Actors as Heroes

I've written on this before, but I can't really grasp why people care what celebrities who derive their fame from acting, or singing, or performing in some fashion, have to say about anything other than their fields of employment.  That doesn't mean that I feel that people with fame can't speak on whatever they might wish, but the association of those individuals with expertise and meaning escapes me.  There's no reason to believe that an actor is particularly knowledgeable on a social issue or politics or anything else, unless they go out and really demonstrate that.  Few do.

Along these same lines, I'm often amazed by the extent to which certain actors become incredibly strongly identified with institutions and values portrayed in their films. To some extent, that's fine.  If a person appears in a lot of religious themed movies, or better yet directs them, a person might be entitled to derive some belief about their values in that fashion.  But that only goes so far.

Recently a columnist for the Casper Star Tribune, Daniel Molyneux, wrote an article taking shots at John Wayne in this fashion.  Molyneax is a Lutheran pastor and writes on a wide variety of topics, and he must be fairly fearless as he really goes after Wayne, while praising Jimmy Stewart.  And he has a point.

The reason he has a point, in my view, is that there are a fair number of people who absolutely worship Wayne as some sort of a hero.  I don't mean to throw rocks at Wayne.  There's a new biography out on him by the same author who wrote about John Ford, and I intend to read it even though I care next to nothing about the lives of actors.  Its just that the Ford book was good and well written and this seems like a natural companion to it.

Anyhow, for that reason, I'll somewhat reserved judgment on Wayne, in part because the earlier Ford book did, giving some credence to his apologists who maintain that there were legitimate reasons he did not serve during World War Two. Still, my point is that he didn't serve in World War Two, and the piles and piles of people who somehow feel that he was a larger than life, real life Sgt. Styker, are off.

Indeed, I'm amazed that Wayne's career survived World War Two, which is another example, I think, of the Depression Era generation I've recently been writing about here being very "liberal" in ways that would now surprise us.  Several years ago there was a big controversy about the Dixie Chicks making some comments about the Iraq War in a concert that caused all sort of angst in some quarter, but here we see the World War Two American populace perfectly content to go to movies made during the war or immediately after it, featuring an actor portraying tough as nails military figures (Flying Tigers, Flying Leathernecks, They Were Expendable, The Sands of Iwo Jima), who never served in the military.  And for those audiences surely most reasons for not serving must have sounded very thin. They apparently just didn't care really.

That's fine, but we shouldn't confuse that actor, or any other, with the roles they played.  At the end of the day, John Wayne was a movie actor.  He did buy a ranch somewhere in later years, but he wasn't a real cowboy in the sense that ranchers who do that from early youth are, and he was never in the military.  I'm sure he had his virtues, and one thing that Molyneax missed is that he did wade into a crowd of Vietnam War protestors during the war to ask them to pipe down as a fellow actor he was with had lost a child in the war.  Still, it should be realized that Wayne, or Clint Eastwood, or whoever, are actors and when we see their popular image advanced, we're seeing the success of their acting, not their real personalities.