamorphose from sadism to masochism.

CHAPTER FOUR JOHN WAYNE AND TEA PARTY IDEOLOGY

[T]he dominant cinema specifies woman in a particular social and natural order, sets her up in certain positions of meaning, fixes her in a certain identification. Represented as the negative term of sexual differentiation, spectacle-fetish or specular image, in any case ob-scene, woman is constituted as the ground of representation, the looking-glass held up to man. —Teresa de Lauretis What he feared was that the world would turn out to be different than he had always believed. That was what they all feared, he thought. His parents too. That their own little world would dissolve like a soaked piece of paper and reveal something else behind it. —Vidar Sundstøl

John Wayne was an A-list Hollywood star before 1948, but he did not become John Wayne until after World War II. Wayne’s soldier and cowboy—the same character, really—were more than commanding screen presences: they functioned as testosterone-fueled reassurances of the centrality and virility of the American white male in the post-World War II era, an era marked by trauma. To channel Bonnie Tyler, America after the war needed a hero, and he’s gotta be larger than life (that song was written by two men, by the way45). John Wayne qua John Wayne materialized because it was a time of national crisis on four fronts: the Cold War, the War between the Sexes, homosexuality, and the Civil Rights movement, though I’m not sure which one seemed a graver threat to white American masculinity. What I do know is that only John Wayne was man enough to stand up to those threats, and his solutions to those four “threats” provide the template for the contemporary Tea Party movement. I will look at the 1963 film McLintock! to see how John Wayne articulates Tea Party ideology. The contemporary Tea Party movement began in January, 2009 when, immediately following the inauguration of President Barack Obama, millions of terrified white folks announced their solidarity with the 1773

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Boston Tea Party participants. Their putative agenda is lower taxes (TEA stands for “Taxed Enough Already”), reduced government, laissez-faire economics, and a literal interpretation of the Constitution (most importantly the Second Amendment—I first saw the Tea Party’s official bumper sticker—“I’ll Keep my Guns, Freedom, and Money. . . You Can Keep the ‘Change’”—in February, 2009); but their real raison d’etre is to preserve White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, a system ostensibly under threat when an African American took power. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say under more threat, given the right wing’s obsession with returning to a better time, that mythological American past when everything was stable, commonsensical, structured, happy. . . it makes no difference that such a past never existed, but to the right wing, every progressive measure is a step farther back from that edenic moment. While it would be accurate to define the Tea Party as a White Supremacist reaction to the Obama presidency, such a limited definition would ignore other factors entangled in Tea Party ideology, notably misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-liberalism. For some mysterious reason, the Patron Saint of the Tea Party movement is Ronald Reagan. As Warner Todd Huston in the Rightwing News gushes, [T]hen came the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan and it was “morning in America” again. He ran as a believer in American exceptionalism even as so many were convinced that such a feeling was simple-minded even imbecilic. Reagan made us believe in America again. In fact, that is the one thing that he told people that he wanted to be remembered for [. . .] Ronald Reagan believed in America and he made us believe in her, too.

But as many writers have noted, Reagan’s actual policies do not jibe with Tea Party ideology. Karl Frisch notes, in addition to Reagan’s unprecedented deficit spending, he gave amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants, negotiated with terrorists in Iran, supported the conservative maligned Earned Income Tax Credit, sought to eliminate nuclear weapons, and signed an abortion rights law in California.

I bring up Reagan because Tea Party confusion about who exactly Reagan was and what he actually did makes sense when you consider that Reagan himself wasn’t Reagan; as a politician, he was rather an encoded John Wayne—a vote for Reagan was instead a vote for John Wayne, who is the ultra-nationalist misogynous racist that current Tea Partiers imagine Reagan to have been. And fortunately for us, John Wayne left a body of

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work that, unlike Reagan, actually does articulate what the Tea Party wants. It is no exaggeration to assert that John Wayne is the most popular actor in the history of cinema. Beginning with The Big Trail in 1930 and ending with The Shootist in 1976, Wayne played the lead in over 150 films, most of them westerners and war films, two genres obsessed with asserting masculinity and nationalism. More specifically, those genres’ primary obsession is recovering a masculinity lost to modernity: on the battlefield or in the Old West function as arenas where real masculinity can be located. McLintock! was released in 1963, the tenth film from John Wayne’s Batjac production company, which began making movies in 1955 with Blood Alley, starring John Wayne and Lauren Bacall. In 1955, John Wayne had been Hollywood’s most high-profile anticommunist crusader for almost a decade, a career that had begun even before McCarthyism itself, when he joined Reagan, Walt Disney, Ayn Rand and several other prominent Hollywood conservatives in an Orwellian organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization dedicated to weeding out communists in the movie industry. Director Sam Wood (Pride of the Yankees and Goodbye Mr. Chips) and actor Ward Bond (The Maltese Falcon and It’s a Wonderful Life) had formed the MPAPAI in 1944, Wayne coming aboard in 1947. He served as president of the MPAPAI for three successive terms beginning in 1949. In the late 1940s, the MPAPAI organized several “Crusade for Freedom” rallies. At one Wayne said, “The past ten years the disciples of dictatorship have had the most to say and have said it louder and more often. All over the world [the Communists] pour their mouthings into the ears of the people, wearing down their resistance by repeated hammerings of half-truths. That’s where our Crusade for Freedom comes in” (qtd. in Munn 125). Replace “disciples of dictatorship” and “the Communists” with “the liberal elite” or “the lamestream media,” and you have a Sarah Palin rally. When McCarthy began his witch hunts, John Wayne was first in line to lend his support. The MPAPAI was the gateway drug which ultimately led to the ‘roid rage of the Hollywood blacklists. A literal anti-communist crusader, Wayne became the figurative version in 1952 with the vomitous Big Jim McLain—where two strapping House Un-American Activities Committee agents (Wayne and a preGunsmoke James Arness) take their bromance to Hawaii to break up a communist cell (led by Batman’s butler, Alan Napier). McCarthyism had taken a major hit in 1954 when Joseph McCarthy was formally censured by the U.S. Senate, thus ending his political career.

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That fact only served to mobilize John Wayne, not subject to Senate censure, who saw his production company as an instrument that could fill the void left by the junior senator from Wisconsin. Being the story of an American sea captain who helps a benighted Chinese village escape the clutches of the Communists, Blood Alley boldly announces Batjac Productions’ alignment with McCarthyism. As I mentioned earlier, McLintock! was the tenth Batjac production. But it was the first after John Wayne’s biggest catastrophe, The Alamo, an anti-communist allegory which had come out in 1960, timed to support the Richard Nixon campaign. Wayne had sunk his entire fortune into the movie, and it was a financial and critical failure. It took Batjac three years to marshal the resources to finance another picture. Wayne needed a hit, so he went back to a standard westerner template for McLintock! He also brought in a trusted team on the project, hiring Andrew McLaglen as director and James Grant as screenwriter. Grant knew the formula to make a hit, saying, “All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank” (qtd. in Wills 278). McLintock! does not disappoint. McLintock! tells the story of George Washington McLintock, a turn-of-the-century cattle baron who must deal with his estranged wife, Katherine (Maureen O’Hara), who has returned from the east coast to divorce him, a divorce he does not want. Like the 1960s white male, G.W. McLintock is traumatized by a radically changing world—a disappearing frontier, the encroachment of immigrants, newfangled ideas, big government, and most threatening of all, women. Like contemporary Tea Party strategies, his solution to these problems is to return to a simpler, better time when his power was uninterrogated. Though McLintock! imagines itself a hilarious retelling of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, it loses the play’s scrupulous ambiguity: Does the hero tame the shrew, or is he tamed by the shrew? There’s no mistaking who tames whom in McLintock!—the hysterical white male subject, traumatized by modernity, must reclaim his dominance, by violence if necessary. Though this reassertion of white male dominance is the overall project of the film—and of the Tea Party—there are other elements in the film that suggest that, rather than the U.S. Constitution, McLintock! may be the Tea Party’s ur-text. The film opens at G.W. McLintock’s massive cattle ranch, where the patriarch is suffering from a hangover after a night of debauchery in the town named after him. The previous night, he had tossed his cowboy hat up to the house roof, where it landed on the weather vane. This tossing of the hat serves as a recurring theme in the movie, a visual metaphor of McLintock’s sexual prowess. The local Hispanic boys have gathered at the

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house to race one another to retrieve the hat, their prize being the hat. I’m interested in this scene not because it presents McLintock as a man drowning his troubles in the bottle, but rather in its depiction of minorities, the Hispanics here presented as children living happily and gratefully under the benevolence of a generous white master, even providing his entertainment. You know how I know they’re Hispanics? They’re all wearing panchos, which they wear even as they’re scrambling up the house to get the boss’s hat. Race is shown even more sadistically later when G.W. brings home a beautiful widow, Louise Warren (Yvonne de Carlo), to take over kitchen duty from his trusted Chinese cook, Ching (H.W. Gim, who, it should be mentioned, was in at least 17 movies between 1938-1969, but only received acting credit in four, McLintock! not one of them). Ching doesn’t want to retire, but McLintock’s butler, Drago, threatens to cut off Ching’s hair if he doesn’t agree to retire. Reassured that he will still live on the ranch as “part of the family” rather than forced back to China, Ching agrees, but not before saying, “Family Clazy” and “Lousy Lelatives.” As with the Hispanic boys, McLintock! shows Ching, not as a human being, but rather as a comical part of the mise en scène, which, as it turns out, is the film’s method: asserting male privilege and white supremacy via comedy, so as to neutralize spectator suspicions about the gender and race politics playing out on screen. In the first half of the film, Native Americans are shown no less clownishly, with two Native Americans selected for derision: a man, Running Buffalo (John Stanley) who plays the “drunken Indian” stereotype, constantly calling out, “Where’s the whisky?” The other is an elderly woman, Tiny Mouth, who, it is suggested was an Indian prostitute. About her, McLintock says, “You wouldn’t believe it now, but 20 years ago she was a mighty handsome maid.” As is true for Gim, neither actor is credited in the movie. In the second half of the film, Native Americans feature more prominently in McLintock!’s most absurd subplot: a group of Indian chiefs, recently released from federal prison, petition the government to get their land back. Established earlier in the film is that fact that before he was the biggest landowner in the territory, McLintock was an Indian fighter whose greatest nemesis was the Comanche warrior Puma (Michael Pate46). Now Puma is the leader of the pardoned chiefs, and, upon arriving in town, asks McLintock to plead the chiefs’ case, the right to return to their land, to a government panel. Puma asks McLintock to plead their case to the panel, which is doubly absurd insofar as a) McLintock’s earlier profession was to exterminate

