Photo by Alekon pictures on Unsplash
READ: A lonely nation: Has the notion of the ‘American way’ promoted isolation across history?
People are lonely the world over. But as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life, some were already asking the question: Do the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape — encourage isolation and alienation?
Or is that, like other chunks of the American story, a premise built on myths?
by framersqool:
As with so much of the pioneering punditry to emanate from Left-Coast American mainstream media, the piece highlighted above in its own right is quite well-written, if predictably built on quite a number of its own essentially mythological claims, being held forth as axiomatic ones.
The myth of what the John Wayne mythos actually always consisted of, for instance, is a reliably soft target for those who had long since accepted, on face value, an entirely inaccurate and academically-redistributed summary of his work: to the effect that it is, on the whole, a promotion of an idea called, usually in mocking tones by its detractors, 'rugged individualism.'
If one were to take a careful look at the storyline of just about any John Wayne film I can think of, on each occasion, the overall message is carried by a character who, indeed, is capable of making his own decisions and carrying them out with (occasionally) solitary courage, but who is also equipped in such courage by a singular and consistent conviction: that a community is worth protecting, and that it is incumbent on the individual to undertake whatever means he finds necessary, within the strength of individual character, to protect it.
Even to single out the small minority of Wayne's screen appearances which John Ford had directed, is both inaccurately prejudicial and altogether misleading.
In the three epic Ford westerns, often summarized as 'the cavalry trilogy,' Wayne plays three commanding officers of US cavalry in the Apache wars of the late 19th century.
In the earliest of the three, and the one I always regarded as the best of them, Fort Apache, Wayne is in command of a company himself but is also subordinate to the newest regimental CO to have arrived on-post from the east. Colonel Thursday's (Henry Fonda's) ignorance and bigotry toward anything to do with frontier life, and especially toward the Apache themselves, immediately begins to put Wayne, who has been acting post commander until his arrival, at odds with him because of the threats posed by his own superior officer's individual approach, to what Wayne already regards, in terms of both the army post and the Apache themselves, as local communities.
There is one scene after another showing how Wayne struggles to maintain the proper balance between his duties as an officer and as a member of a community: from his charming and empathetic guidance of the Colonel's young daughter (an adult Shirley Temple, in what I measure as by far the most powerful performance of her film career) through a developing romance with one of his own officers, to a potentially overlooked scene wherein a regimental dance has been interrupted by a military crisis, and Wayne is suddenly surrounded by his company's officers paying scrupulous attention to his detailed orders, the entire plot is based not at all on this ethos of 'rugged individualism' (whatever that even means) but rather on a strong individual's wholehearted commitment to his community, and the full measure of his duties to it.
Similarly, most of the story in The Searchers, the picture so singled out in the AP column as seemingly illustrative of this 'rugged individualist' mythos, is of two men who undertake to return a young woman taken captive by the Apache to her community. Quite a bit of the story takes place not in any untamed wilderness full of daunting threats, as the columnist would have us focus on, but rather within a small frontier town whose entire existence is based on seeking to maintain a difficult but entirely necessary balance, between the requirements of the individuals and their duties to their community.
My reading of the evocative 'riding off into the sunset' ending is that this eventual fate is as much the irony of Wayne's character as his privilege because his community has, for the time being, no further use for him. That he doesn't seem to mind this in the short term and probably regards his status among them as anything but a lonely one only reiterates the larger theme running throughout Wayne's entire body of work, which is that a person's own business is indeed their own business and that is both a strong and capable individual ready to surmount challenges unilaterally and a reliable and even if need be a sacrificial member of a community, are by no means mutually exclusive commitments.
In Sands of Iwo Jima, a war film eventually coming to its climax in that amphibious invasion of a Japanese-held island in 1945, Sergeant Stryker isn't so much a 'rugged individualist' as simply something of an asshole. Or, to put it more on point, a traumatized war veteran still at war has his reasons for keeping his distance. Distance is first maintained in a scene where he meets a woman in a bar and tells her to 'knock it off' when she begins to try to cultivate his sympathies by intimating to a wartime combat veteran that she has had a hard day and then completely collapses when he ends up coming to her home and finds out she is a mother of a baby girl, who melts his heart on the spot.
Possibly the most powerful and revealing single line in Wayne's entire career comes next:
'Yes, I know about babies.'
In the one, and nearly only, Wayne film I can think of where his character is so much the rugged individualist as to make his life alone on the trail with a stray dog all but unbearable, Hondo, his entire human dilemma is shown as his being as dysfunctional a person as the Left-Coast crowd is content to believe he was always promoting as preferable, and throughout the story a frontier woman who is even more lonely than he is, because of her gossip-enforced alienation from her own community, is the one who is able to get through to him the idea that all of us actually need each other, as difficult and even nearly impossible as this might be at times.
I would even venture to assert that John Wayne's entire body of work as an actor, producer, director, and public figure is more illustrative of his belief in the community than any other such personality I can think of. But to bring this out of any truly discerning examination of his work, one must take it on its own merits and not assume already that he is promoting the opposite of what his life's work had always stood for. Very little, if anything, of a career spanning more than half a century, even remotely resembles the community's rejection in favor of the solitary hero acting entirely on his prerogatives to remain alone.
The John Wayne theme is by no means the whole of the arguments made in the AP piece above, but by choosing it as an introductory illustration, the author very much sets its remaining tone with what I regard as a thorough misreading of what American individualism truly represents.
And, of course, it leaves me suspecting that, without his coming right out and chanting Workers of the world unite! Basically, what he is dog-whistlingly advocating in the place of this 'rugged individualism' is something quite a bit less useful to any community than strong and capable individuals obeying their own consciences within them: more programs, more bureaucracy, more attempts at alleviating things he knows little about from his safe and thoroughly self-serving vantage point within middle-class prosperity, by the creation of more and more..... socialism.
Which altogether misnomered anti-social superstition, the record shows that one apparently rugged individual name Marion Morrison from a small rural town in Iowa, known to history and the world as 'John Wayne,' did indeed commit much of his life's work to oppose, because of the threats it poses to the community.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.