Speaker 1: What's Johnny my Wayne O? What's destroyed? Yeah? Shattering my pelvis,
Speaker 1: my thirteen pound baby? What's irradiating? My racist movie about
Speaker 1: Genghis Khan starring a white man is Genghis Kan? That
Speaker 1: is the funniest thing in terms of like ways John
Speaker 1: Wayne could have died nuked while playing Genghis Khan in
Speaker 1: a movie is pretty funny. That. That's pretty good? How
Speaker 1: are you doing? Francesca Fiarentini, our guest returning for part
Speaker 1: three of three. I have to find out how this ends,
Speaker 1: you know? Well? I mean it's I feel like he
Speaker 1: becomes even more bad, aastardly towards the end of his life.
Speaker 1: But I'm excited. Yes, actually he becomes Chris Catan. Um, real,
Speaker 1: real curveball for the story. That makes as much sense
Speaker 1: as anything else. Um, Chris Catan, great career not over?
Speaker 1: Is it not? Are we still doing christ? I don't
Speaker 1: have anything against Chris Catan in particular, but are we?
Speaker 1: I mean there could be a Night at the Roxbury reboots,
Speaker 1: So there could be or we could even do like
Speaker 1: a like a like an Avengers in game where a
Speaker 1: Night at the Roxbury meets the Blues Brothers and uh,
Speaker 1: it's another one of those Lord Michael's movies. Uh the Superstar,
Speaker 1: I don't know Superstar. Throw that in there, you know,
Speaker 1: throwing the David Cross one where he plays plays a hillbilly. Um,
Speaker 1: make it all happen, but everyone's jacked. It's it's basically
Speaker 1: everybody exactly get everybody like on it, pumped with H
Speaker 1: G H destroy their hearts. Get him just like David
Speaker 1: Cross has like sixteen inch biceps. Yeah, and then nume
Speaker 1: on set and then we knew them, and then we
Speaker 1: knew them on set. That's right. Finally, that's how we
Speaker 1: that's how we end Lauren Michaels' career with that film.
Speaker 1: Uh shouldn't have brought that Night at the Roxbury so um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like the center of this idea of like white
Speaker 1: conservative masculinity um and and has has been for decades
Speaker 1: at this point. By the time we hit like the
Speaker 1: mid Night to late nineteen sixties. Uh, all of these
Speaker 1: people who are like eighteen nineteen twenty uh and old
Speaker 1: enough to start going over to Vietnam have never known
Speaker 1: a world in which John Wayne wasn't like the biggest
Speaker 1: action star in there. Like he's you know, there's not
Speaker 1: really anyone to compare him to. Now, I guess your
Speaker 1: closest would be someone like The Rock. Um. But even then,
Speaker 1: like we we don't really have. The media is so
Speaker 1: much bigger now, so like you have like a million
Speaker 1: different kinds of action stars for everyone in this period
Speaker 1: of time, John Wayne is like uh it yeah, um. So,
Speaker 1: though not publicly a man of particular religious vigor, he
Speaker 1: embodied what muscular Christianity enthusiasts respected, while also speaking to
Speaker 1: the more secular, arch capitalist right wingers who sought a
Speaker 1: more muscular US willing to throw down for the free market.
Speaker 1: All of this sworld together to make him an irresistible
Speaker 1: frontman for Republican politicians. Christine Cobbs Dumez writes in Night,
Speaker 1: he gave a rousing patriotic address at the Republican National Convention.
Speaker 1: When Nixon wanted to explain his own views on law
Speaker 1: and order, he pointed to Wayne's Chisholm, which is one
Speaker 1: of his movies, as a model, a bloody tale of
Speaker 1: frontier justice in which Wayne achieved order and revenge through
Speaker 1: violence some sixty eight like at the RNC, Nixon is
Speaker 1: specifically pointing to John Wayne movies is like this is
Speaker 1: this is how law and order is supposed to be.
Speaker 1: This this cowboy movie by a draft dodger. You know,
Speaker 1: who could take care of these dirty hippies who want
Speaker 1: to stop seeing their friends slaughtered? The Duke John Wayne,
Speaker 1: these we can't it be more like that? Remember when
Speaker 1: the good guys were good guys and the bad guys
Speaker 1: were the brown people. Let's do that. Let's do that again.
Speaker 1: It is also very funny he spent so much time
Speaker 1: shifting on anti war protesters, a lot of whom are
Speaker 1: veterans who didn't dodge the draft like he did. But whatever, so,
Speaker 1: Wayne himself was flabbergasted at the resistance among many Americans
Speaker 1: towards continuing to escalate the war in Vietnam. I'man's biography
Speaker 1: tells a particularly lurid story about Wayne seeing a one
Speaker 1: armed veteran walking across the campus during a protest, and
Speaker 1: this group of protesters like approaches this veteran. They're heckling
Speaker 1: this brave man who lost his arm in combat, and
Speaker 1: John Wayne has to like walk up and say, now,
Speaker 1: don't you like you can speak your piece, but you're
Speaker 1: not gonna yell at this man, and you don't get
Speaker 1: to say this to a hero and YadA YadA YadA
Speaker 1: together becau actly and then everyone clapped. Yeah. Um, there's
Speaker 1: no evidence this ever happened. Uh, it's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of fake stories about stuff like soldiers getting spit on
Speaker 1: from this period and John Wayne being a liar. I
Speaker 1: don't have any trouble believing made this up. Um, he
Speaker 1: needed one for himself. The spit the spit soldier story
Speaker 1: was getting way too much play. Let me invent one.
Speaker 1: He needed a John Wayne version one. Now I don't
Speaker 1: think that particular story is true, Francesco, but we do
Speaker 1: have audio of John Wayne addressing a group of students.
Speaker 1: I think they're like r OTC kids, cadets at like
Speaker 1: a military academy or something. What matters most is that
Speaker 1: he's obviously fucking hammered. It's so funny. He is, he
Speaker 1: is housed. He is just completely fucking still after all
Speaker 1: these years. It's so funny. Um, here's how he says,
Speaker 1: hello to these kids. My name is what? All right?
Speaker 1: First of all, it's Marryan is married. Suddenly you will
Speaker 1: John is short for William. What am I saying? It's
Speaker 1: so funny? This is unimportant? Oh my God, it does
Speaker 1: not get wildly more coherent from there, but the audience
Speaker 1: is very much on board. And honestly, if I had
Speaker 1: been a college student and a drunk movie star had
Speaker 1: come to give my commits like that would have been
Speaker 1: super funny. I would have been all I think most
Speaker 1: kids would write. Um, the audience, I mean this is
Speaker 1: also a more right wing, militant audience. So they're they're
Speaker 1: on board here. Um. Now I'm gonna play another clip
Speaker 1: and for context. Here he's talking about how different things
Speaker 1: were when He's talking about like protests in college and
Speaker 1: how different things were when he were in he was
Speaker 1: in college. Remember, this is a period where students are
Speaker 1: taking over faculty buildings and whatnot. They're trashing the offices
Speaker 1: of certain professors. Like there's all these protests against the
Speaker 1: war by students. We talked about some of this in
Speaker 1: the Kissinger episodes. So John Wayne is talking about how
Speaker 1: different things were when he was in college. Let me
Speaker 1: explain something to you. And I went there. I went there.
Speaker 1: One that was a fella in troll Over College, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, boss many buddy had walked in there, A
Speaker 1: good one got the office and did excrement and his
Speaker 1: power through buddy, you got it. The waste paper basket,
Speaker 1: that's what it is. Had written lewd words on his uh,
Speaker 1: the pictures of his family. We as members of the college,
Speaker 1: would have kicked the god damn hell out of this argiza.
Speaker 1: It's very funny. He's so drunk, does he nod off?
Speaker 1: Because that's where it feels like I feel like he
Speaker 1: might have, like he was sort of he was sort
Speaker 1: of graying out there for a little while. What's the
Speaker 1: having a little brown out, drifting off into the land
Speaker 1: of vodka and fantasies. Classroom, right, the class class I
Speaker 1: never stopped classroom. Just a drunk old man heckling teens.
Speaker 1: So from this point he continues to his main argument,
Speaker 1: which is that he thinks these kids he's talking to
Speaker 1: should beat the hell out of left wing protesters who
Speaker 1: dissent from the view that war is good in the
Speaker 1: US can do no wrong. Well, a lot of the
Speaker 1: speech is very funny. It's mostly very funny. The last
Speaker 1: bit does kind of get a little terrifying because in
Speaker 1: it John Wayne calls for the establishment of the sort
Speaker 1: of violent right wing street organizations that we are currently
Speaker 1: swimming in as a nation. For you guys, you better
Speaker 1: start thinking. It's it's getting to be re god damndiculous.
Speaker 1: If you guys don't start thinking is men, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have a lousy country. Jesus, I'm I have had the
Speaker 1: chance to be you as guys who are with things
Speaker 1: and against things. Christ try as because I try as
Speaker 1: a human being to listen to both sides of everything.
Speaker 1: But there's no both sides anymore. They're just trying to
Speaker 1: wreck our goddamn country. It's time for you younger guys
Speaker 1: to take over. I don't know what they do. Awesome.
Speaker 1: That was brilliant, and you know what, it very much
Speaker 1: is a speech that fits into the year. It does
Speaker 1: it does. That's that's a Giuliani speech right there. That's
Speaker 1: a right down to the drunkenness, right down to the
Speaker 1: fairly being able to stand yes exactly. He was so
Speaker 1: ahead of his time. But it's so he's also it's
Speaker 1: funny because he is also while the hero of every
Speaker 1: single film just kind of like interpersonally and incredibly like
Speaker 1: he's lazy and drunk half the time, like like and
Speaker 1: his only work ethic, Like the hardest thing he did
Speaker 1: was I think, well, I don't know, did he learn
Speaker 1: to lasso or that was the hardest thing, just like
Speaker 1: bringing seven from Mexico. I mean, like he's most people
Speaker 1: will note, and I think this alters a little bit
Speaker 1: at the end of his career. But he's like he's
Speaker 1: generally most people will agree, pretty good on set. He's
Speaker 1: good at like what he does. He's got this kind
Speaker 1: of background in props, so he's he's he knows how
Speaker 1: things should look. He's an active member of like the
Speaker 1: of the crew beyond just sort of like standing and
Speaker 1: hitting his lines. That's generally agreed upon. But you do hear,
Speaker 1: you hear really different stories. So you hear all these
Speaker 1: stories about you know, John Wayne seeing something a directors
Speaker 1: doing and realizing that one look good on camera and
Speaker 1: like fixing the scene and being like very much a
Speaker 1: team player. And then you hear these stories about like, well,
Speaker 1: they couldn't shoot the film before noon because that's when
Speaker 1: he woke up and they had to wait for him
Speaker 1: to take a giant ship first, so they couldn't start
Speaker 1: until he tend like that. I respect that, I definitely respect.
