THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN WESTERN
Why was the Western such a powerful mode of storytelling throughout the second half of the last century? Tompkins has argued that the genre was a reaction to the nineteenth-century novel with its details of domesticity and feminine heroes, as well as an escape from encroaching civilization and feminine influences, in the form of the suffragette movement, temperance, and public decency leagues. Ford’s Stagecoach, for example, opens with a gaggle of pinched, elderly, respectable townswomen running the beautiful prostitute, Dallas, out of town. In short, the wide-open spaces of the American West offered the idea of freedom from the constraints and hypocrisies of industrial society and the interior spaces of the Victorian novel: churches, parlors, bedrooms, kitchens. “The desert light,” Tompkins writes, “and the desert space, the creak of saddle leather and the sun beating down, the horses’ energy and force—these things promise a translation of the self into something purer and more authentic, more intense, more real,” far from, in the final line of dialogue in Ford’s Stagecoach, “the [dubious] blessings of civilization.”
So, setting itself in contrast to the realms of society, church, and civilized law, the Western offered masculine realms of experience and codes of behavior that required physical strength, courage, and endurance. The Western also sought to answer the questions, What is honor? What is justice? What is loyalty? The Western concerns itself with how men come to understand and harness their instinctual urges and their physical power and what the consequences are of not succeeding in that endeavor.
And simultaneous with this rejection of the domestic space, the very model of masculinity was changing. Writers on sex, gender, and sexuality such as Michael S. Kimmel define a historical shift from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century masculine identities, like the “Genteel Patriarch”—a Jeffersonian landowner, family man, and benign patriarch—and the “Heroic Artisan”—economically self-sustaining craftsmen-citizens who cherish the democracy of the town meeting, like Paul Revere—to the “Marketplace Man,” which became the prevailing boilerplate for masculine behavior throughout the twentieth century.
The Marketplace Man defines his masculinity by accumulating wealth, power, and status and is more likely to be an absentee landlord and an absent father than his forebears; the ad executives in Mad Men are prime examples from a later period. He increasingly defines himself in homosocial—all-male—societies, where his sense of masculinity comes from pitting and measuring himself against other men. His masculinity requires proof, often taking the form of exclusion of the “other”: women, nonwhite men, non-native-born men, homosexual men. In other words, “men prove their manhood in the eyes of other men,” or, as playwright David Mamet has noted, “What men need is men’s approval.”
Kimmel cites psychologist Robert Brannon’s markers of manhood in the following summary, which men must acquire to earn the approval of other men:
1. “ ‘No Sissy Stuff!’ One may never do anything that even suggests femininity.
2. “ ‘Be a Big Wheel.’ Masculinity is measured by power, success, wealth, and status.
3. “ ‘Be a Sturdy Oak.’ Proving you’re a man depends on never showing your emotions at all. Boys don’t cry.
4. “ ‘Give ’Em Hell.’ Exude an aura of manly daring and aggression.”
These qualities are often attributed to John Wayne. As film critic Carl Freedman has noted, “Many movie stars have been admired for many varieties of manliness; but no other has defined masculinity to the extent that John Wayne has.” But he was not the first to embody these qualities; rather, he perfected a masculine form that stretched far back into the silent era and to Ford’s earliest days as a filmmaker.
John Ford’s 1924 silent picture The Iron Horse is an early chapter in the great director’s depiction of western expansion, mythologizing the men who cleared and fought for the frontier, laying the tracks for the transcontinental railroad. Stock characters appear that would reappear in later films: buffoonish Irish drunks (presented sympathetically), corrupt businessmen, and ethnic characters representing America’s melting pot, which Ford both celebrated and presented comically, with their distrust of “forriners” and “Eyetalians,” despite their own immigrant status.
The Iron Horse is a thrilling tale, beautifully filmed and acted, which includes a wise, countrified Abraham Lincoln, played by Charles Edward Bull, a precursor of Henry Fonda’s folksy but dignified Abe in Young Mr. Lincoln. He’s the spiritual father of the movie, America’s first great “reluctant hero,” and a role model for Davey Brandon, played by George O’Brien, who doesn’t go looking for a fight and in fact vows not to fight to please his fiancée, Miriam Marsh, played by Madge Bellamy. We feel his frustration as he strains against his civilizing vow, in conflict with his need to avenge his father’s murder, until, at the film’s climax, O’Brien finally fights his archenemy, Deroux, a beefy villain played by Fred Kohler. Their lengthy battle begins in fisticuffs but ends in Greco-Roman wrestling as both men lose their shirts in the fight and are revealed in their half-naked masculinity. The camera admires them, especially a triumphant O’Brien leaning against a wall in contrapposto pose, shirtless, an image of masculine beauty. That arresting image signals that this is not just a typical adventure film, but one in which Ford manages to convey his celebration of the male form and psyche and his ability to present opposite points of view without resolving them or negating either side: to avoid violence is noble, but a fight can be a beautiful thing.
