Politics of Sly Neo-Conservative Ideology in the Cinematic Rambo Trilogy: 1982-1988
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Politics of Sly Neo-conservative ideology in the cinematic Rambo trilogy: 1982-1988 Guido Buys 3464474 MA Thesis, American Studies Program, Utrecht University 20-06-2014 Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3 Chapter 1: Theoretical Framework ........................................................................... 12 Popular Culture ............................................................................................................................................ 13 Political Culture ........................................................................................................................................... 16 The Origins Of Neo-Conservatism ....................................................................................................... 17 Does Neo-Conservatism Have A Nucleus? ....................................................................................... 20 The Neo-Conservative Ideology ........................................................................................................... 22 Chapter 2: First Blood .................................................................................................... 25 The Liberal Hero ......................................................................................................................................... 26 The Conservative Hero ............................................................................................................................. 28 Rambo Light .................................................................................................................................................. 32 Chapter 3: Returning To Vietnam At 0.72 Kills Per Minute .............................. 34 Rambo As Foreign Policy ......................................................................................................................... 36 The Right Thing To Do .............................................................................................................................. 38 Above The Law ............................................................................................................................................. 40 Rambo 2.0 ...................................................................................................................................................... 42 A Break With The Past .............................................................................................................................. 44 Chapter 4:War In Times Of Peace .............................................................................. 47 The Insignificance Of Democracy ......................................................................................................... 50 The Antidote For Fifty Enemies Is One Friend ............................................................................... 52 Winning The Cold War With Stinger Missiles ................................................................................ 54 Renewed McCarthyism ............................................................................................................................. 55 Rambo 2.5 ...................................................................................................................................................... 58 Three Years Too Late And Too Soon .................................................................................................. 59 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 62 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 71 Illustrations ....................................................................................................................... 74 2 Introduction "Movies will be the only thing the United States will ever be remembered for. It was a lucky coincidence that as we became number one in the world militarily, the movies were there for us to use, to make propaganda with, to express ourselves, to sell the world a lot of bills of goods. We're still doing it. We fight our war in Vietnam which we then lose. And over a number of years, we now make movies about it, in which we are making back in the world box office what we lost during the war, naturally."1 - Gore Vidal in The San Francisco Bay Guardian July 11, 1990 “Many people understood that the Soviets were more aggressive in the world; they understood they'd invaded Afghanistan […] and they understood that we had withdrawn and something that was being interpreted worldwide as a defeat. However we interpreted it, everybody else called it a defeat. And I have no doubt that the American people generally believe the world is safer, and that we are safer, when we are stronger.” 2 - Jeane Kirkpatrick While the other prisoners are performing hard manual labor, Vietnam War veteran John Rambo gets called to the gate of the prison. He shuffles towards the barbed wired fence while being escorted by an overweight prison guard. Colonel Sam Trautman is waiting on the other side of the heavily guarded fence, looking eager to talk to his former student. Trautman explains to Rambo how he can get pardoned from prison: “A covert operation is being geared up in the Far East. Your name was dug out by the computer as one of three most able to complete the mission […] You interested?” Rambo rethinks the offer while the sound of prisoners performing hard manual labor continues in the background. Finally a combination of an answer and a sigh gives Trautman the confirmation he is looking for: “Yeah..” Trautman turns around and is interrupted in his walk away 1 Hugo Filipe Ramos, “A Guerra Fria Cultural: Como a Cortina de Celulóide Contribuiu Para Derrubar a Cortina de Ferro,” 13, accessed May 1, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/3875619/A_Guerra_Fria_Cultural_Como_a_Cortina_de_Celul oide_Contribuiu_para_Derrubar_a_Cortina_de_Ferro. 2 “Interview with Dr Jeane Kirkpatrick,” accessed May 22, 2014, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-19/kirkpatrick2.html. 3 from the prison by a last question from Rambo before he is shipped off to South East Asia to start the mission: “Sir? Do we get to win this time?” Trautman turns for one last time and replies: “This time, it's up to you..”3 This fragment comes from the opening scene of the motion picture Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and describes the beginning of an ultra-violent action film. In the movie, American super soldier and Vietnam War veteran John J. Rambo returns to Vietnam in order to fulfill a very daring post-war covert mission. The second Rambo movie fits into a whole series of ‘return to Vietnam films,’ such as Uncommon Valor (1983) and Missing in Action (1984), and its success illustrates that American society was ready for the Vietnam War as a theme in Hollywood movies. People magazine formulated the impact of the film as follows: “Rambo has touched a raw nerve in America, a feeling that we should, in the words of Ronald Reagan, stand tall again. Ten years ago, after the collapse of Saigon and the anguish of the Watergate scandal, Rambo would have been laughed out of the movie theaters. The mood then was virulently antiwar, but today that’s all changed.”4 The character Rambo was originally created by David Morrell in his 1972 book First Blood.5 When the rights of the book were sold in 1972 to Columbia pictures, and then to Warner Bros, Sylvester Stallone got involved in the project as a screenwriter and the main actor. Stallone transformed the character Rambo from a dangerous menace to the public to a more sympathetic character. After the cinematic success of First Blood (1982), the Rambo franchise expanded to 3 George P. Cosmatos, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Action, 1985. 4 Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (Routledge, 1995), 71. 5 David Morrell, First Blood, Reprint edition (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000). 4 three more cinematic sequels, including matching merchandise such as videogames and toys. While Stallone calls the character of Rambo “politically agnostic,”6 some critics disagree and argue that this character does convey politically charged messages. For example, media and cultural critic Douglas Kellner argues in his book Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern that the second Rambo production can be seen as a “cinematic [attempt] to overcome the ‘Vietnam syndrome’”7 The movie, according to Kellner, is part of a new stock ‘return-to-Vietnam’ war films that sprung up in the Reagan era.8 For the first time since the Vietnam War, combat and militancy became themes in American commercial cinema that were portrayed as heroic enterprises.9 A second theme in Rambo that Kellner mentions is the representation of taking active measures against the communist threat: “communist enemies are represented as the incarnation of ‘evil’ who this time receive a well-deserved defeat.”10 A third theme in Rambo, according to Kellner, is the reassertion of global leadership by the United States: “the figure Rambo was assimilated to the aggressive conservative attempts at remasculinization and the re-assertion of U.S. military power during the epoch.”11 The notion that the U.S. had to cure the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’