Speaker 1: So I I don't know, like you do hear like
Speaker 1: a lot of rumors on both sides. It's probably fair
Speaker 1: to say he would not have gotten as far as
Speaker 1: he did if he was not really good at certain
Speaker 1: aspects of being a movie star. So I'll give him
Speaker 1: credit for that. Um. But it's also like, John Wayne,
Speaker 1: you were never willing to go do anything for your
Speaker 1: country overseas. Where are you now saying that groups of
Speaker 1: teenagers should beat the ship out of people protesting a
Speaker 1: war that you can't even like you have. No, He's
Speaker 1: there's no elucidation there in that speech and the other
Speaker 1: ones he gives about like why they should be willing
Speaker 1: to do violence on behalf of this war, right, because
Speaker 1: that's not what's important. What's important is something vague about America.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing that seems most familiar where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you're not really elucidating anything that they should be fighting
Speaker 1: for other than the vague idea of America, and that's
Speaker 1: that's really enough to rile people up for violence. I
Speaker 1: mean again, it's just super fitting. It's like, America isn't
Speaker 1: a country that protests the bludgeoning and killing of civilians
Speaker 1: and the death of like young men uh coming home
Speaker 1: in bodybags their parents. America is the country that does
Speaker 1: those things not a sound without why would you why
Speaker 1: would you make a sound that's just gonna be loud.
Speaker 1: You know you're gonna wake up John Wayne, and he's
Speaker 1: going to be hungover absolutely before noon. Yeah, without the
Speaker 1: yeah kids these days, it's very much just the kids
Speaker 1: these days speech. And then at the end it's fun
Speaker 1: because instead of him being like and that's why I'm
Speaker 1: going to start up blah blah blah or whatever, or
Speaker 1: I'm going to start a militia, which glad he didn't,
Speaker 1: but instead of that, it's just like anyway you figure
Speaker 1: I don't know how to do drunk asked John Wayne.
Speaker 1: Very funny, except great. You know the fact that he
Speaker 1: holds this position in our cultural memory that makes the
Speaker 1: fact that he was a drunken warmonger much more influential.
Speaker 1: But let's continue, So we should talk again about these
Speaker 1: kind of rumors about the Duke that you'll hear because
Speaker 1: you get this like I'm in very much presents this
Speaker 1: picture of him as this incredibly diligent um with quotes
Speaker 1: from people who worked with him, including guys like Ford,
Speaker 1: that he was this he had really, he was really sharp.
Speaker 1: He was always willing to put in the extra effort,
Speaker 1: he'd do multiple jobs, even though he was supposed to
Speaker 1: be the star, just to make sure the film got made.
Speaker 1: And then you'll hear these stories about like his scenes
Speaker 1: needed to be finished shooting before noon every day because
Speaker 1: he was gonna be too drunk after that. Um, but
Speaker 1: he couldn't film in the morning until he'd taken his
Speaker 1: first hungover ship and like, so he's got like half
Speaker 1: an hour, he's got like a good hour in there.
Speaker 1: That's why I those can't be true comprehensively, like they
Speaker 1: may have been true on certain films or in certain times. Right.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there were times and people like, well, you
Speaker 1: can't shoot, you can't you got if you shoot too
Speaker 1: late in the day, he's gonna be drunk, because we
Speaker 1: know he got drunk at and impacted shooting at times.
Speaker 1: But he made way too many movies for them to
Speaker 1: have been for things to have been that ridiculous. You
Speaker 1: can't shoot a movie with an hour a day from
Speaker 1: the star, right, But who knows how the radiation impacted
Speaker 1: his gas row? Intestinal can be and I'm sure the
Speaker 1: older he got to the more it was, like you
Speaker 1: his lifestyle took a toll on him, and that took
Speaker 1: altered the way he was on set. But um, like drinking,
Speaker 1: I mean obviously that's like the sign of an alcoholic,
Speaker 1: but like being like a young kid like on set
Speaker 1: and like drinking and then waking up the next day
Speaker 1: in hell. Yeah, Like obviously we all remember what it
Speaker 1: was like to be nineteen, blessed that moment, but like
Speaker 1: great hangovers in your fifties, hangovers in your fifties as
Speaker 1: a guy who has been just basically inhaling cigarettes and
Speaker 1: nothing else since he was like twelve, Like, um, that's
Speaker 1: I mean, I do want to note, like I'm sure
Speaker 1: aspects of this were true, and I'm also sure aspects
Speaker 1: of what I'm in reports in terms of his like
Speaker 1: diligence on set were really true. Um, it's worth noting
Speaker 1: that two of his very best performances in his career
Speaker 1: were filmed really late in it when he's an old guy,
Speaker 1: the shootest and true grit, true grit being maybe the
Speaker 1: most the one that's most famous today probably that he
Speaker 1: was in you know Rooster Cockburn, great film, really good performance.
Speaker 1: He was not a bad actor. Um, there were some
Speaker 1: moments I forget which film it was, but like because
Speaker 1: most of his early roles he had not had to act.
Speaker 1: He's in a movie that John Ford sees and Ford
Speaker 1: is like a hell. If I had known he could act,
Speaker 1: I would have Tooked done some stuff differently. Um, but
Speaker 1: he isn't some better performance as The Shootest, which is
Speaker 1: his very last film, is a really good movie in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. That's that's interesting too, because it's
Speaker 1: we'll talk about The shoot is a little at the end,
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's kind of a strange one for him. Um,
Speaker 1: but I don't think honestly, it's very like it's a
Speaker 1: little bit of his character, like true grit, A drunken
Speaker 1: hard nos Us Marshall and Texas ranger helps a stubborn
Speaker 1: teenager track down her father's murderer. There you go, like
Speaker 1: hard nosed and hard nosed, never served his country. So
Speaker 1: that's allow one. You gotta take it a little bit.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting, um, because it's one of those things.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's as these anti John Wayne anecdotes
Speaker 1: about how drunk he was. I don't think he was
Speaker 1: as unfunctional as those anecdotes imply. But we might have
Speaker 1: been better off if he had been because another movie
Speaker 1: John Wayne cared a lot about making and put a
Speaker 1: lot of work into later in his career was The
Speaker 1: Green Berets. And this is a film that would go
Speaker 1: on to have pretty disastrous consequences for a number of
Speaker 1: members of a generation. So you're not necessarily a bassard
Speaker 1: as an action movie star if your films like reinforce
Speaker 1: attitudes about violence and masculinity that lead young men to
Speaker 1: make some like dumb decisions such as joining the army. Um.
Speaker 1: But John Wayne knew that his films could do that
Speaker 1: and actively sought to use them to convince people to
Speaker 1: go and fight in Vietnam. Right. He understood that he
Speaker 1: had influenced a generation's idea of manhood, and he decided
Speaker 1: to use that influence to try to get more young
Speaker 1: men to volunteer to go fight in Southeast Asia. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: before we get into that a little more, I want
Speaker 1: to read a quote from this right up I found
Speaker 1: in Salon dot com that gives a good overview on
Speaker 1: the broad strokes of kind of what it meant in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight to be what some people called a
Speaker 1: John Wayne man. John Wayne, Yeah, John Wayne stands simply
Speaker 1: is the most persuasive and overwhelming embodiment of our ambivalence
Speaker 1: about American manhood. His persona gathers in one place, the
Speaker 1: allure of violence, the call away from the frontier, the
Speaker 1: tortured ambivalence toward women and the home, the dark pleasure
Speaker 1: of said romanticism, all those things that reside unspoken at
Speaker 1: the center of our sense of what it means to
Speaker 1: be a man in America, dark ambivalent towards the home.
Speaker 1: Just just say, do women like, Yeah, the man who
Speaker 1: strikes his wife, Well, it's this thing that you have
Speaker 1: because you know early in his career. They're like, we
Speaker 1: want him to look like a guy who doesn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of experience with women because he spends all
Speaker 1: of his time in the frontier, so he kind of
Speaker 1: is uncomfortable around women. And that's kind of part of
Speaker 1: I think why that expands to even more of a
Speaker 1: thing in a Hollywood is you have this mix of
Speaker 1: the male lead. Number one has to be very clearly
Speaker 1: not gay. So you've got to show a woman as
Speaker 1: being interested in him, right, Um, which not necessarily a
Speaker 1: sign that they're not gay for sure. Um, but you
Speaker 1: know we're talking nineteen sixties Hollywood logic. You gotta you
Speaker 1: gotta show him with a woman, but also like sex
Speaker 1: and stuff, that's that's going to get you in trouble.
Speaker 1: So you don't you don't ever want him to get
Speaker 1: too close to him necessarily, and so you you wind
Speaker 1: up with a lot of these heroes who are like
Speaker 1: magnetic to women but also kind of pushing them away. Um,
Speaker 1: these these sort of like yeah, it's all and also
Speaker 1: just like these ideas about masculinity. You don't want to
Speaker 1: have a guy who's like vulnerable with a woman. It's
Speaker 1: the kind of James Bond thing right where he's gonna
Speaker 1: you know, he'll sleep with a woman, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: have relationships or whatever. I think that's up in the
Speaker 1: shower unannounced and they'll just start having sex and you're like,
Speaker 1: I guess that was consent, But like John Wyn won't
Speaker 1: even do that, right because because Jim Bond is more
Speaker 1: advanced in his attitudes towards female liberation than John Wayne,
Speaker 1: characters tend to be you know, um, she can carry
Speaker 1: a gun that yeah yeah, um, yeah, yeah, I know that.
Speaker 1: That is really um, it's it explains so much. And
Speaker 1: also to recruit use your film to recruit young American
Speaker 1: men into a war which is already going to give
Speaker 1: him PTSD and then come home and like the the
Speaker 1: manly thing to do. Don't talk about it, don't address it,
Speaker 1: bottle it up. Stoicism. Like, I think there's a stoicism
Speaker 1: that John Wayne really instilled in about American masculinity. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: And and it's like it's also kind of, I think,
Speaker 1: an impotent stoicism. It's not the kind of there's a
Speaker 1: good stoicism where you're not, you know, letting yourself getting
Speaker 1: beaten down by the world. You're not like showing you know,
Speaker 1: your weakness and situations where that's bad. But John Wayne
Speaker 1: stoicism is like, don't show vulnerability and situations where that
Speaker 1: might make you st younger. Uh. But anyway, that's we're
Speaker 1: getting into a little bit of a deeper topic. But so,
Speaker 1: you know, Vietnam nineteen has become like a thing. You know,
Speaker 1: it's clear that it's a real problem, and Americans really
Speaker 1: don't seem to be liking this, this thing that we're doing.
Speaker 1: And so John Wayne decides, I gotta do whatever I
Speaker 1: can to confence more young boys to throw themselves into
Speaker 1: this meat grinder. And he decides the best way to
Speaker 1: do this is by making a movie about the special forces.