We also see Ford’s double vision in his treatment of the Indians in the movie, whom the railway workers must hold off to complete their task. Throughout his movies, and especially in the later films such as The Searchers and Cheyenne Autumn, Ford revealed conflicting views of Native Americans: brave, yet not “civilized”; brutal, but not without honor. In The Iron Horse, Ford humanizes the warring Indians with a powerful yet intimate image: a dog lays its head on the body of a slain Indian brave (just as one of the buffoonish Irish drunks is redeemed by a heroic death and is tenderly embraced by his countrymen).
Davey Brandon and Abraham Lincoln can be seen as figures in a long continuum of reluctant heroes stretching from Harry Carey, “the good bad man,” in the many silent Westerns Ford made with the veteran cowboy hero, to Henry Fonda’s reluctant hero Wyatt Earp (who doesn’t want to be the town sheriff) in My Darling Clementine, to John Wayne, who begins the major part of his career as the “good bad man” in Stagecoach. As Ford knew, “real men” don’t seek fights, but when they must engage, they do.
Henry Fonda as the “jackanapes lawyer” in 1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln. Lincoln was one of Ford’s heroes and a model for the ideal man—folksy, humble, smart, honorable, and willing to do what it takes.
In his search to tell the quintessential American story, Ford worked with many impressive leading actors, including Harry Carey, George O’Brien, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart, but in John Wayne he found his perfect hero, and the two men succeeded in defining an ideal of American masculinity that dominated for nearly half a century. Over the course of the twenty-three movies Ford and Wayne made together, including early films in which Wayne cropped up as an extra and a stuntman and a late-career documentary he narrated for Ford, Wayne’s persona evolved from a charismatic “good bad man” in Stagecoach and 3 Godfathers; to a U.S. Cavalry man devoted to his men but with no stomach for war in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; to a racist avenger in The Searchers; to an over-the-hill hero whose exploits are appropriated by the new man of the conquered frontier in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford’s last great Western and arguably his last great film.
MEN AS MENTORS
The Western is often about handing down a code of behavior, in which an older, sometimes over-the-hill father figure instructs a youth—preferably but not always a son—in the challenging ways of mastering himself. In John Wayne’s Westerns, the conferring of masculinity on a youth is a sacred duty. As he matured and became less powerfu
l as an action hero, he was especially good in this role, particularly in The Cowboys, True Grit, and The Shootist. From the mentee’s perspective, living up to a father figure’s expectations lies at the very heart of the matter, and to disappoint the father, or fail to be recognized by him, is devastating. Once a boy becomes a man, he must teach other boys to undertake the journey. So, the Western hero is sometimes a youth in search of a father figure or a father in search of a son, or a man out to avenge a wronged father or redeem a shamed one. Or a tough old coot who has no sons to grace with his recognition, so he must teach the offspring of strangers.
In seven Westerns that Ford made with John Wayne, his definition of manhood is much more nuanced, humane, non-exclusionary, and achievable than the stereotypical John Wayne image. To summarize, in Ford’s world, to “be a man,” one must possess the following traits:
1. Humility, courtesy, and the keeping of one’s word, as the Ringo Kid does in Stagecoach. Bullies and warmongers need not apply.
2. The toughness to endure while protecting the weak, coupled with respect—even awe!—for women, like Bob Hightower in 3 Godfathers.
3. The ability to speak truth to power, regardless of the consequences, as Captain Kirby York does in Fort Apache.
4. Loyalty to comrades, against all odds, like Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
5. The ability to admit one is wrong and to change one’s mind, like Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
6. Fidelity to oneself in changing times, without expectation of recognition or reward, like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Indeed, many of Ford’s heroes fail in their intended tasks, but what is important is their willingness to do the right thing—to engage. Despite failure, they remain heroes because of the effort put forward. It’s being willing, as John Wayne’s character, John Bernard Books, says in The Shootist.
Though John Wayne indelibly embodied the Fordian hero, when he turned to producing his own pictures—Big Jim McLain, The Alamo, The Green Berets—the results were often derailed by his ultra-patriotism. Unlike Ford, he ended up making propaganda, not art. Yet at the end of his career as an actor in the post-Fordian movies True Grit, The Cowboys, and The Shootist, his persona finally evolved in satisfying ways, illustrating three additional masculine virtues:
· the willingness to pass on one’s knowledge to a younger generation
· the ability to laugh at oneself and make fun of one’s image
· the ability to know the end when it comes and accept it with dignity
These last films rescued John Wayne from ending his long career as a caricature of himself, giving a more realistic humanity to his iconic image.
Much of Wayne’s legendary status rests on his roles as a man of action, a loner, a hardened soul willing to use violence to get the job done, if necessary, and more intent on proving himself in the eyes of his comrades—whether cowboys or cavalrymen or soldiers of World War II—than wooing women. This raises the question, why does “a man’s man” prefer the company of men and shun women?
The controversial writer and polemicist Jack Donovan has made his lifework an examination, and a celebration, of traditional, undiluted masculinity. In The Way of Men, he notes that “when men compete against each other for status, they are competing for each other’s approval. The women whom men find most desirable have historically been attracted to—or been claimed by—men who were feared or revered by other men.” The operative word here is “historically,” because this paradigm has clearly shifted in the last decades as women looked less for a protector and more for an equal partner and as the popularity of rock stars and ethnic actors replaced the image of an idealized, white, and larger-than-life iconic hero. But aspects of this heroic ideal are reflected again and again in Western films and in most of John Ford’s oeuvre.
