RAMBO, PASSION, AND POWER

...The movie in this sense is the perfect emotional emblem for Reaganism, since it mimics the combination of moral simplicity and a mistrust of modernization, with its overtones of secularism and rationality, which lies near the center of Reagan's popular support...

...This skill is part and parcel of Rambo's preindustrial moral goodness, and one character even goes so far as to say that for most Americans the Asian jungle is hell, but for Rambo it's home...

...As a medieval knight would do, Rambo takes a "favor" from the dead lady (a strip of her dress she used to bandage his hand) and makes a headband for himself and puts on her jade talisman as well...

...Rambo is clearly a movie about power, the power of nations and the power of individuals...

...Rambo also has his contradictions...

...That oversimplifies things somewhat, since there are Americans, Vietnamese, and Russians...

...This action contradicts the latter half of the movie, whose theme has become a tag line: when Murdoch lyingly promises to come to rescue Rambo, Rambo counters by growling, "I'm coming to get you...

...Rambo almost identifies this power—the power of control and observation—as the true source of villainy...

...There are two nations involved, of course, but three sorts of individuals...

...Like the white man turned trailblazer who out-stalked and outprimitivized the Indian in those movie westerns of three and four decades ago, Rambo is more skillful than the indigenous Asian population that is tracking him...

...From then on, his killing prowess is awesome in the implausible extreme...

...The movie is about people like Rambo who love their country beyond all else and because it fulfills their self-image to be so patriotic, and those other people who simply cannot understand patriotism, its depth, and its transforming power...

...So the movie's demonology runs something like this, going from minor devils to major ones: there are the crude but innocent Vietnamese captors, the implacably inhuman Russians, the craven and empty Murdoch and the bureaucracy behind him, and the instruments 110 of control and observation that make all the deception possible and (putatively) antiseptic...

...he rises out of the river and emerges from a mud bank to strike with deadly accuracy...

...Yet this physical strength, while most expressive, is unavailing against the technological superiority of the corrupt military intelligence...

...Some deep social and political longings have been touched, sociologists tell us, when a popular movie provokes such wide responses...

...Rambo grabs Murdoch, slams his head to the desk, plunges his oversized knife into the wood next to his ear, and says, with brutally simplistic irony, "Mission accomplished, sir...

...On the contrary, this power is absolutely sure of itself, comes equipped with only the simplest tools (though it is capable of mastering others at will), and it recognizes only two sorts of people—incorrigible victimizers and victims destined eventually to take revenge...

...The Vietnamese are pictured, however, as nothing but the unwitting pawns of the Russians, who in their turn are shown to be copies of the movie-style Nazis of the late '40s and early '50s...

...Like many another of today's bureaucrats, he is engaged in "crisis management...

...Lionel Tiger, one such anthropologist, has spoken on a television show of how contradictory it all is...

...In this sense, the movie's audience plainly ought to see that Reagan's response to, say, the Shiite hijacking of TWA flight # 847 is just another instance of someone who presents a tough face but is unable to take a truly effective military reprisal...

...But it's when he finally meets up with Murdoch that the movie's tensions escape their paradoxical containment and become simply contradictory...

...On the way, Rambo pauses to blast away at the bank of computers and radar screens that fill the command post and make it look like a corporate banking office...

...To Credit Lyonnais, who made it all possible" went the line, and the hand of international entrepreneurial capitalism was finally, though barely, visible...

...The movie makes no mistake about who the real enemies are, and the audience that I saw the movie with bristled with excitement when Rambo landed his damaged helicopter and immediately stalked off, with a murderous glint in his eyes, in the direction of Murdoch's command center...

...They are the Indians of the Hollywood westerns, of course, and the Russians are the unscrupulous traders who sell them ammunition out of sheer venality...

...One line struck me as the final credits rolled on the screen...

...Earlier I said there were two countries involved in the movie...

...Such complications and suspense as the movie offers are indeed rudimentary, but they are also what gives the movie its impact...

...Such an acknowledgment finally overshadows any formulation about the movie's mythic power, or perhaps in some way it inadvertently reveals it...

...After all, he said, we are not at war with the people portrayed in the movie as our enemy, in fact we are seeking to establish trade agreements with them...

...Finally, it is America's way of believing in the efficiency of its own power, without having to face the awesome destructiveness of that power...

...It does little to update this vocabulary, and adds only the theme of a Luddite distrust of computerization and bureaucracy...

...This is the power many Americans apparently want to believe in, a power that doesn't ask questions about imperialism or world markets, about other people's nationalistic aspirations, about a capacity for self-delusion...

...America and Vietnam are contrasted in the movie as the good nation and the evil one...

...The movie and its simplistically effective hero have also been invoked repeatedly in the halls of Congress...

...It presents the military intelligence, personified by the Murdoch character (played by Charles Napier), as both tough militarily and weak morally...

