War, and the Memory of War

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 36
Ted Kotcheff (Director), First Blood

An unshaven stranger wanders into a Pacific Northwest town, with an American flag patch on his jacket and a Bowie knife on his belt. The local sheriff mistakes him for a common vagabond and shows him the far side of town. But the wanderer comes back into town, stolidly refusing to explain his unwillingness to leave, so the sheriff arrests him. Inside a subterranean holding cell, the prisoner suffers his first violent flashback to Vietnam.

Through the 1980s, movie studios struggled to reconcile John Rambo, and his massive popularity, with the stories Americans told ourselves about our Vietnam experience. They turned Rambo into a musclebound antihero of Cold War exceptionalism, a picture of single-minded virility willing to continue fighting America’s battles after the government abandoned him. This image has become so pervasive that we forget he wasn’t created that way; he was laconic, unwanted, and a receptacle for America’s doubts.

At the movie’s beginning, we know nothing about Rambo. We witness him trying to find his unit’s only other surviving veteran, only to discover that Agent Orange finally took him; the weak smile we see on his face during that scene never recurs, as he realizes nobody but himself remembers what his unit survived. Without the war, nothing gives his life structure. So he resumes the only task which postwar life has provided him: walking.

Rambo’s 1982 big-screen debut followed ten years of development purgatory after David Morrell’s novel dropped, while the war was still going on. Morrell presented Rambo (no first name in the novel) as a villain, a killing machine which America’s government built, then discarded. Wandering his homeland without direction, Rambo becomes a force of destruction, because violence gives him meaning. The movie changes this characterization, reflecting how America’s self-justifying Vietnam narrative had evolved over ten years.

Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) doesn’t hate Rambo initially. He simply prizes order and cleanliness over fairness and justice. Rambo looks, to Teasle, like a stereotypical drifter with no means of support; Teasle assumes that he’ll wind up panhandling downtown, undercutting local businesses. He bears Rambo no animosity, he just wants the scruffy vagrant gone. But Rambo refuses to leave, for reasons entirely his own—he’s persistently taciturn. So Teasle arrests Rambo on specious charges.

You probably already remember what happens next: an overzealous deputy, feeling authorized by Teasle’s unthinking attitudes, attempts to shave Rambo with a straight razor. Rambo suffers a flashback, attacks the massed deputies, and escapes to the wilderness. (In the novel, he kills several deputies.) The law commences a massive manhunt, carrying military-grade assault weapons, but Rambo, trained in wilderness survival, manufactures simple weapons and stays one step ahead. So Teasle calls in the National Guard.

Sylvester Stallone (left) and Brian Dennehy in First Blood

This encapsulates how Rambo represents America’s struggle with itself after Vietnam. The law wants to bury him, because if he disappears, so does the narrative of their missteps. Rambo wants only to survive. Later movies would transform Rambo into an icon of America’s individualism mythology, but in this movie, he isn’t an individualist; he’s a soldier, trained and awaiting orders, who gets dropped by the government that should’ve controlled him. He’s become an unwanted memory.

In one key scene, several National Guard “weekend warriors” preen for the camera before a mine shaft they’ve just detonated with hand artillery, believing they’ve killed Rambo inside. One of them shouts: “Now take one for Soldier of Fortune!” That magazine, which arose in Vietnam’s immediate aftermath, helped spread the belief that America’s government betrayed troops in Vietnam, popularizing the stab-in-the-back myth. These fluffy-bearded kids apparently miss the irony of killing a decorated Vietnam veteran.

Stallone heavily rewrote the story, making Rambo a more sympathetic character, ending the story with hope of future redemption. In Morrell’s novel, Rambo and Teasle kill one another. Stallone, by contrast, gave Rambo a final monologue that helped coalesce, for American imagination, how war caused trauma for wide-eyed soldiers who trained under the belief that they were doing good for world democracy. The changed ending reflects changes in how Americans understood our shared Vietnam experience.

Don’t misunderstand: this movie teems with myths Americans weren’t ready to unpack about how we brought “heroes” home and expected them to reintegrate into society. But as an artifact of a struggle Americans were only beginning to publicly confront, it remains a landmark of self-scrutiny. Sadly, just three years later, the studio flinched from continuing that scrutiny, sending Rambo back to re-fight the war. Thus we return to this moment again, after every subsequent war.