The Ghost of Rambo

The vigilante soldier is back in theaters, dragging decades of cultural baggage with him.

Jesse Walker | January 28, 2008

(Editor's Note: The following article about the Rambo series contains spoilers.)

Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America's movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone's bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you're rolling your eyes, you're not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film's reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as "torture porn," "jingoistic imperialism," and "the Schindler's List of B-list butchery."

For the most part I'll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can't dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.

There are three things people forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was a novel called First Blood, written by a young John Barth scholar named David Morrell and published in 1972. It's about a Green Beret called Rambo—the name was inspired partly by Rambo apples and partly by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud—who has come home from Vietnam and is tramping across America. It's also about a sheriff named Will Teasle, who doesn't want the long-haired, unshaven kid bringing trouble to his corner of Kentucky. Their conflict builds until it engulfs the entire town, with countless meaningless deaths. The book is told alternately from both characters' point of view, switching back and forth until their identities essentially merge. In the end they both die.

It isn't immortal literature, but it's an intelligent thriller. It was even occasionally assigned as classroom reading, though "by the mid-eighties," Morrell later wrote, "the controversy generated by the films had caused teachers to shy away from the book." Morrell's Rambo is more loquacious than Stallone's. He is also more of a cold-blooded killer, picking off policemen who pose no real threat and enjoying the thrill of battle. He's one of the first manifestations of what would become a pop-culture archetype: the deeply damaged Vietnam veteran who can't adjust to the home front and snaps. In real life, Americans who survived that war have been more likely to be married, college-educated, and gainfully employed than other members of their generation. But in the media, they were often portrayed as time bombs waiting to explode.

You can't blame Morrell for that. His Rambo is a well-rounded character with his own motives for what he does, not a cookie-cutter copy of a movie cliché. Morrell meant his story as a metaphor for the culture war breaking out at home while another war raged in Southeast Asia. "The final confrontation between Rambo and Teasle," he wrote, "would show that in this microcosmic version of the Vietnam War and American attitudes about it, escalating force results in disaster. Nobody wins."

When First Blood became a movie in 1982, both the story and the metaphor changed. Rambo became more sympathetic: He kills only once in the film, a slaying that is both accidental and in self-defense. Teasle, in turn, grew less appealing: Brian Dennehy's textured performance keeps him from being entirely one-dimensional, but he's still a redneck sheriff pointlessly persecuting a war hero. His officers mistreat the man in jail, and the film compares their abuses directly to the torture the soldier received as a prisoner of war. It's clear that Rambo is a little crazy—by the end of the movie, he's more than a little crazy—but it's also clear that the viewers are supposed to root for him. "My intent was to transpose the Vietnam war to America," Morrell complained. "In contrast, the film's intent was to make the audience cheer for the underdog."

But there was more to the movie than that. That's the second thing people forget about the Rambo series: The first installment is explicitly anti-war and surprisingly radical.

The film opens with Rambo learning that one of his war buddies has died of exposure to Agent Orange. Right after that, when the sheriff starts to harass the soldier, Teasle tells him that "wearing that flag on that jacket, and looking the way you do, you're asking for trouble around here." The reference to the flag seems to signify an intolerance toward veterans, but the second clause implies that Teasle doesn't like Rambo because of his appearance—i.e., because he looks like a hippie drifter. When the sheriff's men finally find out that Rambo is a Green Beret who served in Vietnam, one of them exclaims, "Jesus! That freak?"

This identification of Rambo with the counterculture is a residue of Morrell's novel, which was partly inspired by a news report. "In a southwestern American town," Morrell writes, "a group of hitchhiking hippies had been picked up by the local police, stripped, hosed, and shaved—not just their beards but their hair. The hippies had then been given back their clothes and driven to a desert road, where they were abandoned to walk to the next town, thirty miles away....I wondered what Rambo's reaction would be if, after risking his life in the service of his country, he were subjected to the insults that those hippies had received."

The most jarring thing about the movie's politics comes later. Everyone remembers Rambo's much-quoted soliloquy at the end of the film, the one where he complains about "maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby-killer." What isn't quoted as often is a conversation between Teasle and Col. Trautman, the Special Forces officer who trained Rambo. Trautman, played by Richard Crenna, describes his student's immense skills as a fighter, and he suggests the police should defuse the situation by letting Rambo escape, waiting a few days, then putting out a nationwide APB and picking him up later. Teasle refuses.

