Mediacy Articles - Volume 17, No. 1
Rambo: Muscles rippling, sweat band rippling in the breeze, he stands triumphant, towering over a landscape littered with the corpses of his nefarious enemies. Once the principal avatar of mindless film violence, at least in the minds of those who argue about it, Rambo recently seems to have faded away with the rest of the old soldiers: we hardly hear about him any more.
Therefore, now that the blood has cooled a little, so to speak, it might be useful to revisit the character, at least as he appeared in his first film. First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff and released in 1982 was, of course followed by its infamous sequels, Rambo: First Blood, Part II in 1985 and Rambo III, in 1988. Rambo’s rep as the epitome of macho male aggression, stems primarily from his exaggerated exploits and high body counts in the sequels, but in fact, the character as originally drawn, is the farthest thing from the mindless mayhem machine we think we remember. Who cares, you say? Given the character’s massive (if ephemeral) cultural impact, the distinction is moot, you say? Well, given recent events in this country, Rambo, in his original incarnation, suddenly has something important to say again; something that will be surprising to many. Let us briefly go back to First Blood then, and re-evaluate the character.
When we first see John Rambo, he’s not in very good shape. A highly decorated Viet Nam veteran, he suffers from the disabling, post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by many other Viet Nam veterans. He is an unemployed hitch-hiker, unable, as we later learn, to hold a job even as a parking lot attendant. He doesn’t even know whether he’s presently travelling north or south. All he has left is the hope of finding his only remaining friend in the world, the only other member of his army unit besides himself to survive the war. That hope is cruelly dashed however, when he discovers that his friend has died of cancer as a result of exposure to Agent Orange during the war. “Killed in Viet Nam and didn’t even know it,” is rambo’s bitter comment.
Now Rambo has the very bad luck of passing under a road sign reading “Welcome to Holiday Land”. He has entered a civil twilight zone called the town of Hope, where he encounters Sheriff Teasle who bluntly tells him he is not wanted and drives him to the town limits. When Rambo, not guilty of any crime, decides to go back into town to get something to eat, Teasle arrests him. In short order, Rambo is ridiculed, insulted, assaulted, stripped and washed down with a fire hose. All of this illegal police brutality he bears silently, though with some difficulty. But when the police attempt to have him forcibly shaved, he experiences jolting flashbacks of vicious torture he endured in Viet Nam. it’s the last straw. Pushed finally beyond endurance, he breaks, fights his way out of the police station and makes good his escape.
For the bulk of the movie he is hunted like an animal, first by deputies with dogs, then with helicopters and finally by the National Guard, equipped with machine guns and heavy weapons. When he tries to surrender, he is illegally, and in defiance of specific orders, fired upon by a murderous deputy. Left with no other choice, he fights for his life, unintentionally killing the deputy.
Throughout all the rest of his flight, he deliberately avoids killing anyone, although he has many opportunities to do so. Instead he wounds or disables four deputies and a police dog handler, captures Teasle and tells him to “let it go,” pointing out that he could easily have killed all of them. Then he flees into the forest.
For their part, the pursuing officers behave like adolescents on a romp, hooting and cheering and bragging about their prowess as warriors. To them, the pursuit is a lark, a game, and the fact that their quarry is a man, insignificant. Warned by Rambo, by his own men and by Colonel Trautman, rambo’s commanding officer, to let his fugitive go, Teasle refuses, insisting on playing out his grudge match with the man who has defied his authority, proved himself the superior warrior, killed his friend, and embarrassed him on the national news. These facts point directly to the main point of the movie, as we shall see.
We jump to the end of the story to find Rambo reduced to desperation, preparing to fight a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds. After trying in vain to disappear into the West Coast forests he has returned to the town that has tormented him, and destroyed half of it in the attempt to bring Teasle to bay and end the war Teasle has declared on him. In any other American movie this would be the heroic climax, but not in First Blood. Trautman, not a social worker, priest, self-appointed activist or any other unofficial representative of the Liberal Left, but instead an officer of the much-maligned military comes to Rambo’s aid, risking death in the attempt to persuade him to surrender. In a few minutes, Rambo, the supposedly perfect image of male insensitivity and mindless, macho violence is sobbing helplessly, not because of the physical trials and indignities he has undergone, but because of the profound moral and spiritual betrayal inflicted on him by his countrymen.