Speaker 1: Now at this point, that's a pretty new concept. The
Speaker 1: very first kind of modern special forces teams were in
Speaker 1: World War Two. Some people will say that like the
Speaker 1: German um uh Falstrom Yeager, some of which were like
Speaker 1: their their their paratroopers. They had some units that were
Speaker 1: kind of the first modern spec ops units. UM, and
Speaker 1: you have you know, some some British and some American
Speaker 1: units that are kind of experimenting with some of this ship.
Speaker 1: Vietnam is really where the modern special forces kind of
Speaker 1: comes together as a distinct thing for the first time
Speaker 1: in a modern way. Um, where we get the first
Speaker 1: Green Beret teams. Right, that's kind of the first popular
Speaker 1: concept of special forces comes from these these teams, which
Speaker 1: are initially called A teams, which is why the A
Speaker 1: Team was called the A team that President Kennedy sends
Speaker 1: into Vietnam in nineteen sixty one, and they gradually like,
Speaker 1: that's what becomes the idea of Green Berets, is these
Speaker 1: these A teams become the Green Berets. When's the Mr
Speaker 1: T episode? Huh. Mr T has never done anything wrong,
Speaker 1: so we're not going to be doing that episode. Look,
Speaker 1: he gave up his chains after Hurricane Katrina. Okay what Yeah.
Speaker 1: Mr T gave up because he went to help in
Speaker 1: the relief efforts and he was he was horrified by
Speaker 1: the privation and poverty he saw on the side. It
Speaker 1: would be obscene for him to continue wearing gold. Damn.
Speaker 1: This is a story where we yeah, I got nothing
Speaker 1: to say bad about Mr T. Yeah, and the serial
Speaker 1: was good one. He's also super vocal about like vaccinations.
Speaker 1: He thinks it's good to be vaccinated. Yes, damn it.
Speaker 1: We need strong men likeness. I pity the fool who
Speaker 1: cannot appreciate Mr T. Like legitimately pity the fool. Um.
Speaker 1: So this idea of like specially trained super soldiers that
Speaker 1: you drop behind enemy lines and they fight under incredible odds,
Speaker 1: this is like Hollywood fodder. Like as soon as we
Speaker 1: start having these Special Forces guys in Vietnam, Hollywood's like, oh, ship,
Speaker 1: this is all We're gonna make movies about for forever, right,
Speaker 1: Like this is this is the only thing we want
Speaker 1: to turn into a movie now. Inter Robin Moore Robin
Speaker 1: Moore is a World War Two veteran and a journalist who,
Speaker 1: because of his connections to I think it was Ted
Speaker 1: Kennedy got to go through Special Forces school as a civilian.
Speaker 1: He's I don't know if he's the only, but he's
Speaker 1: the first civilian to ever do this. And he embeds
Speaker 1: with the Green Berets in Vietnam, and he's technically a journalist,
Speaker 1: but he's also like fighting alongside them, which is ethically
Speaker 1: kind of blurring the lines of journalism. He's a real
Speaker 1: interesting character to study, Robin Moore. Being embedded is like
Speaker 1: a little sauce. You're always like, yeah, it compromises objectivity
Speaker 1: anytime you're embedded, but shooting people is a real violation
Speaker 1: of any kind of burned huts. He may have burned
Speaker 1: some huts, a little bit of hut burning um. And
Speaker 1: he's fun because he'll get conned by a dude named
Speaker 1: Jack Adiema during the war in Afghanistan. But that's a
Speaker 1: lot later when he's an old man, so he writes
Speaker 1: he's in the he spends a bunch of time with
Speaker 1: these Green Berets. He writes this book, The Green Berets,
Speaker 1: which is like, it's like on the best seller list
Speaker 1: for more than a year. It's a huge hit. People
Speaker 1: fucking and he has to he has to be in
Speaker 1: during the height of the war, like sixty it's like
Speaker 1: sixty five or six. I think that it published. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, um sometimes I think it must have been
Speaker 1: like sixty five. Um, so pretty early on. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he publishes this book as a fiction book because he
Speaker 1: has to do that in order to pretend he's not
Speaker 1: giving away operational secrets. The government considers prosecuting him because
Speaker 1: he's writing about a bunch of ship he shouldn't be
Speaker 1: writing about. Um, it's a weird call to just let
Speaker 1: this guy hang out with your special forces. But then
Speaker 1: he writes a book that pisses them off a lot.
Speaker 1: And the reason, one of the reasons apparently that they
Speaker 1: don't go through prosecuting him, is that John Wayne buys
Speaker 1: the film rights from Robin Moore, um, in order to
Speaker 1: make a movie. Um. And so yeah he well, now
Speaker 1: that Wayne is attached, Well, what happens is he sends
Speaker 1: a letter to President Lyndon Baynes Johnson to try to
Speaker 1: get his cooperation, because he basically says, I want to
Speaker 1: make the first pro war movie about the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: To try and build public support for this thing. He writes, quote,
Speaker 1: we want to show such scenes as the little village
Speaker 1: that has erected its own statue of liberty to the
Speaker 1: American people. We want to bring out that if we
Speaker 1: abandon these people, there will be a blood bath of
Speaker 1: over two million souls. We want to show the professional
Speaker 1: soldier carrying out his duty of death, but also his
Speaker 1: extracurricular activities helping small communities, giving them medical supplies, toys
Speaker 1: for their children's and little things like soap. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's the movie. Like John Wayne sends this letter, soap A. K. Hayden, Napalm.
Speaker 1: Napalm cleans things. You know, eventually there's no bacteria in
Speaker 1: the wake of a napalm strike. Absolutely, so you want
Speaker 1: to get rid of napalm knocks it right out, um,
Speaker 1: right up from history Net continues quote. John Wayne took
Speaker 1: his first step towards production of the picture in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, buying the film rights from the author more
Speaker 1: the path was cleared in nearly nineteen sixty six when
Speaker 1: President Johnson's advisor Jack Valinti convinced lb J to give
Speaker 1: Wayne permission to make the film. Valinti observed, Wayne's politics
Speaker 1: are wrong, but insofar as Vietnam is concerned, his views
Speaker 1: are right. If he made the picture, he would be
Speaker 1: saying the things we once said. So I mean he's
Speaker 1: doing he's offering it for free. I mean this is
Speaker 1: before the U. S. Military would bankroll things like black
Speaker 1: Hogdown or like fucking even transformers. They put money behind
Speaker 1: transformers and ship It's fun. You say that, because this
Speaker 1: is how that starts. Oh cute, qute, que cute, Oh
Speaker 1: my god, origin story. But you know what else is
Speaker 1: starting right now, Francesca, what the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast? Their ads are starting right now. Oh
Speaker 1: we're back. Well. I don't know about you, Francesca, but
Speaker 1: those ads convinced me to become a Green Beret. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go fight in Vietnam. Was it a ZIP recruiter
Speaker 1: at it was? It was, it was, and it has
Speaker 1: convinced me to take up the fight. I keep calling
Speaker 1: the recruiters and they keep saying there's no war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: You can't just travel to Vietnam and start fighting people
Speaker 1: like you. You'll go to prison forever. But I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it. I'm gonna give it a shot. Like we
Speaker 1: need a social media manager. You're like green beret, green
Speaker 1: beret that's what I'm gonna do. Um oh my god.
Speaker 1: So really foreshadowing of the the US military funding this.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, well, not funding it. It's not quite there yet,
Speaker 1: but this is this we'll get into it. So Wayne
Speaker 1: John Wayne makes his son Michael the film's producer because nepotism,
Speaker 1: and in February of nineteen sixty six, he hires James
Speaker 1: Lee Barrett, who's a former marine and a screenwriter, to
Speaker 1: draft a screen play. And the screenplay has very little
Speaker 1: to do with Robin Moore's book. That's again some people
Speaker 1: will allege part of the agreement he made with the
Speaker 1: government where like, I'll adapt this into a movie, but
Speaker 1: I won't include anything from the book really because the
Speaker 1: book is full of a bunch of secrets you didn't
Speaker 1: want getting out. And that's part of why the LBJ
Speaker 1: administration is like, well this, this can help us kind
Speaker 1: of launder away some of the ship we didn't want
Speaker 1: people to know that's in that book. Um. So, the
Speaker 1: two Waynes and Barrett visit the Defense Department in Fort Bragg,
Speaker 1: uh in order to like so they get like approval
Speaker 1: from the government to see where special forces trained and
Speaker 1: to do research and whatnot and the production receives. And
Speaker 1: this is one of the first times this has happened.
Speaker 1: A substantial amount of help from the armed forces. Um.
Speaker 1: They did pay fees to use d o D property
Speaker 1: and for some of the equipment least to them, um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of stuff was made free for them
Speaker 1: as props, which did substantially defray costs. Some biographers like
Speaker 1: Jensen dispute this UH and John Wayne would go on
Speaker 1: to claim that they paid for everything. This does not
Speaker 1: seem to have been entirely accurate. It does seem like
Speaker 1: they got a good amount of stuff, at least subsidized,
Speaker 1: that would have cost more or just not been available
Speaker 1: if the d D hadn't played ball. And evidence for
Speaker 1: this can be seen in the fact that the studio
Speaker 1: allowed the Pentagon to retain script control. Right. Wow, So
Speaker 1: you had like forty eight, you had you had something
Speaker 1: kind of like partnerships with Hollywood or not in forty
Speaker 1: In the forties, for like World War Two, you had
Speaker 1: some partnerships with Hollywood and the d O D. This
Speaker 1: is the first time that you have like an independent
Speaker 1: movie that a studio is making on its own that
Speaker 1: they kind of make a deal with the government in
Speaker 1: exchange for stuff to give the Pentagon script control, right,
Speaker 1: and the d D does request extensive rewrites and detailed
Speaker 1: changes to the plot and dialogue, and those changes are made. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is the first modern movie co written by the
Speaker 1: Pentagon in exchange for access to gear in military infrastructure.
Speaker 1: It is not to the same extent that it will
Speaker 1: later be. Right, they're not getting nearly as much ship free.
Speaker 1: They are paying for more ship. But this is the
Speaker 1: start of that process. Yeah. I just think it's incredible
Speaker 1: that at this time you could turn on the television
Speaker 1: and just watch Yeah, kids coming home in body bags. Uh,
Speaker 1: children with napalm burns on them, Like the Meli massacre
Speaker 1: was very much publicized. Don't worry, but just and and
Speaker 1: you're like, well, but this one movie, this is gonna do.
Speaker 1: It's silver bullet like turning around baby. I mean arguably right.
Speaker 1: That was the lesson of Vietnam was like, oh, just
Speaker 1: do the propaganda movies don't show what's actually happening around Well,
Speaker 1: and it is this. You can never do it for everybody,
Speaker 1: but with the right movies at the right time, you
Speaker 1: can change what happens in a war for a select population.
Speaker 1: Like the movie American Sniper for a certain chunk of
Speaker 1: Americans has changed the thing they private like because of
Speaker 1: how big that movie was in certain chunks of the population.
