ABSTRACT
In the middle of the John Wayne classic Hondo (1953), Wayne’s character engages in a ritualized knife fight with an Apache warrior on a cliff overlooking the expanses of the southwest desert. Exploiting the visual pleasures of the film’s three-dimensional and Technicolor technologies (it displays colorfully costumed bodies rhythmically confronting one another and rolling across the dusty precipice as well as close ups of knives thrusting straight toward the camera), the scene clearly signifies a particular vision of the white male body: able, kinetic, efficient, and ultimately superior to the raced-body of its Native American opponent. The colorful, vibrant, and tense confrontation between the two bodies, however, functions not simply on the level of representational visual codes (the ways that the formal and narrative elements of the scene signify a specific range of meanings made legible in their relationship to ideology and historical discourses); the scene also offers a particular set of sensations and emotions about male bodies, movement, violence, and the open spaces of the frontier. The three-dimensional scene seeks to viscerally and bodily engage the audience of such spectacles, to make them jump and experience the textures and tensions of the world on the screen beyond the ideological/discursive relations of the images as signs. The scene offers a sweaty and intense set of feelings and sensibilities about the male body engaged in a kind of intimate violence, an immersion into the conflict itself as the bodies reach out toward the audience. One experiences and identifies with the triumph of the hero’s body but only via the nearly tangible labor of the struggle, the strain of a hardened and efficient body at work in the dangerous frontier.
