In this world of diversity, when people spend their time asking automated
call systems for more options, there are scant few subjects upon which opinions
cleave so closely to the 50-50 mark, like and dislike if you will. John Wayne
is one of those subjects. There are two schools of thought about iconic film
actor Marion Robert Morrison, who never once played the
role of the bad guy in a movie (not even in his portrayal, somehow, of Gengis Khan). You
either love The Duke, and his movies, or you hate them.
Those who love them list many reasons for doing so. Those who hate them
have but one reason. They see John Wayne as a symbol of old white male
conservatism. They say he was too cozy with the Ronald Reagans of the world.
They say he was a symbol of the male dominant era - generally referred to as "history" - that had repressed so many
people for so long. They say his character was a bit too authentic in The
Searchers. While all of that may be true, that just isn't how I see John Wayne.
I see him as a big drunken Irishman who made rollicking movies with lots
of shooting and punching and yelling and chasing girls. He did things the way
everyone would if there weren't laws against doing so. He was like that crazy,
bad-ass uncle that some kids had and everyone else wished for. Today's action
movie stars aren't anything at all like John Wayne. Instead, we get Russell
Crowe and Christian Bale, guys who can’t afford to “play themselves”, because
they happen to be actual jerks whose behavior in real life is far more
reprehensible than anything John Wayne ever did on screen, or off.
I sound like an old guy now, and could even be mistaken for a conservative
in the wrong light, although that's not likely to ever be the case. (Today's
conservatives are, as the Duke would have said, short on ears and long on
mouth.) It's just worth noting what a vastly different world this is in which
Generation Wireless is growing up.
In the 1970s, our TV shows didn't feature young, hip people wearing sexy
clothing. We had a bunch of fat, old people schlepping around in gray trench
coats (even if they were filmed in color) like Peter Falk in Columbo and
Judd Hirsch in Taxi. We had M*A*S*H, where most of the cast was
either graying or balding. Bob Denver was the youngest guy on Gilligan's
Island, and he was already an aging pothead. Hal Linden and the boys on Barney
Miller were only a decade or so removed from doing a nursing home sitcom.
The only real exception in prime-time was Happy Days, a show set in the
idyllic, pre-Civil Rights 1950s. Y'know... John Wayne's kids.
Even when they started to bring on shows that were aimed at the new desired
demographic, like Welcome Back, Kotter or Good Times or Three's
Company, they still featured prominently in their casts a balding old guy.
Veteran actors Gabe Kaplan, John Amos and the absolutely inimitable Norman Fell
(respectively) anchored their programs and helped deliver the ratings, week after week, year after year.
What all of these shows had in common is fairly obvious. Not only did they
employ actual actors and actresses, they took care to address serious themes
(often to their own detriment - see Dabney Coleman and Geena Davis's abortion
episode in the short-lived Buffalo Bill). But other than the rare
exception, most of the programming on television back then shoved viewers in
the direction of law, order and authority.
This was pretty much the case right up until Dukes of Hazzard. Then, the police
became clowns, and traffic laws were made to be broken (as were the frames of
Dodge Chargers all across America). Similarly, television programming didn't
become particularly dark or edgy until Hill Street Blues. Prior to that, cop dramas
were more of the action variety, like Starsky and Hutch or Hawaii
Five-O. Shows like Dallas and Knott's Landing relied on soap opera plots
and, in Larry Hagman and Joan Collins, had actors of severe maturity playing
key roles.
We all watched as our great cultural medium, television, coarsened and
hardened. The unabashed slut-fest that was Melrose Place took over for the
glamorous settings of its dramatic predecessors. Coffee shops, diners and bars
replaced the Korean peninsula as the settings for ensemble comedies. The nudity
of NYPD Blue replaced the pie-eyed hoke of Magnum P.I. and Simon
and Simon... And then came the cartoons.
While I appreciate the comedic value of shows like South Park and
(once upon a time) The Simpsons, I found little redeeming social value
in Ren and Stimpy. Beavis and Butthead had its moments, I guess,
but King of the Hill didn't. Family Guy deliberately shoots
straight for the lowest common denominator.
Basically, I stopped watching
cartoons about the same that I stopped wearing PJs. Cartoons were for Saturday
mornings, and we weren't watching any weirdo Japanimation, either (at least not
until Star Blazers). It was pretty much Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy
Duck, Foghorn Leghorn and Elmer Fudd. That's it. No Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles, no Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and certainly no psychotic
infants dressed up as Adolf Hitler. If those had been my options, I would've quit
watching cartoons long before I discovered the NFL and the WWF.
