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were more aggressive in the world; they understood they'd invaded Afghanistan […] and they understood that we had withdrawn and something that was being interpreted worldwide as a defeat.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,’ actively counter the communist (Soviet) threat, and reclaim its global military leadership,

6 Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone about Politics, Movies, Etc, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpoSL95qqsI&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 7 Kellner, Media Culture, 60. 8 Kellner, Media Culture, 64. 9 Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts, Hollywood’s America: Twentieth-Century America Through Film (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 289. 10 Kellner, Media Culture, 64. 11 Kellner, Media Culture, 74.

5 were also characteristics often attributed to neo-conservative ideology at the time.12 While Stallone never associated himself openly with neo-conservative ideology, the parallel seems interesting. The successes of the productions First

Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II, and, to a lesser extend, Rambo III (1988) caused tens of millions of Americans to see how Stallone portrayed Rambo, both artistically and politically. This dissertation will explain the extend of this parallel by answering the following research question: “To what extend does the character of Rambo frame neo-conservative ideology in the American motion pictures First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III

(1988)?”

Before we go into details of the content of this question, it seems wise to first explain the concept of framing. Professor of Government and International

Relations at the University of Sydney, Pippa Norris, states that “[t]he essence of framing is selection to prioritize some facts, images, or developments over others, thereby unconsciously promoting one particular interpretation of events.“13 For example, when the news reports of a suicide bomber in the Middle

East, or a kidnapping of students in Nigeria, the audience interprets, categorizes, and evaluates these events in the frame of terrorism. Without knowing the people involved, the issues, or even the exact place, audiences can make sense of similar events by using certain frames.14

These frames can in turn be studied by isolating regular patterns in language and imagery. The interpretation of mass communication, including

12 David L. Anderson, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War (Columbia University Press, 2013), 413. 13 Pippa Norris, Montague Kern, and Marion Just, Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003). 14 Norris, Kern, and Just, Framing Terrorism.

6 popular culture, has become increasingly accepted in the fields of cultural studies and media studies (to name just two).15 Although featured films are only a small percentage of popular culture (or even mass communication in that matter), they can still have real life consequences. Chapter 1 will elaborate on this.

One may ask what the relevance of this analysis may be, since the presence of certain political views in film does not necessarily mean that their audiences agree with, or are even influenced by that ideology. Going to the movies, after all, is a leisure activity that represents its audiences’ demand for entertainment, rather than their political affiliations. But political scientist Daniel

P. Franklin argues in his book Politics and Film that films also deepen our understanding of people, ideas, and problems in everyday life.16 According to

Franklin, Hollywood productions can affect their audiences in their biases, preferences, and behaviors, as well as they are a reflection of biases, preferences, and behaviors in American society. However, Franklin adds that films are certainly more a reflection of society, than a tool for manipulation: “[i]f the content of film is more a reflection than a driver of the public mood, the movie industry tells us more about who we are than who we will be.”17 Films, Franklin concludes, mostly “‘activate’ and then reinforce certain biases, preferences, and behaviors” in their audiences.18 The presence of any political ideology in the

Rambo series thus (partly) influenced political biases, preferences, and behaviors of Americans who agreed with its content.

15 Norris, Kern, and Just, Framing Terrorism, 10. 16 Daniel P. Franklin, Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 6. 17 Franklin, Politics and Film, 169. 18 Franklin, Politics and Film, 169.

7 The analysis becomes especially relevant, when the spectacular local and federal political successes of neo-conservatism in the 1980s are taken into consideration. Although the movement was born in the 1960s, the term ‘neo- conservatives’ was first introduced in the 1970s by “friends and enemies” of New

York intellectuals, who had made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left towards the conservative right.19 In the 1980s, the so-called ‘second-age’ neo-conservatives started to make a swift turn from the center-left towards the conservative right with the Republican nomination of Ronald Reagan for

President. 20 In the Reagan era, the neo-conservative ideology had taken root in

American politics and became significantly influential in Reagan’s foreign policy.21 Chapter 1 will explain the rise of the neo-conservative movement in

American society and politics in greater detail, including the competition within the conservative movement.

This thesis follows the path of recent cultural studies on the Cold War.

Scholars in literature, American studies, sociology, anthropology, communication, media studies, and also Cold War History are responsible for the increasing interest in how American culture shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the Cold

War. 22 The book Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States

Imperialism, 1945-1966 by historian Christian Appy can be seen in this context of increased interest in the subject. Appy states that “[w]e need to go farther in our efforts not only to examine the connection between domestic and foreign events

19 Justin Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” The Brookings Institution, 1, accessed May 15, 2014, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2010/04/05- neoconservatism-vaisse. 20 Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Harvard University Press, 2010), 181. 21 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 189. 22 Robert Griffith, “The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies,” Reviews in American History 29, no. 1 (2001): 150, doi:10.1353/rah.2001.0007.

8 but to explore as well the specific relationships between politics and culture.”23

Appy explains that mainstream academics have long ignored the idea that

American Cold War politics “might be profoundly shaped by a social and cultural world beyond the conference table and the battlefield.”24

But what is culture? And in light of this thesis, what kind of culture does cinema belong to? One of the pioneers in the field of culture studies, Raymond

Henry Williams, once said that “[c]ulture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”25 Not surprisingly, there are many competing definitions of mass culture and poplar culture. In order to avoid carving out the foundation of Franklin’s argument, this thesis will follow his distinction between political culture, “which is an enduring iconography of

American society,”26 and popular culture, “which is reflective of a more transient form of expression.”27 Further elaboration of the terminology used in this thesis can be found in Chapter 1, because a hasty discussion of terms such as ‘popular culture,’ ‘political culture,’ and ‘neo-conservative ideology’ would undermine their strength as analytical tools.

The methods used in this dissertation are derived from the fields of history, cultural studies, political science, and media studies. Chapter 1 will combine the definitions and theories of the four fields that are relevant to the research question, to form a theoretical foundation for analysis. The groundwork for the analysis consists, besides theory and terminology, also of the historical context of the neo-conservative movement. Besides secondary literature on neo-

23 Christian G. Appy, Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 4. 24 Appy, Cold War Constructions, 4. 25 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana, 1976), 76. 26 Franklin, Politics and Film, 9. 27 Franklin, Politics and Film, 9.

9 conservatism28, the analysis of ‘neo-conservatist ideology’ will also contain primary sources of intellectuals and politicians that were either labeled or self- proclaimed ‘neo-conservatists.’

The Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain analyses of the three Rambo motion pictures and are divided up accordingly, in a chronological order. Each analysis treats film as a cultural text, in order to compare its content to neo-conservative views of its time period. Because of the scope of this dissertation, film analysis

(in terms of mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, and editing) will only play a minimal role in answering the research question. Like in every field, text analysis is also overshadowed by discussions on correct methodologies and definitions.