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Indians, and b) the probability that the land the Indians want to return to is McLintock’s ranch. McLintock indeed argues passionately for the government to give the Indians their land back, but the request is denied. These scenes crystallize how race anxieties are managed in American pop culture: the White Subject displaces and/or exploits the minority populations, but imagines himself to be adored by those populations, here signified by Puma and McLintock being “blood brothers,” even imagines himself to be their biggest advocate. But when justice is perverted (for example, the seizure of Indian lands and the revocation of post-Civil War promises to African Americans), the White Subject can shrug his shoulders and say, “Well, I did the best I could.” Another tension in the film is the contrast between the benevolent power of the white patriarch and the impotent, corrupt power of the government. This is shown in many ways in the film, but one in particular warrants consideration. In town one morning, McLintock and the town sheriff, Jeff Lord (Chuck Roberson), come upon a lynching party. A homesteader, Jones (Leo Gordon), has strung a rope to a scaffold, and is about to hang Running Buffalo, whom Jones suspects of abducting his daughter. With the rope around his neck, Running Buffalo says, “Where’s the whisky?” Sheriff Lord rushes up to the scaffold to free Running Buffalo, but is effortlessly beaten up by a homesteader. It is only when McLintock intervenes that the lynching party is busted up. What is significant about this scene to me is the sheriff’s impotence— though he is first on the scene to break up the hanging, he is quickly dispatched by the lynch mob. The implication is that law and order is kept by the patriarch, not by the legal system put into place by the patriarch. This “good guy with a gun” fantasy has real-world implications: the Florida “Stand your Ground” law—successfully invoked by George Zimmerman in his shooting of an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, in 2012—is predicated on that fantasy, it’s a priori that law enforcement is too impotent to protect “us.” As Quirt Evans does in Angel and the Badman (discussed below), McLintock, with his noble sense of right and wrong, produces justice alone, with the added benefit of seeming a friend to the Native Americans. The primary obsession of McLintock!, though, and I would argue that that is also true of the Tea Party movement, is the policing of women’s behaviors. It turns out that Katherine left G.W. because, well, boys will be boys, and he would have an affair or two. But this film engages in no pofaced finger-wagging at wayward men: it in fact fully embraces the double standard, asserting that women just need to deal. The film furthermore suggests that Katherine’s haughtiness at catching G.W. in the act of

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adultery is itself a behavior that warrants punishment. The thrilling climax of the movie occurs when G.W. has finally had enough of Kate’s hoitytoityness, and chases her through town to discipline her. What plays out in this scene is what you normally see in a horror movie, the helpless female running away from her attacker, who always catches up to her even though he is walking. The difference in McLintock! is that comical music is playing, and the entire population of the town are present to support G.W. Over the next few minutes, Kate is stripped to her underwear and subjected to a mock tar-and-feathering (involving molasses and a pillow), until finally he catches her and, much to the delight of the townsfolk, spanks her with a coal shovel. Having had enough, G.W. agrees to the divorce and urges her to go Back East where she belongs. But playing on the long-held male fantasy that when a woman says no, she really means yes, the chastened Katherine begs G.W. to take her back. The film ends with a thoroughly tamed Kate submitting to her husband’s authority, and, noticing G.W.’s successful cowboy hat-on-theweather-vane trick, even gushing about G.W.’s sexual prowess. The first time I showed this film to students, back in 2003, I asked the class if they were comfortable with Kate’s public humiliation, and one male student said, “The bitch deserved it.” I get that: I know that for many men, the movies are an important location where fantasies of male power play out, where that uppity girl from the We Can Do It poster can be thrust back in the home where she belongs, where she can be forced to submit. But what I don’t get is women’s investment in this power dynamic. In her essay “The Tea Party and Angry White Women,” Ruth Rosen notes that between one-third and one-half of Tea Party activists are women. “Why have so many women been attracted to the Tea Party?” she asks, To put it bluntly, one reason is that some women love men who love guns, love men who hate the government and loathe taxes, or love men who are not afraid to voice racist and xenophobic feelings. In short, they are the intimate partners of Tea Party men. (61)

But a deeper reason, Rosen argues, is that women make up a large percentage of voters dedicated to the same principles as right-wing men, issues such as immigration, abortion, homosexuality, and so-called family values, and the Tea Party offers them a voice within that discursive space. With respect to spectatorship, I would add another factor: conditioning. In 2006, after showing McLintock! to another group of students, I asked, “Why would women like this movie?” A woman answered, “That’s all we know.”

CHAPTER FIVE JOHNS WAYNE

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. —Charles W. Mills Since September 11, 2001, much of the West has been gripped by a stereotyping frenzy. —Ewan and Ewan

Kaja Silverman forcefully argues that American mainstream cinema is a crucial component of the “Dominant Fiction,” that is, the ideological constructions—primarily “the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject” (Male Subjectivity 16)—buttressing the patriarchal order. Like Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t, Silverman’s study is a deployment of Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” i.e., a demonstration of how mainstream Hollywood cinema functions as an ideological apparatus. What is not adequately addressed in Althusser, de Lauretis, or Silverman, however, is the degree to which white supremacy factors into Hollywood materiel. bell hooks addresses this deficiency, asserting that, with respect to Hollywood, “family” means “white family,” and “male subject” means “white male subject.” Subjectivity means white subjectivity, which to me goes a long way in explaining the enduring popularity of John Wayne, a figure whose over-the-top masculinity desires white subjectivity to be so overpowering as to preclude interrogations against it. In the current phase of the long held-over Masculinity Crisis, mainstream cinema is crucial: it is where ideal white masculinity is located, and John Wayne is the template for that ideal. According to Krin Gabbard and William Luhr (2008), “no player in the long history of the cinema has been as important as John Wayne in showing men what it means to be masculine [. . .] For generations, he has stood as a dominating ideal for American masculinity” (3-4). Gabbard and Luhr’s “has stood” is an accurate tense: The Duke persists as the model white American male, the American ego ideal.

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Frank Sinatra, whose superstar status was contemporary with John Wayne’s, inspired legions of copycat singers: Vic Damone, Tony Bennett, Dick Haymes, and Steve Lawrence, to name a few. But though there were legions of cinema heroes concurrent with John Wayne, none were really like John Wayne, whose screen persona is no less mannered than Frank Sinatra’s singing style, no less recognizable, but there are no stars contemporary with John Wayne whom you could name a copycat. There was and continues to be a cottage industry of John Wayne impressions, most of which are campy even when they seem to be trying to honor that presence. But his ideological significance is contingent on a tacit agreement between the spectator and the medium, both conspiring to pretend that this mannered style, like John Wayne himself, is something other than what it actually is, something at best spectral, at worst nonsensical. But then again that “conspiring” may be the nature of ideology: we know that the voice, the mannerisms, the walk are strategies to materialize an ideal subjectivity, but insofar as they are performative rather than actual—reifications of things non-existent—we fantasize that the signs are the signifiers. And we cannot acknowledge this conflation as made up. This discursive/ideological arrangement is what Ottave Manoni calls the je sais bien mais quand même, “I know all the same but nevertheless.” And brings to mind Judith Butler’s axiom that “gender is a performance.” Of course, Butler goes further: “as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (522). Gender is performed in conditions of perceived duress, the result of which is a sexual economy of surveillance and punishment. Mainstream cinema not only gauges that economy—women and men within the medium submitting to historically mandated roles, their having no freedom to escape compulsory heterosexuality—but also polices it as well, strictly regulating the heterosexuality of the male subject and the subordination of the female object. One of the reasons that John Wayne works as the ego ideal is that he is a ringer in the fight for White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal power, which after World War II imagines itself in a heightened condition of duress. John Wayne was certainly a successful Hollywood actor before and during the war, but John Wayne as superstar is a postwar phenomenon, beginning when he was a middle-aged man and lasting well past his death at age 72 in 1979. Google search results reveal that 1950s and 1960s images are vastly more popular than earlier images, a fact suggesting that we prefer the patriarchal John Wayne. After the trauma of the war, John Wayne’s screen persona merges the traditional male hero with the nom du pere: postwar conditions perceived