Pro wrestling and pro football were staples of every kid's life when I grew
up. That's what prompted us to pick up our first dumbbells before we were four
feet tall. Today's children want Pokemon cards; we wanted biceps. Just
as the actors on our TV shows seemed older and wiser, so did our athletes,
those who went according to choreographed scripts and those who tried to really
kill each other on the gridiron. There were no young guys in pro wrestling,
except as stooges to be thrown around in predictable fashion by large, middle-aged
men with receding hairlines who wore their Lycra trunks pulled halfway up to
their breasts, from Hulk Hogan to the Junk Yard Dog to Jesse "The
Body" Ventura (the latter of which would go on to be, of all things, the
governor of Minnesota).
Vince McMahon's glitzy World Wrestling Federation certainly transfixed
millions of viewers, but when cable TV came into our living rooms, Ted Turner's
network brought with it the truly seamy underbelly of wrestling, the decidedly
minor-league NWA. (National Wrestling Alliance? Something, pronounced,
"ENNNN-Dubya-ay".) The announcers drawled out their truly Faulknerian
story lines in their laconic Southern accents. The arenas were small and dimly
lit, and the fans, not so many.
The main players were the likes of “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, well on his way
up the pro wrestling ladder, and Dusty Rhodes, who always looked like he was on
the brink of an impending heart attack (which he was), along with such luminaries as Abdullah
the Butcher, Lex Luger and Manny "The Raging Bull" Fernandez, a
guy who won Super Bowls with the Miami Dolphins in the '70s. All in all, it was quite depressing,
and had to have been the creative wellspring for the equally depressing film
"starring" Mickey Rourke, so eruditely titled, The Wrestler.
In real sports, rookies rarely saw the field. The stars of the game were
graybeards. Roger Staubach served in the Navy before he had a blue star on his
silver Cowboys helmet. Terry Bradshaw looked like a math teacher and talked
like a lawnmower mechanic. Jim Plunkett looked like the school janitor. "Mean" Joe Greene
and John Matuszak appeared to be actual cavemen. Jack Tatum looked like a damn
pimp - and played the game with much worse intentions.
Today's football players wear pink for four weeks out of the season. They
shave their arms so we can all see their artsy-fartsy tattoos. They go to Tina
Turner's hair stylist. And they have a commissioner who is overly concerned
about "player safety" in a sport where the very intent is knock the
shit out of one another. Reduce injuries? Jack Youngblood of the Rams played in
the Super Bowl against the Steelers with a broken femur. Head injuries? Dick
Butkus – appropriately of the Bears - once kicked a colleague in the face. Pittsburgh’s
Jack Lambert was playing hockey on cleats. Tatum's nickname was "The
Assassin"; he infamously refused to apologize for paralyzing New England
Patriots receiver Daryl Stingley in a preseason game.
Even in baseball, the young players rarely got to play in the big parks.
They were being shuttled about on creaky buses between towns with names like
Racine and Murfreesboro. They had to earn their stripes in the minors before
they could get to The Bigs. It wasn't a system so much as it was a tradition.
The professional baseball players we saw on TV seemed like thoroughly grown-up
people, not troubled young athletes with drug problems who dated the cougars of
the entertainment industry. They didn't much look like athletes, either; it was
more Goose Gossage than Barry Bonds.
One baseball player who stood out was Bobby Murcer, the longtime-Yankee who
ended up with the Chicago Cubs, becoming a lone bright spot in the mire of that
franchise’s mediocrity. Bobby Murcer once told a terminally ill child, a young Cubbies fan named
Scott Crull, that he would try to hit a home run and a double for him. Then,
that night, before that kid's eyes on the TV screen above his hospital bed,
Bobby Murcer hit two homers. For any kid, that would be a miracle, especially
poignant when miracles were the only thing left that a deathly ill kid had going for him.
But baseball changed, too, just like everything else. In 1994, there was no
World Series winner, because there was no World Series. The business side of
baseball ushered the players and the fans out of the ball parks, and the only
thing that has made that sport noteworthy since then is a steroids scandal. And
everyone feigned such shock that all those guys with Popeye’s forearms would ever ingest something other than their spinach.
John Wayne didn't need steroids. He was just big and strong and enduring,
qualities that have kept his movies in the regular rotation on channels all
across the dial - not that they've made any TVs with dials in about 25 years
now. Television is being supplanted, anyway, by the Internet as the social
medium of its time.
When I pull up my home page, I am usually greeted with a
story about Katy Perry or Justin Bieber or Britney Spears or Rhianna – and that’s just what's in the news. As far as cinema goes, computer-generated graphics have replaced talented actors in our movie theaters, with no looking back.
Bobby Murcer died of brain cancer in 2008. The Cubs never did amount to
anything. And they probably never will. It's all right. In every place else in this savage and beautiful world,
throughout humanity's tumbling generations, hope springs eternal... Even, somehow, among those who really ought to know better by now.
pH 7.o9.13
