American Lament

Not very long ago, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the most singularly iconic members of American society, the individual who did a significant amount to define patriotic masculinity in our social consciousness, and who fought a long, patriotic campaign to make sure that no one ever used the phrase “social consciousness” to describe himself.

John Wayne helped define postwar America by representing our virtues and glorifying our vices. Wayne was born in 1907 as Marion Morrison, a comically un-Duke like birthname that most people are convinced is a lie; his name might as well be Percival Higginbotham III the Thoughtlessly Homosexual. Thankfully, he changed his name to the more dashingly appropriate John Wayne, and forever cast that name into the annals of our cultural history.

His early years were often noted with modest success tainted with failure. He tried college, but it didn’t take; he suffered an injury and lost his football scholarship. He soon found himself working at the prop department at Fox Studios. He soon took bit parts, eventually working himself up to a leading man. This was back in the day when one could become a leading man through hard work and determination, and not by being the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.

Wayne’s forte was largely westerns and war films, and this was well-suited to his masculine personality. He soon came to represent this onscreen personality in an almost universal level, bringing the weight of an entire gender upon his shoulders as he rooted out evil men, wooed the ladies, drank like a fish, shot German infantrymen and Mexican bandits, wasn’t too keen on the Indians, smoked like a sublimating chimney, and did pretty much everything that could conceivably be considered grade-A class-1 American Man to the highest degree possible.

Of course, this hypermachoism is likely an overcompensation factor for the fact that John Wayne, regardless of the number of Huns he mowed down onscreen, never served in the military. At the time of World War II, he was 34, was injured, and had a young family, which under normal circumstances would have easily qualified for a deferment. Wayne did so with no hesitations, jumping on his exit ticket with both feet. However, many other Hollywood stars in similar situations, such as Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart, enlisted with little fuss. He felt incredibly guilty about not only passing up service but also exploiting the leading man gap to increase his stature in Tinseltown. Because of this, he tried as hard as possible to convey blatant jingoism and marketed testosterone as a recommended daily allowance as penance for him taking a powder on Europe.

One of the most bizarre aspects of Wayne’s life was one that never happened. Stalin—that’s right, the leader of our perpetual Cold War opponent, Russia—at one point decided that John Wayne represented a direct threat to the spread of establishing the People’s Paradise (or, at the very least, impede the pro-Communist insurgency of Hungary, one can safely presume) and issued an order that the Duke be assassinated. That’s right, the Party Chairman, representing 50% of the total number of people in the world at the time with their finger on the button, bypassed John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon and went straight for the co-lead in The Flying Leathernecks.

Action stars rarely get respect from the critics, and Wayne was no exception. A lot of his movies, especially his early ones but by no means excepted in his later years, were largely formulaic throwaway films. As time marched on, however, Wayne differentiated himself as movies in general became more dramatic, stories became more complicated, audiences demanded intellectual stimulation, and the industry in general become more…well, more incredibly pussyish. Leading men were no longer Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott but Rock Hudson and Woody Allen. In the new Hollywood, Wayne could have easily been brushed off as a discarded relic of the past, a purveyor of a violent genre long past its prime. Instead, John Wayne embraced it, expanding its influence on cinema, and keeping it alive as a valid form of entertainment. The movies were top quality, the writing excellent, and Wayne was duly recognized with a Best Actor award for True Grit. And not because he threatened each and every member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with blackjacking their four-year-old daughters in the dead of night if they didn’t vote for him. Well, not only because.

The unthinkable happened, then, to the invincible. He contracted lung cancer, no doubt due to decades of chronic tobacco intake, or—if you are a regular listener to Coast to Coast, and if you aren’t, you should be—as a result of nearby nuclear testing by the government during the filming of The Conqueror in Utah. While he had a successful operation to remove the cancer, the removal of a lung made highly complicated stunts such as walking highly difficult, a fact most studio executives tried to minimize. It’s hard to represent American machismo when you have to stop to breathe every ten feet.

A different form of the C finally took John Wayne off the screen altogether in 1979—today, in fact: June 11th. This time it was the stomach, and there weren’t any cigarettes or government H-bombs to blame this time. And while Wayne is long off the scene, the ideals and values he represented are still prevalent in Hollywood, though they are slowly degenerating. In The Shootist, his last film, he refused to have his character shoot an enemy in the back, despite the script being written that way, stating that he didn’t want his real persona to transcend any negative portrayals on screen. By comparison, Dakota Fanning’s 12-year-old character is raped in 2006’s Hounddog without much objection by anyone involved in its production. John Wayne, alas, is dead.

The 30th anniversary of the most overrated franchise in movie history, Star Wars, is soon upon us. Millions of fans will take the day off of working at the comic book store or temporarily halting their two cents a word career writing for the Robot and Dragon Digest to pay good hard-earned money to watch a movie they have watched every single day of their known lives.