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as so threatening to masculinity that they mandate both the Oedipal subject and the no-of-the-father patriarch, stacking the deck, so to speak, to ensure the survival of the status quo. In postwar John Wayne, we don’t see the man breaking free, but rather the man submitting to the traditional roles assigned him, a submission that grants him the right to discipline those who don’t submit. With respect to gender regulation, one can see the punitive consequences play out in McLintock! where George Washington McLintock is both the husband who reins in his uppity wife and the father figure to his future son-in-law, Devlin Warren (played by John Wayne’s real son, Patrick Wayne), whom he beats up in a fight 21 minutes into the film. So the film spectator witnesses gender performed and policed, most importantly with the punitive consequences foregrounded, and in such a way to facilitate its naturalization in the spectator’s real life. So John Wayne’s screen primacy was that for four decades he was both heroic subject and disciplining father. His legacy is that he has sired two generations of Johns Wayne to urge men to “cowboy up,” to urge women to lie down. America pines for a lost masculinity that John Wayne ostensibly embodied. Any cursory glance at the Free Republic website, which functions as an unfiltered cistern of right-wing thought, will reveal panic at the “Wussification,” “Pussification,” “Sissification,” “Pansification,” “Girlification,” “Metrosexualization,” and “Feminization” of the American male, conditions that John Wayne functions as the antidote for. Gender Studies in the last two decades has managed to get the word out that there was never any “lost masculinity”—men are no more or less “manly” now than they were in the past—but the prevailing belief that there was an ideal masculinity somewhere in the past, that it must at all costs be recovered, and that John Wayne signifies it is remarkably powerful and present. Michael Kimmel dates this Crisis in Masculinity to the latter half of the nineteenth century. Though it is certainly true that, as Lynne Segal says, “masculinity is always in crisis” (239), there is a contemporary strain of masculinity anxieties dating from the woman suffrage movement. Phenomena such as the advent of many organized sports—baseball, soccer, and American football were organized in the 1850s, the same decade as the Seneca Falls Convention; rugby in 1871; tennis in 1872; hockey in 1875; basketball in 1891—bodybuilding (1893), the return of the Olympic Games (1896), the Boy Scouts (1910), goat gonad xenotransplantation (1918), and, most importantly for this study, the vast popularity of narrative cinema are historical-hysterical responses to concerted efforts by women to demand full citizenship/full subjectivity. Kimmel points out that the modern American man is acculturated to

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believe that women are bad, that terms such as feminine, girl, and woman are pejorative, anathema to attaining true masculinity. Kimmel argues that woman is “the negative standard by which men measure their own value” (5). More than sports, more than the Boy Scouts, even more than goat gonads, though, the American mainstream cinema is the most significant reaction to this gender panic. And the star of stars in the cinema firmament is John Wayne. John Wayne played the lead in over 150 films, but his position as the ubermensch of American cinema is a post-World War II phenomenon. By the end of the war, John Wayne had already filmed two-thirds of his career, his a bankable, easily recognized name, but he wasn’t a household name—certainly not on par with Clark Gable, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, or Mickey Rooney (four actors, by the way, who actually served their country during the war). His transition from actor to icon is specifically related to traumas associated with the war. Kaja Silverman’s “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity” (1992) sets Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” into a historical context, which is important in understanding how the crisis in masculinity metamorphoses. A potential problem with a psychological reading of movies is that insofar as it seeks a “unified theory” of film analysis it may seem ahistorical, but films are of a particular time: they function as a location where historically specific issues manifest themselves. The crisis in masculinity can be easily enough detected throughout the history of mainstream cinema, which, pace Molly Haskell, tells “The Big Lie” that women are inferior to men. But it is a crisis taking different forms depending on when it appears. The emergence of John Wayne as the cinema icon signifies a sea change in how “The Big Lie” is told, the kid gloves coming off, a more assertive man stepping into the ring. That John Wayne’s privileged status doesn’t occur until after World War II speaks to an intensifying sense of panic. Beginning in 1947, one or more of his movies appeared in each year’s top-ten highest grossing films for 27 out of the following 28 years, an unprecedented run of success, especially considering that, though he had been an A-list actor for 17 years before 1947, he had appeared in only one film landing in the annual top ten box office successes, The Big Trail in 1930. His primacy is a reaction to the radical changes brought on by the “historical trauma” of World War II, a time when "the male subject's aspirations to mastery and sufficiency are undermined from many directions" (52). According to Silverman, the two historical traumas are World War II and “the collapse of traditional gender divisions on the home front demanded by the war effort—a collapse for which [men] hold women responsible” (53).

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The John Wayne film is conventional: it is in lockstep with the standard features of classical Hollywood cinema, and, being unashamedly patriarchal, it knows what the male spectator wants, and it delivers the goods every time: John Wayne, 6’4” and 240 pounds, functioning as the “main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify” (8), the ne plus ultra object of white male identification. The magic of the cinema is that it functions as a space where the male spectator can go to play out his fantasies, fantasies that (re)center and (re)assert the male ego. So when the male spectator sees John Wayne, especially John Wayne on the big screen, he sees not only a big, powerful man, he sees his own “screen surrogate”: As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. (Mulvey 13)

John Wayne’s iconicity is crystallized in Angel and the Badman (1947), in which he plays the titular old-west “badman,” Quirt Evans, who after getting shot in an ambush, is nursed back to health by a Quaker family, the Worths, whose water supply has been illegally commandeered by a rancher, Frederick Carson (Paul Hurst). Quirt, as the spectator suspects, isn’t really bad, just a bit in the legal gray area—like most cinema cowboy heroes, he has a strong sense of right and wrong. And a gun. Once Quirt regains his health and learns of Carson’s dastardliness, he saddles up and rides up to the Carson property to confront the unethical rancher, to right the wrong. What plays out is a standard wish-fulfillment fantasy. Cinema in general and westerners in specific are rife with law enforcement and legal anxieties. Families such as the Worths in Angel and the Badman and the Starrets in Shane (1953) find themselves at the mercy of evil men. Seems that there’s always some widow out there whose farm is about to be seized by some bastard banker. Furthermore, that these good folks can’t rely on the local law enforcement or the legal system for help because those institutions are either impotent or in cahoots with the evil men. The solution to their problems: the lone white gunman. Quirt mounts his horse and rides slowly and confidently to the Carson Ranch. When he arrives at the ranch house, Quirt immediately notices that Carson has dammed up the creek that once streamed to the Worth farm. Carson confronts Quirt, instructing him to “vamoose.” Quirt dismounts and orders Carson to “take off the top two planks” of Carson’s illegal dam.

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“And who might you be when you’re at home?” asks Carson. “Quirt Evans.” A closeup of Carson’s face reveals terror. Quirt, after all, is an infamous badman, the sort of hombre no one—not even an evil rancher— would want to tangle with. Cowed, Carson orders his men to take off the top planks, saying to Quirt, “I don’t need all that extra water.” Once the planks are removed, the water flows freely down to the Worth farm, the Worths looking to the heavens in relief and gratefulness. As is true with respect to Rambo 40 years later, the wish-fulfillment element involves the insertion of the great white hero into dangerous territory. The John Wayne result: problem solved. No sheriff. No lawyers. Minimal discussion. Total time elapsed: two minutes, eleven seconds. On the surface, this scene is absurd—intensely, maddeningly absurd— but it’s easy to see why it would be attractive to the spectator: “the allure of the simple is addictive.” Wouldn’t it be great to have some badass fix my utilities problems? In addition to being nonsensical, though, this scene on a deeper level reifies white male fantasies of empowerment and adequacy, that he alone can transform chaos to order. This lone gunman fantasy, however, exacerbates our material problems: it is a misnomer to call those reified fantasies reifications insofar they are materializations of things that never existed in the first place: no lone gunman ever transformed chaos to order, not even in the Old West. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that our subscription to this fantasy has a paralyzing, rather than empowering, effect. Judith Hess Wright (1974) argues that the cinema spectator is “encouraged to cease examining his/her surrounding, and take refuge in fantasy from his/her only real alternative—to rise up against the injustices perpetrated by the present system upon its members” (18). History, literature, and cinema have always overvalued—cathected, using a term from psychology—the role patriarchy has played in the “betterment” of civilization. When patriarchy itself is the problem, our fantasy solutions, so heavily invested in the legitimacy of patriarchy, are not only in vain, but also counterproductive. This John Wayne formula worked for over four decades, until the cataclysmic events of the 1960s and ‘70s necessitated better, stronger, faster Johns Wayne. Even a better, stronger, faster medium: the westerner died and was replaced by the action movie. The advent of the James Bond movie in the early 1960s hammered the last nails into the westerner and war movie coffins, those genres by then losing their power to treat an erectilely dysfunctional masculinity. Since 007, we’ve seen a dramatic spike in the number of action movies, a genre where one can find, according to Rikke Schubart, "the most celebrated

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myth of utopian masculinity" (192). It’s no stretch to say that the action movie is the most popular genre in all cinema, Hollywood or otherwise, certainly the most lucrative. Consider this: there have been 14 billiondollar-earning film franchises at the American box office: Harry Potter, The Avengers, Star Wars, James Bond, Batman, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, Spider-Man, Twilight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek, Transformers, X-Men, and Iron Man, 13 of which are action movies, the unifying structure of which is that they feature a white male hero whose endeavors are crucial to the survival of his community, suggesting that the “utopia” action cinema desires is managed by the same people who manage us in the real world now. Within the action movie medium, Hollywood delivered three new Johns Wayne: Phase 1) The 80s surrogate Reagans, Sylvester Stallone (specifically as Rambo and Rocky) and Arnold Schwarzenegger; Phase 2) The post-Stallone/Schwarzenegger mutations, such as Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films, Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon films, Keanu Reeves from the Matrix films, and Indiana Jones, who, like Rambo and The Terminator, have the necessary ass-kicking skills to defeat the enemy (and stimulate the male spectator), but unlike their troglodyte predecessors, can speak English relatively well—they are the kinder, gentler Johns Wayne. Even Stallone and Schwarzenegger entered Phase 2, their roles in movies such as Tango & Cash and Kindergarten Cop desiring to distance the actors from their ID-iotic past; and Phase 3) The twenty-first-century superheroes, such as Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Wolverine, and Iron Man, whose turbo-charged bad-assery represents the current phase of Dukification. Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger materialized to fill the Duke’s considerably large shoes. John Wayne’s death in 1979 came at a bad time: by that time, Vietnam, the women’s movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the gay rights movement had so traumatized traditional masculinity that coping devices such as the westerner and the war movie were no longer adequate. And, of course, John Wayne himself got old, his roles as the over-the-hill Colonel Kirby in The Green Berets (1968) and the over-the-hill police lieutenant in McQ (1974) articulating exhaustion rather than virility. With no more Duke to set things right on screen, Hollywood produced his immediate successors, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, whose over-the-top masculinity was akin to allowing NBA players in the Olympics: a cast-iron guarantee of victory “this time.” The most obvious problem with this first wave of anti-feminists, though, was their absurd inexpertise with standard English. More silent film

