Chuck Norris died last week at the age of 86, after a remarkable career. He was part of the karate craze that swept America in the ‘60s, teaching, competing, becoming a national and international champion, and showcasing on Johnny Carson. In the ‘70s, he got involved in exploitation cinema. In the ‘80s, he became an action hero, and then, in the ‘90s, a TV star, too. He eventually became an outspoken Christian and conservative, and did a lot of other things besides, from charitable work to off-road racing.
Once, when he was filming his TV series Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran for nine seasons, Norris was attacked by two robbers in the streets of Dallas. You can imagine that it didn’t end well for them. No doubt, it was satisfying to fight crime, but what’s more interesting is the robbers’ motivation. They didn’t happen upon Norris by accident, nor were they indifferent to his fame. They attacked him on purpose, at the top of his fame, because they thought he was only tough on TV.
That was crazy of the criminals. But in another way, it reflected the cynical attitude of our times, or the tendency to be “too clever by half,” which makes it difficult to admire a tough guy. The overuse of sarcasm, moreover, leads to a kind of indignant reaction when confronted with genuine manliness. For example, consider the Variety obit for Norris, which insists on why and how the politics of half the country should deny Chuck Norris his status as a movie legend. We’re not talking about the propaganda arm of the Democratic Socialists of America here, but a Hollywood trade paper.
There’s another way to think about movies, morality, and manliness, and Norris at his best showed that it’s available to people who don’t share in Hollywood’s glamour or its Progressive ideology. Instead, Norris connected manliness, as exemplified by the discipline and power of the martial arts, to justice. His characters almost always pushed people to take responsibility for their own lives while remaining loyal to family, friends, country, and God. This was indeed part of his code and his teaching in his Chuck Norris martial arts system.
Norris’s reputation as a fighter and the severity of his cinematic persona made it plausible that good guys do win, which came as a great relief after the misery of the cinema of the 1970s. And therefore, he encouraged his admiring audience to take any number of major social or global issues seriously, as his movies did, dealing with everything from urban crime to international terrorism without cynicism or despair.
Moreover, his success came at the very moment when the liberal confidence of the ‘60s had fully reversed because of national and international crises in every field from race relations and the economy to war and diplomacy. After the failure of the Great Society came a deep demoralization in the ‘70s. Liberal elites and the New Left blamed the American people for their failure. There was a need for a new politics that would take the side of the people, as the Nixon and Reagan landslide elections showed. But there was also a need for a popular culture that cared about manly citizenship more than about elite prestige. Enter the action movies of the ‘80s.
Given this opposition, it should be no surprise that Norris found a path to success outside of respectability and glamour. He made himself into a martial artist and found a great audience among practitioners and admirers before he could do anything in entertainment. He built and lost businesses like martial arts schools. His early productions, like Good Guys Wear Black (1978), had to book theaters because they couldn’t get distribution. Norris went on a tour for the better part of the year to theaters to present the movie and attract audiences. It worked, and he got a career out of it.
Working outside of the studio system and making do however one can is, in a way, dirty work. It may have something to do with why Norris was never offered really good scripts or ever sought out really good artists. But he did become a movie legend, what is called an iconic actor, easily recognizable to perhaps a hundred million people. The same qualities that ensured he wouldn’t win any Oscars endeared him to international audiences. The lack of sophistication made him a celebrity to many people who share the simple taste for action movies, including in the third world and what used to be the second world, i.e., the countries enslaved by Communism. Admiration for manliness is universal, or almost—liberal elites loathe it. So Norris ended up being an ambassador for America at a time when America needed such public cultural diplomacy and in situations in which a lack of sophistication meant reliability, trustworthiness.
We live with problems that Norris dramatized and will continue to do so until we overcome the problem of cowardice afflicting our politics.
That’s a remarkable achievement for a guy who started in exploitation cinema, which is a general term for cheap, non-studio productions that had something sensational to recommend them to unpretentious audiences. It’s unfortunately a very wide range of productions catering to every unleashed passion, so it basically stretches from pornography to martial arts. In a rather sordid situation, Norris made mostly the right choices to acquire fame.
