DECONSTRUCTING THE DUKE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Why John Wayne? Because he is there. Or, more properly, because he is still there, coming in first or second in polls asking us to identify our favorite movie stars despite the fact that he has been dead 18 years.

In John Wayne's America (Simon & Schuster; 380 pages; $26) Garry Wills imagines that this must tell us something about the soul of postmodern America. And perhaps it does. But by the end of his confused and digressive meditation, this usually mordant cultural historian looks rather like a second heavy in a Wayne western--rubbing his jaw and spitting dust as the Duke's shade strides off toward the horizon, as impervious to academic analysis as he was to a bad man's six-shooter.

Wills thinks Wayne remains a psychic presence for us because he embodied the frontiersman's virtues, a free man ranging a free and open land, the rot of the cities, the ambiguities of an intricately developed society well lost. But the description is stale and does not suit Wayne the way it does quieter, more mysterious figures like Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott. For the Duke was only intermittently like them--in The Big Trail, his first starring role, or in the starkly iconographic Hondo, which Wills unaccountably fails to mention. Mostly his character was not a man escaping civilization and its discontents but one bringing them to the wilderness. Discounting the many B westerns he made in his early days, he played more military men, lawmen and empire builders than he did freelance saddle tramps.

Wills notes that Wayne conducted his career cautiously, and one suspects that, like the Old West itself, Wayne was a large, empty space needing to be filled in. This task was largely undertaken by his powerful mentor, John Ford, a director whose sentimental pictorialism masked a mean and primitive spirit. Wills devotes almost as much space to him as he does to Wayne, yet never notices that Ford romanticized not far-darting freedom but stolid dutifulness. He and Wayne gave it near tragic dimensions in the great They Were Expendable, a terrible obsessional quality in The Searchers. Twice (in Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) they endorsed the creation of elaborate lies in order to lend grandeur to this essentially selfless and military virtue.

As Ford, if not Wills, shrewdly sensed, the imposing physical presence and the cranky large-heartedness Wayne conveyed onscreen gave good dramatic weight to this sense of obligation. But by 1979, when he died, most of us no longer found that idea or the ideal of the frontier very useful. Our culture had ceased to celebrate people who bound their lives to the defense of the simple moralities that Wayne embodied--moralities that even liberals, deploring his reactionary politics, found they missed. Wayne's legend, his apparent immortality, the sources of which keep eluding Wills, derive from that curiously haunting sense of loss.

--By Richard Schickel