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villains than talkie good guys, the hyperbolically muscular Stallone and Schwarzenegger seemed curious choices to take up John Wayne’s baton. However, their lack of speaking skills—Rambo/Rocky’s monosyllabic grunting and Arnold’s just-the-right-amount-of-Nazi accent—wound up being pluses rather than minuses. Barbara Creed writes, “Both actors resemble an anthropomorphized phallus, a phallus with muscles” (65). In the 80s, so it seems, we didn’t need fancy talkers: we needed gigantic phalluses that could fill the hole left by The Duke’s departure. In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo, commissioned to go into Vietnam to rescue American POWs, asks his former commander, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), the quintessential question from a traumatized White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy: “Do we get to win this time?” If you knew nothing of American history, you might find Rambo’s question confusing: who are the “we”? And “win”? Win what? What does “this time” mean? Keith Beattie asks, “Who are ‘they’ that wouldn’t let us win last time?” (22). But American spectators in the mid1980s knew what Rambo was on about: “we” means “America,” “win” means “the Vietnam War,” and “this time” means “now that we’ve got Reagan in the White House instead of that pussy Carter.” But the “we” is also “masculinity,” so traumatized by a decades-long losing streak that it produces a distortion to guarantee a “win this time.” The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency was imagined a corrective to his predecessor, the allegedly weak Jimmy Carter. In Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (2000), Sally Robinson writes, “In the seventies [. . .] American imperial might is diminished, its energy in crisis, and America itself is ‘held hostage’ to foreign powers. America is getting fucked in the seventies” (45). What America needed in the eighties was a leader who could be the fucker instead of the fuckee, someone who could “win this time.” If not in reality, then at least cinematically with the phallic phalanx of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. In her essay “Can Masculinity be Terminated?” Susan Jeffords noted that the over-the-top physical masculinity displayed in the action movies of the 1980s was giving way to cinema heroes who have been constructed as more internalized versions of their historical counterparts. More film time is devoted to their explorations of their ethical dilemmas, emotional traumas, and psychological goals, and less to their skill with weapons, their athletic abilities, or their gutsy showdowns of opponents. (245)

Jeffords’ prediction was that the 1990s would usher in a new era of a kinder, gentler hero who “instead of learning to fight, learns to love”

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(245). To a degree, we see this temperance in the second phase of Johns Wayne, where our action heroes soften up a bit. Indiana Jones, Martin Riggs, John McClane, and Neo are more articulate, more thoughtful, more user-friendly Johns Wayne, especially in the sequels, but though less cartoonish than Stallone/Schwarzenegger, they are not radically different: they still have the John Wayne feature of an extraordinary physical prowess designed to center male subjectivity, to reassure the American white male that he is the master of the universe. It seems possible that the grotesque masculinity we witnessed in the first phase of Johns Wayne would have just faded out, the softening we see in Phase 2 petering out to lifeless flaccidity, especially insofar as we were seeing our Phase 1 and 2 heroes, as we had with the Duke himself, grow old before our eyes in the sequels. Perhaps even a termination of the action film altogether. But then 9/11 happened, and it changed everything in American popular culture. It was the trauma that consolidated all the masculine anxieties stemming from the FDR reforms, World War II, 1960s civil reforms, and Vietnam to usher in the third wave of Johns Wayne. In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi argues that American culture’s response to 9/11 was a reactionary desire to reassert the more overt articulations of White Patriarchal power, its most enduring symbol being John Wayne. “Welcome Back, Duke” was the headline of Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column of October 12, 2001. What strikes me, remembering the Reagan-Bush years, is that John Wayne never left, but 9/11 provided the impetus to pine for him as such, to suggest that hard times called for a hard man. 9/11 seemed to mandate a superhuman John Wayne to tackle the seemingly intractable problems facing this new, dangerous world. Mainstream Hollywood films since 9/11 have been marked with an increasing sense of panic and have attempted to contain that anxiety by manufacturing a new generation of turbo-charged heroes, the superheroes. Spiderman, Wolverine, Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Iron Man are the post-9/11 Johns Wayne. Given their extraordinary popularity—Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine, and Iron Man are members of the billionaires club—it’s safe to say we have a trend. Even in their human forms, that is, as Clarks Kent, these superheroes have all the cards stacked in their favor: white, heterosexual, male, and, of course, American. But in the post-9/11 world, we find even THAT is not enough; they need spidey sense, x-ray vision, and those crazy claw thingies on Wolverine to augment their already privileged status, as if to suggest that the white male as himself is inadequate. What these superhero movies desire to articulate is the eternal adequacy of the white male subject, that he is indispensible, but what they

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really articulate is impotence. The law enforcement/social programs anxieties we see play out in the John Wayne westerner are writ larger in the post-9/11 superhero movie, where we see a civilization in a condition of paralysis and decay, perhaps best symbolized in Pixar’s Wall-E, set on a planet of junk, a postmodern version of the abandoned warplanes in The Best Years of our Lives. I’m reminded of the comic trope in the Sam Raimi Spider-mans: cops and firefighters impotently loitering around during crises, clearly powerless against the crimes and fires erupting all around them, only the great white savior equipped to solve these problems. However well this trope works to center white male subjectivity—the spectator identifies of course with the superhero rather than the donuteating cop—the fact remains that the actual human beings we see are completely worthless. And that however desperately these movies attempt to center white masculinity, what we see is something we absolutely cannot be. While the mainstream cinema has remained obsessed with the superhero John Wayne for over a decade, popular fiction has provided a more flesh-and-blood John Wayne: Jack Reacher. Reacher, as he is known in the novels, is John Wayne+. Whereas John Wayne was 6’4”, 240 pounds, Reacher is 6’5”, 250 pounds, implying that John Wayne himself is not quite John Wayne enough to handle the complexities of the contemporary world. Reacher even gets an extra syllable in his name. Reacher is a contemporary version of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from The Searchers: a cynical, ruthless, murderous obsessive whose strong sense of right and wrong obviates his having to submit to the inconveniences of due diligence. Like John Wayne heroes such as Edwards and Sergeant Stryker, Reacher is an unattached loner, a convention in literature and cinema heroes articulating an ideological ambivalence. Silverman accurately names “the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject” as the key components of the Dominant Fiction, but the classic lone gunman text has difficulty squaring those components. If we use Ethan Edwards and Shane as poster boys for the Dominant Fiction, we find that though they have the “adequacy of the male subject” down pat, their interest in preserving family unity is problematic. The plot of both films, The Searchers and Shane, is the lone gunman rescuing a family in distress (the Starrets in Shane and the Edwardses in The Searchers), a diegetic problem solved at films’ end, but it should be noted that, however unified the family is as the film credits roll (the Starrets rid of the evil rancher, Debbie Edwards returned to her home), the hero is not part of that family—both Shane and Ethan ride off into the sunset. Thus

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we see a contradiction involving “the unity of the family”: as scrupulously and obsessively as these films are in asserting their heroes’ adequacy, there appears to be some slippage in the relationship between the hero and the unified family. The hero’s adequacy manifests itself as physical prowess—fighting and shooting skills. But that adequacy does not stretch to the family realm. Ethan, after all, spends the majority of the time in The Searchers looking for Debbie in order to kill her. In the same way that the divorced Ronald Reagan and the alcoholic George Bush could signify “family values,” the cinema hero can preserve the American family without actually having to be in one. We see this problem in Reacher novels as well, where Reacher’s vigilante justice, in addition to being a cost-effective way of handling crime, has the added benefit of functioning as a healing mechanism for wounded families. In several novels (The Persuader, The Hard Way, Tripwire, and Worth Dying For), Reacher functions as the Ethan Edwards figure, obsessively tracking the sadistic bad guy terrorizing a family. In The Persuader (2003), for example, Reacher infiltrates an illegal weapons operation run by Zachary Beck, a devoted family man with a wife and college-aged son. As the story progresses, we find that Beck is actually a pawn being used by the real bad guy, Francis Xavier Quinn, whose similarity to The Searchers’ villain, Scar, is manifested in literal scars47: bullet wounds from when Reacher had shot him 10 years earlier. Quinn’s evil bona fides include cutting off women’s breasts with a knife. When Reacher catches Quinn—significantly in the Beck home—he buries a knife into Quinn’s skull, then rides off into the sunset (in a Cadillac instead of on a horse), leaving the Becks in a state of family unity. All the novels terminate with Reacher catching the bad guys and then mercilessly killing them. For example, in The Affair (2011), Reacher, sitting in the back seat of an SUV, deploys his “football-sized” hands to break the necks of a corrupt senator and his military officer son who is a serial rapist, then leaves the SUV on railroads tracks so that the subsequent collision will appear to be an accident. Earlier in the novel, with a single punch to the neck, he had killed a high-ranking Pentagon officer who had been covering up the crimes. Cinemagoers had to wait over a decade for Jack Reacher to arrive on screen, but, in one of the most unintentionally hilarious casting mistakes in film history, the part went to the famously wee Tom Cruise, 5’7” and 150 pounds. Of course, I realize that Tom Cruise himself purchased the film rights in 2005, doubtlessly with an eye on playing the titular titan, but that’s no excuse. If anything, Tom-Cruise-as-Jack-Reacher-ness underlines a certain arrogance in White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, that white

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male privilege is so powerful that even Tom Cruise gets to be Jack Reacher. The secret to John Wayne’s iconicity is that he promises an impervious masculinity. In the American consciousness, John Wayne precludes inadequacy, precludes vulnerability, precludes castration. And, if anything, that desperate will to contain ostensible threats to masculinity has only intensified in the decades since John Wayne’s death. We are still in the John Wayne era, ever more Johns Wayne materializing to continue the legacy.

