“We have to change this shit”: Spike Lee’s issues with the mythology of John Wayne
Considering he’s gone on record quite literally saying, “fuck John Wayne“, it goes without saying that Spike Lee has never been too enamoured with ‘The Duke’ and his lasting contributions to cinema.
While it’s undoubtedly true that Wayne is one of Hollywood’s most indelible legends, a silver screen icon, and remains a recognisable figure and towering influence on the moving image almost 50 years on from his death, it’s equally accurate that some of his credits and many of his personal opinions are relics of a bygone age.
As the most famous spokesperson for the anti-communist witchhunt of the 1950s, a staunch advocate of the Vietnam War who headlined what was essentially a propaganda movie to try to sway public opinion, and a man who held some views that were questionable even by the standards of the ‘Golden Age’, Lee’s incendiary and socially conscious style were always going to place them in opposition.
It’s no secret that the trailblazing auteur holds Wayne – and by extension, his most storied collaborator, John Ford – in narrative and thematic contempt, which he made patently clear onscreen by working that disdain into the opening sequence for his 2008 war epic Miracle at St Anna.
The story follows the segregated 92nd Infantry Division during its deployment in Tuscany during World War II. Four of its members ended up trapped behind enemy lines after rescuing a local boy, and while certain parts of the movie are fictionalised, it serves to reinforce Lee’s point that pivotal moments in African-American history tend to be overlooked by the industry’s power players.
Miracle at St Anna opens in 1983, with Laz Alonzo’s Hector Negron watching the Wayne-starring jingoistic war epic The Longest Day on television, with the combination of actor, film, and context a very deliberate decision. “It is not a mistake that this film begins with Wayne,” Lee told The Guardian. “This is the Hollywood bullshit mythology that excludes one million people.”
“You look at John Wayne; what did he represent? In the Second World War films, John Wayne is kicking Nazi ass, and in the Pacific, he’s kicking Japanese ass. And if it’s a western, he’s killing the savage Indian,” Lee continued. “This film is a rebuttal to the same mythology that demeans other people. We have to change this shit. We cannot continue putting out these lies again and again. Young people growing up have no idea that this stuff even happened.”
The films ‘The Duke’ made, whether they were based on true stories or entirely fictional, were told almost exclusively in black-and-white; he was the unflappable hero, dispatched into action to save the day, which he always did. Of course, the real world is a lot more complicated than that, with Lee bristling at the way the actor and the business at large swept so many important stories under the rug in favour of servicing their own mythos.
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