The Man Who Could Go Either Way: The Many Faces of Cowboy Masculinity in 1950s American Film and Advertising

This thesis explores the cowboy as an iconic figure of white masculinity in the middle-class in 1950s America, focusing on film and advertising as a means of interpreting images of idealized manhood.It explores films including High Noon, Rio Bravo, and The Searchers, as well as print advertising from Levi's and Marlboro, to juxtapose different projections of masculinity.It finds that, contrary to expectation, the cowboy was not just a singular image of stoicism and martial power, opposed to domesticity and consumerism.Instead, he was more of a language through which different values could be expressed.This creates an intriguingly contradictory image: the cowboy is domesticity and anti-domesticity, invincibility and anxiety, fashion and anti-fashion, and a relic of America's past and the herald of its future all at once.In this regard he becomes a surrogate for diverse masculinities interacting on the backdrop of the early Cold War.John Wayne way.We might as well do it the right way." 3 He has a strangely mixed character, equally a hero as a fool.4 And yet he still lives on in film, be it at the hands of Quentin Tarantino or in forgotten reruns on The Western Channel.In advertising, too, tough cowboys are used to sell products to people, whether they play those cowboy tropes straight or subvert them comically.5 He appears as a representative or advocate for countless products, representing individualism and folksy wisdom and rugged masculinity to sell products like beer, trucks, cigarettes, and even catheters.6 To me, too, the cowboy is a mixed symbol fraught with ambiguity.I am not an American, nor do I have any in my bloodline, and American conceptions of the cowboy are not much a part of Chinese-English Canadian heritage (any more than the usual bleed-over of American culture into Canada).But the cowboy is nonetheless a part of my childhood.Before my maternal grandfather died, he watched Westerns almost all day.He watched strong, almost-always white men in narratives where Chinese men were almost entirely absent, and imagined himself as a strong white hero.This hero, of course, was in the process of taking a gun to people of color and criminals (and/or both).And his ancestors, in the times depicted in many of those films, worked on the railroads with aching backs and calloused hands.Spurred on (get it?) in my youth by that cowboy image, I got a plastic toy revolver from a dollar store with a big orange nose on the 3 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (New York: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), p. 520. 4 Paul Dickson's War Slang tellingly carries two definitions for John Wayne: "(1) To act heroically.(2) A soldier who "acts it up" for the media, especially the camera."This source also corroborates Slotkin's observations.Paul Dickson, War Slang: American Fighting Words & Phrases Since the Civil War (New York: Dover Publications), p. 278.5 A Budweiser commercial comes to mind: the cowboy threatens violence against the townsfolk when the local saloon doesn't have Budweiser, but when a fresh shipment comes in… he leads the crowd in a spirited rendition of Elton John's Tiny Dancer."Budweiser Cowboy Commercial," YouTube, Sept. 2, 2011, accessed Feb. 29, 2016.Starts at 0:27 after an excruciatingly long introductory animation by the uploader.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgOUcMjouvU 6 Really!Everything you need to know is in the title: "I'm a Professional Cowboy & I Use Catheters," YouTube, Mar.

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