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I’d like to examine the race ramifications of the post-9/11 Johns Wayne. Throughout its history, mainstream Hollywood cinema’s primary ideological investment is in preserving White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. Though we may look at Birth of a Nation (1915) as an extreme example of a preserve-white-subjectivity-at-all-costs project—KKK members saving America from the threat of an African-American takeover—how different is it, really, from thousands of mainstream movies whose diegetic elements move heaven and earth to preserve white male privilege. Take, for example, while we’re on the subject of heaven, Warren Beatty’s 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, where the top of the food chain American Subject, a white professional quarterback, is whisked up to heaven prematurely and gets to return as a white American billionaire back on earth, where he gets to be both a billionaire AND a quarterback. And sleep with Julie Christie. Or consider The Artist, which won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Picture, where an arrogant silent movie star loses his privileged status due to the advent of the talkies, but of course we spectators are not satisfied with this date with karma; rather, we are horrified at the loss of his money, his wife, his mansion, and his chauffeur, and we are swept along as the upand-coming starlet who had enjoyed the noblesse oblige of the hero back in the good old days deploys her influence to restore him to his rightful place at the top of the food chain. Or consider Admission (2013), where Princeton University admissions officer Portia Nathan (Tina Fey) sacrifices her career to get an underachieving white kid—sure, he doesn’t have the grades, but he’s got a lot of potential!—into the Ivy League school. Confronted with persistent and disturbing signs of race inequality, mainstream white American culture is obsessed with asserting that those signs don’t exist, or that they mean something else. “Racism,” asserts Dinesh D’Souza in his 1996 book The End of Racism, “is a thing of the

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past.” Thus we are confronted with terms such as “post-racism” and “raceneutrality,” which are not descriptions of material reality, but rather articulations of desire. My experience teaching at predominantly white schools is that these terms are in currency because White Subjectivity wants them to be true, irrespective of evidence. In a White Supremacist coup, D’Souza even turns racism around: he coined the term “rational discrimination” to suggest that African Americans experience discrimination not because Whites are racists, but because African Americans are dysfunctional. This redefinition of race politics proved to be solid gold to the American right wing, who could now assert that if inequality existed (and they’re not sayin’ it does), it was the minorities’ own damn fault. In her 1999 essay “Legitimation Crisis and Containment: The ‘AntiRacist White-Hero’ Film,” Kelly Madison suggests that the persistent conditions of inequality in post-Civil Rights America created a “legitimation crisis” for White Subjectivity, that is, a white American compulsion to maintain the illusion of racial equality so that whites could continue to think of themselves, not as perpetrators of racism, but as “defenders of liberty, justice and equality” (400). According to Madison: Although white supremacist patriarchal capitalist ideology transparently dominated U.S. culture during most of the twentieth century, the last thirty to forty years of this century have been marked by a legitimation crisis for white supremacy and patriarchy and a concurrent backlash of the institutionalized forces of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. African American movements for equality played a pivotal role in creating this crisis. They destabilized white domination by forcefully arguing, and painstakingly illustrating, the illegitimacy of the structure of white “racial” oppression. (400)

The Reagan/Bush/Clinton-era result of this crisis was a plague of “AntiRacist White Hero” movies such as Cry Freedom (1987), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Heart of Dixie (1989), Mississippi Burning (1988), Glory (1989), and Amistad (1997), which posit that the heroes in America’s race struggle were white men. In Mississippi Burning, for example, a film strangely devoid of speaking roles for African Americans, FBI agents Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman) and Alan Ward (Willem DaFoe) are the Anti-Racist White Heroes who tackle Southern bigotry. Like many other films of the era, it suggests that the champions of the Civil Rights struggle were whites—at best trivializing, at worst erasing the role African Americans played in that struggle. These films played well to white audiences, who were able to see themselves, not as perpetrators of, but rather as innocent of racism.

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I bring up Madison because her historicization of the Anti-Racist White-Hero phenomenon, written in 1999, is helpful in gauging how ramped up White Supremacy has become in the twenty-first century cinema. However uneasy White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy was in the post-Civil Rights era, desiring so desperately to perceive itself as innocent, what is not present in the Anti-Racist-White-Hero film is any anxiety about the legitimacy and durability of White patriarchal power. That anxiety materializes later. As they do for many visual signs of dysfunction, John Wayne films model the overarch of white supremacy. The struggle for race equality is one of the most dramatic stories of twentieth-century America, AfricanAmericans’ fight for equal rights materializing in all forms of popular culture, especially in literature and popular music. But there’s very little of it in mainstream cinema, white subjectivity’s desire to appear innocent of the crime of racism making it seem that the KKK in Birth of a Nation had actually succeeded in rescuing America from “the negroes, [who] knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences,” as one intertitle puts it. The “collective make-believe” of Hollywood mostly ignores racism, disappearing it so as to palliate white subjectivity’s anxieties regarding its racist history. That disappearing act can be detected in the John Wayne movie, where there is no race struggle, only a white supremacist a priori. For example, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the relationship between Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and his loyal black servant, Pompey (Woody Strode), presents how John Wayne-style white supremacy works. Throughout the movie, Tom speaks to Pompey as a friend and equal, but nevertheless Pompey defers to Tom as a slave would to a master. Just as White Supremacy desires race dynamics to play out, Tom’s supremacy and Pompey’s subordination are thus not argued, but rather a priori established, any questions about the arrangement not so much ellipted as prolepted, not subject to interrogation. The absurdity of this dynamics is borne out by the literal contrast between the actors: Woody Strode actually was the American that most people mistakenly believe John Wayne to have been: he was an actual Californian; an actual football star, teaming with Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson on UCLA’s undefeated 1939 team48; and an actual soldier during World War II, serving in the Army Air Corps. Nevertheless, he is shown as ”naturally” subordinate to John Wayne in Liberty Valance. Another example of this dynamics occurs in The Cowboys (1972), where Wil Anderson (John Wayne) recruits his old colleague Jebediah Nightlinger (Roscoe Lee Browne) to be his cook on a cattle drive. The dynamics between the two are identical to that between Tom Doniphan

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and Pompey, Anderson seemingly treating Nightlinger as a friend, perhaps even as an equal, but that treatment is a canard disguising the actual master/subordinate relationship on screen. A similar arrangement occurs in The Green Berets (1968), where Raymond St. Jacques’ Doc McGee serves as the conventional “loyal sergeant” to John Wayne’s Colonel Mike Kirbey, “Doc McGee, the dependable” as he is described in the movie’s trailer. However seemingly treated within the story—benevolently, respectfully—Strode, Browne, and St. Jacques are nevertheless playing roles that White America is comfortable with: Pompey a servant, Nightlinger a cook, McGee a subaltern. As opposed to John Wayne-era treatment of race, which constitutes a type of willful ignorance, race is configured differently in Reagan-era cinema, with its oblique acknowledgement of racism. There is little sense in those Anti-Racist-White-Hero films described by Madison that White Power in under threat—in those films, the power superstructure is just a matter of course. But that was before 9/11. American culture’s response to 9/11 was a reactionary desire to resurrect the more overt articulations of White Patriarchal power, the most enduring symbol being John Wayne. Mainstream Hollywood films since 9/11 have been marked with an increasing sense of panic and have attempted to contain that anxiety by grafting the necessity of white power to the figure of the Anti-Racist White Hero. What has replaced the AntiRacist White-Hero ethic is the White Savior Industrial Complex, a term coined by Teju Cole in his essay of the same title in the April 2012 issue of The Atlantic, that is, white subjectivity’s desire not only to be perceived as anti-racist and guiltless of the race inequality that persists in America, but simultaneously to argue for the legitimacy of white power as the crucial necessity in world affairs. And not just in the here and now, but also in the world of fantasy and in the future, to infinity and beyond. There are of course mergings of the the three circles representing the phases of Johns Wayne. Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris have made a plague of Stallone/Schwarzenegger-style movies, most long after Stallone and Schwarzenegger filed for divorce from their former selves. And there is overlap between the second and third phases as well, the flesh and blood(-ish) heroes from the James Bond, Matrix, Fast and Furious, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings franchises, e.g., cohabitating comfortably, if box office receipts are any indication, with their superhero neighbors.49 Two additional figures who come to mind, Harry Potter and James Kirk, the former a blending of Phases 2 and 3 (a superhero whose superpowers don’t require him to disguise himself), the latter a Phase 2 hero. In their movies, we witness

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how post-9/11 White Supremacy is articulated, how it is John Wayned. I will look at two of those movies that not only attempt to legitimate white power, but also show the necessity of bending the rules to ensure it: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and Star Trek (2009). I realize, of course, that the Sorcerer’s Stone book, arriving in 1999, was a remarkable publishing phenomenon, but I believe his superstar status is historically contingent on the films. Harry materializes on screen as a sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder, a young orphan suffering unrelenting abuse from a moronic family that forces him to live in the broom closet of their middle-class home. His victim status certainly would have spoken to post-9/11 filmgoers, that catastrophe occurring two months before the film was released. To me, the Harry Potter phenomenon is maddening. Not because the books and movies are ho-hum, but because the real hero of the franchise, Hermione Granger—that is, the smartest, most competent, most courageous figure in the story—is nevertheless relegated to second fiddle. And she gets saddled with that doofus Ron Weasley at the end (spoiler alert). I think one of the keys to the success of Harry Potter is that Harry is both victim and over-privileged white subject, his sufferings, so meticulously foregrounded in Sorcerer’s Stone, mitigating any discomfort the spectator might feel about Harry’s arrival at Hogwarts with all the advantages the world has to offer already in his favor: status, pedigree, wealth, popularity, good looks, mad flying skills, and the favor of the highest ranking officials. Now that I think of it, this sounds less like fantasy and more like the biography of George W. Bush. However, despite these overwhelming advantages, we find that those advantages are not enough. At the end of Sorcerer’s Stone, it turns out that Harry’s fraternity, Gryffindor, has finished second in the All-Sports trophy to Slytherin. This will not stand. So, like the Supreme Court after the 2000 Presidential election, Dumbledore intervenes to give extra points to Harry Potter. Worse still, rather than reacting with horror at how the Hogwarts system is rigged to protect the interests and privileges of the White Savior, we spectators cheer this on. Next I want to look at the 2009 Star Trek movie, which, like Harry Potter, bears witness to the advantages enjoyed by white men, though adding in race elements to explain the necessity of preserving White Supremacist Patriarchy. When I first heard that there was going to be a reboot of the Star Trek film franchise—couched in terms of an etiological prequel to the Original Series—my immediate two questions were 1) What about the Kirk and Spock thing, and 2) What about Kirk and Uhura’s

