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By GARRY WILLS Simon & Schuster, 380 pages, Nonfiction
Topic sentences come thick and numbingly familiar: "The disappearing frontier is the most powerful and persistent myth in American history ... The Western deals with the 'taming' of the West ... (The) air of invincibility gave Wayne his special status." Everybody got that? Wills wanted to write the book, he says, because Wayne is an intellectually unfashionable star who has figured prominently in the public imagination. Fair enough. But Wills overestimates how deeply Wayne has penetrated into the American psyche. Wayne's popularity spanned decades, but as an American icon, Wayne has remained static (unlike Elvis, whose mutability seems nowhere near exhausted). Wills' real problem, though, is that he simply doesn't know how to read movies. He claims that John Ford wasn't trying to make Wayne a star with the famous shot in "Stagecoach" that introduces Wayne (a laughable claim to anyone who's seen it and fallen immediately for this intensely likable kid). He falls for the "greatness" of later Ford duds like "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," that pile of blarney "The Quiet Man" and the overrated "classic" "The Searchers," while completely missing what may be the older Wayne's most appealing picture, Howard Hawks' relaxed and thoroughly engaging "Rio Bravo," a movie where his authority carries some weight precisely because it isn't invincible.
After slogging through "John Wayne's America," I still wasn't sure why Wills wanted to write the book. But I got a clue from the author photo -- Wills in Monument Valley, trying to look both like a regular guy in his running shoes and baggy chinos, and authorial as he clutches a pencil and book. Wills is too much the serious academic to admit it, but I think that, for him, "John Wayne's America" is a way of living out a fantasy of being a man who can take the measure of men, of paying homage to a male authority figure who fascinates him without violating his own reputation. "How the fuck can John Wayne die?" asks a mobster in the new movie "Donnie Brasco." Wills doesn't have an answer to that. But his book does show how the Duke might be embalmed.
-- Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. |
the trouble with academics and theorists and social and political critics who write about the movies is that they treat pictures as if they were theses to be proven or discredited. Even when Garry Wills is right in his new "John Wayne's America" (and that isn't often), what he's saying seems to bear no relation to our experience of the pictures he's talking about. Before he's out of the prologue, Wills has made factual errors (claiming screenwriter-director John Milius created Conan the Barbarian; it was actually '30s pulp writer Robert E. Howard), put forth embarrassing misreadings and given no indication that he has anything original to say.