Speaker 1: A lot of people when they think of the Iraq
Speaker 1: War don't think about that we of the government light
Speaker 1: a shipload to get us in there. That are primary.
Speaker 1: Many of our goals were not achieved if there were
Speaker 1: not weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi people suffered tremendously,
Speaker 1: that the rebuilding process was corrupted and efficient. They think, big,
Speaker 1: strong guy sniper, he shoot people good, look at him,
Speaker 1: he's American Sniper. I got him on a hat. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna wear it. That's Bradley Cooper, right, Yeah, it's Bradley
Speaker 1: Cooper exactly. That's why when the hurt Locker, I'm like,
Speaker 1: man like, I support women directors, but why does it
Speaker 1: got to be Cavin Bigelow doing the hurt Locker, Like, really,
Speaker 1: that's the story. And then she gets on stage and
Speaker 1: thanks the firefighters. I'm sorry, I'm showing my prejudice against you.
Speaker 1: Can't you you can't actually have a movie about the
Speaker 1: Iraq War, um, because it would be I mean, there's
Speaker 1: issues with the movie Vice but that's an actual movie
Speaker 1: about the Iraq War to an extent, where it's about
Speaker 1: like the the people and kind of the venal and
Speaker 1: corrupt attitudes that lead us in there. You can't have
Speaker 1: a movie about what the Iraq War is actually about,
Speaker 1: but you can make a bunch of movies about likable
Speaker 1: dudes in the Iraq War that will make people feel
Speaker 1: more fondly towards the military and the military industrial complex
Speaker 1: as opposed to just be like, all of these wars
Speaker 1: are disasters and clearly the people running our defense department
Speaker 1: are incompetent because look at how these get handled every time.
Speaker 1: Look at how badly these wars were prosecuted. That's not
Speaker 1: like you're not gonna forbid perspective of an Iraqi either.
Speaker 1: I mean, every now and then, I will say this.
Speaker 1: The movie Mosle, which was um directed by it was Carnahan,
Speaker 1: but it was produced by the Russo brothers. That is
Speaker 1: a really good movie that does it. There's not like
Speaker 1: an American in that movie. Really, it's all like iraqis.
Speaker 1: All of the characters, Uh, they think they're pretty much
Speaker 1: a good a buddy of mine. Sangar was actually like
Speaker 1: the local consultant on the cultural consultant on the film. Um,
Speaker 1: and it does. As someone who was there in Mosle,
Speaker 1: it was a really good job. I know some of
Speaker 1: the dudes it was based on here, so you do
Speaker 1: actually get some really good like it. It doesn't not
Speaker 1: happen right like stuff like this, But most people probably
Speaker 1: haven't seen Mosele. And everybody knows about the movie American Sniper,
Speaker 1: you know, and this doesn't have Bradley. This doesn't have Bradley.
Speaker 1: Um and again like just this is happening in Vietnam too. Um,
Speaker 1: the Green Berets becomes the only I think definitely the
Speaker 1: first and I think the only pro Vietnam movie about
Speaker 1: Vietnam that comes out during the war. Um what's his name?
Speaker 1: Makes Platoon specifically because he hates the Green Berets so
Speaker 1: much like the movie Platoon is a reaction to how
Speaker 1: what a piece of propaganda that Green Berets is? Is
Speaker 1: that Oliver Stone? Or am I I think it's Stone?
Speaker 1: I think it's Stone? Um? And he he gets like
Speaker 1: piste off by what a piece of bullshit this film becomes.
Speaker 1: I've never I need to see Green Berets because I've
Speaker 1: never like I've never seen a positive spin on the
Speaker 1: Vietnam It's pretty fun. I watched it as a kid.
Speaker 1: My parents wanted me to see if they thought it
Speaker 1: was a great movie. One of my uncle's was a
Speaker 1: Green Beret, so like, yeah, and it's think, um, I
Speaker 1: mean he abandoned anyway, we don't need to get into
Speaker 1: my uncle. Um, we don't need to talk about that
Speaker 1: uncle in particular. I never I never knew him super well,
Speaker 1: but like his service was a regular topic of discussion.
Speaker 1: I think that's part of why my mom wanted me
Speaker 1: to see To the Green Berets, is to know that
Speaker 1: what my uncle Jim had done in the Green Berets. Um.
Speaker 1: But this, I don't think this is a particularly accurate
Speaker 1: movie about what the Green Berets did. And it's certainly
Speaker 1: like it's filmed in Fort Bragg. It's very obviously not Vietnam.
Speaker 1: It's like pine tree form. It could not look like Vietnam. Um. So,
Speaker 1: this film, though, would start to prove to be kind
Speaker 1: of the start of what is to date a decades
Speaker 1: long collaboration between Hollywood and the d O d Um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a it's a proof of concept. The
Speaker 1: film is utterly panned by reviewers, and it actually sparked
Speaker 1: anti war protests in New York, Los Angeles and other
Speaker 1: cities that because they protest, it makes conservatives loves that
Speaker 1: love the film even more, right, Like, sure, do you
Speaker 1: hear there's this there's this movie about our brave soldiers,
Speaker 1: and they're protesting it in l a Like that's not
Speaker 1: going to do anything but make you love it more.
Speaker 1: Absolutely Suddenly it's it's it's become a martyr of the right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they love that stuff. Roger Ebert called it cowboy and
Speaker 1: Indian idiotic. Renata Adler of The New York Times called
Speaker 1: it vile and insane. Uh, none of this stopped it
Speaker 1: from being a huge commercial success, earning twelve million dollars,
Speaker 1: which is all of the money in the world in
Speaker 1: nine dollars, and giving John un Wayne an excuse to
Speaker 1: call the bad reviews quote ridiculously one sided, blind, stupid
Speaker 1: criticism of our picture that made real people more conscious
Speaker 1: of just how honest we were anti American. They tried
Speaker 1: to cancel us, but can't cancel America. This is like
Speaker 1: what the Daily Wire is going to try to remake.
Speaker 1: They're gonna like remake the Green Berets and Shapiro is
Speaker 1: going to fund it. Now here's the thing. John Wayne
Speaker 1: was talented, so we are I am a little less
Speaker 1: worried about Ben Shapiro because John Wayne had things he
Speaker 1: was good at. There was there's the other Quigly sister,
Speaker 1: it's like Margaret Quickly, and then there's the You've got
Speaker 1: James Woods, James Woods, there's one other washed up right
Speaker 1: wing celebrity, and you've got like Kirk Cameron. Get them
Speaker 1: all together and get your A Team together, do a
Speaker 1: new A Team reboot with just like disgraced conservative actors.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Oh man, I need to see that.
Speaker 1: Have have the have the have your like Bosley be Uh,
Speaker 1: Kelsey Grammar. Yeah, introducing Kyle Rittenhouse. Turns out that cry
Speaker 1: was fake. Kyle Rittenhouse and James Woods in a fucking
Speaker 1: action shoot him up. Ah yeah, do it? Do it?
Speaker 1: We dare you? We want to see this. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's interesting. I do legitimately want to see that movie.
Speaker 1: It'll happen, It will have something like that, will have
Speaker 1: written the House will get cast in an action movie
Speaker 1: within the next couple of years, for sure. It is
Speaker 1: just interesting that, like, even though he was a good actor,
Speaker 1: like this sucked and it was like like sixty nine
Speaker 1: it came out. Well, it's I think it sucked. I
Speaker 1: think you would probably think it sucked. Most reviewers think
Speaker 1: it sucked. A lot of people don't. A lot of
Speaker 1: people like and they're not like when I say it's successful.
Speaker 1: They're not like just blindly buying it to own the libs.
Speaker 1: They enjoy it. It's a movie that's got some cool
Speaker 1: action sequences and ship like it's not a good movie
Speaker 1: about the Vietnam War, but as a movie, it succeeds
Speaker 1: in making the audience happy. So you know, like so
Speaker 1: it it like mission accomplished. Yeah, absolutely accomplished. Um And
Speaker 1: and Wayne makes a big deal in like the the
Speaker 1: ads for this or in the pr campaign for this movie,
Speaker 1: the fact that he visited Vietnam and like spent time
Speaker 1: with soldiers on his own, without handlers. He was like
Speaker 1: adjacent to combat. He's on like chunks of the line
Speaker 1: where there is shooting. Um And he gets really popular
Speaker 1: with a lot of soldiers he meets there because they're like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: this guy who I saw in movies as a kid,
Speaker 1: who like influenced my conception of manhood is like here
Speaker 1: standing on the line. Uh, that's great. UM. So you know,
Speaker 1: some of them think this is cool. There's obviously a
Speaker 1: lot of Vietnam veterans, perhaps even significantly more of Vietnam
Speaker 1: veterans who have been in combat and see this movie
Speaker 1: and are like, well, this is just rank gross propaganda.
Speaker 1: But it's not like one sided. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of Vietnam veterans who like the fact that he does this. UM.
Speaker 1: But it also must have been like the death of
Speaker 1: a hero for a lot of the kids when they realize, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: who were actually there and saw their friends die and
Speaker 1: got injured and maimed and for what, Like it's kind
Speaker 1: of that moment where you're you're like your hero, you
Speaker 1: realize it's like a vicious right winger. It's this moment
Speaker 1: a lot of people have in UM, A lot of
Speaker 1: British kids have in World War One, when they realized
Speaker 1: that all of these poems they had been told read about,
Speaker 1: like the glory of war and all of these lutrid
Speaker 1: paintings of colonial victories, that like, now here's what it's
Speaker 1: really like to get shot at by a machine gun.
Speaker 1: There's nothing glorious or manly about it. UM, And that
Speaker 1: that there are a bunch of people who have it
Speaker 1: and a bunch of kids who like had joined and
Speaker 1: volunteered for Vietnam in part because of the things that
Speaker 1: John Wayne had led him to believe about masculinity. Um
Speaker 1: in Jesus and John Wayne, Dumez rights as one working
Speaker 1: class Vietnam veteran later recalled he went to Vietnam to
Speaker 1: kill a comie for Jesus Christ and John Wayne. It
Speaker 1: was Sands of Iwajima that inspired ron Kovic to volunteer
Speaker 1: for the Marines during the Vietnam War, a war that
Speaker 1: would cost him the use of his legs and lead
Speaker 1: to a disenchantment with war that he chronicled in his
Speaker 1: memoir Born on the Fourth of July. Off screen, to
Speaker 1: Wayne worked to recruit young men to the war effort,
Speaker 1: ridiculing as soft those who didn't enlist. One critic labeled
Speaker 1: Wayne the most important man in America given the role
Speaker 1: his films played in driving American engagement in Vietnam. Covics
Speaker 1: would later say on his previously John and Wayne inspired
Speaker 1: ideas about war and manhood. I gave my dead dick
Speaker 1: for John Wayne. Oh my God, and he made a
Speaker 1: necklace out of them. Just a bunch of dead American
Speaker 1: John Wayne just a bunch of kids, dicks on his
Speaker 1: neck and kid Dick's adorning him like a head dress
Speaker 1: like this is. He does get a bracelet from the Montignards,
Speaker 1: but yeah, this is still his unfulfilled World War Two.