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interracial love? As an eight-year-old addicted to re-runs of the Star Trek Original Series, I was puzzled by a nagging problem: Why is Kirk the boss when Spock is such much more qualified? I was certain that Spock would make a better captain. With respect to the first question, the Original Series suffers no anxiety over this arrangement because, well, Kirk is an American and Spock is a foreigner, which for the 1960s is all the justification required. But in the twenty-first century, shouldn’t there be at least a perfunctory examination of this problem? And indeed in the 2009 reboot there is. And the news is not good. What we find in the new film is not a correction of the race inequality of the Original Series, but rather an insidious reassertion of white male privilege, that post-9/11 Hollywood cinema remains obsessed with legitimating white authority, even legitimating the unethical methods white authority uses to preserve that power. The first scene I want to look at in the rebooted Star Trek is early in the film when pre-Star Fleet Kirk meets his surrogate father, Captain Pike. A local boy, Kirk has just gotten into a bar fight with Star Fleet Academy cadets, a scene setting up Kirk as the working-class “townie” and the cadets as the overprivileged “college boys.” This is a convention in Hollywood cinema which positions the white hero as an underdog who struggles against a rigged-against-him system to succeed. Here the legitimation crisis materializes on screen: rather than see the hero for what he is—a white American born into a system absolutely rigged in his favor—the spectator instead sees him as a plucky, pull-yourself-up-byyour-bootstraps outsider who beats the odds to succeed. Captain Pike enters the bar to find the outnumbered Kirk getting his ass kicked by several cadets, breaks up the fight, and tries to convince the recalcitrant Kirk to enlist at the academy. The reason: Pike knows who Kirk’s father was, George Kirk, one of the most revered heroes in Star Fleet history, a man who had sacrificed his life to save hundreds of his shipmates. Inspired, Kirk shows up the next morning to catch the shuttle to college. If you’re waiting for more evidence to warrant Kirk’s admission to the Star Fleet Academy, you’re still waiting. What we see here is a reification of contemporary college admissions practices, that is, that the best way to get into an elite school is to use your family’s connections. And it’s similar to Harry Potter’s admission to Hogwarts, like Kirk’s based exclusively on his legacy status. Harry’s is even more insidious, though, because we see that nature itself is demanding Harry’s admission, signified by the vast parliament of owls flooding Harry’s adopted parents’ home with acceptance letters. While this

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practice is distressing in contemporary realpolitik, it’s pretty depressing to see it true in the world of fantasy and in star date 2258.42. Unlike Harry Potter’s matriculation at Hogwarts, when Kirk gets to the Academy, he finds that the Big Man on Campus is not himself; it is Spock, who is not only the greatest student in the history of the Academy, but also the greatest man in the history of his own planet, Vulcan. Oh well, tug boats need captains, too, Jim. . . But to assume that Kirk would play second fiddle to a vastly more qualified minority is to misunderstand how White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy is organized, and how mainstream cinema works hand in glove to legitimate it, a gentleman’s agreement ramped up post 9/11. What we witness in the next half hour of the movie is, as in Harry Potter, how the system is organized to ensure the success of the White Male Subject. The next significant scene involves getting Kirk onto the Federation’s newest, sleekest flagship, the Enterprise. Because Kirk is expressly forbidden to board the Enterprise because, well, he cheated on his exams, his friend Dr. McCoy sneaks him onboard. As if being a legacy weren’t enough, Kirk must now use his crony connections to land him a plum assignment. Cronies, by the way, willing to break the rules to ensure the white hero’s success (cf. Admission). Once onboard the Enterprise, Kirk must now deal with the biggest hurdle standing between him and the captaincy, Spock. Indeed, it is the biggest problem associated with Star Trek OS 50 . It turns out that the captain of the Enterprise is Pike, the connection Jim used to get into Starfleet Academy. Spock is the Executive Officer of the Enterprise, meaning that he would assume command were something to happen to Pike, which contingency does in fact happen when Pike is kidnapped by the evil Romulan, Nero, who it turns out is the same villain responsible for the death of Kirk’s father. A minority in a position of leadership is, to borrow from Mulvey, a burden the film cannot bear. So what we will see here is a scene that negotiates the problem of White Subjectivity’s confrontation with a seemingly insoluble problem. In the film’s diegetic climax, Spock has assumed command of the Enterprise, but his “by the book” leadership style threatens not only the Enterprise but also the entire Star Fleet. Kirk pleads with Spock to change his strategy, but Spock refuses, arrests Kirk, and banishes him from the Enterprise to a desolate ice planet, then races off to provide aid to distressed Star Fleet ships in another galaxy, a diversion Nero has manufactured to disguise his nefarious plot to destroy Earth. Back on the ice planet, Kirk finds Spock-from-the-future (played by Leonard Nimoy, the Spock from the OS), who directs Kirk to a remote Star Fleet outpost on

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the planet, manned by Montgomery Scott, a banished engineer. Spock, using technology from the future, teaches Scott how to beam Kirk back to the Enterprise, a telling scene from a race perspective: the achieving minority gifting a technological innovation to a white man, who gets to enjoy the credit for it. Scholars for decades have read Spock as an encoded African American. In 1976 51 , Robert Chrisman asserted that Spock was “an obvious colored man” (820), Allen Kwan in 2007 identifying him as a “mulatto” (61)52. Spock’s racial identity problematizes a Star Trek future imagined as a post-racial utopia, not to mention a Star Trek franchise which imagines itself, as Kwan writes of the OS, “a socially conscious television series that promoted a humanist and liberal agenda regarding the position of race and gender within traditional American values” (59). If it be true that the Star Trek future is free from the race and gender problems plaguing the modern world, why are all the minorities and women in that future still in subordinate positions? While Spock is certainly the compelling character of the OS, acting as foil to Kirk’s John F. Kennedy-style passion, exuberance, and militarism, he is nevertheless subordinate. Chrisman writes that Spock, though mentally and physically Kirk's superior, lacks the leadership, the values of Captain Kirk, and so like the colored people of earth, he must assist, often supporting behaviors and actions that he finds irrational and objectionable. (820)

That supporting role has been exacerbated by the time he becomes the old Spock in the 2009 Star Trek, where he is reduced to being just one of the cronies greasing the skids of Kirk’s career track. On the ice planet, Spock’s servile role is to assist the two white men, Scott and Kirk, get back to the Enterprise, even gifting to Scott the mathematical formula to beam people to a moving vessel, with the assurance that math whiz Scott was going to discover it anyway53. Back on the Enterprise, Kirk devises a scheme to replace Spock in the Captain’s chair: to suggest that Spock is unfit for the captaincy because, his home planet having recently been annihilated by Nero, he is too emotionally traumatized. Here is where the film’s flimsy construction collapses. However much it might have made sense to the 1960s spectator that the captain of the Enterprise had to be a white American man, that sensibility is surely complicated by decades of reforms, and of course an All-American belief that your success should be contingent on your merits. But in a surprisingly-even-for-Hollywood short period, Kirk cuts in front of every other person in line on the Enterprise to position himself as

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the captain. By invoking the recent destruction of Vulcan, and by simultaneously suggesting that Spock is both a mama’s boy (your mother died on that planet) and not enough of a mama’s boy (didn’t you love your mother?), Kirk baits Spock into an emotional rage, thus rendering him “unfit for duty.” The film distracts the spectator from the astounding absurdity of this scheme via the frenetic editing, quick cuts of Kirk, Spock, and the astounded onlookers mixed with the camera spinning around Kirk and Spock. This diversionary tactic, the film desires, would distract the spectator from interrogating the scene’s disturbing race politics, that is, the Great White Hero convincing the minority that he’s mentally incapable of quarterbacking the team. With the White Savior installed as captain, the better qualified minority as subordinate, order is restored. Regarding the second question, that is the Kirk and Uhura thing, perhaps the most famous incident in the Original Series, the new Star Trek chickens out. In Episode #65 of the OS, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” which aired in November 1968, Kirk kissed Uhura, the first romantic interracial kiss in American TV history, or as one wag called it, “The Captain’s Snog.” The TV show’s producers feared a racist backlash, especially from the South, but no such backlash materialized, suggesting that late 1960s TV audiences were more tolerant than the studio suits imagined. But what the Kirk-Uhura kiss did not do was usher in an era of interracial couples on screen. Though there were the Willises on The Jeffersons, that show has been off the air for 30 years, and very few interracial couples appeared during or since. It’s still taboo in American popular entertainments, despite its widespread acceptance in American society. The seven Star Trek movies before the reboot, beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and ending with Star Trek: Generations in 1994 simply pretended “The Kiss” never happened. The new film exacerbates this cowardice with a cruel twist: it suggests that it is Uhura who rejects Kirk. There are two scenes early in the film establishing Kirk’s attraction to Uhura, once in the bar-fight scene and one in the bedroom scene where Kirk is necking with Uhura’s green roommate (I call this scene the Laura Mulvey Scopophilia scene because it shows Uhura stripping to her surprisingly 21st-century-style undies from Kirk’s hidingunder-the-bed perspective), but Uhura rejects him both times. And we find out later why she rejects him: because she’s in love with Spock! This surprise development is the film’s racist coup de grâce. Post9/11 popular entertainments seem scrupulously interested in enforcing traditional race and gender boundaries. While it might have been rare in the ‘60s and ‘70s to show interracial love, it did exist. But it doesn’t exist in the post-9/11 blockbusters, those entertainments so heavily invested in