Trautman: You want a war you can't win?
Teasle: Are you telling me that 200 men against your boy is a no-win situation for us?
Trautman: You send that many, don't forget one thing.
Teasle: What?
Trautman: Plenty of body bags.

A small but committed guerilla force humiliating a larger power that doesn't comprehend the fight it's in—the comparison to Vietnam is obvious. It's also a little discomfiting, because it puts Rambo in the role of the Viet Cong. Morrell was wrong: The movie did transpose the Vietnam war to America. It just did it in a radically different way than the book did, and with radically different implications. It asks the audience to cheer for a guerilla hero.

This was surprisingly common in the allegedly right-wing cult movies of the '80s. Consider John Milius' Red Dawn (1984), in which a small group of Colorado high school jocks battle a Soviet occupation. The film outraged liberal critics, but further to the left it had some supporters. In a witty and perceptive piece for The Nation, Andrew Kopkind called it "the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers," adding that he'd "take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary situation I can imagine." The one sympathetic character among the occupying forces is a Cuban colonel with a background in guerilla warfare. At one point he tells a Russian officer, voice dripping with disgust, that he used to be an insurgent but now is "just like you—a policeman." Increasingly sympathetic to the Coloradoan rebels, at a key moment the Cuban allows two of them to escape.

First Blood drew from the same water, and from several other genres as well: the redneck movie, the revenge movie, the war film, the western. One sequence, when the sheriff's men track the fugitive soldier through the woods only to discover that he's hunting them rather than the other way around, feels like a slasher flick, with Rambo in the Jason/Freddy/Michael Myers role. The difference—and it's a substantial one—is that unlike the villains of Friday the 13th and Halloween, Rambo has the audience's sympathy. In that, he's more like the monster in Universal's old Frankenstein series. Frankenstein was, in fact, one of the inspirations for the script: According to the feminist writer Susan Faludi, who interviewed several people involved in the Rambo sequence for her 1999 book Stiffed, Stallone "envisioned the drama 'like the Frankenstein monster and the creator,' a creator who 'understood what he made' and 'felt guilty' for it." (Stallone's role in creating the Hollywood Rambo cannot be underestimated. He co-wrote all four films and directed at least one, perhaps two of them—George P. Cosmatos, credited as director of First Blood Part 2, was reportedly a figurehead.)

Comments

Johncjackson3rd- VP Cosmotaria|1.28.08 @ 1:20PM|#

I'm sure the movie sucks, but it is pretty cool that Stallone uses HGH and thinks it's no big deal and a positive thing.

Episiarch|1.28.08 @ 1:23PM|#

Nice summary of the series, Jesse. It would be good to see more film examinations like this.

Fluffy|1.28.08 @ 1:28PM|#

The Rocky series is pretty similar, in that it starts out as a heartfelt story of a sub-working-class loser who proves himself not by winning, but by enduring, and eventually turns into Rocky IV.

The funny thing is that you can't paint these franchises as good stories ruined and turned into kitsch as Stallone got more control over them - because he had a lot of control over them from the outset. Rocky is an Oscar-winning, layered, textured character study and probably the greatest sports movie ever made, and Stallone is completely responsible for that. But he's completely responsible for Rocky IV also. How does that happen?

BakedPenguin|1.28.08 @ 1:28PM|#

Like the previous picture in the series, First Blood Part 2 owed a lot to the western. But where the first film resembles those existential stories where a stranger enters a corrupt frontier town...

High Plains Rambo?

The lady prisoner is almost comically pure, kind, white, and blonde, while every Asian character except one-a thoroughly westernized mercenary who was obviously raised in the United States-is either a victim or a savage.

This explains a lot of TV news, as well.

Lava|1.28.08 @ 1:35PM|#

Excellent Article

Episiarch|1.28.08 @ 1:36PM|#

But he's completely responsible for Rocky IV also. How does that happen?

It happens when a guy who is excellent at individual stories about underdogs and personal triumph tries to write something where two individuals are supposed to represent whole countries/political systems.

Stallone is way, way more talented and intelligent than people give him credit for, but he's also partly a musclehead. It's a weird mix and it doesn't surprise me that you get some weird mixes of work from the guy.