In the many Westerns and war pictures Wayne starred in, there is a marked absence of women. Men prove themselves in the eyes of other men, and that is their fundamental, existential challenge. A man of action instead of a romantic hero, Wayne seldom wooed the girl, and when he did, the relationship was often expressed through antagonism (The Quiet Man, McLintock!) or doomed to be sacrificed on the altar of duty and esprit de corps among men (Rio Grande, They Were Expendable). Strong women do appear in Ford’s films (notably in Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers), but their actions are usually dependent on and secondary to the male hero’s.
One reason for the relative lack of women characters is that the reinvention of the Western for grown-up audiences, credited to John Ford’s Stagecoach, came on the heels of the “kiddie” Westerns churned out by Poverty Row studios such as Monogram and Republic, where John Wayne toiled for nine years, learning his craft but well aware of (and embarrassed by) the simplistic—and second-rate—quality of much of the final product. Because those Westerns were aimed mostly at young boys, the absence of a romantic story line suited their audience: no yucky love scenes, and few or no women. In these B Westerns, boys could escape from overprotective mothers and nagging schoolmarms into an all-male world of friendship and derring-do. And could those cowboys fight, and leap on a horse! So it’s possible that the dearth of strong women characters in serious, grown-up Westerns stems, in part, from the genre’s origin as children’s entertainment, mostly for young boys, as well as a rejection of what was perceived as a feminized, overly restrictive society.
So when women appear at all, it’s usually in the form of a sweetheart or a prairie wife who tries to keep the hero at home, away from the quest that calls out to him. Or as her opposite: the tough, sexually available saloon girl, who knows the score but is usually cast aside when the quest is fulfilled. In other words, the usual virgin-whore paradigm.
Ford, however, included in many of his movies another female archetype: the strong, tough, and loving matriarch, best represented in his story of Welsh coal miners, How Green Was My Valley, and in John Steinbeck’s Depression-era tale, The Grapes of Wrath. His Catholic background might have been an influence here, with its reverence for the Virgin Mary, but he has also said that the mothers in those two movies were reminiscent of his own mother, and they are the moral centers of both films. In either case, he was able to attribute traditionally “male” values—courage, toughness, outspokenness—to many of his female characters (these qualities would find their apotheosis in the great, fiery Maureen O’Hara, arguably Ford’s and Wayne’s favorite actress).
THE FALL
Questioning traditional masculine images and behavior in popular culture gained traction in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Westerns were disappearing as a dominant film and television genre. This shift coincided with the second wave of feminism, and in part that questioning—that searching for new models of masculinity—was also a response to America’s disastrous military intervention in Vietnam, in which the wisdom of the elders and masculine virtues such as valor and loyalty were increasingly seen as fallible or wrongheaded. M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, The Graduate, Catch-22, Cannonball Run, and countless other popular books and movies satirized the American hero or called into question masculine virtues that had been taken for granted and had been nobly expressed in American cinema since its inception—especially in Westerns.
As post-Vietnam mistrust of the armed services grew, and an all-volunteer army relegated the military to mostly blue-collar American men, masculine models in popular culture increasingly appeared outside the realm of war pictures and Westerns. Rock music glorified the strutting, peacock male, introducing a sometimes androgynous element to the masculine image and making it possible for masculine icons to be skinny, pallid, not conventionally handsome: Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, David Bowie.
But what still lurked behind alternate, late twentieth-century representations of masculine objects of desire, especially in transcendent artists like Bob Dylan and the Band, were vestiges of the Western hero, in style and dress. Dyla
n still dresses like a Western dandy, and Mick Jagger, in one of his rare cinematic performances, played the nineteenth-century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Dylan, for that matter, wrote a haunting score for and appeared in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Maybe it’s the Western style of dress—most men look good in blue jeans, vests, neckerchiefs, boots, and hats!
Proper Westerns still appear from time to time on premium cable and on the big screen, occasionally enjoying critical and popular success, such as A&E’s Longmire and HBO’s iconoclastic Deadwood and a handful of Robert Duvall–, Clint Eastwood–, and Kevin Costner–helmed big-screen Westerns. There are also latter-day incarnations with incredible cultural power, like Star Wars. But the idea of what it means to be a man, and how a boy becomes a man, has shifted dramatically. As the Western disappears from the cultural landscape, what has replaced it as a paradigm of how boys become men?
One genre where we still see this drama played out is in African American films, such as those produced, directed, and written by John Singleton. In his seminal 1991 film, Boyz n the Hood, a stark contrast is made between a boy brought up with a father, who does the right thing, and those brought up without fathers, who become gangstas. As Furious Styles, played by Laurence Fishburne, tells his son Tre, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., “Any fool with a dick can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children.” Singleton’s 2001 film, Baby Boy, also explores themes of masculinity in struggling black communities, where boys must become men in a world where there are few positive masculine role models.
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