Speaker 1: Um like whatever fantasy or or shame really that he's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to send other people to die now. That
Speaker 1: is what a lot of people who knew him suggest
Speaker 1: is that he never got over his shame for failing
Speaker 1: to serve in World War Two. So he decided like,
Speaker 1: this is how I'm going to overcome it is by
Speaker 1: getting all these kids to serve in my place in
Speaker 1: this other war. You know, I I didn't come through then,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna come through now for America by getting
Speaker 1: all these kids to die in a jungle for nothing.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's crazy? Is it? Like today you would
Speaker 1: see John Wayne and this career path and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: he's an OP, like he was created by the c
Speaker 1: I A Like he's been a d O D like
Speaker 1: OP from the beginning. And he's not like he just
Speaker 1: know he did this. They've been sure, but he's he's
Speaker 1: he's motivated by his own shame because he realizes that
Speaker 1: being the guy he is, he should have fucking done
Speaker 1: something in World War two, Um, and he did not.
Speaker 1: What I mean is he just seems like he was
Speaker 1: created in the lab of like all of America's lies,
Speaker 1: just like sewn together in some you know, evil scarecrow.
Speaker 1: He's all of our lies sewn together in a package
Speaker 1: that unfortunately is really good at a specific kind of acting.
Speaker 1: And it allows him to, yeah, just like stand in
Speaker 1: front of me and get them to sign up to
Speaker 1: go fight in Vietnam and ridicule people as soft for
Speaker 1: refusing to do it. If John Wayne slapped someone at
Speaker 1: the Oscars, well we're building that, Francesca. So the Ballot
Speaker 1: or the Green Berets, launched six months after the Tet Offensive,
Speaker 1: put a lie to the idea that the US was
Speaker 1: particularly close to a victory in Vietnam. Within months of
Speaker 1: its release, the first rumors of the Malai massacre had
Speaker 1: begun to percolate out into the culture. So right after
Speaker 1: this movie we find out that American soldiers have killed
Speaker 1: hundreds of civilians brutally um in the sacking of this village.
Speaker 1: So the Green Berets had shown US soldiers spending most
Speaker 1: of their time helping adorable kids and like building up
Speaker 1: villages and infrastructure projects. The reality was that very often
Speaker 1: US troops killed those same kids and blew those villages
Speaker 1: to bits. John Wayne portrayed war crimes as purely the
Speaker 1: purview of the viet Cong, while reality proved him wrong
Speaker 1: over and over again. Large numbers of Conservatives tucked their
Speaker 1: heads into the comforting lie he had offered them. John
Speaker 1: Wayne referred to the Milai massacre as the so called
Speaker 1: Milai Massacre and redirected any questions about it to lurid
Speaker 1: claims about atrocities committed against our people by the viet Cong.
Speaker 1: It's again, it's like what about is um where It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a war. You can always find bad things that
Speaker 1: every side has done in a war. But he's pretending
Speaker 1: that like, oh, Americans are just they're handing out clean
Speaker 1: water and these meanal viet Cong or killing them for
Speaker 1: some reason, for no reason at all. Um, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: much so called me lie. There's not even a village.
Speaker 1: He would be like, look, there's so much going on
Speaker 1: in Vietnam that there's no good reason. Quote one little
Speaker 1: incident in the United States Army should make a fuss.
Speaker 1: The reality, the sad reality, I mean a sad reality
Speaker 1: is I feel like there are way more mealies that
Speaker 1: we just don't know about. There's a number we do
Speaker 1: know about. There were quite a few times like that happens. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: We remember this one, but there were many, many, many others.
Speaker 1: We don't have a the tipre tongue, the images of
Speaker 1: which were not particularly even you know, they weren't captured.
Speaker 1: The journalist wasn't there on the ground at the right
Speaker 1: moment of the right time, or I mean, the reason
Speaker 1: mel becomes what it is is because one of the
Speaker 1: officers who sees it like threatens to machine gun everybody
Speaker 1: if they don't stop, and then reports it landed his
Speaker 1: helicopter in between civilians and was like, fucking stop. A
Speaker 1: cool dude, way a way cooler dude than John Wayne. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so other far right figures rushed into assure John Wayne
Speaker 1: that he was right on the money. Um, and he
Speaker 1: is to you know, still to this day, popular with
Speaker 1: a segment of Vietnam veterans who want to believe that
Speaker 1: they were there for a reason, or that their kids
Speaker 1: were there for a reason fighting a fight that needed
Speaker 1: to be fought. No less a fascist luminary than Douglas
Speaker 1: MacArthur told John Wayne that he represented quote the American
Speaker 1: serviceman better than the American serviceman himself. There. Here's what's
Speaker 1: funny about that is General Douglas MacArthur fired from his
Speaker 1: job prosecuting the Korean War for number one not being
Speaker 1: great at it and number two wanting asking for permission
Speaker 1: to nuke China and Russia. Repeatedly, Um, douglasman, please, please please.
Speaker 1: Douglas MacArthur, famous for his you know, command of US
Speaker 1: forces in the Philippines. Uh. Also the Duke like he's
Speaker 1: saying that John Wayne represents the American service better than
Speaker 1: the American serviceman. During the Bonus Army Marches, which is
Speaker 1: when a bunch of US World or one veterans were
Speaker 1: like marching during the Great Depression to get the money
Speaker 1: that they were promised by the government, Douglas MacArthur led
Speaker 1: the forces that gunned them down with tanks and the
Speaker 1: machine guts DC. So I really want to hear who
Speaker 1: Douglas McCarthy thinks represents the American serviceman best. He seems
Speaker 1: like a good source on that Douglas MacArthur would never
Speaker 1: do the American servicemen wrong by, say, killing many of
Speaker 1: them for protesting because they're not getting paid. I love you,
Speaker 1: fucking Douglas MacArthur. The amount of times I was told
Speaker 1: that piece of ship was a hero as a kid
Speaker 1: makes me want to light some things on fucking fire.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Patton was there with him, so
Speaker 1: fuck them all. Damn well that is I mean, sadly,
Speaker 1: this is this is the American military, and it always
Speaker 1: has been. Right. We like the myth better than the
Speaker 1: actual soldier. Fucked the soldier. Fuck the soldier. We want them,
Speaker 1: we want the John Wayne. I mean, it's the same
Speaker 1: thing soldier getting convenient as hell. A lot of them
Speaker 1: have experiences that are really hard to monetize. I know,
Speaker 1: they're never posing, they don't know what to do with
Speaker 1: the props. Ever. Some of them are sad. They're always
Speaker 1: just attached to home life anyway. But it is this
Speaker 1: sounds like the crassness, and I hate to bring it
Speaker 1: to to now because I'm just like Funk, We've always
Speaker 1: been this way. But you hear that crassness, you know
Speaker 1: I'm not going to defend John McCain but saying that
Speaker 1: like he was like a loser because he was captured.
Speaker 1: You hear that you have and then you've got like
Speaker 1: fucking Trump leaning over you know, World War One and
Speaker 1: two soldiers being like what was this? Why did they die? Losers?
Speaker 1: That is within the context of this episode. At least
Speaker 1: McCain as like a rich kid who didn't have to
Speaker 1: went and got fucked up. Um. I have a lot
Speaker 1: more respect for John Kerry because he wasn't bombing people, um,
Speaker 1: and also got sucked up. But you know, at least
Speaker 1: they both of them, unlike John Wayne put skin in
Speaker 1: the game. You know. Um, John Wayne didn't even have
Speaker 1: like that. Uh. I guess it's one of those things.
Speaker 1: I guess it's morally better to advocate for an unjust
Speaker 1: war and serving it than it is to advocate for
Speaker 1: an unjust war and refused to serving it. I think
Speaker 1: I feel like that that does sound weird, but at
Speaker 1: least at least it's evident. It's like with fucking um
Speaker 1: what's his name the star who like testified, who like
Speaker 1: win against his studio to go like talk at the
Speaker 1: fucking um to name names and ship. At least he
Speaker 1: was putting his skin in the game. I guess it's
Speaker 1: not I don't know better and worse or useless terms
Speaker 1: for this, but at least like it points to the
Speaker 1: fact that, well, this person did believe in the shitty
Speaker 1: thing that we're doing. You're not just a total fucking
Speaker 1: empty hypocrite, right, Yeah, I don't know. It's weird. I
Speaker 1: I don't want to be like trying to mark any
Speaker 1: of this down as moral lessons because it's it's bad
Speaker 1: to bomb people, John don't mark down just at least like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm more there's something more unsettling about
Speaker 1: a person who like is so empty that all of
Speaker 1: these things are just posturing for them. And I don't
Speaker 1: know how much that is true for because some of
Speaker 1: it maybe that John Wayne really did believe he should
Speaker 1: have served in World War Two and kind of hated
Speaker 1: himself and that's what's driving him to do this. I
Speaker 1: don't know. There's a lot of complicated ship going on,
Speaker 1: and that has a lot to say about masculinity. This
Speaker 1: podcast isn't going to say all of it, but it's
Speaker 1: definitely stuff I think about a bunch. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't like emotionally unavailable man. That's like your first boyfriend,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. But then you move on
Speaker 1: and you're like, I mean, I've been that boyfriend for
Speaker 1: a lot of people. But yeah, I wasn't gonna say anything, Robert,
Speaker 1: but you know you just learned, I'll learn to open up. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know, he's he's pretty happy after the Green Berets.
Speaker 1: This really cements him in the right wing as this
Speaker 1: kind of like littant ur con of masculinity. It wipes
Speaker 1: away this sort of shame of his failure to serve
Speaker 1: in World War Two. Um, it gets him. You know,
Speaker 1: he's he's he. It kind of helps him settle into
Speaker 1: his new role as an elder conservative icon. Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: actually reaches out to him and it's like, hey, bro,
Speaker 1: you know what you ought to do is become governor
Speaker 1: of California. Like we could put your ass in the
Speaker 1: White House one day. And thank god, he says, no,
Speaker 1: he's not in great health. Thank god he because he
Speaker 1: would have won for sure, would have definitely would have won.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine a few I can't imagine a series
Speaker 1: of invention which John Wayne runs for governor of California
Speaker 1: and loses I can't conceive of it. No, we we
Speaker 1: are trash here in this state. We we've I mean,
Speaker 1: look at how many times one And he's a way
Speaker 1: better person than John Wayne. Yeah, No, it's very true.