Abdul|1.28.08 @ 1:36PM|#

What possessed God in heaven to make a film like Rambo?

jackanapestarian|1.28.08 @ 1:47PM|#

That these movies get made--and watched--is an indictment of our culture.
Stallone is just giving us what we want.

|1.28.08 @ 1:50PM|#

Rambo. I never really got into the Rambo movies. Oddly enough, whenever I hear "Rambo", I think of Aliens. A guy I knew in college was watching Aliens with a bunch of us and issued the immortal epithet, "Rambitch", when he saw Sigourney Weaver carrying some heavy ordinance. I think a Rambitch movie would be popular.

|1.28.08 @ 1:54PM|#

I think a Rambitch movie would be popular.

T2 isn't good enough for you?

PC|1.28.08 @ 1:54PM|#

"But he's completely responsible for Rocky IV also. How does that happen?"

I believe the lead up to the first Clubber Lang fight in Rocky III may have serve as a good metaphor to answer your question.

The first Clubber Lang fight might be a metaphor for Rocky V, either that or the Apollo/Rocky hug on the beach.

There is also a Rocky IV/Rambo III parallel that may play a part. If you think about it both movies show how the Cold War was fought and reasons why it ended, easing relations and indirect fighting to bleed them.

Taktix®|1.28.08 @ 1:58PM|#

Rocky is an Oscar-winning, layered, textured character study and probably the greatest sports movie ever made, and Stallone is completely responsible for that. But he's completely responsible for Rocky IV also. How does that happen?

See: blowing one's creative load.

|1.28.08 @ 1:59PM|#

How does that happen?

Maybe HGH isn't as harmless as we think?

|1.28.08 @ 2:00PM|#

Stallone's greatest work was in Bananas.

|1.28.08 @ 2:07PM|#

That these movies get made--and watched--is an indictment of our culture.
Stallone is just giving us what we want.

You can tell how messed our culture is by the poor sales of Hollywood movies internationally. It's OUR culture. The rest of the planet has no use for American made movies. It's French cinema and Bollywood for the cultured people of the world.

Or maybe the average moviegoer just likes crap. Everywhere.

|1.28.08 @ 2:14PM|#

God, you read to much into this C series.
All the films are ridiculous.

|1.28.08 @ 2:16PM|#

"Stallone's greatest work was in Bananas."

Au contraire, Pro Libertate. You should check his sensitive, nuanced performance in "Party At Kitty and Stud's".

BakedPenguin|1.28.08 @ 2:18PM|#

J sub D - actually, most "Hollywood" (e.g., big budget effects fests) movies do pretty well across the globe.

Bollywood is utter crap, with few exceptions (Lagaan was supposed to be good). If you don't like musicals, especially cheap, cheesy ones, you'll hate Bollywood.

I don't see it as a strictly either/or position. I can watch Seijun Suzuki, Jon Jost, or Yasujiro Ozu, but I sure like seeing John Carpenter flicks, too. And I thought the first Rambo was a pretty good film, for what it was.

|1.28.08 @ 2:21PM|#

Nah, Woody Allen brought out the best in Stallone.

BP,

What, pray tell, are you implying about John Carpenter?

BakedPenguin|1.28.08 @ 2:24PM|#

Oops. I meant to add to that Bollywood comment above. Nearly all of the worthwhile films coming from South Asians are created by the diaspora, since India has very strict censorship. Satyajit Ray was able to make some good films, but few others had his talent.

Deepa Mehta is an excellent director, and her subject matter caused at least one of her films (Water) to be banned in India.

BakedPenguin|1.28.08 @ 2:25PM|#

PL - Hey, I love his films. And when I watch them, I never have to think, ever.

kinnath|1.28.08 @ 2:26PM|#

Copland
Demolition Man (guilty pleasure)
Oscar

Episiarch|1.28.08 @ 2:28PM|#

And when I watch them, I never have to think, ever.

So you didn't think about paranoia when watching The Thing?

|1.28.08 @ 2:29PM|#

The great thing about the Rambo movies clearly is that Stallone was able to reuse the same basic costume from "Stayin' Alive." All the fashion-conscious violent meatheads wear headbands, after all...

Good work, Jessie. How about a write-up of the foreign policy implications of the "Porky's" series?

|1.28.08 @ 2:32PM|#

"Rocky Balboa," the 6th in the series, wasn't all that bad. In fact, it really is the other slice of yummy bread in what is basically a giant shit sandwich.
Give me "Rocky" and give me "Balboa," and let me make up the rest of the story in my mind.

|1.28.08 @ 2:33PM|#

You were not put upon this earth to get it, Mr. Penguin!

|1.28.08 @ 2:35PM|#

How about a write-up of the foreign policy implications of the "Porky's" series?