For many, the core issue of the film had been obscured and confused by their moral judgements of the Viet Nam war, of war in general, and of violence in film. The real point is however, that John Rambo is a man authorised by his country to use violence, specially trained to kill in the national interest. Moreover, he is bound by a special code of honour, a strict set of rules about when, how and against whom that violence may be directed. Teasle and his deputies, while not specifically trained to kill, are also trained and authorised to use force or even violence in the national interest, and are theoretically bound by an even stricter code governing its use. The recent plethora of investigations of police conduct in Canada and the USA bears witness to how seriously the public takes this code. However, throughout First Blood, Teasle and his men repeatedly violate their code, prompting Rambo’s tearful cry, “back there [in Viet Nam], there was a code of honour. Here, there’s nothing.”
This returns us to the question of male aggression, which has been blamed by some for virtually every evil in history. An actual study of history shows that most cultures deal with male aggressiveness not by denigrating or trying to suppress or deny it, but rather by creating officially sanctioned outlets for it, carefully circumscribed by strict codes. The codes of bushido, chivalry and the warrior codes of native American peoples come to mind. This is not to say that these codes were always perfectly adhered to; what code ever was? But Rambo is not a mindless mass of raging testosterone. On the contrary, throughout his so-called rampage, he functions entirely within the bounds of his code, until driven half out of his mind by the pressures of the undeserved, immoral and unprincipled war forced upon him by the ego-driven Teasle. “They drew first blood,” he cries, trying to make Colonel Trautman understand his bewildered anguish. What he’s saying is, “they broke the code.”
The film is about more than the abandonment of Viet Nam veterans by their embarrassed government and a hostile civilian populace. It sounds a serious warning for our society today, years after that particular issue has faded into the greys of historical debate.
The disbanding of the Canadian Airborne Regiment shows us that we’ve leaned nothing from the Viet Nam experience. This elite and very expensive military unit is now lost to Canada, not because a few of its members tortured and killed a Somali youth, clearly a violation of any civilised code, but because liberal-minded people were offended by the lengths to which these men went to prove their strength and loyalty to each other. There can be little doubt that what the hazing videos revealed was excessive, or that these men ought to have been disciplined and counselled. However, the heat of the controversy among people who have never been anywhere near the realities for combat for which these men are trained, springs directly from this failure to understand male aggressiveness and the need for bring it within strict codes. Rambo, as originally conceived, does not pose a danger to our culture. On the contrary, his strict observance of his warrior’s code while fighting an unprovoked battle of self-defence actually suggests a positive approach to the problem of male aggressiveness.
We have, in the current politically correct impulse to denigrate male aggressiveness, systematically rooted out almost every socially acceptable outlet for this irrepressible energy. Instead of teaching our young men to take pride in mastering it, we have taught them to be ashamed of feeling it. Even that traditional male terrain, the ritualised contests of organised athletics is being eroded by budget cuts and popular culture: many, many more men watch athletics than participate. Consequently, we have a young generation of males growing up without any effective constraining force on their aggressiveness. They have no code, nothing to make them want to control their aggressiveness. They are not taught to define their manhood in terms of self restraint or service to an ideal (for which the military has historically been modestly useful). Instead, they’re left to believe that manhood is defined by the expression of violence. Of course, youth crime is a more complex social problem than these remarks would indicate, but still, in the current cultural climate, it’s no surprise that street gangs have proliferated, and the incidence of teen violence is rising so alarmingly.
It may well be impossible to depict violence in a film without at least seeming to glamorise it. That issue aside, John Rambo’s predicament comes to mind because, as the Airborne Regiment fracas proves, we are still a long way from knowing how to deal with our professional warriors. It is even more urgent, if we want to get youth crime under control that we harness our young civilian men’s warrior instinct within the bounds of willing self-restraint. We have to teach them to value the pleasures of self-mastery over those of violent aggression. We won’t even understand how to accomplish this if we continue to denigrate male aggressiveness and instead waste our time bleating pathetically about the (still-unproven) dangers of violence in the media. There are far more dangerous things in the media than depiction’s of violence, but that’s another story.