This dissertation will follow the broad definition proposed by cultural scientist

Alan McKee, who describes “a form of 'textual analysis' whereby we attempt to understand the likely interpretations of texts made by people who consume them.”29 A result of this approach is that the focus lies on the interpretation of the content, rather than the reception of the audience. This means that the purpose of this analysis is to explain neo-conservatism in film and that it influenced American society, rather than a detailed explanation of the ways how it influenced its American audiences.

A point of criticism in this respect could be that this analysis says more about Sylvester Stallone as a screenwriter, than popular culture in general. This can be countered by looking at commercial cinema as a product, more than an art form. Products have to obey to the rules of demand and supply while art does not. Franklin states that “[i]n the consumer market, art may not sell, which is the

28 Among others, the works of Justin Vaïsse and Francis Fukuyama 29 Alan McKee, Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide (SAGE, 2003), 2.

10 case more often than not,”30 while the main purpose of featured films, however, is to make as much profit as possible.

30 Franklin, Politics and Film, 7.

11 Chapter 1: Theoretical Framework

The field of American Studies is a relatively new one. Starting in the 1970s, the field has changed and expanded following intellectual developments in the social and cultural sciences.31 American literature, history, culture, art, media, politics and law sparked the interest of scholars both inside and outside the United

States, which resulted in international interest in American identity. Today,

American Studies is characterized by its interdisciplinary nature, which often combines methodologies from cultural and social studies. A crucial notion in this interdisciplinary approach is that the methodologies, originating from differing fields, must be compatible. This chapter will explain how different methodologies can be used in order to answer the already mentioned research question.

The analysis in this dissertation is based on cultural studies, political science, media studies, and history. In line with cultural studies, film will be approached as a cultural text. This way film can be interpreted as a force that influences American society. In this respect, the medium cinema can be seen as containing messages, which relate to certain aspects in American culture; namely

(neo-conservative) ideology. The tools to ‘encrypt’ these messages are provided by media studies, by means of film analysis, and textual analysis through literary criticism. Political science is used as an important part of the justification of the analysis. Franklin explains how film can have real political consequences in the sense that films deepen our understanding of people, idea, and problems in

31 Janice A. Radway et al., American Studies: An Anthology (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 3.

12 everyday life.32 Furthermore, history and film history will provide the historical context to explain the importance of both the influence of the Rambo franchise and neo-conservative ideology in the 1980s. But before the analysis can begin, it is important to elaborate on the terminology, which will form the foundation for this thesis.

Popular culture

The field of popular culture is staffed by theorists who have varying ideas on how to understand popular culture in modern societies.33 Depending on the context of its use, the term ‘popular culture’ can be defined in a number of ways.

All these definitions have one element in common and that is that they are created in contrast to other conceptual categories that define culture, such as mass culture, high culture, folk culture, etc.34 A problem is that most definitions of popular culture try to be as inclusive as possible. This is problematic because it then needs to include pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies. The quest towards one single definition consequently causes the different definitions to contrast, and even exclude, each other. One solution to this problem is to create a broad definition of the concept, which excludes pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies. This solution will be useful in this analysis, because the focus is

American society of the 1980s. Media theorist Dick Hebdige introduces such a definition in his book Hiding in the Light: “[Popular culture is] a set of generally

32 Franklin, Politics and Film, 6. 33 Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004), ix. 34 Holt N. Parker, “Toward a Definition of Popular Culture,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (mei 2011): 148, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2011.00574.x.

13 available artefacts: films, records, clothes, TV programmes, modes of transport, etc.”35

But this definition is not entirely satisfactory, because it does not specify what sets a ‘popular’ film apart from a ‘non-popular’ film. Media scholar John

Fiske notes that one must first define the concepts ‘popular’ and ‘culture,’ in order to define popular culture.36 Staying in line with Fiske, ‘popular’ can both be defined as statistical as well as the notion that it “serves the interest of ‘the people.’”37 In this sense, Fiske notes, ‘the people’ should be seen “not [as] a class or social category, but rather [as] a shifting set of social interests and positions that are defined by their subordinate relations to the dominant society.”38

Because it is difficult to measure if the Rambo franchise served ‘the interest of the people’, the statistical approach seems more appropriate. If ‘popular’ is defined by looking at a quantitative index, it becomes clear that the Rambo films can be defined as such. Although the exact line between popular and not-popular can be grey, it can be assumed that the Rambo franchise was popular, because the estimated average domestic gross per film (without being adjusted to ticket price inflation) exceeds 73,5 million dollars.39

The concept of ‘culture’ can also be problematic depending on the conceptual context. For this analysis however, a general definition of the term will suffice. Fiske describes culture as follows: “the social circulation of meanings, values, and pleasures, to the processes of forming social identities and social

35 Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Psychology Press, 1988), 47. 36 John Fiske, The John Fiske Collection: Understanding Popular Culture, 2 edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 2010), 323. 37 Fiske, The John Fiske Collection, 322. 38 Fiske, The John Fiske Collection, 323. 39 “Rambo Franchise Box Office History,” accessed May 18, 2014, http://www.the- numbers.com/movies/franchise/Rambo.

14 relationships, and to entering into relation with the larger social order in a particular way and from a particular position.”40 This articulation will function as a working definition, whereof this thesis will be partly derived.

The cinematic Rambo series, which fit the definitions of both Hebdige and

Fiske, can thus be seen as popular culture. Popular culture, however, is made up by a variety of forms on a variety of mediums, of which featured films are only a small percentage. Other forms of entertainment and journalistic media, such as documentaries or news programs, seem more likely candidates to influence their audiences through framing, as is showed by the amount of research devoted to this relation.41 But, as Professor of Cinema Studies Ed Guerrero illustrates in his book Framing Blackness, featured films can indeed also play a role in framing the perception of its audiences.42

A final note on popular culture is that it is a flexible concept, rather than a static one. Historian James B. Gilbert argues that “the changes in popular culture over the last thirty years suggest that these genres may have different meanings in different periods.”43 An example of this is the change in symbols of authority in

Hollywood cinema in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Starting in the 1950s, with the decrease of censorship in commercial films, popular culture has increasingly included American subcultures in its content, without stating a

40 Fiske, The John Fiske Collection, 322. 41 These include the works of R.M. Entman (‘Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm’ in: Journal of Communication), E. Goffman (Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience), and W.A. Gamson, & A. Modigliani, ‘Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach’ in: American Journal of Sociology). 42 J. Ronald Green, “Review of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film by Ed Guerrero,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 4 (July 1, 1995): 47, doi:10.2307/1213584. 43 James B. Gilbert, “Popular Culture,” American Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (April 1, 1983): 142, doi:10.2307/2712717.

