The United States of Paranoia (33 page)

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THE GHOST OF RAMBO

On Wednesday we’ll sing patriotic songs and pretend I said none of the above.

—Good Guys Wear Black
1

I
n the 1980s, the United States rediscovered its faith in its leaders. Or at least that’s the standard gloss on the era, and there’s certainly some truth to it. If the iconic political footage of the seventies featured Richard Nixon resigning, the eighties brought the nation’s TV screens a Ronald Reagan ad declaring it morning in America.

But the same cynicism about the government that powered a great deal of the seventies Left also helped elect Reagan, and that attitude didn’t disappear when the candidate became president. Reagan refused to attack Nixon for Watergate, and he called the investigation that felled the thirty-seventh president a “lynching” and a “witch hunt.”
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But as the liberal pundit Thomas Frank would later grumble, the Nixon scandals also “poisoned public attitudes toward government and stirred up the wave that swept Ronald Reagan into office six years later—and made antigovernment cynicism the default American political sentiment.”
3
Reagan co-opted that cynicism, but he didn’t kill it. The skeptical seventies spirit didn’t disappear so much as it mutated into new forms and hid in plain sight.

One of the forms it took was the shirtless Sylvester Stallone firing a machine gun. When Stallone’s Rambo movies came to theaters, many critics hailed or damned them as a sign that the sixties were dead and a new patriotic moment had arrived. Far fewer recognized that they were watching a brawny, bloody descendant of
The Parallax View
.

There are three things people tend to forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was
First Blood
, a 1972 novel by a young literary scholar named David Morrell.
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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 the United States. 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 eventually engulfs an entire town, with countless people dying 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 respected enough to be assigned occasionally 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.”
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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 media stereotype: the deeply damaged Vietnam veteran who has trouble adjusting to the home front and finally 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.
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But in popular culture and the press, 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.”
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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 an act of self-defense. Teasle, in turn, grows 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 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.”
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But there was more to the movie than that. That’s the second thing people forget about the Rambo films: The first one is explicitly antiwar and surprisingly radical. Director Ted Kotcheff’s earlier credits include
North Dallas Forty
, a jaundiced take on professional football, and
Fun with Dick and Jane
, a crime comedy that mocks middle-class materialism and the corporate world.
First Blood
continues in that antiestablishment vein.

The film opens with Rambo learning that one of his war buddies has died of exposure to Agent Orange. He wanders into a small town, and almost immediately the sheriff starts to harass the soldier: “Wearing that flag on that jacket, and looking the way you do, you’re asking for trouble around here,” Teasle tells him. The reference to the flag may seem to signify intolerance toward veterans, but the second clause adds the implication that Teasle doesn’t like Rambo because of his appearance—that is, because he looks like a hippie drifter. When the sheriff’s men finally find out that Rambo is a Green Beret who served in Indochina, one of them exclaims, “Jesus! That freak?”
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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 recalled, “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.”
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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 Colonel Sam Trautman, the Special Forces officer who trained Rambo. Trautman describes his student’s immense skills as a fighter, and he suggests that the police should defuse the situation by letting Rambo escape, waiting a few days, then putting out a nationwide all-points bulletin and picking him up later. Teasle refuses.

TRAUTMAN:
You want a war you can’t win?

TEASLE:
Are you telling me that two hundred 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 guerrilla 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 discomforting, because it puts Rambo in the role of the Vietcong. Morrell was wrong: The movie
does
transpose the Vietnam War to the United States. It just does it in a radically different way from the novel, and with radically different implications. It asks the audience to cheer for a guerrilla hero.

That was surprisingly common in the superficially right-wing cult movies of the eighties. Consider John Milius’s
Red Dawn
(1984), in which a small group of Colorado high school jocks battle a Soviet occupation. The film outraged liberal critics, but farther to the left it had some supporters. In a witty and perceptive piece for
The Nation
, the socialist writer 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.”
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The sole sympathetic character among the occupying forces is a Cuban colonel with a background in guerrilla 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.”
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Increasingly sympathetic to the Coloradan rebels, at a key moment the Cuban allows two of them to escape.

First Blood
drew from several other genres as well: the redneck movie, the revenge movie, the war film, the western. One sequence, in which 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 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.”
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(Stallone’s role in creating the Hollywood Rambo should not be underestimated. He cowrote all four films and directed at least one, perhaps two of them—George P. Cosmatos, credited as the director of
First Blood Part II
, was reportedly a
figurehead
.)
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First Blood
ends with a confrontation between Rambo, the sympathetic monster, and Colonel Trautman, his creator. As originally shot, it concluded with Stallone’s character committing suicide, but the test audiences hated to see their hero die. So the filmmakers changed the ending. The veteran was sent to prison instead, preparing the way for a series of sequels.

Like the monster emerging from the pit beneath the burning mill at the beginning of
Bride of Frankenstein
, 1985’s
Rambo: First Blood Part II
starts with the title character being freed from a prison that Trautman calls a “hellhole.” 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?”
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So begins the movie everyone remembers; or, rather, the movie everyone thinks he remembers. If Stallone’s speech about the mistreated vet serves as a screen memory that conceals the more radical implications of the first Rambo picture, the hype and hysteria around the follow-up film have done something similar for
First Blood Part II
. 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 a hostage crisis, “After seeing
Rambo
last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”
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The word
Rambo
entered the language, in phrases such as
Rambo foreign policy
. Some veterans picketed the picture. One vet—Gustav Hasford, the author of the book that became the movie
Full Metal Jacket
—called it “
Triumph of the Will
for American Nazis.”
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All of which makes it easy to forget that the film is as cynical about the government as any 1970s conspiracy thriller. Indeed, the POW/MIA rescue genre, of which
Rambo
was merely the most popular example, evolved directly from those post-Watergate pictures.

The transition film was Ted Post’s
Good Guys Wear Black
(1978), a conspiracy movie that contained the seeds of the POW/MIA cycle to come. The story begins with an ill-fated effort to free some prisoners of war. The rest of the picture is a poor man’s
Parallax View
, with Chuck Norris and Anne Archer tracking down the plotters who sabotaged the mission. It’s no salve for Vietnam hawks: Early in the film, while teaching a class, Norris’s character calls Vietnam “a war that never should have begun, in a country we never should have entered,” adding that “the reasons for the war were beyond any rules of logic.” (At that point a bell rings, signaling the end of the class. Norris cracks a joke: “On Wednesday we’ll sing patriotic songs and pretend I said none of the above.”) But there are elements of another old narrative here, along with that familiar seventies story of the Enemy Above. As part of the Paris peace agreement, we learn, the North Vietnamese negotiator secretly demanded “a sacrifice” in which U.S. soldiers are killed. The line recalls the story colonial soldiers whispered about Governor Edmund Andros, that he had “brought them theither to be a sacrifice to their heathen Adversaries.” Ghosts of the Indian wars haunt the picture, and sometimes the symbolism is overt. Stateside, our heroes are trailed by a pair of Vietnamese assassins, one a man, one a woman; when the woman shoots a former CIA agent, she does it at the Squaw Valley ski resort.

In other words, the movie has merged the Enemy Above and the Enemy Outside.
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When he finally confronts the chief conspirator, a few hours before the villain is scheduled to be sworn in as secretary of state, Norris mentions one of the Vietnamese assassins: “At first I assumed he worked for
them
, whoever
they
were—but of course,
they
are
you
, and
you
are all
one
.”