The Ghost of Rambo

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

Jesse Walker | January 28, 2008

(Page 2 of 3)

First Blood ends with a confrontation between Rambo, the sympathetic monster, and Col. Trautman, his creator. As originally shot, it concluded with Stallone's character committing suicide, but test audiences hated to see their hero die. So the filmmakers changed the ending. The veteran was sent to prison instead, and a series of sequels became possible.

Like the monster emerging from the pit beneath the burning mill at the beginning of Bride of Frankenstein, 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part 2 starts with the title character being freed from a prison "hell-hole." Dangling the possibility of a pardon, Trautman asks if Rambo is willing to go on a covert reconnaissance mission to find MIAs in communist Vietnam. Rambo accepts with just one question: "Do we get to win this time?"

So begins the movie everyone remembers; or, rather, the movie everyone thinks they remember. If Stallone's speech about the mistreated vet serves as a screen memory that conceals the more radical implications of the first Rambo picture, then the hype and hysteria around the follow-up film has done something similar for First Blood Part 2. Yes, it's an ultraviolent story about a supersoldier refighting the Vietnam war. Yes, it implies that we could have won Vietnam the first time around if our hands hadn't been tied by liberals back home. Yes, Ronald Reagan co-opted it, joking at the end of one hostage crisis that "After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens." The word "Rambo" entered the language, in phrases like "Rambo foreign policy." Some veterans picketed the picture. One vet—Gustav Hasford, author of the book that became Full Metal Jacket—called it "Triumph of the Will for American Nazis."

All of which makes it easy to forget that this movie is as cynical about the government as any 1970s conspiracy thriller. Indeed, the POW/MIA rescue genre evolved directly from those post-Watergate pictures. The transition film was Ted Post's Good Guys Wear Black (1978), which begins by sending Chuck Norris on an ill-fated effort to free some prisoners of war; the rest of the picture is a poor man's Parallax View, with Norris and Anne Archer tracking down the conspiracy that sabotaged the mission. In First Blood Part 2, likewise, we learn that Rambo was never supposed to find any prisoners; he rescues them only by ditching the authorities' plan and setting off on his own. (I haven't read Morrell's novelization of the film, but it apparently includes a scene in which Rambo chuckles darkly as he informs the disbelieving POWs that Ronald Reagan has become president. He "couldn't bring himself to tell them that Vietnam was about to change its name to Nicaragua.") In the movie's climax, Rambo returns to the computerized command center and pumps pounds of ammo into its alienating array of machinery. It's a violent, cathartic revision of an old '60s slogan. I am a soldier. Do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate me.

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, Part 2 is about a cowboy who rides deep into the wilderness to save white captives from savage Indians. Complicating the racial dynamics, Rambo is now a identified as a halfbreed, part civilized and part wild: We learn that he's half Native American himself (his other half—paging Gustav Hasford!—is German), and he has a brief affair with a Vietnamese woman. But you can still trace the core plot to the Indian captivity narratives that first flourished in 17th-century New England, and which have manifested themselves in the American imagination countless times since then.

The movie may have had a more recent antecedent as well. In the late 1970s, a self-promoting soldier named Bo Gritz staged several unsuccessful efforts to rescue American POWs from Vietnam. It is often claimed that Gritz's exploits helped inspire First Blood Part 2. Whether or not that's true, the movie certainly had an impact on Gritz, who started to bill himself as the "real-life Rambo" after the film became a hit. If you take that literally, you can chart two illuminating courses from the movie.

First we have Hollywood Rambo. He appears in another picture, 1988's Rambo III, in which he fights alongside the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. It's another bringing-Vietnam-home film, but this time Stallone is bringing it home to the Soviets. (In this one Col. Trautman—the same man who warned Sheriff Teasle about those body bags—informs the Russians, "This war is your Vietnam, man. You can't win!") Hollywood Rambo also gets his own TV cartoon (Rambo and the Forces of Freedom) in which he works for a military peacekeeping unit and battles a global brotherhood called S.A.V.A.G.E. There are Rambo video games, Rambo action figures. This is the Rambo of the "Rambo foreign policy," the Rambo of popular memory; it is invoked by both the fans and the foes of Reagan's bombing raid over Libya and Oliver North's illicit efforts to aid the Nicaraguan contras.