I think Porky can be seen as any number of dictators. The problem is that fucking with Porky led to all sorts of trouble in the next county.
Foreign policy implication = let Porky run his whorehouse, try to get pussy in your own place.
Recipe for noninterventionist foreign policy?

BakedPenguin|1.28.08 @ 2:37PM|#

Episiarch - I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the blood to jump. Not really thinking about it.

PL - Obviously not. Perhaps you could do a Jesse style breakdown of the meaning of Escape From New York.

BTW, serious Carpenter fans should know that Netflix has Dark Star, the first movie he directed. It was written by the guy who wrote the original Alien scenario.

|1.28.08 @ 2:42PM|#

BP,

I haven't the time for a nuanced analysis; however, I will say this in parting: Isaac Hayes is a Scientologist.

|1.28.08 @ 2:43PM|#

The first Rambo movie was decent. And I will always have love and respect for Demolition Man, one of the best cheesy mainstream movies ever to come out of the cesspool we call Hollywood. And I was all set to give the new Rambo a shot -- because the trailers made it look like a glorious throwback triumph akin to the final Rocky installment, because of the abovementioned love and respect for Demolition Man, and because of the presence of the lovely and talented Julie Benz. I don't give a crap if Stallone takes prohibited drugs. I do, however, give a crap when someone who makes their living pretending to shoot people comes out as a pants shitting hysterical anti-gunner.

Fuck Stallone.

|1.28.08 @ 2:49PM|#

Wow, Vlad, had no idea about Stallone's personal crusade against the Second Amendment.
Thanks for the link.
And yeah, fuck him.

Franklin Harris|1.28.08 @ 2:57PM|#

The only Stallone movie you need to see.

Neu Mejican|1.28.08 @ 3:08PM|#

Stallone's greatest work was in Bananas.

Naw...

Death Race 2000...

Just cuz' in inspired Alien Sex Fiend

i wanna see u buried
i wanna drive the hearse,
in reverse, over you!!!

http://www.asf-13thmoon.demon.co.uk/

Neu Mejican|1.28.08 @ 3:13PM|#

Of course,

The song could have been inspired by the video game...

http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7541

Neu Mejican|1.28.08 @ 3:15PM|#

But I think the video game was inspired by the movie...

|1.28.08 @ 4:56PM|#

Vlad Drac posts "The first Rambo movie was decent."
Stallone fires off a million bullets and no one is killed. That is decent.
Your a jerk Vlad.

|1.28.08 @ 5:30PM|#

Your a jerk Vlad.

Oh, dear. Guess I'll go slit my wrists and sob at your witty, cutting remark. Then you can quit pretending to be an Internet tough guy and go back to eating your mom's ass.

|1.28.08 @ 6:01PM|#

Death Race 2000
Rocky
Copland
Stop or My Mom Will Shoot

All great movies.

|1.28.08 @ 6:06PM|#

"You can tell how messed our culture is by the poor sales of Hollywood movies internationally. It's OUR culture. "

except the facts conflict with your theory. as another pointed out, hollywood movies do quite well worldwide. generally speaking, they copy us, not the other way around.

one exception to that rule is many of the pretty good horror films coming out of asia, that we have copied - the ring, the eye, the grudge, etc.

also some pretty good asian action flicks - infernal affairs is the (superior) movie that the departed is based on.

"The rest of the planet has no use for American made movies. "

do you just make this stuff up? feel free to go to any # of sites and check international box office receipts. our movies do very well overseas.
"It's French cinema and Bollywood for the cultured people of the world. "

more elitism. it's hollywood "movies" but french "cinema". and of course, the "cultured" people wouldn't watch american movies. btw: france ... jerry lewis.

|1.28.08 @ 6:59PM|#

Wow. Lots of sarcasm detectors on the fritz today. Must be the sunspots.

|1.28.08 @ 7:09PM|#

The first Rambo is the best movie of all time. I would like to thank Mr. Walker for his thoughtful and intelligent article on the Rambo franchise.

|1.28.08 @ 10:09PM|#

Crap. I wish I'd remembered this sooner. Bob Rivers did a song parody called "Rambo On" (to the tune of Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On"). You can find the tune here. Here's the lyrics:

Bodies dropping all around,
Blood is flyin' your way.
Rambo III has hit the screen,
Oh, what a happy day.

