Jimmy Stewart: The Bastard I Hate to Love

In each of his film roles, James Stewart plays some sort of charming “everyman” character in a way that, for instance, a towering beast like John Wayne would never be able to pull off. However, as still waters tend to run deep, we see that Stewart’s characters—especially his post World War II films—are extremely complex and have turbulent interior lives despite their outward affability. That is, to use Freud’s metaphor, the ego of any of Stewart’s characters plays the rider in the saddle barely controlling the bucking horse of his id. While the ego is ostensibly in control, the character’s motivations are often of nebulous origin, if not downright unclear.

Furthermore, in the classic struggle between Stewart’s ego and id, he almost invariably finds a “superego” mentor figure: Frenchy in Destry Rides Again, Ronda Castle in The Far Country, and of course Midge in Vertigo. John Wayne's Tom Doniphan in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance does double duty by playing the true antagonist as well as the mentor figure. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of these mentor figures are women: even in Liberty Valance, Doniphan plays something of a mother hen to the book-smart, street-dumb Stoddard. The fact that women are willing to get close to him is perhaps an indicator of something more insidious: Stewart exhibits a subtle type of masculine stubbornness. He is an introverted independent who implodes on himself rather than taking out his aggression externally, and the lack of obvious red flags makes him seem "reasonable" to the careless viewer. In any case, these mentor figures all affect Stewart's moral compass during the film, effectively teaching his rigidity to bend, although certainly through different means in each case. Interestingly, in each case, Stewart is decidedly in conflict with the mentor throughout much of the film. Nevertheless, it is only out of this conflict that any true change in his character arises.

Highlighting this contrast, it is the illusion of emotional accessibility, and thought, that seems to separate Stewart from his diametric opposite, Wayne. Stewart doesn’t walk around with his dick swinging out for the world to see. He mumbles and stutters, he rarely carries a gun, and he thinks before he acts. He seems to be the “safe option,” the kind of man you would invite home to meet your mother. Yet it is exactly this over-thinking of every situation, from Destry’s hesitation arguably leading to Frenchy’s death to Stoddard’s insistence that Valance can be dealt with peacefully—until the point where Doniphan must take matters into his own hands--that leads him into trouble in almost every circumstance. This supposed standoffishness seems rarely more than selfishness: that is, the motivation for such behavior is rarely more than saving his own sorry hide. In contrast, Wayne’s characters are arguably more genuinely coy, cf. not only Doniphan but also Chance in Rio Bravo, and certainly more chivalrous.

John Ford was undoubtedly aware of this character flaw, but it was only Hitchcock who had the nerve to expose this it and play it up: Stewart’s two most loathsome characters ever, Jeff in Rear Window and Scottie in Vertigo, hesitate, waste time, and generally screw the pooch as concerns their personal lives—truly miserable specimens of humanity to anyone and everyone who cares for them--because each has obsessively fixated on a mess that could easily have been avoided. Not accessible in the slightest, they are some of the most selfish and hopelessly introverted characters to have ever graced celluloid. Fine, you might argue, but where would the film be without the respective obsessions? The answer is simple: the film wouldn’t exist. Ergo, Stewart is a bastard, and we love him for it.

More than 30 years after his last notable film role, we still love watching Stewart movies, and not because Mr. Smith went to fucking Washington. Why do we love him so? Because he’s the Robert Downey, Jr. of his generation: sensitive, deep, troubled, and with the brilliant--if perhaps unconscious--gift of enticing others to take care of him, grievous flaws and all. Except Stewart totally wins, because he did it without crack.