John Wayne’s Deathbed

Legendary Actor John Wayne perpetually stood as the watchtower of white masculinity on the silver screen from the zenith of his popularity until well after his death. To this day there is not a prominent pop culture icon who stands taller as a superior badge for the traditional idea of American maleness and more of a guardian of masculinity than Wayne. Throughout most of Wayne’s career Hollywood’s depiction of individual ideals and morals mirrored the country. Everything was in black or white. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Good vs evil was easily identifiable there was little gray area, nuance or imagining. The heroism of Wayne was clear. He was big, strong, stoic, and heroic. A real American who stood for the real America. In the 1970’s Wayne’s career wound down and Hollywood began the golden age of the anti-hero thanks to a string of raw, unnervingly compelling, and groundbreaking movies all released within a few months of each other in 1969. Movies such as Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Z, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, The Graduate, The Wild Bunch. The 1970’s consisted of main characters who were woefully unheroic and deeply flawed and who were bristling up against the establishment’s formalities and traditional humanity’s expectations for them. They surely were not heroes as they were complex personalities and an expansion of the gray areas of life and a new coverage of human character was spreading across the cinematic landscape. Heroes were not just running low in film but also in society. Certainly, after Watergate on Americas idealism took a major wallop like the back of a bad guy’s head took the butt of one of Wayne’s pistols. While this loss of optimism and romanticism and the fair dealing America was increasingly reflected in the movies. John Wayne was stricken with Cancer and had made his last movie, The Shootist. In this new age of movie protagonists made up of so many rascals and runaways there seemed nobody centered and grounded. There was nobody to cheer for anymore. Enter stage left a punchy pugilist from the streets of Philadelphia. As heroic and self-confident as Wayne was the ultimate underdog was the character of Rocky Balboa. Actor Sylvester Stallone had witnessed all of the murky rogues filling up movie houses and appeared to write his screenplay for 1976’s Best Picture Winner Rocky out of this hero deprived weariness. Whether he knew it or not Stallone also had his finger on the pulse of a huge majority of the movie audience who were more than ready for it. Rocky ushered in what the 70’s and 80’s would bring back to the new built for noise and popcorn movie houses in spades. The lone white male full tilt hero. The resurrection of John Wayne who was now figuratively at least up and out of his deathbed. Stallone himself would help lead the advance throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s playing the Wayne type of character in Rocky, Rambo, and a heap of other action movies where Stallone was the only thing standing between freedom and terrorism. Stallone with the success of Rocky and First Blood his Rambo series became a major spark that lit the fire for a new American super patriotism movement that was fully indoctrinated and cemented in the 1980’s by the election of literally one of these white cowboy actors as President Of The United States, Ronald Reagan. Through the 80’s Rocky Balboa kept getting his face pummeled in just as the Government did from Reagan’s deregulations all throughout the decade. Rocky 2, Rocky 3, Rocky 4, and so on. Audiences continued forking over the trickle-down dough to go to the movies to stand up and cheer for Rocky like they were cheering for America while America itself was getting pummeled and was falling down on its knees. The Republican party’s answer to the corrupt Richard Nixon turned out to be a president that was even worse. Before they knew it Reagan was embroiled in his own anti-constitutional turmoil and doing more damage than Nixon ever thought of doing to the country. Regan was slashing away like Jason Vorhees with his machete at campers and bleeding out were important government programs, jobs, unions, and policies, which were vital to working class people’s lives and livelihoods and keys to their survival. For the first time worker production grew and monies compensation did not. The middle class would spend the rest of the decade disappearing and dissolving into ghosts. But Reagan was still wildly popular and supported as the country was being purposely brainwashed by the republican party that was being produced by Hollywood strategist and producer Roger Ailes and his latest lead actor Ronald Reagan. At the movies, this extreme patriotic trend was on fire as main characters and entire films seemed to be sculpted right from Reagan’s falsely perceived character profile. Tough, no nonsense, muscular, a protector who was a rugged individualist yet grounded in the traditional family values of the country that was seeing massive multicultural changes. But he was not a protector in fact he was an enormous compound that triggered the demolition of the destruction of the American family and of the American worker, but