Speaker 1: Not a good person, but better. Yeah, dude, what does
Speaker 1: Arnold do for American masculinity? I honestly, I think he
Speaker 1: was probably a better I think as I think as
Speaker 1: the fucking Terminator, he was a healthier symbol of American
Speaker 1: masculinity than John Wayne. Because a big thing the Terminator
Speaker 1: stands for is like putting yourself before or putting your
Speaker 1: child before, a kid before yourself, and like making the
Speaker 1: success and happiness of that child the entire like motive
Speaker 1: force of your life. Right, Like, there's actually some nice
Speaker 1: things in that movie, nice dad's stuff in that movie. Back,
Speaker 1: he actually will be back. It's not like John Wayne
Speaker 1: is going to go start another fucking family. No, He's
Speaker 1: gonna be back in some increasingly hard to follow sequels
Speaker 1: that we don't need to talk about, um whatever. Broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: the cyborg Killer Bought from the Future is a better
Speaker 1: symbol of of emotionally available manhood than any John Wayne character.
Speaker 1: Yes that, um so, Yeah, John Wayne chose not to
Speaker 1: get into politics in an electoral capacity, but he did
Speaker 1: spend the rest of his life bloviating about politics readily,
Speaker 1: as this passage from the book Jesus and John Wayne
Speaker 1: makes clear. In the nineteen seventy one interview in Playboy,
Speaker 1: Wayne was particularly harsh in his assessment of the blacks
Speaker 1: or colored or whatever they might want to call themselves.
Speaker 1: They certainly aren't Caucasian. With a lot of blacks, there's
Speaker 1: quite a lot of resentment along with their descent, and
Speaker 1: possibly rightly so, possibly rightly so, but we can't all
Speaker 1: of a sudden get down on our knees and turn
Speaker 1: everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe
Speaker 1: in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a
Speaker 1: point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and
Speaker 1: positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. As far
Speaker 1: as African American representation in his own films, Wayne asserted
Speaker 1: that he'd given the blacks their proper position. He had
Speaker 1: a black slave in the Alamo, and he had a
Speaker 1: correct number of blacks in the Green Berets. His views
Speaker 1: on Native America Rikans were no more enlightened. I don't
Speaker 1: feel we did wrong in taking this great country away
Speaker 1: from the Native Americans are so called stealing of this
Speaker 1: country from them was just a matter of survival. People
Speaker 1: needed land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep
Speaker 1: it for themselves. Outstanding ship, John Wayne, incredibly boom bloody.
Speaker 1: Keep telling yourself that and finish the bottle. That is.
Speaker 1: I just it's it's um Sometimes kind of I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm looking at racism in a terrarium, like it's
Speaker 1: so crystallized and perfect. It like it's I don't hate them,
Speaker 1: They're just you know, second class citizens, and they're not responsible,
Speaker 1: and they're idiots, and it's it's a very specific kind
Speaker 1: of racist, and that I don't think today John Wayne
Speaker 1: would have if he was around to day, he would
Speaker 1: never call himself a white supremacist in an interview. He
Speaker 1: would not to say he wouldn't have believed the same things.
Speaker 1: Admit back then. If you admit said you were, you
Speaker 1: believed in white supremacy. You know, when till they're educator
Speaker 1: or whatever. That's not controversial, that's not a fringe right
Speaker 1: wing thing. That does not identify you as part of
Speaker 1: a dangerous political sect in nineteen one. And part of
Speaker 1: the evidence for that is that, like the only people
Speaker 1: who get angry when he says this are like black publication.
Speaker 1: There's there's there's like no impact on the mainstream because
Speaker 1: John Wayne. Liberals are like, no, he's got a point, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the leaders are crazy, or they're more just like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, that's just that's just John Wayne. You know,
Speaker 1: that's just how certain people think and like it's it's
Speaker 1: not it's not the same as calling yourself a white
Speaker 1: supremacist in two thousand and twenty two would be like,
Speaker 1: he's not, he's not identifying himself with a fringe of
Speaker 1: the political spectrum here. It sort of reminds me of
Speaker 1: oh god, I hate I hate doing the show and
Speaker 1: bringing up like like uh like a present day examples.
Speaker 1: But it reminds me of Joe R. Hio going in
Speaker 1: front of that like fringe spa group. Yes it was,
Speaker 1: and like some people say I'm a racist and everyone's
Speaker 1: like cheering, and he was like, well wait, I was
Speaker 1: supposed to the point was that I'm not Why are
Speaker 1: you cheering? It's not a good thing, and they're like, no,
Speaker 1: we've changed. Yeah. I could see John Wayne getting like
Speaker 1: tricked by something like that, and he probably would have
Speaker 1: liked backpedaled again, not because he's not racist, but because
Speaker 1: he would not be the kind of guy who would
Speaker 1: want to like look bad like he doesn't. John Wayne
Speaker 1: would not have wanted to completely alienate himself from like
Speaker 1: his liberal friends, or from like the academy and ship.
Speaker 1: He was not, it was not He was not that
Speaker 1: kind of political figure, you know, sure Hollywood number one. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he would have I think he would have. He
Speaker 1: would have choosed he would have said the same thing
Speaker 1: in different words. If he was interviewed today, you know, um,
Speaker 1: slightly more careful words and less he was really drunk,
Speaker 1: then he would have said the same thing, and it
Speaker 1: would have been a problem for him. Um, but not
Speaker 1: that big a problem. He would have been okay. But
Speaker 1: still even without white supremacy in there, which is yeah, jarring,
Speaker 1: It is a perfect distillation of a lot of white
Speaker 1: American thinking. Yes at the time and sometimes currently. Again,
Speaker 1: he's not like fringe in anyway. This is all very
Speaker 1: mainstream stuff. Um, you know what else is mainstream? What
Speaker 1: the products and services that support this podcast, like racism,
Speaker 1: They're all deeply woven into the fabric of American society.
Speaker 1: How's that, Sophie? Is that good? I think you you
Speaker 1: crushed it? My friend? Is that good? That going to
Speaker 1: make him happy? All right? Beautiful? Uh, we're doing great,
Speaker 1: folks were back. We're happy. Everybody's smiling, everybody laughing. Ending, right,
Speaker 1: it does have an ending, and that ending occurs probably
Speaker 1: in Hollywood. Um so uh John Wayne, well, I think
Speaker 1: he probably would have been more careful today than he
Speaker 1: was in nineteen seventy one. I should note that he
Speaker 1: also blew his cover as a giant racist on several occasions,
Speaker 1: and one of those would have been the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three Oscars. This is the most recent reason John Wayne
Speaker 1: went viral in the wake of Will Smith lightly slapping
Speaker 1: a dude and then, let's say moderately slapping a dude.
Speaker 1: I was waiting for the Evans take on this, like
Speaker 1: it's I think it was a really good film slap right,
Speaker 1: like it read on camera really well. Um but yeah,
Speaker 1: so people brought up when I'm frustrated. It's weeks later
Speaker 1: and they still think pieces coming out about this, the
Speaker 1: things people said, I've got a forthcoming one, oh good,
Speaker 1: oh good. There was this, there was this fucking stuff
Speaker 1: about like, uh, you know, Will Smith getting canceled and like,
Speaker 1: but nothing happened to John Wayne when and then they
Speaker 1: would talk about this story that we're about to talk about,
Speaker 1: and you're like, yeah, okay, this is a good one.
Speaker 1: So Marlon Brando right famously not a problematic dude. Uh,
Speaker 1: star of the Isle of Dr Moreau and probably a
Speaker 1: couple of other movies, got nominated for Best Actor for
Speaker 1: his role in the Godfather, which is not nearly as
Speaker 1: good a movie as The Isle of Dr Moreau, but whatever.
Speaker 1: So Brando had struck up what seems to be a
Speaker 1: really legitimate and honest friendship with an Indigenous American activist
Speaker 1: named Sashin Little Feather. She was of Apache and Yaki
Speaker 1: descent and was angry at Hollywood for a white variety
Speaker 1: of understandable reasons. Uh. And Brando agreed with her about
Speaker 1: the things she was angry about. So he decides he's
Speaker 1: going to turn down the Oscar if he wins it. Um.
Speaker 1: So she's hanging out with him the night that he's
Speaker 1: supposed to like go to the Oscars, and he's typing
Speaker 1: out this eight page speech in case he wins. And
Speaker 1: this speech he wanted to use his podium to protest
Speaker 1: the wrongs being that had been done to Native Americans
Speaker 1: by Hollywood. Right, So, the unjust and racist portrayal of
Speaker 1: Indigenous people in decades of cowboy movies, including a bunch
Speaker 1: of John Wayne movies. And he's also specifically, he and
Speaker 1: Little Feather specifically angry about Wounded Knee. So this is
Speaker 1: a battle which is a bunch of just a horrible,
Speaker 1: horrible battle, and at this moment in seventy three, it's
Speaker 1: the site of a standoff between Native activists and the
Speaker 1: Feds over the murder of a Lakoda man. Right, So
Speaker 1: that's going on while the oscars are about to happen. Um.
Speaker 1: And so Brando decides he's gonna turn if he wins
Speaker 1: the best Actor, he's going to turn that into a
Speaker 1: place to talk about them. Um. So Little Feather helps
Speaker 1: him put together this speech, and then kind of at
Speaker 1: the last moment, he's like, well, what if you deliver it? Right,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't deliver it, Like why don't you go don't
Speaker 1: touch don't even touch the oscar, don't take it. Just
Speaker 1: deliver this speech in my stead, right, Um, if you
Speaker 1: want to, And she wants to, so he gives her
Speaker 1: the speech she's written. But when she arrives, the presenters
Speaker 1: number one seed that like, oh ship Brando's sent this
Speaker 1: person here. She wants to give a speech. Um, you
Speaker 1: can't have more than sixty seconds. You can't read that
Speaker 1: eight page thing that Marlon Brando gave you. Um. So
Speaker 1: she has to come up with something kind of on
Speaker 1: the fly, and here's what she comes up with. Hello.
Speaker 1: My name is Sashi Little Feather. I'm APACHE and I'm
Speaker 1: president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I'm
Speaker 1: representing Marlon Brando this evening, and he has asked me
Speaker 1: to tell you in a very long speech which I
Speaker 1: cannot share with you presently because of time, but I
Speaker 1: will be glad to share with the press afterwards, that
Speaker 1: he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And
Speaker 1: the reasons for this being are the treatment of American
Speaker 1: Indians today by the film industry excuse me, and on
Speaker 1: television and movie reruns, and also with recent happenings that
Speaker 1: wounded me. I beg at this time that I have
Speaker 1: not intruded upon this evening and that we will in
Speaker 1: the future our hearts and our understandings will meet with
Speaker 1: love and generosity. Thank you on behalf of morm and Brando.
Speaker 1: So that's lovely. Yeah, it's like so much more cordial
Speaker 1: than any account. Extremely polite, yes that any account you
Speaker 1: will read of what happened and how it happened. She
Speaker 1: is like insanely soft spoken, but but firm and like apologetic.
Speaker 1: I don't I hope I didn't ruin your night, and
Speaker 1: like were so appreciative of the award, but we just
Speaker 1: can't take it because of like, Yeah, she's very very mild,
Speaker 1: and it's incredible that Hollywood stopped with any kind of
Speaker 1: racist portrayals of Native Americans from that point. Never again happened.
