Believing in Gary Cooper - Critical Essay - Biography

Criticism, Wntr, 2003 by George Toles

"I always said--in answering Ravelstein's question, 'What do you think death will be like?'--'The pictures will stop.' Meaning, again, that in the surface of things you saw the heart of things."

--Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

"And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else...."

--Miguel de Unamuno, "The Secret of Life"

Author's Note:

The essay that follows these introductory observations is, in fact, a fragment (albeit a substantial one) of a considerably longer monograph on Gary Cooper that I have written. The scope of my original inquiry includes Cooper's entire career in movies. The chosen segment focuses primarily on a single major sequence from Frank Capra's Meet John Doe. Though the Capra analysis is the centerpiece of my study, it is buttressed in the full version by detailed accounts of many other Cooper performances. It is one of my principal contentions that star acting is not well-served by commentary composed of loose summaries or quick sketches of major roles (fortified by knowing generalizations about the star's type, which is assumed to be an easy-to-grasp "given"). I would not advance my cause, therefore, by shrink-wrapping my readings of specific scenes, which offer close examinations of Cooper's responses to an unfolding dramatic situation, at times almost moment by moment--for the sake of a misleading overview and a melange of snippets. (1)

Gary Cooper is not exactly a forgotten star, but he survives at present largely through association with "our former ideals of masculine virtue," in Richard Schickel's phrase, ideals which seem somewhat quaint, genteel, and decidedly more rural than urban. So far has our culture drifted from a genuine interest (much less belief) in Cooper's brand of gallantry--at once courteous, forthright, self-deprecating, and laconic--that his once captivating way of embodying these attributes may now, according to Schickel, "even be held against him." (2) Perhaps it is fair to say that he has dwindled into "a rather distant and psychologically inert figure to audiences [especially those with little direct experience of his movies], viable to them more as victim than exemplar." (3) What are we to make of the fact that a star such as Cooper, hugely popular for decades as a quintessentially American hero, has become not only less visible culturally--a common fate--but less intelligible as a type after a relatively brief period? We are sharply reminded that types and personae, as much as the actors who "indelibly" express them, are not fixed, but rather provisional figures, whose meanings inevitably fluctuate. All at once it can seem a matter of some difficulty and strangeness for Cooper, who in former times made a clear statement merely through entering a room or looking another person in the eye, to naturally be that sort of individual. In other words, it is not only challenging for a viewer to find a performer's identity as type instantly recognizable and emotionally accessible after time blurs the needs and values that made the type obvious; it is equally challenging for the performer to remain at one with his type, however dependably it belonged to him at the height of his fame. For later audiences, the grounds for believing what a star reveals on-screen must be secured with less help from the defining persona, which originally supplied a swift, sure route to understanding. If we continue to find authority in a star's performance after his type grows elusive and diffuse (rather than clear and concentrated), he must draw additional sustenance from other sources. It may also become necessary to read him backwards, in terms of recent performers who could be used as reference points and analogues. Cooper, for example, might be made into an odd composite of Tom Hanks, Clint Eastwood, and Max von Sydow.

Marilyn Monroe is arguably the supreme instance of a star whose type is continually being refurbished. To audiences in the early 1950s, Monroe seemed to occupy, without much imagination or inventiveness, a type condescendingly referred to as "the dumb, sexy blonde." The phrase suggests a unified, if flimsy, impression, one that can be seized at a glance and confirmed the moment Monroe moves or speaks. When one revisits Monroe movies of this period, including those in which her scripted roles are granted no dimension that is not cartoonish, the effect of her presence is startingly complicated, and not only because we now know more about her so-called "real life" tribulations. The Monroe persona is a balancing act, in which many opposites pair up in unlikely ways to create an astonishing, fragile harmony. She is both exuberantly sexual and persuasively shy; innocent yet calculating; filled with delight and shadowed with sadness; in a tipsy daze and alert in all her senses, like an animal. Once Monroe is no longer available to make films, it becomes apparent that the type she projected, with such guileless aplomb, could not be taken over by others with comparable ambition and a more "refined" technique. The Monroe type itself has not exactly disintegrated over time, but as it departs from familiar usage it becomes less conceivable as a "common sense" version of something we all understand (whether to approve or disapprove). The type has somehow been transformed, after the fact, into a highly personal language which a woman once devised, from the available cultural materials, in order to express herself--with unrepeatable fluency, and a clarity so intense that it turned mysterious.