And then there is Real-Life Rambo. In the late '80s Gritz continued to build on that suspicious post-Watergate mood, accusing the intelligence community of connections to the drug trade and speaking to audiences of both the radical left and the radical right. 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. For the authorities and most of the media, it was another version of the captivity narrative, with the ATF and FBI unsuccessfully attempting to rescue children from a sexually depraved death cult. In the alternative story, the police were the villains and the confrontation was a massacre, part My Lai and part Wounded Knee.

Which of those two Rambos prevailed? When the Cold War ended, Sylvester Stallone's movies lost their hold on the culture and decayed into '80s kitsch. But that distrust of the government didn't disappear; if anything, it intensified and crossed what used to be sharp ideological lines. (In the early '90s, it wasn't that unusual to hear left-wing radicals pondering the possibility of a POW coverup—or right-wing radicals touting the powers of hemp.) Since 2001, the balance has tipped back and forth. When the wounds of 9/11 were fresh, the outrage of the heartland populists turned outwards again; since then, the failures of the Iraqi occupation have driven many of them back to an anti-government stance.

And now we have a new Rambo movie, giving Stallone another chance to reflect some segment of that constantly shifting Zeitgeist. An early version of the script pitted his alter ego against a right-wing American paramilitary group—sort of a Rambo vs. Rambo scenario. But the finished product takes us back to Southeast Asia instead.

The fourth film in the Frankenstein series was called The Ghost of Frankenstein. The fourth film in the Rambo franchise is ghostly as well: After an absence of two decades, both the series and its protagonist feel a little undead. When we return to Stallone's character, he is a numb man hunting snakes for a living in Thailand. Vietnam is deep in his past, and the country's fresher wounds don't seem to have touched him—the word "Iraq" appears nowhere in the movie, and neither do "Al Qaeda," "Islam," "9/11," or "bin Laden." The writer/director/actor told Ain't It Cool News that he did this because "the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President's lap declaring 'The world is now safe, Chief' would be a bit insulting." I don't doubt Stallone's sincerity, though World War II-era GIs didn't seem to mind the fact that Superman, Captain America, and the rest were fighting alongside them in the comic books. Personally, I wouldn't have minded seeing some of the Afghan heroes of Rambo III return as villains in Rambo IV, but that might push the franchise into areas that Stallone would rather leave alone.

Instead the action takes place in Burma, where brutal government soldiers have seized a group of missionaries tending to Christian villagers. Rambo sets out to rescue them, arriving just in time to save a young woman—the closest we have to a female lead—from a rape.

In other words, Stallone has returned to the classic Indian captivity narrative. Here's how the historian Richard Slotkin described the archetypal captivity story in his 1973 book Regeneration Through Violence:

a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God....In the Indian's devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian's "cannibal" Eucharist. To partake of the Indian's love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.

That story has appeared in hundreds of guises in the last three centuries. There are movies that intelligently explore the racial and sexual anxieties that underlie the tale. The most famous is John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers, in which the captive woman does not want to leave the Indian community; her would-be rescuer, a complex antihero played by John Wayne, would rather kill her than watch her become an Indian. The new Rambo, by contrast, merely adopts those old anxieties as its own. 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. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Slotkin writes, when the original captivity narratives enjoyed their peak of popularity, "It almost seems as if the only experience of intimacy with the Indians that New England readers would accept was the experience of the captive (and possibly that of the missionary)." Rambo gives us both, and little more. It doesn't seem to have anything to say about the country's scars, in Vietnam or in the Middle East. Or rather, it doesn't until the final scene, when Stallone does something unexpected.

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.