Regan and Republicans did some script rewrites and blamed everything on poor people, welfare queens. Essentially Black people. The white middle class gave it all a standing ovation and five stars. They loved it. They didn’t have to take any blame for electing Reagan and for their own suffering and could proceed with their favorite pursuit of biting off their nose to spite their face and blaming people lower on the power totem pole that they were and protecting the powerful who trickled on them. Calls to make America great again were being echoed down the corridors of power born out of the white working-class consciousness well before the year of our lord 2016. Reagan’s fake tough guy persona echoed Wayne’s, but they weren’t fearless men they were fearful. The tools they used to distinguish their fear were widely taken for strength and bravery. Movies like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Red Dawn, Missing In Action, Top Gun, Lethal Weapon, Iron Eagle, Crocodile Dundee. Hero main characters all white men dissipating this fake strength with big action, big guns, big knives, and a big axe to grind with thugs, liberals, and the Government. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, all of them at one time or another incapsulated This tough white male lead loner hero character represented white America and the threat it was up against in a changing country and especially multiculturalism, gay people, and feminism. Watch any of these movies and sooner rather than later you are bound to notice a theoretical portrait of Reagan and an actual portrait of Reagan hanging up on the wall in a police station, or home or office somewhere. The National Rifle Association fashioned its own campaigns around this Hollywood created myth that society was breeding a new kind of criminal whom the only way to deal with was for police to break the rules. They sold the fantasy of crucially needed self-defense because of out-of-control crime that required big men with big guns to deal with by using another actor from the Reagan and John Wayne mold in Charlton Heston. As went the real world so went Hollywood. Their newest chew toy was Cops in danger. The formula of these types of films was simple structure. It was the Superman story over and over again. With various particulars but the same rise and fall and rise again and a similar heroic character. Many of these actors were Conservatives themselves and without any pondering decided that the true America was the one they were representing in their movies. The simple answer as to why these men were needed heroes was because their ilk was in danger of dying out like John Wayne. Rocky Balboa may be an underdog but only because he is a white boxer in a sport that was continuing to be dominated by Black men. He is that outnumbered police officer inside the ring. That is what makes him heroic. Rocky hanging onto the ropes as Apollo Creed and MR. T continue to blast holes in his face and knock his teeth loose are an extension of his white fans hanging onto their country and their jobs being taken by Black people. Dirty Harry needs to keep the streets clean for Ozzie and Harriet. He is keeping the 50’s Dragnet world of which John Wayne is the biggest star safe in the treacherous and more electric and colorful 1970’s. He’s Joe Friday with a sudden need for a bigger gun and to work his itchy trigger finger at Black and brown thugs while bending the rules and breaking the laws instead of upholding them. The character of John Rambo in Stallone’s First Blood is a metaphor for America up against Government tyranny. Rambo is a consolidation of all the nutty right-wing so-called “militias” and their avenging angel fever dream the Government’s chickens coming home to roost. Self-appointed protectors and freedom fighter groups who live in a projected illusion that they are fighting for good, but simply put they just do not want to live in a nonwhite society protected under the same laws as they are. The hatred for law enforcement is reversed when it comes to police abusing their authority and torturing and murdering Black people but when it happens to a white man it is time to blow the joint up. Rambo by the definition of conservative law is a domestic terrorist murdering police officers using self-defense as an excuse. He should have complied. Stallone’s next character of a Detroit cop was fashioned out of the police are outgunned myth against killers who kill for the thrill of killing and have to follow no rules while cops are sick of following the rules, so they just do whatever they want. Cobra, a Stallone movie about a rogue Detroit cop was simply Rambo flipped. Harassing, arresting, and beating someone like John Rambo would be perfectly fine within the confines of this invented structure for the character of Cobra to do. Rambo and Cobra are merely the two sides of a conservative contradiction. The military and police connections are intertwined thoroughly into these movies. In Lethal Weapon John Wayne is back from the war in Vietnam and a crazy cop who is Suicidal from the death of his wife and paired with another former soldier as his new partner. As a cop he also has too many legal and moral confines to appropriately fight the bad