Speaker 1: Never again happened. I'm gonna google Johnny Depp real quick.
Speaker 1: Nobody absolutely no reason why I am doing this, just
Speaker 1: typing it into Google. So, um, yeah, she gets a
Speaker 1: lot of support that night. You hear a lot of clapping,
Speaker 1: a lot of cheers. Um, you do hear some booze,
Speaker 1: though not an insignificant amount. Now I think we both
Speaker 1: are in agreement. You would have to be a crazy
Speaker 1: asshole to take any offense at that whatsoever. Um, it's
Speaker 1: a pretty uh polite and very very mild statement of conviction. Um,
Speaker 1: that is not how John Wayne takes it. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to read another quote from the Guardian here and
Speaker 1: this is Um, this is starts with a Little Feather
Speaker 1: talking she's interviewed for this piece. During my presentation, he
Speaker 1: was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the
Speaker 1: stage and he had to be restrained by six security
Speaker 1: men to prevent him from doing so. Presenting Best Pictures
Speaker 1: soon after, also for The Godfather, Clint Eastwood quipped, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I should present this award on behalf
Speaker 1: of all the cowboys shot and all the john Ford
Speaker 1: westerns over the years. When Little Feather got backstage, she says,
Speaker 1: there were people making stereotypical Native American war cries at
Speaker 1: her and miming chopping with a tomahawk. After talking to
Speaker 1: the press, she went straight back to Brando's house, where
Speaker 1: they sat together and watched the reactions to the event
Speaker 1: on television. Was John Wayne just there, like, get my
Speaker 1: movies out, you fucking mouth? Yeah? He was. He He
Speaker 1: would have hit her probably if he could have. He
Speaker 1: was ready to six men. He's a big guy, six men,
Speaker 1: and she's like tiny doesn't look like a big person.
Speaker 1: No um of course sandwich by Oh god, just John
Speaker 1: Wayne and Clint there's still like Clinty's would still mad
Speaker 1: about that. I would have What would have been amazing
Speaker 1: is if Brando had done it and the security guards
Speaker 1: hadn't been there, and we've gotten to see a fist
Speaker 1: fight between fat aging Marlon Brando and fat aging, drunken
Speaker 1: John Wayne at the Oscar. That would have been amazing.
Speaker 1: That would have been incredible. Oh my god, what a
Speaker 1: moment that would have been. I do feel like dad.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, the ratings were good this last Oscars,
Speaker 1: and I do think that we should have old drunk,
Speaker 1: washed up actors like wrestling each other on stage. I
Speaker 1: want to see Brando bottle John Wayne with some fucking wine,
Speaker 1: just like nail him in the skull. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know. Orson Wells also has like one of the
Speaker 1: most memorable on screen drunk moments where he's trying to
Speaker 1: do the ad for that wine. Yeah. The French there,
Speaker 1: yeah them all fuck it? So uh Sashen is the
Speaker 1: primary source we have on this um, but I don't
Speaker 1: have any particular trouble believing it. John Wayne had a
Speaker 1: history of hitting women, sometimes in public. Um, and to
Speaker 1: reinforce that we should talk a bit here about how
Speaker 1: his marriage to his second wife, Chata ended. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: this is actually happens back in ninety six. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: for jumping around. This just seemed like the natural place
Speaker 1: to put this so soon. Here's but yeah, it's right,
Speaker 1: they are not together long. Um. Here's BuzzFeed summing up
Speaker 1: the details. The problem was that the current Latin American
Speaker 1: wife wasn't fulfilling her domestic duties, which is why they
Speaker 1: were divorcing and why Chata, infuriated and bitter, was alleging
Speaker 1: horrible things about the duke in court that he'd blackened
Speaker 1: her eye, pulled her from bed, and beat her, given
Speaker 1: her multiple bruises, called her obscene names, and was man
Speaker 1: handling her in front of guests. He went someplace where
Speaker 1: there were strip teasers, called girls, prostitutes, or whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call them, she testified. He came home the
Speaker 1: next morning, very drunken, with a big black bite on
Speaker 1: his neck. This was a human being bite. Wayne's lawyer
Speaker 1: countered that Chatta was a drunk who stayed out all
Speaker 1: night and returned with grass stains. On her clothes and
Speaker 1: during their estrangement, entertained a male guest at their residence
Speaker 1: while Wayne was on set. The divorce drama threatened to
Speaker 1: become a huge scandal, but Wayne forked over a substantial
Speaker 1: amount of alimony, The two settled, and his image remained unscathed,
Speaker 1: in part because allegations of domestic abuse weren't yet taken seriously,
Speaker 1: but also because Wayne's alleged actions were not out of
Speaker 1: line with his on screen image, which had him regularly
Speaker 1: verbally abusing women and if not giving them black eyes,
Speaker 1: then man handling, throwing them over shoulders, and generally putting
Speaker 1: them in their place when necessary. So you know, Johnny, Wayne,
Speaker 1: I really I just was so invested in this one.
Speaker 1: I felt like, you know, it was going to be
Speaker 1: the one. I like him. That quote was allegend horrible
Speaker 1: things about the Duke, all right, Marian The Duke married
Speaker 1: his third wife in nineteen fifty four. The two did
Speaker 1: originally did eventually divorce. Worse um, they stayed in each
Speaker 1: other's lives to some extent. She's interviewed after his death
Speaker 1: and still speaks very highly of him. So again, these
Speaker 1: are not to the extent that he was abusive. Everyone
Speaker 1: he was with in the past doesn't speak negatively of him.
Speaker 1: His kids all seem to speak positively of him. They
Speaker 1: claim publicly he was a good father. Um. He was
Speaker 1: in general a charming man and a good friend to
Speaker 1: a number of people. More than that, he seems to
Speaker 1: have just been kind of a magnetically charismatic person. And
Speaker 1: it's easy to forgive certain things of people like that.
Speaker 1: We do it as a society pretty much constantly. Also,
Speaker 1: tall can we privilege does not hurt Um. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, when he turned seventy, an article in the
Speaker 1: right wing journal Human Events tried to explain Wayne's a
Speaker 1: lure as the fact that he represented a basic American breed,
Speaker 1: the tall celt of pioneer Scott's Irish and English descent.
Speaker 1: The book Jesus and John Wayne continues all of Wayne's
Speaker 1: greatest hits and of valiant white men battling and usually
Speaker 1: subduing non white populations, the Japanese, Native Americans or Mexicans
Speaker 1: Like Teddy Roosevelt. Wayne's rugged masculinity was realized through violence,
Speaker 1: and it was a distinctly white male ideal. Yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: I feel like like groups today like those sort of yeah,
Speaker 1: just like neo Nazi groups full of you know, sort
Speaker 1: of virgins, Like they probably all get together and watch
Speaker 1: old John Wayne movies and he was like a ha,
Speaker 1: like on ironically some of the love that stuff. It's
Speaker 1: more than just put his face on things, because modern
Speaker 1: action movies are a lot better at keeping your attention.
Speaker 1: And if you were to watch his latest movie, like
Speaker 1: What's Funny the last movie he does, the Shootest, Like
Speaker 1: the basic plot of The Shootest is there's this old
Speaker 1: gunfighter who's dying of cancer like Wayne was kind of
Speaker 1: at the time, uh, and he wants to engineer a
Speaker 1: last gunfight to kill himself. Um. So he wants to
Speaker 1: set up a situation whereby he can have a last
Speaker 1: gunfight and die um because he otherwise cancer is going
Speaker 1: to get him. And instead he gets shot in the
Speaker 1: back and killed. Um. Which is like a weirdly show
Speaker 1: like suggests a weird amount of self knowledge for John Wayne.
Speaker 1: That like that's how that's the movie. He goes out
Speaker 1: in this movie about uh uh this like manly ARCon
Speaker 1: of like badass nous in his aging years, who's trying
Speaker 1: to get in Like who's trying to set up one
Speaker 1: last fight so he can die with dignity and get
Speaker 1: shot in the back instead. It's interesting that he the
Speaker 1: last thing he does. Yeah, right, because cancer, you know
Speaker 1: it just like it's not a great way to go out. No,
Speaker 1: it's it's a pretty shitty way to go out. Um
Speaker 1: so Yeah. In his declining years, when he filmed again
Speaker 1: some of his best movies, Wayne upped the anti on
Speaker 1: his conservative rhetoric, screeching at cowards who spit in the
Speaker 1: faces of the police and judicial sob sisters. Human Events
Speaker 1: wrote that as a man, he has loathed and demeaned
Speaker 1: by sanctimonious liberals and a whole mess of bug out
Speaker 1: on America hip crits. But Wayne was top shelf with
Speaker 1: freedom fans who thrilled to the big guy's charge. John Wayne.
Speaker 1: Judicial system, What's what is that? A reference to people
Speaker 1: who are angry that the criminal justice system in prisons
Speaker 1: and murders innocent people. Oh, it's just like those pumpkin lilies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pumkin lilies. That's right, exactly, judicial pumpkin lily. So John
Speaker 1: Wayne dies on June eleventh, nineteen seventy nine, of ask cancer.
Speaker 1: He never lived to see the entirety of the world
Speaker 1: he built come to fruition, But by nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 1: the electoral power of the left had been solidly broken.
Speaker 1: Not long after his death, Ronald Reagan, his old buddy,
Speaker 1: would be elected president. He would be followed by George H. W. Bush,
Speaker 1: and then the next Liberal president to follow would be
Speaker 1: considerably further right than most Democrats had been in John
Speaker 1: Wayne's day. There are numerous reasons for these shifts, which
Speaker 1: we've discussed in many podcasts, but the seductive, intoxicating vision
Speaker 1: of manhood which stuck in the heads of millions of
Speaker 1: men who are still alive and voting today, played a
Speaker 1: strong role. As Kristin Cobbs Dumez writes, John Wayne become
Speaker 1: an icon, became an icon of rugged American manhood for
Speaker 1: generations of Conservatives. Pat Buchanan perrotive Wayne in his presidential bid.
Speaker 1: Newt Gingridge called Wayne's Sands of Iwajima the formative movie
Speaker 1: of my life, and Oliver North echoed slogans from that
Speaker 1: film in his nineteen Senate campaign. In time, Wayne would
Speaker 1: also emerge as an icon of Christian masculinity. Evangelicals admired
Speaker 1: and still admire him for his toughness and his swagger.
Speaker 1: He protected the week, and he wouldn't let anything get
Speaker 1: in the way of his pursuit of justice and order.
Speaker 1: Wayne was not an evangelical Christian, despite rumors to this
Speaker 1: effect regularly circulated by evangelicals themselves. He did not live
Speaker 1: a moral life by the standards of traditional Christian virtue.
