Rambo: First Blood, Part II. Written by James Cameron and Sylvester Stallone. Directed by George P. Cosmatos. Tri-Star Films.
Reviewed by Richard Alleva          Â
“RAMBO, AMERICA’S HERO, WANTS YOU”
—Advertisement for the movie
“What you call hell, he calls home.”
—Dialogue from Rambo; also used as an advertising slogan.
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never melted.”
—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.
You won’t catch me turning down AMERICA’S HERO. I go with the winners. But I made a bad mistake in attending a weekday matinee at a downtown Washington, D.C. theater. There were only five others in the house (a man and his tiny son, two teenagers, and a Vietnamese gentlemen, the last taking notes on the movie), and six people could not possibly work up the uproarious response this film is supposed to be receiving from crowds all over the country. In fact, we watched in silence: no shrieks of ecstasy when Rambo shot people with his exploding arrows, no cheers when Rambo called upon America to love the Vietnam vets as much as they love her, no hisses for the sadistic Russian torturer who grilled our hero on the latest of electronic racks. A pretty tepid workout for the viscera. On the other hand, the movie now existed on its own merits. Sitting in near-isolation in a choice seat, I saw every shot clearly and heard every word that made it past Stallone’s adenoids. And I have some surprises to report.
The loathing this film has aroused in liberals is probably caused more by the advertising than by the movie itself. In fact, I think that the advertising keeps certain people away, because it seems to exult in the sort of brimstone joy in total, merciless warfare that Frances Ford Coppola presented with baleful fascination in Apocalypse Now. But there, the cruel figure of Kurtz was supposed to evoke our mingled awe and loathing. The advertising of Rambo seems, at least at this terrorist-beleagured stage of our history, to tell America to throw proportionality to the winds and go for the gusto.
But grudge movies have to be made with a certain mordancy to be effective. The violence inflicted on the sympathetic characters must be corrosive and cry out for redress. The tigercage scenes in The Deer Hunter had precisely this sort of vindictive, audience-grabbing power. But Rambo, with its Fu Manchu villainy, James Bond gadgetry, and rock-video editing, turns out to be a breeze: lightweight summertime entertainment. I found myself walking out of the theater trying to remember who did what to whom. That Vietnamese marksman whom Rambo sights so patiently with his bow and arrow—was he the same soldier who killed the lovely female agent? The American POW who gets shot in the back as he clambers onto the helicopter—wasn’t he the same guy Rambo tried to carry to safety earlier in the film? Or was that the obviously unwounded soldier who waves goodbye to Rambo at the end? And how did Rambo dispose of his Russian torturer? With his bare hands, or did he shoot or stab him?
These aren’t crucial questions that rob me of sleep and make of my life one long penance, but the trouble with Rambo is that the bodies keep falling as perfunctorily as the electronic planes in a videogame and with as little effect on the viewer. This is true of Gunga Din, too, and the Indiana Jones movies, but those films are fairy tales and impactful violence would be as out of place in them as in a Punch-and-Judy show. I love Gunga Din, but Kipling probably would have misunderstood and hated it because he knew Anglo-Indian soldiers, had eaten at their mess tables and listened to their grousing. India was a real place to Kipling and the image of a dying British soldier or Sepoy meant something more to him than thrills and spills. (Hence, Kipling’s self-defensive stoicism, which some mistake for heartlessness.)