15 value judgment.44 According to Gilbert, this resulted in a depiction of heroes and

(to a lesser extend) heroines in films in the 1970s, which “showed a […] discomfort in the contradictory moral present, and they often lived above or beyond the law.”45 However, these changes in popular culture do not appear without reason. Popular culture is strongly connected to the society that consumes it. In fact, according to Franklin, film cannot be isolated from its users:

“commercial film is a reflection of a large part of American political culture.”46

Political culture

Among scholars, there is some disagreement about the definition of political culture and its relation to culture and politics. Although the term seems simplistic, it actually presents complex conceptual problems. It was initially coined to solve the cross-cultural micro-macro problem of how individuals affect their political system and vice versa.47 The original definition was created in

1963 by political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in their cross- cultural work The Civic Culture. They describe political culture as: “the specifically political orientations— attitudes towards the political system and its various parts, and attitudes towards self in the system.”48 Since the introduction of this definition in 1963, many scholars have pointed out the problems it causes with defining, measuring, and testing the concept. Critics are correct to be weary of one single definition that encompasses all case studies, because the term then

44 Gilbert, “Popular Culture,” 142. 45 Gilbert, “Popular Culture,” 142. 46 Franklin, Politics and Film, 9. 47 Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (SAGE Publications, 1989), 51. 48 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, 12.

16 becomes too broad and therefore unusable for specific purposes. This problem is solved when the concept is shaped to fit a specific angle of analysis.

This thesis will therefore follow Franklin’s approach, because he also focuses on the political implications of American commercial films. Franklin argues that political culture is political, because the “attitudes, particularly in a democracy, are translated into public policy through political participation.”49

Consequently, the media shapes and reinforces this political culture to the extend the media becomes part of a process that “guides the formation of public policy.”50 For example, if the media portrays a structural image of an increased terrorist threat, it is likely that the government is pressured into reacting on this image in their public policy. In other words, Hollywood films, as part of the media, help create an image that can influence American “societal context in which distributive decisions are made.”51

The Origins Of Neo-Conservatism

The term ‘neo-conservative’ was introduced in the 1970s by enemies and friends of a group of New York intellectuals, who had critical views on the left turn that liberalism had made in the 1960s.52 While some who made the ideological journey from the liberal left to the conservative right refused to be called a neo-conservative, others wore this title with pride. The neo- conservatives were mostly concerned about domestic issues regarding black

49 Franklin, Politics and Film, 4. 50 Franklin, Politics and Film, 4. 51 Franklin, Politics and Film, 4. 52 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 1.

17 nationalism, radical feminism, the student protests, environmentalism, and

Lyndon B. Johnson’s anti-poverty policies.53 Intellectuals and politicians such as

Symour Martin Lipset and Daniel Patrick Moynihan found an output for their ideas in a political magazine created by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in 1965, called The Public Interest. 54

But the neo-conservative movement was (and is) not a single and cohesive one. Historian Justin Vaïsse rightly points out that ‘neo-conservatism’ has become a collective term for different ‘kinds’ of neo-conservatism originating in the 1970s and 1980s.55 Besides the New York intellectuals, Vaïsse describes the second generation of neo-conservatives: the ‘Scoop Jackson Democrats.’

The second generation of neo-conservatives, named after Senator Henry

‘Scoop’ Jackson, followed some of the traditions of their predecessors.56 First of all, the second generation also made an ideological journey from the left to the conservative right. Intellectuals and politicians such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben

Wattenberg, Eugene Rostow, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, and Joshua

Muravchik switched party lines from the Democrats to the Republicans, after they got disillusioned with the Democratic leftist policies of President Carter.

Secondly, the New York Intellectuals and the Scoop Jackson Democrats had the same enemies: leftist liberalism, anti-Americanism, moral relativism, and communism. After the American war in Vietnam these feelings crystalized into political positions regarding foreign policy, national identity and history.57

Thirdly, they shared the same journals and institutions, such as the Commentary.

53 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 1. 54 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 1. 55 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2. 56 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2. 57 David Hoogland Noon, “Cold War Revival: Neoconservatives and Historical Memory in the War on Terror,” American Studies 48, no. 3 (September 1, 2007): 76.

18 Vaïsse explains that the main reason that these two groups together became known as ‘neo-conservative’ is that there was mutual exchange of ideas between the two groups.58

Despite their similarities, the two neo-conservative ‘breeds’ had some major differences. The Washington-based Scoop Jackson Democrats were, for example, also interested in foreign policy issues rather than solely domestic ones. Vaïsse describes their ideals as follows:

“They wanted to get back to the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy: progressive policies at home, muscular anti-communism abroad, including the defense of human rights and fellow democracies. That is why they found themselves battling not only the left wing of the Democrats, but also Nixon and Kissinger’s realist policy of détente, which included de- emphasizing ideological concerns and engaging Moscow, thereby, from the neoconservative perspective, legitimizing the Soviet regime rather than trying to change it.”59

Another difference is that the Scoop Jackson Democrats found their political spokesman in Ronald Reagan in the Republican Party, while the New York

Intellectuals never united in the political arena. Reagan, who also made the switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party, was partly inspired by the ideals of the ‘latter day’ neo-conservatives in the foreign policy of his first term.60

The supporting of anti-Communist ‘freedom fighters’ behind the iron certain, the military build-up, the increased anti-Soviet rhetoric, and military guarantees for democracies all fitted in the neo-conservative ideology. Reagan, however, ultimately chose the pragmatic road of negotiations over the neo-conservative strategy, therefore breaking with the orthodoxy of neo-conservatism.61

58 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2. 59 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2. 60 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2. 61 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2.

19

Does Neo-Conservatism Have A Nucleus?

From the 1970s onward, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish neo- conservatives from other forms of conservatism. Self-proclaimed ‘ex-neocon’,

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama argues that in the 1970s and 1980s, the political views of the different conservative movements overlapped on most domestic and foreign key issues.62 The divisional line became less clear after most conservative movements, ranging from small-government libertarianism to religious conservatism, adopted neo-conservative views on foreign policy.

Another reason why it is hard to define the movement is that the neo- conservatives themselves “began adopting domestic policy positions of traditional conservatives.”63 An example of this kind of adaptation is the stance towards capitalism in the 1980s. Although the former leftist socialists were not active proponents of absolute capitalism, they did not publically oppose it either.64

This ‘greying’ of the dividing lines between the conservative movements makes is hard to pinpoint the exact political positions of the neo-conservative movement. Fukuyama, however, solved this problem by arguing that the neo- conservatives were in fact a united movement on key issues: “the fact that neo- conservatism is not monolithic does not imply that it does not rest on a core of

62 Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, Annotated. edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 38. 63 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 39. 64 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 39.

20 coherent ideas. Rather, it is a confluence of intellectual streams that have resulted in areas of ambiguity or disagreement among neo-conservatives.“65

According to Fukuyama, the neo-conservative movement knows four core principles. First, “[a] belief that the internal character of regimes matters and that foreign policy must reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies.”66 Neo-conservatives held a great concern about threats towards democracy, human rights, and the foreign policies of other countries. They believed that the internal character of regimes defined their foreign policies. This explains their aggressiveness towards negotiations with the Soviet Union in the

1980s.67

A second common neo-conservative view is also on foreign policy: “A belief that American power has been and could be used for moral purposes, and that the United States needs to remain engaged in international affairs.”68 In other words, the United States has the moral obligation as the world’s leading democratic super power, to do ‘the right thing.’ The responsibility of ensuring global safety stretches from promoting democracy and other core American values to allied countries, to actively fighting communism of hostile regimes.

