I was only able to find two essays by Meeuf online that concerned John Wayne. I read them (and actually downloaded them as well). Both were well written and not difficult at all to understand. I don't think he is out to deface John Wayne's image at all, and I do believe he is a John Wayne fan as well. That being said, however, I also think that he does have a tendency (as do most intelligentsia of today) to lean towards a deconstructing of what they view as modern mythology. Not necessarily a bad tendency though, depending upon where John Wayne lies on ones scale of popularity. I think most of the intellectuals of today tend to think that the vast majority of John Wayne fans have elevated him to the status of god, and those intellectuals feel it necessary to knock him down a few pegs in the eyes of those particular types of fans, so they can see that he is, after all, just a man. From that aspect, I have no problem with what they are doing (including Meeuf, if that is what he is doing), because that is exactly what John Wayne was - just a man. However, it is my experience that the majority of John Wayne fans do not view the Duke that way. They simply enjoy his films, his sense of humor and his philosophies. In other words, most of the intellectuals not only do not understand John Wayne, they also do not understand his fans. Because of this, they have a tendency to misinterpret the life and career of John Wayne, and thus really hammer away at his legacy, his body of work, and those human frailties that are so common to all of us and in doing so they come across as elitist bullies (which some of them actually are). Prime examples of this are Garry Wills and Douglas Jensen.
I don't know if Russell Meeuf falls into this category or not, although I suspect he does not. After reading the two articles I was able to find by him concerning John Wayne, I found one of them ("Shouldering the Weight of the World: The Sensational and Global Appeal of John Wayne's Body") somewhat troubling as he came across (at least to me) as having some, um, well, "underlying tendencies" that I would not agree with, and those tendencies seem to permeate the article. The other article ("John Wayne as Supercrip: Disabled Bodies and the Construction of Hard Masculinity in Wings of Eagles") also exhibited those same tendencies, but to a lesser degree, thus making that article more enjoyable to read. All in all, I still have to stick to my previous statements regarding "heroic masculinity," but the proviso that they are based solely on a review of his book rather than the book itself. Once I read his book (which I intend to do and look forward to doing) those statements may very well change. I won't condemn his book outright, nor praise it unconditionally until I have read it through.