An example of Norris’s achievement is the movie that did most to create his image as a successor to the great stars of the Western: Lone Wolfe McQuade (1983). The Western is the all-American genre. And it’s some confirmation of that fact that the Western is where Norris eventually found his greatest fame, with Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2002). As you can tell by the title, the film is about a rugged individualist, that most distinctly American archetype. Norris plays a Texas Ranger fighting a modern crime organization and eventually bringing them down, in a victory for the American way of life.
But Lone Wolfe McQuade is also an heir to the Spaghetti Western, the genre that made Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood famous in the ‘60s. That genre was not too far from exploitation cinema, itself, and it differed from exploitation not only because of artistic merit, but also because of an inclination to demoralize that might be suspected of nihilism. One of the uncredited advisers on Lone Wolfe McQuade was the great John Milius, whose interest in manliness also meant making movies that could not be taken seriously, like Conan, and who also worked on Clint’s Dirty Harry movies. Violence and the vision of America falling apart are necessary preconditions for such stories, but it is very difficult after these conditions are met to restrain artistic ambitions. The ruggedness of rugged individualism could be the end of America.
Contrariwise, Lone Wolf McQuade has a kind of modesty or self-restraint because its protagonist is a willing servant of the law, if barely able to live in a community. He belongs to the borderlands, but he knows on which side of the border he’s supposed to be. Even a lawful community needs to deal with danger, but especially a lawful community is one where most people have no idea why danger even arises, since decent people do not wish to countenance the thought that weakness provokes aggression.
There are two kinds of wicked men that McQuade has to fight that correspond to the problem of establishing the law and the problem that follows from that success, preventing decadence. He first faces Mexican horse thieves that recall movies like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), a case of savagery that we could almost call natural in the sense that anger is natural. We call such people animals, precisely because we are aware that wickedness is uniquely human—animals are too unimaginative to take such pleasure in cruelty. The distinctly human character of wickedness and the cowardly liberal attitude that denies that evil men exist make it necessary to look at characters like McQuade, who is their opposite, because he is familiar with evil, yet does not hide from it in gated communities.
Everything that makes McQuade admirable makes him a misfit, however, so he cannot be a leader—he is the strong, silent type, whereas the essential quality of a leader is that he is an educator. McQuade’s fearlessness involves him in deadly danger; his taste for freedom encourages him to live in the wilderness, since the world is a better measure of a man than a town, where one always depends on others; and his pursuit of self-sufficiency, which involves conflicts with wicked men, cannot but teach him that ordinary men are contemptible since they dare not face danger. One reason it’s very important to understand such a character and to become familiar through the movies is that our warrior class is recruited largely from among such men.
But war and policing are so different as activities that we do not have adequate defenses against criminal organizations. So McQuade has to face Rawley Wilkes (another major figure from exploitation cinema, David Carradine, who also famously starred in the TV show Kung Fu). In this case, cruelty is almost an art—it involves all the arts of the city, at least, since Wilkes has put together crime and business. This is a stand-in for a problem so pervasive in America that it never gets discussed: the ubiquity of illegal guns. The liberal solution, as usual, is cowardly: gun control—lawful gun owners are the only ones liberals consider trying to disarm, since they would obey the law even if it were unjust.
The alternative would involve not merely arming the citizenry more, but insisting on the difference between citizens and criminals in light of the passions Lone Wolf McQuade brings out in the audience and modifies through its central conflict. That is the moral basis of the popular approval of law enforcement agencies. So we’re talking about a good recruitment movie, as most of Norris’s movies are, and we always need recruitment movies. But it’s also more important, as I’ve tried to show, because it teaches a fundamental lesson about not being squeamish and not allowing cowardice in the face of crime to corrupt the laws. It offers a standard of manliness by which to understand our claims about justice and our institutions, which should, but don’t necessarily enforce it. So watch Lone Wolf McQuade and celebrate Norris as he deserves for making us more serious—we need it. We live with these problems that he dramatized and will continue to do so until we overcome the problem of cowardice afflicting our politics.