The third core view is “[a] skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice.”69 This can also be seen as a ‘light’ version of Wilsonianism. The ideal of

Woodrow Wilson was to create and promote democratically based peace by means of supranational organizations, such as the United Nations. Neo-

65 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 14. 66 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 67 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 46. 68 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 48. 69 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

21 conservatives, however, believe that only the United States can and should promote and protect liberal democracies. The second and third principles form the intellectual justification for US militarism.70 After all, in order to stay the dominant global superpower, one has to have the capacities to eliminate any potential threat.

The fourth and last point is “[a] distrust of ambitious social engineering projects.”71 Neo-conservatives saw massive state intervention as a bad idea, because the consequences are often unpredictable. According to the neo- conservatives, the consequences of social engineering are more than often too complex to take into account. The representation of this ‘evil’ method to control society and its economy was the Soviet Union. Neo-conservative critique of how

Stalinism disrupted Soviet society was often the main argument for this stance.72

The Neo-Conservative Ideology

The four abstract principles of Fukuyama mold the movement into a single definition that includes neoconservatives ranging from the 1930s until today.

This is the only description of neo-conservatism that covers the entire development of the movement from its start to contemporary ‘neocons.’

However, the timeframe of this dissertation ranges from 1982 until 1988. This means that there can also be looked outside the definition that only describes the core of the movement. Anti-communism, for instance, is not typical for the neo- conservative movement of the 1990s, while the intense hatred of communism

70 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 63. 71 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 72 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

22 and the Soviet Union in particular can be seen as fuel for the motor of the movement in the 1980s. This is illustrated by the lack of uniformity during the direct post-Cold War period in the 1990s.73

Another position that can be identified for defining the movement of the

1980s is a need to ‘cure’ the Vietnam syndrome. Neo-conservatives used the words ‘syndrome’ in its literal interpretation to describe “a group of signs or symptoms that collectively indicate or characterize a disease, a psychological disorder, or other abnormal condition.”74 The first generation of neo- conservatives supported the Vietnam War and was opposed to any form of opposition to the war in the 1960s.75 They formed as it were, an anti-anti-war movement. After the humiliating retreat from Vietnam, the post-Vietnam war period of détente triggered the Scoop Jackson Democrat neo-conservatives to split up from the left. Their notion was that the United States should not be sitting in the corner licking its wounds, but should rather reassert their global military leadership. They wanted to ‘cure’ the Vietnam syndrome with domestic progressive policies and muscular anti-communist policies abroad.76 Other positions commonly attributed to ‘neocons’ of the 1980s include anti-leftist liberalism, militarism, and a can-do proactive attitude.77

The neoconservative ideology thus consists of a center and a set of time bound political positions. The neoconservative frames used in the analysis of the character of Rambo include both Fukuyama’s four principles and the five

73 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 39. 74 Anderson, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War, 412. 75 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 18. 76 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 2. 77 See Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana , Maria Ryan, Neoconservatism and the New American Century, and Justin Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters.”

23 political positions typical for neo-conservatism in the 1980s as listed above.

Chapter 2 will now continue with the analysis of First Blood (1982).

24 Chapter 2: First Blood

The character Rambo was originally created by David Morrell in his 1972 novel

First Blood. The main character in the book, John J. Rambo, is a former Green

Beret and Vietnam War veteran who is hitchhiking through the town of Madison in Kentucky. The local sheriff thinks that the war veteran will only cause trouble in his little town and escorts Rambo out of Madison. When Rambo repeatedly returns to the town, sheriff Teasle decides to arrest him for vagrancy and resisting arrest. Rambo starts to have flashbacks to his time in a POW camp in

North Vietnam after being put in in a cold wet cell. When the police officers try to shave him, he snaps and forcibly escapes the police station. After killing several policemen and civilians, Rambo flees into the nearby mountains. This is the start of a massive manhunt that escalates as time progresses. By the end of the book,

Rambo has killed hundreds of policemen, civilians, and national guardsmen.

Colonel Trautmen, Rambo’s former commander in Vietnam, finally shoots

Rambo in the head after a near-lethal duel between Rambo and Teasle.

The rights of First Blood were sold in the same year as its publication to

Columbia Pictures, who later sold them to Warner Bros. The film adaptation of

First Blood came out ten years later in 1982, caused by a series of delays. After careful consideration, Sylvester Stallone was chosen for the personification of

Rambo. His portrayal of the disillusioned Vietnam War veteran was a huge box office success, while the film was originally negatively received by the critics.78

78 Janet Maslin, “Movie Review: First Blood (1982),” October 22, 1982, http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E0DE0DB143BF931A15753C1A964948 260.

25 Instead of copying the story of the book, the three screenwriters (Michael

Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone) chose to make a few significant adjustments to the story. Rambo was transformed from a sadistic antagonist to the protagonist of the story to which the audience can sympathize with. In contrast to the book, Stallone’s Rambo does not (directly) kill anyone and at one point even tries to defuse the situation. The violence against police officers, national guardsmen, and civilians is scaled down significantly to help create the feeling of sympathy for the, now more misunderstood than cruel, ex-Green Beret.

The mistreated hero is driven to the extreme and has to be put to a halt by his former commander, Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna). While Trautman kills Rambo in the novel, he is able to calm Rambo down and take him into custody in the film adaptation. This modification turned out to be a profitable one, considering the millions of dollars the sequels turned over in the same decade.

The Liberal Hero

The Rambo franchise has often been compared to pro-military and Right Wing political views. For example, Kellner puts Rambo as a representation of conservative ideology by highlighting his militarism and his aversion towards bureaucracy, state regulations, and the ‘governmental machine’ in general.79

Another example is the analysis of social scientist Susan Jeffords, who states that

First Blood can be seen as a reflection of conservative views on the realist

79 Kellner, Media Culture, 65.

26 policies of the 1970s.80 The weak police force, amateurism in the National Guard, and the negative image of society in general are in this view the result of the

‘weakened’ years of the Carter presidency. But when the film is compared to neo- conservatism, it also shows multiple contradictions to the political ideology.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, foreign policy is an important element in defining neo-conservative ideology. The story, however, takes place exclusively in a domestic environment. From the beginning to the end, the camera stays within the boundaries of the small town Hope, with the exception of three flashbacks to a POW camp in North Vietnam. The themes of the film, including the struggles of returning Vietnam War veterans and police brutality, also represent domestic issues rather than foreign policies.

The four principles introduced by Fukuyama do not seem to fit the actions and representations of the character Rambo in First Blood. When excluding the principles that solely cover foreign policy, only the aversion towards social engineering and social welfare programs is left. This is because this fourth principle of neo-conservatism covers both foreign policy and domestic policies.