I'm coming to get you!

We gonna' Rambo on.
They did one or two,
Just for you.
They're gonna' drag it on,
After Rambo X,
They'll do it again.
We gonna' Rambo on.
He can't be beat,
But his brain is dead meat.
Like a one ounce steak,
It sure looks clear that
Rambo's gonna' stay.

Another round of shells and mortar,
A few more Commies blown away.
Another wordless script,
Of yelps and yutz.
What the hell did he say?
We gonna' Rambo on.
He's gonna' nuke those pukes
With big bazooks
And leave the camera on.
He's gonna' shoot shoot shoot.
We gonna' Rambo on.
And make it last
With a napalm blast.
Shoot shoot shoot shoot.
I guess I can Rambo on.
Rambo Rambo Rambo Rambo.

John Rohan|1.29.08 @ 6:19AM|#

Interesting write up, although I think you overanalyze the Rambo I & II a bit, and for some reason you give short shrift to Rambo III? Why is that?

It should also be pointed out that Rambo III cost over $42 million to make, and at that time, was the most expensive movie ever made. The Soviet Union also put out a press release complaining about the film, and then shortly afterward announced they were withdrawing from Afghanistan (which at the time I couldn't help wondering if it was more than coincidental).

Basically, these are just action films, with a sympathetic but rebellious hero. That's all. I don't think we need to take their messages too seriously.

|1.29.08 @ 12:27PM|#

Americans like underdogs, and like being them. The problem is militarily speaking that's almost an impossibilty anymore. When you have a navy larger than the rest of the world's navies combined, and the most advanced and well trained armies on the planet it's, hard to find situations where Americans are underdogs. This is especially so post-Cold War. So we invent contrived ways to appear as underdogs.

I think Rambo, along with many other films like it, just fufills this need of Americans to be the little guy fighting incredible odds when the reality is quite different.

|1.29.08 @ 1:52PM|#

I'm waiting for the Rambo movie which shows him fighting for our liberties and freedom right here in the US by stalking and killing renegade SWAT team members.

|1.29.08 @ 4:41PM|#

I have a nit to pick with the article. Referring to Bo Gritz' presidential aspirations, we have this:

"In 1992 he ran for president, drawing support from what would soon be known as the militia movement. His core constituency was a bunch of angry patriots, many of them veterans, who said they loved their country but feared their government. Their rallying cry was the confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal police at Waco, a conflict that was retold in two very different ways."

The siege of the Branch Davidians took place in 1993.

RAMBO FOR PRESIDENT!|1.29.08 @ 9:14PM|#

I DARE YOU TO SAY THAT TO RAMBO'S FACE MOTHERFUCKER!

Sun Stealer|1.30.08 @ 12:01AM|#

Where to begin?
1) Historically, no insurgency has ever succeeded against a standing army without support from a patron state. The Soviets supplied North Vietnam and we supplied the Afghanis.

2) Seriously, pulling the race card. Not that I doubt your telepathic abilities to detect hidden, racist thoughts from screenwriters, but I'm going to call bulls**t.

3) That you would write this bizarre, political treatise on the secret meaning of Rambo films has convinced me that you seriously need to undergo a psychological evaluation. Have the planets aligned or something, all my fellow libertarians have gone out of their mind this year.

Jesse Walker|1.30.08 @ 12:51AM|#

Alan: I didn't mean that Waco was an issue in 1992, just that the constituency that Gritz tried to speak for in '92 was the same one that would make Waco a rallying cry. I probably could have expressed that more clearly.

John Rohan: I didn't delve into Rambo 3 for a number of reasons, but the main one was space. It's an awfully long article already, and while there's a number of interesting things to be said about the movie they would have amounted to a long aside.

Sun Stealer: Whether or not your first point is true, it doesn't contradict anything I said in the article. Nor did I claim any "telepathic abilities to detect hidden, racist thoughts." The racial subtexts I pointed to were hardly hidden, and they don't necessarily reflect racist intent on the part of the screenwriters; they're embedded in the captivity-narrative formula, and they're likely to show up unless (like the people behind The Searchers) the filmmakers make a conscious decision to undermine them.