| John Wayne is most commonly seen as an icon of US national identity, but Wayne was also the world's most popular movie star after WWII, attracting international audiences with his big budget action spectacles. This dissertation, therefore, argues that Wayne was a crucial figure in Hollywood's internationalization and global appeal after WWII. Wayne's dark and tortured depictions of masculinity in his most popular films of the decade, I contend, reflected the turbulent social disruptions of global capitalism and modernization. Connecting Wayne's most popular films with the global historical context of the 1950s (for example, the increasing internationalization of capitalism, the forced modernization of the so-called Third World, and the beginnings of decolonization), my research reveals how Wayne projected the contradictions and pleasures of a modern, capitalist masculinity around the world from roughly 1948-1962.;This argument is grounded in a political economic understanding of Hollywood's relationship to international markets after WWII, thus my project explores how and why Hollywood studios transformed themselves in this period into transnational media producers and distributors. Next, by analyzing Fort Apache (1947), The Searchers (1956), and Rio Bravo (1959), I show how the John Wayne western dramatizes the transformations of space and social relations in the fifties through modernization and urbanization. Through a reading of Red River (1948), I also analyze Wayne's detachment from women at a time when romance and nuclear family domesticity became important aspects of masculinity around the world. Wayne offers instead an alternative vision of modern manhood based in homosocial professionalism. Then, using Hondo (1953) as a key example, I historicize the pleasures of watching Wayne's body in action within the body politics of global capitalism, revealing how Wayne expresses a globally capitalist definition of masculinity rooted in wage labor and mobility. Finally, I explore Wayne's cultural engagement with Asia in The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), a film that uses a narrative of interracial romance to reinvent US-Japanese relations and Japanese modernity within the framework of global trade. In this way, Wayne's World uncovers the complex, transnational history of John Wayne and his global vision of manhood. |