But in First Blood, this principle also seems to be missing as a political frame in the movie.

Rambo illustrates the struggles of returning Vietnam War veterans with their reintegration into American society. The aversion of society towards veterans becomes clear in the attitude of the police force against Rambo. Sheriff

Teasle illustrates this in his first dialogue with Rambo: “You know, wearing that flag on your jacket, looking the way you do... You're asking for trouble around

80 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers University Press, 1994), 32.

27 here, friend […] we don’t want guys like you in this town.”81 Another example that illustrates the difficulty of reintegration can be found in the last dramatic monologue by the wounded and broken Rambo: “Back there I can fly a gun ship, I can drive a tank, I was in charge of a million dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!”82

In this view, the film represents the result of neglecting and harassing war veterans to the point where they feel they have lost all connection with society.

Rambo formulates this by saying: “there are no friendly civilians.”83 His emotional last monologue followed by a firm embrace with his former commander, illustrates his need for affection and understanding. From this perspective, the film promotes rather than discredits social welfare and affirmative action programs, aimed at preventing discrimination and injustice towards the ‘weak.’

The Conservative Hero

So in what ways does First Blood frame neo-conservative ideals? Although the film does not reflect Fukuyama’s requirements for the movement as a whole, the

Hollywood production does include several frames that are often associated with the neo-conservative movement. First of all, there is the criticism towards leftist liberalism. Although the film definitely is not pro-Vietnam war, it is fairly critical to the ones who protested against it. In his last dramatic monologue, Rambo tells

Colonel Trautman that anti-war protesters were first in line in scapegoating the

81 Ted Kotcheff, First Blood, Action, Thriller, 1982. 82 Kotcheff, First Blood. 83 Kotcheff, First Blood.

28 Vietnam War veterans for all the misery of the war: “Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport protesting me, spitting, calling me baby killer and all that vile crap! Who are they to protest me?”84 In a 2002 television interview, Sylvester Stallone recalls that one of the purposes of the film was to raise awareness of the mistreatment of war veterans by anti-war protesters: “The message was that we shouldn’t be so hard on, you know, the bearer of bad news. These people were just doing their job.”85

Another example of this is the criticism of Democratic leftist foreign policies of the 1970s. In her book Hard Bodies, Jeffords argues that this is visible in the depiction of masculinity and that the bodies of protagonists and antagonists can frame political messages.86 Jeffords links the representation of so-called ‘hard bodies’ with the political rhetoric used by Reagan during his presidential campaign and first term in office. In this perspective, the ’soft bodies,’ portrayed by the police officers and National Guardsmen, represent the legacy of the ‘weak years’ during the Carter administration.87 The National

Guardsmen are portrayed in a caricaturistic manner as amateurs, while the local police force is depicted as corrupt and incapable. Generally, all the authoritative characters of the movie are presented in a ‘weak’ manner. According to Jeffords, these ‘soft bodies’ can therefore be seen as representing disability to defend against outsiders.88 This was an argument also used by the Reagan administration to describe the ‘weak’ state of the defenses of the United States during the détente of the 1970s. Furthermore, the ‘hard body’ of Rambo

84 Kotcheff, First Blood. 85 Rambo First Blood Actors Interview, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZePH9o8w3ss&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 86 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 21. 87 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 32. 88 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 32.

29 represents the ideal image of the United States as a global superpower according to Reagan: resilient, masculine, dominant, and competent.89

An important note to this argument is that the body of Rambo is not indestructible in the movie. It is scarred, it bleeds, and it bruises, not to mention the weak emotional state of Rambo throughout the movie. But this does not necessarily mean that the argument is invalid. The scarring, bleeding, and bruising of the hero’s ‘hard body’ is overshadowed by his resilience. Although

Rambo’s body is scared from his ordeal in Vietnam, he does not seem to be affected by it physically. Furthermore, after falling a hundred meters of a cliff, being shot at, and being cut in the arm, Rambo takes five, patches himself up and moves on, hardly showing any signs of structural damage to his body.

Where in the novel Rambo had reached the point of no return or became

“non-refundable”90 as Stallone puts it, he was still ‘fixable’ at the end of the movie.

This attitude can also be found in the rhetoric of neo-conservatives towards curing the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ at the time. For example, Reagan formulates this attitude in a speech before Vietnam War veterans in 1980 as follows: “For too long, we have lived with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ […] It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.”91 Vaïsse describes this notion of resilience as “the preference for a can-do and proactive approach to fixing problems rather than managing them; the refusal to accept a normal, rather than exceptional,

America; [and] the restlessness vis-à-vis dependence on others.”92

89 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 32. 90 Rambo First Blood Actors Interview. 91 Ronald Reagan, “Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety” (Chicago, Illinois, August 18, 1980), http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/8.18.80.html. 92 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 10.

30 A third neo-conservative frame is the portrayal of anti-communism.

Although the North-Vietnamese soldiers93 who tortured Rambo are only visible in three short flashbacks, their negative portrayal is clearly visible. In the three scenes, which combined do not last longer than fifteen seconds, Rambo is reminded about the inhumane treatment he endured in the POW camp on the

Chinese border. The communist soldiers are depicted as ‘evil’ since they torture

Rambo, who at this point in the film is portrayed as the victim of both foreign and domestic abuse. In the flashback, the soldiers physically torture Rambo by cutting him and mentally by binding him and covering him in water, which is presumably mixed with feces. However, anti-communism is only the backdrop of the story, put there to remind the audience how Rambo became a broken super soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Intense anti- communism only becomes a central theme in the franchise in the sequels of First

Blood, as we will see in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

A last neo-conservative frame in the film is U.S. militarism. Rambo is introduced by Colonel Trautman as:

“an expert in guerilla warfare […] a man who's the best. With guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who was trained to ignore pain, ignore weather. To live off the land... to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. In Vietnam, his job was to dispose of enemy personnel, to kill... period. Win by attrition. Well, Rambo was the best!”94

The character is objectified as the ultimate war machine that unfortunately

“blew a gasket.”95 A common thought in neo-conservatism is that the United

States should have large military capacities and the political will to use them, in

93 The soldiers could also be Chinese, because movie does not specify their nationality and the setting is on the border between Vietnam and China. 94 Kotcheff, First Blood. 95 Kotcheff, First Blood.

