Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Rewatching can be a form of moral whiplash: the older the movies, the clearer the genius and the rot appear in the same frame. Lethem’s line works because it refuses the comforting choice between canonizing John Ford or canceling him. Instead, it stages a grown-up encounter with the American archive, where artistry is rarely politically clean and pleasure often arrives braided to discomfort.

The phrasing is doing quiet rhetorical heavy lifting. “Looks like a giant” is a cinematic metaphor disguised as criticism: Ford enlarges over time not because culture told us to revere him, but because his images keep revealing new scale. Then Lethem punctures any drift toward hagiography: “His politics aren’t so good” lands with deliberate understatement, a shrug that signals familiarity with the battles over Ford’s mythmaking of nation, masculinity, and the frontier. The next clause sharpens the point. “You have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor” is a sly admission that Wayne is less a chameleon than a monument; appreciating him often means accepting his limited range as part of the aesthetic, and reckoning with what that “monument” represented on-screen and off.

The final turn is the key: “he’s a poet in black and white.” Lethem isn’t praising Ford for realism; he’s praising him for compression, rhythm, and visual argument. Ford’s monochrome isn’t just a technical era marker, it’s an ethic: hard contrasts, moral silhouettes, landscapes that speak louder than dialogue. The subtext is a readerly one: modern viewers can critique the ideology while still submitting to the spell, because the spell is craft.