guys. Government red tape is always the villain no matter what. If the criminal is black, It will not let the cops do their jobs. If the criminal is white, it lets the cops do their job too well. Ultimately the cop’s job should be to protect white supremacy. Top Gun’s hero doesn’t listen to the government rules that exist for his safety so obviously he’s a maverick. Even after he gets his partner killed with his reckless and selfish behavior, he’s immediately forgiven and honored. The death of his partner is played for dramatic effect but also to make Maverick what he really needs to be: Lone. Top Gun’s romanticization of mechanical war as its lone white male hero recoils against Government regulations even when it fails others and only serves him was obviously a monster success with Reagan era audiences. The hero in Die Hard is fighting terrorists who are white so they’re really just robber barons. The evil is bent down a notch but only symbolically as they still have to pose enough of a threat to excuse big action, a lot of blood, and payback, so they ceremoniously murder a couple of hostages to give John McLane more justification to blow them away. John McLane is alone, bleeding, smoking, killing, winning and John Wayne wouldn’t have had it any other way. Their games and even their names rhyme together. Sometimes Hollywood needed foreigners to do their Wayne bidding for them. Mick “Crocodile” Dundee is from the outback of Australia and a true tough guy who has not been feminized yet like these American men have. He is needed to come to America to teach younger males how to ignore these weakening of men trends happening and to give American women the manly pleasure they need from a real man who still wears a cowboy hat and carries a big knife. This identical projection was placed against the acting career of a former bodybuilder and Olympian from Austria named Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger was John Wayne on steroids. Though he was a foreigner who could barely speak English he was considered one of the good ones because of his skin tone. Schwarzenegger had all the pedigree, down to even being a huge Ronald Reagan supporter and looking up to Reagan with immense reverence and esteem. For conservatives who believe that liberalism is a disease, and they are the cure Schwarzenegger was a massive dose of medicine with a spoonful of sugar to make it go down. Whenever possible Hollywood harkened back to the good old days and used the good old day actors to do it. The 1986 Picture Tough Guys is a movie about lifelong ex-con train robbers who are finally released from prison after thirty years and now have to adjust to a frightening society that has transformed to the modern world with petrifying things for tough guys to have to deal with like light beer, vegetables, black break-dancers with boom boxes, brunch, frozen yogurt, yuppie restaurants, working women, nerdy children, senior homes, gay bars, welfare hotels, sexually liberated women, punk rock, androgenous 80’s fashion and gym culture. These results of liberalism are just too hard to live with for conservative men, so our hero ex-cons retreat to their criminal pasts to rob another train even if it means going back to prison. Real men Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster are ripped from the 1950’s and dropped off into this irrational 1980’s. The senior home in tough guys where Lancaster lives is run by a tyrant and is played more like a prison that he just came from. The truth is for tough guys the modern day is the real prison and the feminization of men is a prison even though de-masculinization of men is commonplace in prisons. Still in this world it is better to be controlled by a man because at least you are not being controlled by a woman. Women are villains in Wayne’s world compared to Wayne. Women of cinema throughout the 70’s, 80’s and even the 90’s unless they’re serving a man’s needs, they’re prostitutes, drug addicts, stalkers, lesbian serial killers or being chopped up and killed by a man who can’t deal with their liberation. Women in those movies do not seem to know what to do with themselves when a man is not around. Wayne was such a powerful and unforgettable figure that his shell lives on even today. The Republican party has doubled down on the Wayne inspired rugged individuality canard where everyone is supposedly more content and safer and more manly on their own, even needing to fight viruses using no vaccine or masks or there is no freedom left and even more of a need for bigger guns to fighter bigger Government and more Wayne machismo mechanisms. Gay men still are not real men and a man putting on dress is worse than dying. Republicans are even pushing cigarette smoking which is what killed Wayne as being healthy and needed as the right masculine thing to do. Hollywood created the John Wayne prototype which they have remodeled over the years but still exists like all their other formulas and protypes. He is there when you are at the movies and see that big action star fighting bad guys alone or that lone white male up against the Government and trying to protect his family. For the Republican party they appear eternally content on being the party of John Wayne’s deathbed.