31 order to retain global primacy.96 This form of militarism is portrayed in the movie by showing that Rambo is an expert on all military fronts. Not only is he an expert of guerilla warfare, he also knows how to handle high-tech equipment, such as a M60 machine gun, a gun ship, and a tank.97 In terms of capabilities,

Rambo is the personification of the ideal military machine. The political will to actually use the available military resources is showed by Rambo’s personal ‘war of attrition.’ An interesting parallel between the character and the actor (and screenwriter) is shown in a television interview on First Blood, in which Stallone states that he originally supported the Vietnam War and saw it turning into a war of attrition.98

Another parallel can be seen on the issue of who was to blame for the failure of the Vietnam War. In the interview Stallone states that the soldiers were mainly victims because “these people were just doing their job.”99 In the film the portrayal of the innocence of the military goes one step further by showing that even military leaders were just following orders. This is shown in Colonel

Trautman telling the Sheriff Teasle that “[i]n Vietnam you can bet that Rambo and I got pretty confused. But we had orders.”100

Rambo Light

All in all, First Blood does not seem to frame neo-conservatism on the surface.

This statement can be made because all the political frames shown in First Blood

96 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 5. 97 Kotcheff, First Blood. 98 Kotcheff, First Blood. 99 Rambo First Blood Actors Interview. 100 Kotcheff, First Blood.

32 were not exclusively neo-conservative. As explained in the previous chapter,

American conservative movements of the 1980s blended into a mixture of political perspectives that were difficult to distinguish. Anti-leftist liberalism, criticism of Democratic leftist foreign policies, the can-do resilient attitude, anti- communism, and militarism were ideals, which were shared at the time with traditional conservatism, small-government libertarianism, religious conservatism, and American nationalists, to name just a few. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this chapter is that the Hollywood production does not frame the four core principles of neo-conservatism, as presented by

Fukuyama. At the most, the film can be seen as framing conservative ideology of the 1980s.

The next two chapters will access if and how neo-conservatism is framed in the sequels of the series, namely Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo

III (1988). An important difference to keep in mind between First Blood and its sequels is that the story of the former was based on a book and the latter were not. This meant that the screenwriters, including Stallone, had more space to express themselves artistically, but also (although perhaps not intentionally) politically. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 will show that, in more than one way, First

Blood can be described as ‘Rambo light’ in comparison with its sequels.

33 Chapter 3: Returning To Vietnam At 0.72 Kills Per Minute

The movie First Blood (1982) became a box office success even though the critics initially responded mostly negative. For Stallone, this great success meant that he was now burdened with great responsibility for the character and the social and political messages it represented. In a 1985 interview he states that Rambo is based “very much on fact” and that Rambo could help to “develop more of a social conscience,” regarding the Vietnam veterans.101 The responsibility that

Stallone felt towards the character is shown by the development of Rambo: First

Blood Part II (1985). While the movie initially had two screenwriters, Sylvester

Stallone and James Cameron, Stallone ended up rewriting practically the whole script to his liking. Cameron later recalled his cooperation with Stallone on the film as follows: “I admire its success and I’m happy for everybody involved, but I always have to distance myself from it because it’s not the film I wrote. I wasn’t really vocal about it at the time, but it was substantially rewritten by Sylvester

Stallone.”102

The film is set a few years after the first Rambo film. It begins with a shot of the prison where Rambo ended up after his rampage in the small town of

Hope. He is greeted by Colonel Trautman, who offers him a chance to a presidential pardon in exchange for Rambo’s participation in a highly dangerous mission in Vietnam. The mission is to take photographs of former POW camps to ensure the Congress that there are no POW’s left in South East Asia. Rambo agrees to the mission and is brought to Thailand, which is where the

101 Sylvester Stallone on Entertainment Tonight - May 1985 - RAMBO II, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnq135VG9lQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 102 “James Cameron Interview: On His Own Movies,” Total Film, accessed June 2, 2014, http://www.totalfilm.com/features/james-cameron-interview-on-his-own-movies.

34 headquarters for the operation is located. He gets the clear instruction not to engage the enemy but Rambo being Rambo, ignores this instruction as soon as he finds out that there are in fact still living American soldiers being held in one of the camps. Rambo tries to help one POW by escorting him to a rendezvous point, but is instead betrayed by the CIA bureaucrat who is in charge of the mission: Marshal Murdock. Rambo is recaptured and taken back the camp to be tortured by both Vietnamese and Soviet officials. His local contact, a woman named Co-Bao, initiates his escape and on their way out Co gets killed. After he buries her in the jungle, Rambo goes on a killing spree yet again to have his revenge on his communist adversaries. Rambo finally rescues all the American soldiers that were kept in the camp and manages to kill the Soviet officials during a spectacular helicopter chase. Once back in Thailand Rambo confronts Murdock and forces him to promise to serve the nation by rescuing all the POW’s still left in South East Asia. In the last scene Rambo states that the main message he is trying to convey is that war veterans want “for our country to love us ... as much as WE love it.”103

The reception of the second Rambo movie in the summer of 1985 was comparable to the start of the original times two: the critics were even more negative, and the audiences even more positive. In the U.S. the film opened in its first week with a gross of $32,548,262 in a record-breaking 2074 theaters.104 By the end of the summer, the movie had earned its creators more than $150 million, making it one of the most popular movies of the 1980s.105

103 Cosmatos, Rambo. 104 Kellner, Media Culture, 70. 105 Kellner, Media Culture, 70.

35

Rambo As Foreign Policy

As we have seen in Chapter 1, neo-conservatism is mostly defined by common ideas on foreign policy. Whereas the first Rambo film mainly has a domestic setting, Rambo is mostly set in a foreign country, namely Vietnam. This makes the second Rambo movie more viable for comparison with Fukuyama’s four principles of the movement, since these principles are, for the most part, based on foreign policy. The first of these principles is the “belief that the internal character of regimes matters and that foreign policy must reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies.”106 This is the ideological element that sets capitalism apart from communism, good from evil, and, as we will see, Rambo from the antagonists. Furthermore, the comparison of the first pillar of

Fukuyama and Rambo consists of looking at the portrayal of Vietnamese society, its government, and its military, and the American liberal democratic values that

Rambo conveys.

The film describes that Vietnamese society has fallen prey to the evils of a totalitarian military regime. Co-Bao, following her father’s footsteps as a supporter of American values, describes the situation in Vietnam as follows:

“There's too much death here. Death everywhere. I just want to live, Rambo! […]

You take me with you?”107 The story also hints that the communist take-over in

Vietnam has led to anarchism with the display of drunken pirates who terrorize the local population.

106 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 107 Cosmatos, Rambo.

36 In this view, Rambo can be seen as the personification of American foreign policy. In the film, Rambo distrusts and eventually kills everyone who is not a supporter of liberal democracy, namely all pirates and almost all communists. What is interesting is the depiction of the ‘good’ part of Vietnamese society as feminine. Literally all Vietnamese male characters are portrayed as evil, while the female characters (two prostitutes and the guerilla fighter Co-Bao) are victimized and portrayed as being in distress. The masculine Rambo even agrees to take Co-Bao to America, perhaps to illustrate a way to relieve the feeling of guilt of leaving behind the Vietnamese supporters of the American cause after the hasty retreat from the war in the mid-1970s.

