McLintock: John Wayne and the Catholic Church

My father died two years ago. He managed his money well and left me some, not a fortune, but a pretty decent chunk. I have lived in fear ever since. And as the stock market soured, my fear increased.

Now, something seemingly unrelated: McLintock (the serious-comedic western starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara that you couldn't buy for years) and Anthony Esolen.

In the June 2009 issue of Touchstone, Anthony Esolen has a great article titled "The Unquiet Men." In it he draws out and develops some aspects of McLintock that I had pretty well overlooked every time I watched the movie. Setting the stage at the beginning of the article, he writes:

"'You speak to the white man,' says the Indian chief, his countenance scarred with age and battle. 'You tell them, Big McLintock.'"

"The broad-shouldered rancher (John Wayne) and the Apaches are standing in front of a covered stage, where the dignitaries of the territory are meeting to round up these last Indian braves and take them to the reservation that the federal government has kindly provided for them. The Apaches are beaten, and they know it. The world they loved is gone forever. There will be no war-joy, and no roaming freely across the plains with their women and children, in pursuit of the deer and the buffalo."

But they will have security, and all their needs will be provided for by the US Government. Never again will they have to worry about dying in battle or freezing to death or starving. On the reservation-their inheritance, their money in the bank-they will be safe. Esolen continues:

"'Tell the chief,' says the territorial governor to McLintock, 'that there will be food on the reservation, and schools, and medicine. Tell them that they will be cared for.' . . ."

"But Puma, the chief, cannot accept that promise. It is not that he believes the white man is lying. If only he were lying, Puma would have some hope! Instead, he explains to McLintock that he cannot accept life on those terms."

"'Chief Puma,' says McLintock, 'says that the life you promise his people may be fit for women, but it is not a life for Apache braves. If a man must be provided with his own food, then he is no longer a man. All the Apache ask for is the freedom to hunt as they used to do.' . . ."

"The casual moviegoer will suppose that is but another criticism of the foolish and miserable treatment of the Indians by their white conquerors. But it is far more than that. Director McLaglen is echoing the master here, and he, John Ford, had always cast a discerning eye upon the deadening blandness of a certain kind of civilization we take for granted. . . . an indictment-leveled in many of his films, particularly in the brilliant The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-against the modern world, with its sterile rationalism, and its technological wonders put to the procurement of physical safety and comfort. That world is the precondition, too, for feminism, but, at least in Ford's vision, really strong and dangerous women reject it too McLintock."

McLintock is my seventeen-year-old daughter's favorite movie and one of my favorites too. She likes just about any John Wayne movie because she likes John Wayne. I'm convinced that when you're watching John Wayne play a part, you're really getting John Wayne, not acting. And I think we could probably say the same about Maureen O'Hara, at least when she played across from John Wayne. Esolen speaks to this:

"Always in the movies of John Ford McLintock, men and women move like titans of ancient epic, forces that make scientific and sociological analysis look as petty and ineffectual as a city boy in a bow tie. It is dangerous to marry a woman; just as it is dangerous to tread upon holy ground. . . . in his world, which is I think the true world, men and women are elemental realities, meeting in conflict and love. Either one of these is potent enough to shake the earth-or to bring upon earth that tender and most shattering being of all, a human child."

So let's set aside all the silly sociological and psychological explanations and acknowledge that this is why we like John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in westerns. They are those elemental and dangerous forces of masculinity and femininity striding across the stage drinking big, living big, fighting big, and loving big. We all, especially boys and girls, admire masculine men and feminine women-and I'm not talking about big muscles and large bosoms here-because they're genuinely what they're supposed to be and what we deep down, before the desire is deadened, aspire to be. But they are also, as Esolen points out, dangerous. And we have come to prefer the domesticated, denatured , and safe to the elemental, genuine, and dangerous.

That's why, as I have observed with my daughter's posters in her bedroom and crushes at school, young girls seem to go for effeminate-looking boys, and the boys seem to like girls who look like twelve-year-old boys with breasts stuck on. Why? Because it's safer. It's much less frightening and dangerous than the alternative-that is, allowing your affections to light on a creature so obviously and fundamentally different from yourself. So, now, we're content to keep our John Waynes and our Maureen O'Haras at a safe distance on the screen only.

You can always count on Chesterton to state the obvious in a memorable way. Concerning this, he said somewhere that it's just silly to dissolve a marriage for reasons of incompatibility . . . because men and women, by definition, are incompatible. But now-now-we'd rather have the safety of compatibility. No risk, no danger, no complementarity.

So what does this have to do with me and my money? Well, this, I think.

I was anxious because I wanted safety and security. I wanted to build my newer and bigger barns, sit back, and enjoy the safety and security of some money invested. I was fearful that I would lose my new-found safety net (and I did lose about half). But as Chief Puma sagely said, that's no kind of life for a man, especially a Catholic man.

We're not Protestants. We haven't reduced our religion to the purely intellectual. We live continually in the face of ineffable mysteries. And none of it is safe.

It's a frightening and awful act, fraught with danger-as those folks in the New Testament who received the Eucharist unworthily found out-to eat God. True evangelization is an enormously dangerous enterprise, as St. Paul and John Paul II well knew. Sacramental marriage is a perilous undertaking because there's no checking out, and at some point you will have to confront your own glaring flaws and deficiencies, as I am finally finding out after over twenty years of marriage. None of this stuff is safe.

For a while, I acceded to the world's requests to give up real life, a large life, and live on the reservation, to be provided for, to be safe and secure. But safety and security are illusory. I was the small miserly man counting his coins and fearing their loss. Safety and security aren't safe: they're dangerous to the soul.

I think, too, that a similar thing has happened to the Church in this country. The Church in the US was once an alien phenomenon in this thoroughly Protestant society. It seemed dangerous and was to be feared, full of immigrants who drank too much and engaged in bizarre rituals, rife with large outspoken characters, denying divorce, answering to Rome. It just wasn't American.

But then She was assimilated and tamed, moved to the American reservation. Sure, physical life for Catholics is a lot tamer and safer now. Catholics no longer have access to only the hard-labor jobs, the dangerous jobs, or crime. And it's no big deal now to elect a "Catholic" politician. But at what cost?

Now, the Church counts her coins, even Her government-granted coins, and fears losing them in Her hospitals. Only a small handful of bishops speak out against "Catholic" politicians who advertise themselves as Catholic and still promote abortion. And, of course, we have the abuse scandals of just a few short years ago. So, safety is dangerous.

C. S. Lewis wrote something that has always stuck with me, even though I never really put it into practice. He said that a Christian is on the right road when he is striving to live in a state of "cheerful insecurity." G. W. McLintock says much the same thing, but cast in secular terms, when he is trying to explain to his adult daughter what makes a marriage. He says that it's the danger and hard times that bond a man and wife together, that it's the working and striving together as one and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds and obstacles that glues them tight-basically that a secure life with her dandified and wealthy boyfriend wouldn't be a real life. And that seems like pretty sound advice to me.

I've got a copy of McLintock beside me right now, and I should probably go put it in the DVD player. Not as good as some things, but better than the slavery of worrying about money. Besides, my father loved John Wayne.