I’ve never quite fallen in love with Star Wars, and I have never really grasped it immense appeal. No particular reason, I guess; I was into sci fi when I was a child, and I still enjoy a good ole fashioned space opera just as much as the next mouthbreather. Probably because I was born just a touch too late; Star Wars was released on the year of my birth, and I was nary old enough to understand what would have been happening during the last of the original trifecta, The Return of the Jedi. Though I suppose this isn’t a valid excuse, since most of my friends were into Star Wars and they were just as old as me. I must be repressing some Wookie-related memory or something.

I would blame this on the old Star Wars/Star Trek debate, but, truth be told, I wasn’t really into Star Trek, either. At least the original series. I mean, yeah, it was kind of cool when I was a kid, but even back then I was unimpressed with William Shatner’s acting, and this was from someone who honestly believed that Inspector Gadget deserved some sort of Emmy. (Not the voice actor or the series, mind you, but Inspector Gadget himself.) And even I could tell that most episodes were derivative of each other, their ham-fisted plots about vaguely-veiled racism or the Vietnam War, and always ended up with Shatner throwing pink Styrofoam rocks around or getting it on with his own bad self with some green-skinned honey with big 60’s knockers and a skirt short enough all the way up to the Y. It wasn’t bad, mind you, and I kind of got a kick out of realizing that it was at least different, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it was better than Indiana Jones and the Millennium Falcon.

(Though I will admit that that episode with those scary looking flat transparent-skin-diseased things flew around the place and sucked on your epidermis really, really, really creeped me out. I mean, seriously. I can’t eat pancakes or date Goth girls to this day thanks to those nasty-looking things. Ick.)

But the overwhelming success of Star Wars eludes me. I don’t get the action-figure characters, the stale plot points, or the artificially induced dialogue. Aliens are fun and all, but when one of them is just a rug with googly eyes on it and whose range of emotion goes from “EEEOOORGH” to “EEEOOORGH” and another one is just a fat, punch-drunk, dyslexic Kermit the Frog, one has to wonder at what kindergarten they held the focus groups in. Not that that’s a bad idea, since kindergarteners are the ones most likely to have clueless relatives to buy all kinds of plastic Kenner dolls for their nieces and nephews (well, nephews, anyway) to lose without realizing that they would be worth something around three million dollars on the eBay just if they hadn’t spilled mango Capri-Sun all through the bendable joints and left it in the yard for your father to hit it with his weed eater.

And, seriously, Star Wars was nothing more than The Thorn Birds only with big white ships, cranky-looking machines that shoot CGI out of their eyes, and background shots made with black construction paper with pinholes poked in it held up against a 60 watt. Fans can dress it up and pretend that it’s all a rich tapestry of David vs. Goliath patriotism, good versus evil, and the innate righteousness of fighting for a just cause, but everyone just kind of wanted to know if Han and Leia were gonna knock boots once Luke got his skinny ass out of the way. (“Hey, Luke, boy, can’t you go away for like forty five minutes or so and Force up some pita bread or something?”)

I think I may have some ideas, though, as to why I’m just not impressed. First off, I didn’t really see any of the movies until I was nearly in college, not so much due to a lack of opportunity but more to not really caring all that much about it. I was too busy forging my apparent future career as a snare drum player in high school marching bands. But I sat down and watched them all at once one rainy Saturday, being mildly entertained but hardly blown away. At this point in my life, of course, I was already wowed by the special effects of Universal Soldier and the intricate plot development of Second Sight, so Star Wars was old hat.

More importantly, though, I think it’s just that I don’t appreciate what Star Wars did for the epic movie because I saw it after its impact was felt in the movie industry. Star Wars basically told audiences: There are no more pink Styrofoam rocks. There are no more aliens with pasty makeup or played by washout cameos from To Tell The Truth. The plots aren’t lifted from some boilerplate morality tome dictated from the suits from Standards and Practices or Mr. Ed only with aliens instead of that other horse down the road. But we can still get a good story and set it in a science fiction setting without it just being a kid’s show. Star Wars lifted science fiction out of the pulp and camp genres and make them into philosophical allegories about the I SAID HAN SHOT FIRST. NO, JACKASS, I SAID HAN SHOT FIRST. NOT GREEDO, YOU MORON. DID YOU NOT WATCH THE MOVIE? I SAID DID YOU NOT WATCH THE MOVIE? You HAVE? If you HAVEN’T, which I think is the CASE since only an IDIOT would say that GREEDO SHOT FIRST, then you just need to SHUT UP since you DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. Seriously.

Anyway, Star Wars made a lot more money than I ever will, so I guess I am wrong about it. Star Wars rocks, not just because of its cultural importance, but mostly because I don’t want to get a thousand emails about how rotten Deep Space Nine is and how George Lucas needs one of those Jewish holidays named after him. Or something, I don’t know. Right now, I’m going to go look for that Jabba the Hutt action figure in my attic to see how much of my college debt I can pay off.