However, foreign actors are not the only evil forces that undermine the values of liberal democracies. Just as in its prequel, an American bureaucrat is also portrayed as one of the antagonists. CIA official Marshall Murdock is depicted as ‘evil’ because he is motivated by greed and is willing to let American soldiers die in order to achieve his goals. Besides being amoral, he also tries to undermine American democracy, by lying to Congress about the presence of

POW’s in Vietnam. Murdock portrays an imbalance in the separation of powers by hiding information from the legislative branch. The idea of ‘trias politica’ is one of the most foundational compartments of contemporary western democracies and is especially important in the political environment of the

United States. Its main purpose is to prevent abuse of power (that is tyranny), which is always high up on the American political agenda.

37 The Right Thing To Do

The second principle of Fukuyama consists of “[a] belief that American power has been and could be used for moral purposes, and that the United States needs to remain engaged in international affairs.”108If we stick with the idea that

Rambo is the personification of what the US foreign policy should look like according to neo-conservatives, then we see that this moral obligation to ‘do the right thing’ is a strong theme throughout the movie. Rambo is depicted as a

‘moral crusader’ from the start of the movie until the end in the decisions that he makes. For example, Rambo illustrates this in the opening scene by accepting the mission to risk his “expendable” life, for that of American soldiers who are still in the clutches of evil abroad.109

Furthermore, when the renewed super soldier discovers that the POW- camp still holds American soldiers, he feels the responsibility to free these men by any means. The responsibility to help the oppressed extends to the

Vietnamese supporters of American ideals, personified by Co-Bao in the film.

Rambo fulfills this responsibility through an ultra-violent manner and retaliates without mercy whenever he meets opposition. Reagan jokingly referred to

Rambo’s militaristic approach after the hostage crisis in Beirut on June 14, 1985 as follows: “Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time.”110

The paternal feeling of helping allies in need is also shown by Colonel

Trautman. The Colonel feels that he has a moral duty as an American to save the

108 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 48. 109 Cosmatos, Rambo. 110 Kellner, Media Culture, 70.

38 POW’s still left in Vietnam: “There's men down there! OUR men!”111 It can be said that if Rambo is the personification of US foreign policy, then Trautman is the personification of the US military. Just as in First Blood, Trautman is the only person that Rambo trusts during his mission. Trusting on military power to achieve foreign policy goals is an idea that is also common among neo- conservatives:

“Neoconservatives, like most Americans, from the beginning had a strong sense of the potentially moral uses of American power, which has been employed throughout the republic's history to fight tyranny and expand democracy around the world. But belief in the possibility of linking power and morality was transformed into a tremendous overemphasis on the role of power, specifically military power, as a means of achieving American national purposes.”112

The parallel between the responsibility that Rambo and Trautman feel towards allies who are being oppressed and the responsibility the neo-conservatives feel the United States should have towards their democratic allies is striking.

Furthermore, Rambo illustrates the ‘neocon’ idea that the retreat from Vietnam was a display of weakness and that this has to be compensated by the US by reasserting its place as a global dominant power.113 Rambo did this by returning to Vietnam and symbolically winning the war how it should have been won, while Reagan pursued it by supplying financial and military aid to ‘freedom fighters’ in a whole range of overseas conflicts.

111 Cosmatos, Rambo. 112 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 63. 113 Kellner, Media Culture, 74.

39 Above The Law

The third principle of Fukuyama is a “skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice.”114This aversion towards international law and its corresponding institutions (such as the United Nations Security Council) is clearly visible in the lack of references to them. Murdock and Trautman got orders from policymakers to set up an American covert reconnaissance mission in order to investigate the potential presence of American POW’s in North Vietnam. Consequently, the movie shows how the American intelligence agency and military handle the

POW/MIA issue, without any outside help.

The POW/MIA issue (also called the ‘live prisoners theory,’) is the idea that the governments of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were still holding

Americans after the war had ended. In the film, Murdock and Trautman were commissioned by Congress to send Rambo into North Vietnam in order to find out whether the POW/MIA myth holds any truth. By doing so, they clearly violate international law, as written in the Charter of the United Nations. Clause 4 in

Article 2 of the Charter states that “[a]ll members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”115 In the film, this is in no way portrayed as a negative act.

114 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 115 “Charter of the United Nations: Chapter I: Purposes and Principles,” accessed June 9, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml.

40 Truth be told, the film only justifies Rambo’s miniature war against his communist adversaries because the diplomatic alternatives had failed. Trautman makes a reference to diplomatic efforts to return American POW’s during the

Paris Peace Accords: “In '72, we were supposed to pay the Cong 4.5 billion in war reparations. We reneged, they kept the POWs.”116 Regardless of its possible discriminating connotations, this piece of dialogue describes a critique towards the Nixon administration and all other administrations afterwards for failing to get all POW’s back to the US peacefully.

Nonetheless, there is not a single reference in the movie to the Geneva

Conventions or the United Nations in relation to solving the POW/MIA issue. The film advocates national military capabilities, rather than international cooperation in order to resolve international issues. It represents an ‘if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself’ mentality. In this respect, CIA agent Murdock and Colonel Trautman illustrate the aversion towards international law and institutions, by setting up an American covert mission, rather than an international overt investigation.

The character of Rambo, on the other hand, takes the aversion towards international law and its institutions one step further. As discussed above, the fictional super soldier bases his decisions on morality, rather than rules of any kind. When Rambo is seen as the personification of foreign policy, then the movie frames the belief that American foreign policy should not be limited by laws and rules of (international) authoritative bureaucracies. In this view, foreign policy should only be based morality, in order to achieve either security or justice.

116 Cosmatos, Rambo.

41

Rambo 2.0

The fourth principle of neo-conservatism is the most abstract one, namely: “[a] distrust of ambitious social engineering projects.”117The film does not directly deal with issues of government intervention in American society or the economy, which means that Rambo cannot be seen as a movie that frames this principle on a domestic level. Consequently, the only way in which an aversion towards social engineering and social welfare programs is visible in the film is in the portrayal of anti-communism. Communism, in this respect, represents the ultimate neo- conservative fear of an intrusive government in both society and the economy. A distrust towards an invasive government can therefore be seen as a political frame in the film, in the intensity of anti-communism.

Where the antipathy towards communism was only visible in three flashbacks in the first movie, it dominates the story in the sequel. Communists

(including Vietnamese and Soviet soldiers) are depicted as emotionless sadists, who do not respect women and show no empathy towards their prisoners. The only three women in the story (two prostitutes and Co-Bao) are mistreated and sexually objectified by the Vietnamese male characters. Rambo, in contrast, looks at the girls with concern and is protective over the character Co-Bao.

