20 dead in Orlando gay club shooting

[Rev. Rye]

Or watch The Shootist. The overarching theme of the movie is the futility of violence as a solution ... and yet how the social admiration that comes to tough guys gets handed down, only to complete the circle.

Fair enough, The Shootist does explicitly deal with those themes. Come to think of it, most of Clint Eastwood's best films deal with it to some extent, particularly his westerns (the ones he and Sergio Leone directed especially, and Unforgiven most of all.) That said, I linked to those two videos from The Searchers to underscore that, no, even in his best films, John Wayne is not always heroic, and anyone looking closely at his films should notice this. It's impressive to see how people can latch so heavily onto those films as a guide for life and miss something so blatant as that. If only the Western didn't more or less die out just as the genre as a whole really started to embrace the moral ambiguity inherent in the whole enterprise.