RIP Chuck Norris

The martial artist-action hero has died. I wrote a couple of pieces about Chuck Norris, to recall the version of manliness he represented, justice & discipline, self-control in post-60s or post-70s America. For my friends at the Acton Institute, I overviewed his career in the context of the Reagan revolution.

That career started in even more astounding fashion, as Bruce Lee’s preferred antagonist in The Way of the Dragon(1972), which Lee also directed. The climax of the movie is a duel to the death under the steps of the Colosseum in Rome. This may sound preposterous, but Bruce Lee was a remarkable entertainer, not just a fighter, and he knew what he was doing. The two had become friends as martial artists in the late 1960s in Los Angeles, trying to establish themselves. The other influence on Norris was one of his karate students, Steve McQueen, the coolest actor of the era, who encouraged him to make movies.

Norris was a very unlikely candidate for the movies or for celebrity. He had an unhappy upbringing and signed up for the Air Force after high school in 1958. He was stationed in Korea and learned martial arts there. After his discharge, in the 1960s, he started fighting and eventually winning in karate competitions, becoming a champion. He became a self-made man and a teacher, not just of martial arts but of self-help through strength and self-reliance, discipline and a disposition to be decent.

So as Norris became an entertainer, it was natural that he would turn to patriotism, too, against the cynicism of the ’70s. His first success, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), is about the aftermath of Vietnam. Here he plays a veteran who tried and failed to save MIAs and who next tries to save his own men from assassination. That became the theme of his three Missing in Action movies (1984, 1985, 1988), when he became a mainstream actor.

For my friends at Law & Liberty, I wrote about his Lone Wolf McQuade, the problem of the Western, justice, versus the cowardice of overwhelmed liberal institutions, at home & abroad.

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.