Speaker 1: Yet for many evangelicals, Wayne would come to symbolize a
Speaker 1: different set of virtues, a nostalgic yearning for a mythical
Speaker 1: Christian America, a return to traditional gender roles, and the
Speaker 1: reassertion of white patriarchal authority. Yes, so just back on
Speaker 1: the ranch. None of these just sissy jobs, jobs, punkin lily,
Speaker 1: content creators, TikTok dancers, casting pods and their basements can
Speaker 1: weak ship? Where when can we conquer some ship? Let's
Speaker 1: deconquer so we can reconquer the West. That's what I say,
Speaker 1: decolonized to recolonize. Who's with me? America? Recolonized England? I
Speaker 1: just we need Like this is why, um the show
Speaker 1: that I don't watch Westworld, But that's why I like
Speaker 1: that made sense because you're like, you need a simulation
Speaker 1: for men who feel inferior to get their rocks off
Speaker 1: in a safe place. Obviously, then the robots are sent ship.
Speaker 1: That's bad. They don't want them to say, I only
Speaker 1: watched the first season of that, which I did like,
Speaker 1: but I'm not I understand it goes some places apparently,
Speaker 1: you know, it's fine, but yeah, like you need Disneyland
Speaker 1: for adults, yeah, yeah, and that John Wayne is a big,
Speaker 1: a big help. He does a lot of work to
Speaker 1: create this cultural Disneyland that's like mental vacation space we
Speaker 1: have for white men. To imagine that there was a
Speaker 1: time in which if I only been born, then I
Speaker 1: would have been a real big man on the range.
Speaker 1: You know, I would have been carving out a new America,
Speaker 1: and I would have had a woman who loved me
Speaker 1: and didn't have a career of her own, and everything
Speaker 1: would have been perfect. Absolutely, And then but it was
Speaker 1: just a few more years before, like you know, grunge
Speaker 1: came around. It's thank god, Yeah, that did wonders for
Speaker 1: angsty white men. Hell yeah. And then you know, suddenly,
Speaker 1: well that's not cool anymore now. Masculinity's just it's so
Speaker 1: willie Nilly, and we've got you know, Disney groomers or
Speaker 1: whatever we're doing. Yeah, everything's gotten dumber since um um,
Speaker 1: I yeah, it's I'm fascinating by that because I don't like,
Speaker 1: I don't respond. I'm trying to think of like action
Speaker 1: heroes that like I respond to, like where I get
Speaker 1: like ting, where like spidy, like hell, I want to
Speaker 1: be that. I don't have that, Like, was that Jean
Speaker 1: claud for you? Was it so Stallone? Is it Schwartzenegger?
Speaker 1: Who's the For me? It was? It was Bruce Willis
Speaker 1: and die Hard? Right, that was the movie I saw
Speaker 1: as a kid that was like, well and and actually
Speaker 1: I'm honestly like much more than that. It was Indiana Jones, right,
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of men in mind, like
Speaker 1: that was the Harrison Ford of his peak that it's
Speaker 1: a leading man right there, totally And he's but he's
Speaker 1: kind of funny, right, He's got a little he's Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's incredibly charming, cheeky. That's what he keeps getting
Speaker 1: jail every time he crashed a plane into a golf course.
Speaker 1: Nobody can get angry. Nobody can stay angry at Harrison Ford.
Speaker 1: No exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Ford makes sense. Um,
Speaker 1: also old, also kind of older. Yeah, for a lot
Speaker 1: of his movies, he's got I mean, you know, he's pretty,
Speaker 1: he's pretty young and swollen them Indiana Jones movies, but
Speaker 1: not the most recent one. He was for the It's
Speaker 1: very funny because if you watch the behind the scenes
Speaker 1: for the second Indiana Jones movie, there's a ton about
Speaker 1: like how intense his workout schedule was to get him
Speaker 1: that jacked. And he's like he's like, he's like, he's
Speaker 1: like the guy you would cast as like a skinny
Speaker 1: office worker in a modern movie. But yeah, we didn't
Speaker 1: know how to get people jacked back then. We weren't
Speaker 1: as good at it. Modern Jack's technology just didn't exist. No,
Speaker 1: that h g H just wasn't for We didn't know.
Speaker 1: We didn't have as much h H we were gonna have.
Speaker 1: I wonder what what what were we talking about? John Wayne?
Speaker 1: And John Wayne would think about that, Bruce Wayne, Oh lord,
Speaker 1: I mean, but you also did have this period because
Speaker 1: like Indiana Jones is kind of like right before you
Speaker 1: start to have this like all of these super jacked
Speaker 1: action stars, that's when like Arnold and Stallone and and
Speaker 1: damn uh and then they all give way to Bruce
Speaker 1: Willis and Die Hard where it's like, now we're going
Speaker 1: to have like the everyman badass, and then nine eleven happens. Uh,
Speaker 1: and right now we have the Soldier bad and now
Speaker 1: and now they're super jacked again. Yeah. Who got people
Speaker 1: through the eighties that was like the Stallone's and the shorts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but well later okay, okay, yeah, alright, alright, late seventies,
Speaker 1: late seventies, late seventies. You've got your Indiana Jones, and
Speaker 1: you've got Dirty Harry. Right, you've got Clint Eastwood is
Speaker 1: Dirty Harry where he's kind of like a skinny, wiry
Speaker 1: due right, Clint count out. Can't clan out Clint Eastwood. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of chairs that a stern talking to look.
Speaker 1: Masculinity is complex, is it? No? Not not really, not honestly,
Speaker 1: not not very much at all. That's why it's so
Speaker 1: easy for Hollywood to market too. Now, Robert, when you
Speaker 1: watch like John Wayne movies, or is there part of
Speaker 1: you that's like I get it, you know, You're like
Speaker 1: I could see how this would be appealing. I think
Speaker 1: some of his movies are really good, Um, like fucking
Speaker 1: True Grits. A solid, solid film in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: I do. I do really like actually Um the remake
Speaker 1: with Um the dude in it. But you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: like as a kid, I watched a bunch of John
Speaker 1: Wayne movies, like they're they're really well shot. I I've
Speaker 1: always preferred more about the old Westerns. The way they're shot,
Speaker 1: the way the music is directed, kind of like the
Speaker 1: sense of rather than any of the specific dialogue or characters,
Speaker 1: is like the kind of tone that they have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's vibes that are very appealing in those movies,
Speaker 1: in part because just a lot of really talented people
Speaker 1: were making some very beautifully shot Western's beautifully shot propaganda.
Speaker 1: But hey, but still share all artists propagandas or we
Speaker 1: would would tell us, did he have fifty pounds of
Speaker 1: meat in his intestine upon death? I don't know, Probably
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think there's any evidence of that.
Speaker 1: But god damn, maybe you know maybe that let the
Speaker 1: meat and zoom the body, but let the meat stuck
Speaker 1: in John Wayne's corpse be the Santa clause of your
Speaker 1: beliefs about karma. I don't really know what the message
Speaker 1: would be if there is a lot of me. Be
Speaker 1: the Gerbil in Richard Gear's asshole. Yeah, be the Gerbil
Speaker 1: and Richard Gear's asshole. That's all. I think that's a
Speaker 1: good line to end on. Everyone. Go out there, be
Speaker 1: the Gerbil you want to see in Richard Gear's asshole.
Speaker 1: You know. God, that's an that's an that's an old
Speaker 1: Hollywood rumor, like a four people are going to remember
Speaker 1: that such an old rumor. I think the lesson is
Speaker 1: what is the You don't need um to subjugate people
Speaker 1: of color or Japanese or Native Americans. Um. In order
Speaker 1: to feel masculine and strong and powerful. Um, you might
Speaker 1: need to serve your country. That might help. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's the one war where that's a good idea,
Speaker 1: if it's the one war where it's good yeah, and
Speaker 1: uh and and yeah. And also like I feel like
Speaker 1: this all ended in Brokeback Mountain, Like Brokeback Mountain really
Speaker 1: just that was it. It was like, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 1: can't be stoic anymore because because Ennis, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think that's very stoic. That's a stoic gas movie.
Speaker 1: It is a stoic aas movie. But I'm saying like,
Speaker 1: like the the sort of the idea that you're like
Speaker 1: that bottled up emotionally, you're like, man, I think maybe
Speaker 1: you know, maybe maybe there's more going on here, Maybe
Speaker 1: you're not fishing by the rivernity can be. This is
Speaker 1: why I'm so excited about Pedro Pascal as a as
Speaker 1: a male lead. A lot of exciting new visions of
Speaker 1: manhood that Pedro Pascal is it is neat. I think
Speaker 1: actually there is something to be said about the fact
Speaker 1: that and you can say this probably maybe does start
Speaker 1: with some of James Cameron's early stuff where you're you're
Speaker 1: kind of idolizing a slightly more nurturing attitude towards a
Speaker 1: male action star. I think that's one of the things
Speaker 1: that's interesting about The Mandalorian, which has been a big hit,
Speaker 1: is there is like that is a big emphasis. You've
Speaker 1: got this like badass gun slinger, but who's also defined
Speaker 1: in large part due to his like desire to nurture
Speaker 1: a child um which is not a negative not a
Speaker 1: negative change. And and yeah, there's an emotional journey and
Speaker 1: that is a space Western. So right, that's pretty fun space.
Speaker 1: I enjoy that series quite a lot. I guess when
Speaker 1: I when I really think John Wayne's legacy died is
Speaker 1: probably Little nos X, old town Road, m assless chaps,
Speaker 1: openly gay, proud as hell, and crushing it. Hell yeah,
Speaker 1: well yeah, so until next time, dig up the corpse
Speaker 1: of John Wayne and mail his bones to Little nos X.
Speaker 1: That's I love this. This is a good project. And
Speaker 1: I again Little nos X loves a trigger the right,
Speaker 1: so I bet he will remake one of these films
Speaker 1: dressed in the bones of John Wayne, wearing his rib
Speaker 1: cage like a corset fante. So you have any plugs
Speaker 1: for us at the end here after that, it's amazing. Um,
Speaker 1: oh my god. Everyone check out the Bituation Room podcast.
Speaker 1: It's a weekly podcast with comedians and myself and activist experts.
Speaker 1: It's a good time. And yeah listen, yeah, all right again,
Speaker 1: go defile the grave of John Wayne. Where is that grave? Oh,
Speaker 1: that's a great question. Where is John Wayne's I want
Speaker 1: the address Pacific View Memorial Park in Newport Beach. Ah,
Speaker 1: that's on brand? Are you about to say? Of course
Speaker 1: it's Newport. It's definitely Newport Beach. Well, yeah, a little
Speaker 1: slice of red over in this southern California blue I guess.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. Yeah, I'm sure we are not the
Speaker 1: only ones to have located where he is buried us
Speaker 1: in order to steal his bones and give them to
Speaker 1: little Nozax so he can turn them into a corset. Yes,
Speaker 1: I like that he's dead. Yeah, um, good riddens. May
Speaker 1: we never have someone who plagues the American consciousness so
Speaker 1: horribly um, to the point where we're still we're just
Speaker 1: waiting for the John Wayne generations to die off. Thank God, well,
Speaker 1: thank you. This is great. H m hmm.