...Only when Rambo is able to commandeer a helicopter for himself and outmaneuver a faster, more sophisticated gunship can he complete the mission...

...These individuals allow the simplistic good-and-evil morality of the movie to generate some dramatic tension and plot suspense...

...The paradoxes at the movie's center extend even to the theme of race...

...He has become the earth itself, master of the jungle, the same environment that was, by all popular belief, the main source of America's defeat in the real war in Vietnam...

...For the power behind those computers and radar screens that Rambo shatters with his bullets is virtually invisible, controlled as it ' is by those who have designed the "information" society...

...Social anthropologists speak of modern "myths," and it becomes increasingly hard to avoid using mystificating schemes if one seeks to explain the feelings audiences testify to in discussing why this movie grips them...

...Apparently it is the system of bureaucratic, computerized control (presented as evil and ineffective at the beginning of the movie) that is ultimately responsible for our failure in the jungle of Southeast Asia...

...Rambo satisfies the first part of the revenge plot by single-handedly killing off a hundred or so of his pursuers, destroying the entire prison camp, and rescuing all the American prisoners...

...Even Reagan's Star Wars can be seen as the paradoxical epitome of this sentiment, for it is his main contribution to modern images of warfare: a technology that renders all other technology null and void...

...It uses the chase and the betrayal-and-revenge structures to give the audience a visceral approach to its themes...

...The movie says something essentially revolutionary but its revolution is in the direction of fascism: namely, that those who, in this case, love the country are not those who govern it, and vice versa...

...This theme is further developed when Rambo is symbolically reborn after his pursuers kill his love interest, a Vietnamese woman who is described as a loyal "indigenous contact" who saves Rambo from a particularly gruesome torture session...

...Each demon is progressively more powerful, more removed from the jungle and its savage beauty, more out of touch with simple emotions like love and patriotism...

...It won't do to see the movie as simply racist (which it undoubtedly is), or fixated on revenge through violent and oddly narcissistic self-assertion (which it also undoubtedly is...

...Indeed, the Vietnamese are shown, not as the masters of guerrilla warfare and jungle survival that they were in fact, but as slow-witted victims of money, whisky, and whores...

...But there are also evil men in the (apparent) service of a good country: the bureaucrats and military men who enlist Rambo and then set him up for betrayal...

...This set of paradoxes can be spelled out as the belief that moral sternness is greater than weaponry and technological expertise, even if the latter two forces occasionally have the upper hand...

...The paradox might be said to be resolved when Rambo destroys the computer terminal rather than Murdoch...

...There are clearly good men in the service of a good country, namely Rambo and the American servicemen he is sent to rescue...

...There are clearly evil men in the service of an evil country, these being the Vietnamese captors...

...Like the Luddites who responded to the advent of technology by breaking machines, Rambo epitomizes reactionary attitudes that stand for a "purer" vision...

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...But it's not Murdoch who planned the war or prosecuted it...

...When it comes to individuals, however, a simple good-and-evil classification doesn't work so easily...

...We need to see a movie about how the crisis gets started in the first place, a movie that makes corrupt power—especially the power to decide what is subject to control and observation— fully visible...

...At the end of the mission he grabs a machine gun and a belt of cartridges and goes off, obviously to hunt down the traitorous Murdoch...

...WHAT STARTS AS A REVENGE MOVIE directed against Vietnamese has turned into a vengeful hunt for the betraying bureaucrats...

...This divided attitude toward the relation between morality and weaponry is paralleled by a divided attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats...

...On the other hand, Rambo possesses a moral vision that makes him physically imposing: the barbaric nature of his pose, the blank stupor of his facial expression and trite dialogue, the half-primitive nature of his weaponry are all expressions of a pure commitment to a good cause...

...as he says, "I'm just here to clear up the mess...

...109 The movie echoes the simplistic macho attitudes of such national leaders as Reagan, Weinberger, and Kirkpatrick—while at the same time it says that leaders are weak and self-serving...

...THE MOVIE OFFERS a nice set of interlocking paradoxes...

...Since Rambo's life is saved by a Vietnamese woman and he even pledges to take her back to America (just a moment before the enemy cuts her down and provokes our hero's rebirth), the movie apparently clears itself of any charge of egregious racism...

...BY RELYING ON MOVIE STEREOTYPES drawn from westerns and World War II anti-Nazi movies, Rambo deals with a simple cinematic vocabulary...

...And while the polls may show that Reagan's approval rating drops because of his ineffective response to such terrorists, the belief will persist that he is the best choice to negotiate a tough arms-control treaty with the Russians and to prevent the spread of communism in Central America...

...Time magazine soon reported on the "spin-offs" it generated, down to models of the bow and arrows tipped with grenades that Rambo uses—too late alas for Father's Day, but probably a sure profit item...

...Put slightly differently, it allows Americans to know that if a simple man controls the tools, they will always be used correctly...

...But underneath it all is a belief in power, specifically a moral power that is capable of outstripping technology and corruption...