Likewise, Vietnam is a real place to me. Though I never set foot there, I have friends who did and who still live a portion of their mental lives on that terrain. So, when I see a violent movie about Vietnam I’d like the violence to shake me, to give me cause to bow my head once more in sorrow. Michelangelo Antonioni once expressed dissatisfaction with another filmmaker because, he said, “I need to be punched by a film, and his films give me no punch.” Of course, punches can produce momentary unconsciousness, but you tend to remember them. As far as movies about Vietnam go, I need this punch. Perhaps that’s too much to ask for mere melodrama, and perhaps no melodrama can be made about the Vietnam experience that won’t seem offensive or inept. Whatever their (many) flaws, The Deer Hunter and Go Tell the Spartans (the latter being the one truly good movie about American soldiers in Vietnam) have bite, a feel for landscape and people, and a sense of horror. Rambo is just good, clean all-American violence. No lingering deaths. No glimpses of mutilation. No medicinal aftertaste. This is violence for the Lite generation, and the Lite generation isn’t going to follow John Rambo into battle. Not that our hero wants any company. And that brings me to the second surprise Rambo had in store for me.
The movie begins in a prison where John Rambo has been sent for slicing and dicing policeman who liked hassling Vietnam vets. Our hero is slamming away at a rock pile dreamed up by Dante Alighieri when he’s called away for an interview with his old company commander (Richard Crenna). It seems John has been selected by a computer (what a data base!) as one of the three men best qualified for the job of discovering if there are any MIA’s left in Nam. (The other two selected were Chuck Norris and Robert de Niro but they were away for the weekend.) Rambo hesitates. You can’t really want to stay in this hell hole? Crenna expostulates. “At least in there I know where I stand.” But a moment later he accepts. “Do we get to win this time?”
Ah ha! I thought, no wonder President Reagan loves this movie. Here is the ideal fighting man backed up—at last—by an administration willing to turn him loose to win. “Do we get to win this time?” What a line. How well it sums up the movie I’m about to see.
But list, oh reader, list! By the end of the movie I realized that if any line summed it up, it was the one about prison as a place where Rambo knew where he stood. For it turns out that the mission has been set up by a pencil-necked bureaucrat, Murdoch, to demonstrate that there are no POW’s left—so the U.S. won’t have to pay war reparations in order to ransom its men. Abandoned by his helicopter back-up when he accidentally discovers a POW camp, Rambo (who’s half American Indian and half German) goes native. To martial music, he performs a ceremony in which he winds an Indian band around his head, sinks his hands into the rain-soaked earth (communion with Mother Earth), and reaches for—a bow and arrow. Never mind that the arrow has an exploding head. Rambo treats all his weapons, including guns, intimately, infusing them with totemic power.
All through the movie, machine power is contrasted with the primitive power of the body, epitomized by the naked warrior in the field. While high-powered machinery is cranked up for the mission’s launch by a million technicians, Rambo just sharpens his trusty knife. At one point, when Crenna vainly orders a pilot to circle back to retrieve Rambo, the churl grumbles that fuel is being wasted. And, after the abandonment, Murdoch shrugs that Rambo has simply been dumped where he belongs. No wonder that when Rambo returns for vengeance, he shoots up the computer room instead of Murdoch.
When I was eight, I saw a movie called Apache three times in one day. In it, Burt Lancaster played an Indian who outfoxes every cavalry man and U.S. marshall who ever lived by simply knowing the land and relying on his own lone prowess. Likewise, John Rambo. Hailed or condemned as the ruthless, chauvinistic warrior of tomorrow, he is actually the mythic warrior of yesterday, whose cunning and rootedness in nature can wreck the organization of governmental bullies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. I wonder if even the makers of this movie knew what a subversive little piece of schlock they were making.
Rambo is the top grossing movie of the summer. What are so many paying to see? The naked warrior in the wilderness. The man who takes no orders and brooks no discipline that he doesn’t impose on himself. The man who has no family and no prospects for achieving one. The man who walks off alone towards the horizon at the film’s conclusion
Yes, I know there is supposed to be new support for the military abroad in the land. Yes, I know enrollment in ROTC is up. Yes, I know recent Memorial Days have been the occasion for new sympathy for the Viet vet.
But when Americans just want to have fun, they know what sort of hero to turn to. And that hero is as familiar as Clint Eastwood’s laconic loners and as old as James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, about whom D. H. Lawrence wrote:
True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventures of the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.