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asserting white supremacy, and, if the romance of Spock and Uhura is any indicator, ameliorating spectator anxieties about miscegenation as well, the two minorities in the narrative segregated together. Even more cruel is the suggestion that the Spock-Uhura relationship predates the Enterprise christening, meaning that their relationship began while Spock was a Star Fleet professor, Uhura a student. What we see at the end of Star Trek is a post-9/11 white supremacist fantasy, the White Savior installed as “natural” leader, minorities as “natural” subordinates. This Kirk-Spock arrangement aligns with other blockbuster movies as well, most of which desperately install the White Savior as savior/leader. The Harry Potter movies have no minority characters in major roles, the one of significance, Cho Chang, gets to date Harry in Order of the Phoenix (2007), as if to prove the franchise’s progressive politics (look, our hero will even kiss an Oriental girl!), though this romance, of course, fizzes out when Cho breaks up with Harry, thereby disencumbering the text from potentially uncomfortable race dynamics, and, as a bonus, marshaling even more pathos for Harry as jilted lover. The great film actors Morgan Freeman and Don Cheadle are reduced to “loyal servant” roles in the Batman and Iron Man franchises, humiliatingly as the recipients of their wealthy masters’ noblesse oblige. In the library of post-9/11 superhero films, Disney’s animated film, The Incredibles (2004), is perhaps the clearest example of white male panic and of Silverman’s arguments with respect to the Dominant Fiction: the preservation at all costs of “the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject.” The premise of the film is that in the glorious American past (signified comically with black-and-white newsreel-style flashbacks), there were certain special Americans, superheroes, who performed mighty deeds. Où sont les neiges d’antan? But various developments, mostly litigious, incited the government to outlaw the superhero-ness, forcing these elite into lives of mundane dreariness. The greatest of the heroes was Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), a John Wayne-style white American who has been forced to change his name to Bob Parr (i.e., average) and live in the suburban wasteland of Metroville with his wife and three children, all of whom forced to suppress their own gender-appropriate powers: the wife and daughter have the nurturing powers of, respectively, flexibility and protective-shield-construction; the father and son get the more manly skills of strength and speed. The film articulates, generally, American anxieties about a lost greatness, anxieties borne out in Tom Brokaw’s 2001 book, The Greatest Generation, a paean to the Americans who grew up during the Depression

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and fought during World War II. Brokaw called them “the greatest generation any society has ever produced” (2), implying, unfortunately, “not us.” More specifically, the film articulates Bush-era frustrations about the War on Terror, where Iraq and Afghanistan were proving to be quagmires. The film suggests that Americans have, like the Parrs, suppressed their greatness, a loss of power signified by Bob’s being reduced to working as an insurance agent, surely the sine qua non of professional castration. The internal logic of the film mandates that, to recover its former greatness, America must, as it were, “Release the Kraken” of its long-restrained superpowers, the white nuclear family, represented by the Parrs, being the crucial element in that recovery. In the film’s climax, evil robots have invaded Metroville, necessitating the erstwhile superheroes, in the words of the biblical King David, to “break their chains and throw off their shackles” and kick some serious ass. Further underlining the centrality of the white nuclear family is the third child, the infant Jack Jack, who, when his family is threatened, unleashes his own hyperbolic superpowers at film’s end, superpowers that dwarf everybody else’s, a development suggesting that this unleashing will produce greatness in the next (white) generation. The race politics of the film warrant scrutiny because, like the Batman and Iron Man movies, The Incredibles features an African American functioning as an adjunct to the male lead. Samuel L. Jackson plays the “cool” superhero, Frozone 54 , whose ice-making superpower is clearly inferior to Mr. Incredible’s super-strength. Most popular American animations simply ellipt race; so as to “wish it away,” they either draw white-only utopias—e.g., Disney’s “classic” films such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid (no one of color, even “Under the Sea”), or Beauty and the Beast—or encode the race politics by presenting the characters as animals (e.g., the well-documented white supremacist Africa of The Lion King55 and, to a more disturbing degree, Tarzan, with its presentation of Europeans as humans and Africans as apes). The Incredibles features the African American, as if to announce its liberality and inclusion. But post-9/11, that cinematic inclusion is a fraud, the film’s half-attempt to include minorities hardly squaring with its overarching project to center white subjectivity . With respect to Tarzan (1999), it was a fitting choice for Disney’s last animated film of the twentieth century, its being a pro-colonialist allegory of the white man’s natural mastery of the “Dark Continent.” Disney films have a well-documented racist, misogynous, and monarchist/colonialist tradition56. The film itself works as a “Coming Attractions” of the desperate will to assert white male supremacy we see in post-9/11 mainstream

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cinema. One can find its fingerprints on DreamWorks’s How to Train Your Dragon (2010), with its disingenuous inclusion politics. The film, set in a Scandinavian past under constant threat of dragon attacks (signifying America’s post-9/11 fears of terrorism), desires to tell a story of cultural understanding, that if we (white people) understand them (African Americans? Border-crossing Mexicans? Communists? Islamofascists?), then we could all get along. This theme’s disingenuousness is betrayed by the fact that the “understanding”—signified by the tender relationship of the boy and the dragon—involves the dragons being in subordinate positions, their having to act as transportation for the Scandinavians at film’s end. This dynamics seems not too different from the opening set piece of Birth of a Nation, which shows antebellum slaves working happily in the cotton fields. What these cinematic race relations reveal is the desperation and cunning required to assert white supremacy in post-9/11 America. It’s clear from her essay “Can Masculinity be Terminated?” that in the early 1990s Susan Jeffords was more than ready for cinema to do something new, to go in a direction other than its standard route of preserving White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. But what we have witnessed in post9/11 mainstream cinema is a resurgence of not only the masculinity Jeffords wanted terminated, but also of the segregation and miscegenation anxieties so thoroughly saturating the Jim Crow era. For example, The Incredibles is scrupulous in showing that Lucias Best (Frozone’s alter ego) lives, not in the suburbs with the Parrs, but in the Metroville inner city57. Mainstream American culture’s desires regarding masculinity and white supremacy seem no different than they were during the Jim Crow era, though the material articulating those desires has metamorphosed into something that appears kinder and gentler. In his magnificent book Male Fantasies (1987), Klaus Theweleit examines the novels, poetry, cinema, and songs of the Freikorps, the rabid anti-socialists who roamed freely in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s murdering intellectuals, Jews, socialists, homosexuals, communists, immigrants, and union organizers. The Freikorps would later constitute the core of the Nazi Party. Of course, Theweleit is not really interested in the banal, sentimental entertainments of the Freikorps; his real target is the traces of fascism that still persist in the post-World War II West, fascism that evolved following the Holocaust to not seem as it did during the Nuremberg Rallies. Not the fascism of Skinheads, or Storm Front, or even of the American South or UKIP, but rather the fascism that can be traced in the obsessions of the West, first and foremost in the overweening preservation of white masculinity. What, after all, motivates the

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concealment of male weakness, male vulnerability, male inadequacy, male dysfunction? One of my first reactions to Male Fantasies was, “The Freikorps had its own novelists?” Of course they did, but what must be remembered is that however much literature the Freikorps produced, it was a still a niche market. There’s nothing niche about American mainstream cinema—it rules the world.

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Jeffords, Susan. “Can Masculinity be Terminated?” Cohan and Hark 245262. —. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. Kinney, Katherine. Friendly Fire: American Identity and the Literature of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kinder, Marsha. “On Female Spectatorship.” Camera Obscura 20-21 (1989): 199-204. King, C. Richard, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, and Mary K. BloodsworthLugo. Animating Difference. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Kinney, Katherine. Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. Kozol, Jonathan. “Still Separate, Still Unequal.” Harper’s 1 September 2005: 41-54. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. —. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kwan, Allen. “Seeking New Civilizations: Race Normativity in the Star Trek Franchise.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 27.1 (2007): 59-70. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. —. “Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar.” October 40 (1987): 81-95. —. “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety.” 1963. Trans. Cormac Gallagher. n.d. ufl.edu. Web. La Ferla, Ruth. “The Duds of ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’” The New York Times 29 June 2006. nytimes.com. Web. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Print. Lukács, Georg. Theory of the Novel. Boston: MIT Press, 1974. Madison, Kelly. “Legitimation Crisis and Containment: The ‘Anti-Racist White Hero’ Film.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16.4 (1999): 399-416. Mann, William J. Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969. New York. Penguin, 2001.

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NOTES

 1

See Kozol. Texas wasted no time after the Supreme Court decision, in August 2013 legalizing a voter identification law that was in prior violation of the Voter Rights Act, its agenda to exclude potential Democrats from the polls. 3 “So after Hollywood does all it can to insult people for [sic] faith,” asks Kip Russell on the Free Republic website, “now they decide they want to come out with religiously inspired shows and movies?? But what about their real religion in Hollywood, liberalism?” n.p., 2 September 2013. Or “Hollywood has been a queer and pedophile town since the 20’s [sic],” adorno, n.p., 2 February 2013. More bluntly, in “Why do Liberals Hate America?” “Sysiphus” writes, “It’s too bad liberals run Hollywood,” blogs4brownback, n.p., 26 March 2007. 4 “Where Have all the Cowboys Gone?” is just one of many songs that have been similarly misappropriated. Other examples include “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day, which is about a spurned lover venomously and ironically saying to the girl who left him, “I hope you had the time of your life,” a song that is now played at pretty much every wedding and graduation in America to signify “These are good times.” Or “All Kinds of Time” by Fountains of Wayne, which is a song about how fleeting time is, though it seems to be exclusively used now to signify “you have a lot of time to get done what you need to get done.” And perhaps the most egregious example, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” a song about how the American government abandoned its Vietnam veterans, was used as a jingoistic hymn in Reagan’s re-election campaign. 5 Venturer, freerepublic.com, n.p., 6 September 2011. Web. 25 July 2013. 6 Hannity calling him “the epitome of American values and heroism,” “Tribute to John Wayne,” Online Video Clip, Sean Hannity’s America, YouTube, 26 May 2007. 7 “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” Dr. Laura’s infamous hectoring of a caller in August, 2010, being perhaps the most egregious example of this ramped up rhetoric. For a deeper analysis, see the “In Focus: Right Wing Media” special issue of Cinema Journal 51.3 (2012) and Jamieson and Cappella. 8 For a more detailed discussion of this scene, see Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space.” 9 This submission is earlier manifested, quite comically, when Johnnie and Lina’s engagement occurs under the painting of General McLaidlaw, there being no way the couple can escape the nom du père. 10 Le nom du père is a double pun: of course it denotes “the name of the father,” but when spoken it sounds exactly like le non du père (the “no” of the father) and les non-dupes errent, “those in the know are mistaken.” See Lacan, “Introduction 2

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 to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar.” 11 See also Sam Worthington (Avatar), Tobey Maguire (the Spider-mans), Shia LeBeouf (the Transformerses), Bill Pullman (Independence Day), Ben Stiller (Meet the Fockers, Night at the Museum), Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws), Jim Carrey (Bruce Almighty), Bill Paxton (Twister), and Bill Murray (Ghostbusters). This is an incomplete list, of course, but I chose these actors and films because they are all in the top 100 highest-grossing films. Source: boxofficemojo.com. 12 Another term that seems to work here is Saul Kripke’s Rigid Designator. Seemingly panic-stricken at the Derridean idea that there may be complications between sign and signifier, Kripke sought in the early 1970s to rescue language from the deconstructionists, to locate something that could only meant itself: “Let’s call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object” (48). As a rigid designator, John Wayne leaves me wondering, “Is that all there is?” 13 Well, I do, but my film students, first in line at whatever big-budget blockbuster is opening at the cineplex, laugh at me for it. Seriously, who wants to construct meaning when the movie already does that for you? 14 See Rogin, “Ronald Reagan: The Movie” (1987), where he asserts that Reagan’s entire political career was not just a performance but a re-performance of his movie roles. 15 I do not want to discount the important work done by pre-“Visual Pleasure” feminist film scholars, a thorough examination of which appears in E. Ann Kaplan, “A History of Gender Theory in Cinema Studies,” in Gabbard and Luhr. 16 And in the case of You’ve Got Mail, Kate and Leopold, and Sweet Home Alabama, removing the successful working woman from her job into the she’ll-behappier-that-way arms of a good man. 17 Or, for that matter, anything else, either. 18 Source: IMDB.com. 19 All of whom served in World War II, N.b. 20 Russell won two Academy Awards for Best Years, one for Best Supporting Actor and an Honorary Award “For bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.” 21 Žižek uses the term “symbolic deception/fiction” to describe this phenomenon. See The Ticklish Subject 323. 22 “Election Results,” CNN.com, 2005. 23 N.b., Noodling is only legal in Louisiana and Oklahoma. 24 He was also in The New Frontier (Carl Pierson, 1935), about “Sooners” (people claiming free land in Oklahoma before the official Land Rush on April 22, 1889), looking to John (John Wayne) to rid their town of an evil gambler, Ace (Warner Richmond). Notably, John is not a Sooner (i.e., cheater), but rather the son of a Sooner shot in the back by Ace, John racing to Oklahoma to avenge his death. 25 Cf. This Stuff’ll Kill Ya (1971), where two girls on the way home to New York from Spring Break in Florida stop to ask for directions at a revival meeting in rural Oklahoma. I am not making this up.

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26

See also The Cowboy and Lady (1938) and Never a Dull Moment (1950). See Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 28 And even this small favor would prove temporary: when the film was rereleased in 1950, it was renamed War of the Wildcats. To be fair, this name change was likely designed to distinguish it from another famous westerner, In Old Arizona (1929, directed by Raoul Walsh and Irving Cummings). 29 Paul Fix may have appeared in more movies than anyone in history: the IMDB lists him in over 300 films (!). 30 This and the following quote are in “The Recent Closure—The Moral Aspect: Opinions of the Press,” an article responding to New York City mayor George McClellan’s closure of over 500 nickelodeons on Christmas Eve 1908. See also Friedman. 31 !. 32 See Mann, Wisecracker. 33 Stephen Heath tempers Barthes’ assertion, calling cinema "potentially a veritable festival of affects" (53). 34 Miller lists other examples: “Brandon and Philip live together with no mention of girlfriends—but that doesn’t necessarily mean. . . —They also went to a boys’ prep school. —But that doesn’t prove. . .” (125, Miller’s italics). 35 According to something called The Overlords of Chaos, “Hollywood is a major component in the apparatus of Organised Evil. It is a social engineering factory of the worst kind since it is so effective. For many years it has been a major influence upon Western culture and has been used by the Secret Group to change society. The "Dream Factory" has for many years been a potent weapon used by Organised Evil [to?] attack traditional, Christian moral values of Western culture. Its movies[,] deliberately filled with pernicious philosophies and brutalising imagery[,] have bludgeoned the moral senses of the world. Moreover, some of them are now nothing more than perverted, anti-Christian political platforms for all and any group that have an axe to grind, especially the Homosexual Lobby,” “Homosexual Agenda,” overlordsofchaos.com, n.p., n.d. 36 There was such a thing as a HUAC investigator. See Gladchuck (2007) and O’Reilly (1983). 37 Viz., the Lethal Weapons (1987, 1989, 1992, 1998), Top Gun (1986), Weird Science (1985), Colors (1988), Tango and Cash (1989), Cocktail (1988), Alien Nation (1988), Trains, Planes and Automobiles (1987), Twins (1988), Ishtar (1987), 48 Hours (1982), Trading Places (1983), The Rookie (1990), Rising Sun (1993), Shawshank Redemption (1994), the Wayne’s Worlds (1992, 1993), Swingers (1996), Dumb and Dumber (1994), Kingpin (1996), Tommy Boy (1995), Friday (1995), Money Train (1995), Maverick (1994), Rush Hour (1998), White Men Can’t Jump (1992), Bad Boys (1995), House Party (1990), Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991), Wild Wild West (1999), Loose Cannons (1990), Heart Condition (1990), Chasers (1994), et al. 38 Not surprisingly, Disney—ever eager to exploit traditional prejudices—leads the 27

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 field in contemporary representation of the gay villain, e.g., Jafar (Jonathan Freeman) in Aladdin (1992), Scar (Jeremy Irons) in The Lion King (1994), Governor Ratcliffe (David Ogden Stiers, n.b., an American actor affecting a British accent) in Pocahontas (1995). 39 See La Ferla. 40 A frustrating aspect of Lehman’s book, however, is that he appears to oversimplify film theory’s interest in male bodies, arguing that theory has “falsely presumed that, for the male spectator, issues of the male body are the exclusive domain of gay theorists and critics” (23). I don’t think there is any such presumption. I also take issue with Lehman’s assertion that film theory has “drastically underestimated the pleasure afforded women in looking at male bodies in the cinema” (23). 41 This initiation, called the Okipa, was actually a ritual of the Mandan tribe of North Dakota, but verité is not often privileged in Hollywood. For a detailed description of the Okipa initiation, see Bowers, Chapter IV. 42 A thorough discussion of masochism in the Mel Gibson oeuvre is in Brown. 43 See Robinson (2000) and Savran (1998). 44 John Wayne would sing this song again on screen, as a duet with Lee Marvin in The Comancheros (1961). 45 Jim Steinman and Dean Pitchford. 46 Michael Pate, who made a good career for himself playing Indians and Hispanics, not letting the fact that he was a white man from Australia hold him back 47 We see this “Scar”ring in other Reacher villains as well, e.g., Carl Allen in Tripwire (1999), who has a prosthetic hook and burn scars covering half his body. 48 Also a star track athlete, Strode, together with Washington, broke the National Football League’s color barrier in 1946, a year before Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s. 49 Not to mention the library of White Savior TV shows such as The Mentalist, Lie to Me, House, the various CSIs, Mad Men, 24, Chuck, Avatar, Firefly, Castle, Hawaii 5-0, Grimm, Dr. Who, Torchwood, Burn Notice, Friday Night Lights, NCIS, the myriad Sherlocks Holmes, you get the idea. 50 The Reagan/Bush-era Star Trek: The Next Generation neutralizes the race complications of OS by simply removing the minority from the chain of command: the Executive Officer (Spock’s rank) in NG is a white American, William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes). 51 Chrisman’s article originally appeared in The Black Scholar 7.5 (1976); the citations here are from its reprint in College English 38.8 (1977). 52 See also Blair (1977) and Greenburg (1984). 53 At least in Admission, Tina Fey didn’t take the SAT for the kid. Crikey. 54 Also a pun on “‘fro,” a slang term for the “afro” hairstyle. 55 In addition to Giroux, see Williams, Martin-Rodriguez, and King, et al. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Animating Difference (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 53-74. 56 See Bell, et al. and Cheu.

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57

And Lucius’s wife, Honey (Kimberly Adair Clark), is “comically” represented (though she is never shown) as a conventional “bitter black woman.”