Interestingly, the Soviet antagonists are the only characters besides

Rambo, who portrayed as having ‘hard bodies.’ The masculine depiction of communists is, however, in line with other movies at the time, such as Red Dawn

(1984) and Rocky IV (1985). Jeffords argues that this represents the contrast in

117 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

42 the preparation for an eventual war between the two superpowers: while

Americans were getting fat and weak, the Soviets were getting fit and strong.118Nonetheless, the audiences are guided to dislike the Soviets, because of their lack of emotion and empathy. The aversion towards communists is most apparent, however, in the massacre committed by Rambo. Where the super soldier had trouble to end the lives of National Guardmen, policemen and civilians on American soil, he has no problem with killing in Vietnam. If we count the accidental kill of police officer Galt in the first movie, then Rambo killed 58 times as many adversaries in the sequel (see figure 1).

Moreover, anti-communism is not the only element that has been increased. The display of militarism also matured in the second Rambo production. As in the analysis of First Blood, militarism is represented by masculinity, violence, and display of military equipment. In the sequel, Rambo is portrayed even more masculine than before, which is mostly emphasized by the removal of his shirt in the latter half of the movie. In the sequel, he seems to have transformed into an improved version of himself. One of the biggest differences with his former self is that he does not have any agonizing flashbacks and that his past does not seem to haunt him at all. Where Rambo ‘blew a gasket’ in the first movie, he returns in Rambo as the ultimate fighting machine who’s only weakness is his affection for his fellow (wo)men. His increased fitness is in line with his physical resilience, which is best described as indestructible. In First

Blood, Rambo got cold, fell from a cliff, got cut, got shot, and got attacked by rats, which all had effect on him over a long period of time. For example, after his fall from the cliff, he had to stitch his wound up and walk around with a limp arm for

118 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 38.

43 half the movie. In Vietnam, however, Rambo does not seem to be bothered by the attacks on his body. He gets beaten up, electrocuted, cut, burned, and strangled which do not have any lasting effects. Even the amount of scars on his torso has decreased, which perhaps can be seen as explaining the absence of his PTSD episodes.

The ‘new’ Rambo also makes use of a bigger array of military equipment including non-firearm weapons, handguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, machine guns, explosives, a rocket launcher, and even a Russian helicopter. In contrast to the first movie, the action hero uses these weapons to do what they were designed to do: to kill. In total Rambo kills 58 individuals, consisting of Vietnamese soldiers, Soviet officials, and Vietnamese pirates. All in all, in Rambo: First Blood Part II, John J. Rambo has become a better version of himself. In the sequel he has transformed from the broken Vietnam War veteran suffering from PTSD, to an indestructible action figure, with an even ‘harder body’ than before.

A Break With The Past

In contrast to the ‘hard body’ of Rambo, the body of American antagonist

Murdock is depicted as ‘soft:’

“Murdock sweats uncomfortably throughout the film, drinking imported Cokes and positioning himself in front of fans as protection against the climate of Vietnam. In this crucible that crystallized the hardened body of a John Rambo, Marshall Murdock's body is shown to be out of place, ineffective, and weak, in other words, soft.”119

119 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 37.

44 According to Jeffords, Murdock represents Reagan’s rhetoric about the weak state of the United States, just as Sherrif Teasle was in First Blood.120 But the difference is that the ‘soft body antagonist’ from the first movie represents the weak state of the US before Reagan took office, while it represents in the second movie it represents domestic weakness after Reagan took office. This is because the story of the former took place just after Reagan’s inauguration and was released in 1982, while the latter is set in 1985, the same year the film was released.

However, this does not necessarily mean that the ‘soft body’ is a critique of Reagan’s administration. On the contrary, Reagan himself also referred to the weakening of American society. Jeffords argues that Reagan successfully established a domestic threat that was the “equivalent to the ‘foreign terrorist,’” which is the weakening of ‘the American.’121Masculinity (or the lack of it in other characters) in Rambo II can therefore not longer be seen as a criticism of the détente period of the 1970s, but rather as a critique of US society in 1985. Yet, criticism towards leftist liberalism is still shown in the Hollywood production by the firm belief in national capacities on the global stage, over international cooperation (as explained above).

Finally, one of the most used arguments by media critics for ‘accusing’

Rambo as representing (neo-)conservative or right winged ideology, is that it supposedly symbolizes winning the Vietnam War, and thusly helps to ‘cure’ the

Vietnam Syndrome.122 It can be said that the story suggests that the war could have been won without the interference of bureaucrats and indecisive politicians.

120 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 34. 121 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 38. 122 Kellner, Media Culture, 28.

45 First Blood already hinted towards this argument, with Rambo screaming: “I did everything I had to do to win, but someone wouldn't let us win.”123In Rambo this message is extended by both the dialogue and the storyline.

The beginning of the movie presents a can-do proactive attitude towards abandoning the feeling of defeat after the Vietnam War when Rambo asks his former commander: “Sir? Do we get to win this time?” To which Trautman replies: “This time, it's up to you...”124Within a few hours upon his arrival in

Vietnam Rambo manages to complete his mission by rescuing a POW and bringing him to the rendezvous point. Murdock then prevents Rambo from finishing the mission because of his deeper political intentions:

Murdock: “Who the hell do you think you're talkin' to, Trautman?” Trautman: “a stinking bureaucrat who's tryin' to cover his ass.”125

In the end, Rambo is able to determine whether there were POW’s left in

Vietnam and rescue them, all by ignoring the orders he got from the governmental bureaucracies.

123 Kotcheff, First Blood. 124 Cosmatos, Rambo. 125 Cosmatos, Rambo.

46 Chapter 4: War In Times Of Peace

On May 25, 1985, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was in fact the first in this position to have been born after the revolution. Gorbachev inherited a whole array of economical, political, and social issues, which he was determined to overcome. Economical setbacks that the Soviet Union had to endure in the mid-

1980s included low oil prices, low- and high-level corruption, and general inefficiency of the economy. Growing social unrest in the Soviet Union urged

Gorbachev to initiate drastic economic, ideological, and political reforms. One of the worst nuclear disasters in human history, in what is now Ukraine, did not help to improve the situation. In this climate, Gorbachev initiated a stream of political and ideological reforms.126 Gorbachev’s reasoning was that the union had to be reformed politically and ideologically, before any economical reforms could be implemented.127 After all, he needed the approval of the Politburo for his policies.

These policies were called Glasnost, meaning ‘openness,’128 and

Perestroika, meaning ‘restructuring.’129An unforeseen consequence of the restructuring policies was that they only further exposed the already existing social, political, and economical issues in the USSR. The corresponding tensions did not wane until the dissolution of the communist union in 1991. In these last years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Reagan administration

126 Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty- First Century, 3rd Edition edition (London: Penguin, 2009), 451. 127 Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, 451. 128 Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, 448. 129 Robert W. Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 93.

47 abandoned their aggressive stance towards their rival, which initiated a period of rapprochement between the two superpowers.130One of the many decisions made by Gorbachev that deescalated the tensions between the USSR and the US, was the withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Afghanistan on May 15, 1988.

Rambo III was released on May 25, 1988, only ten days after the first

Soviet forces started to leave Afghanistan. The film, written by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich, was the most expensive production in Hollywood history at the time, with an estimated production cost of $63 million. Domestically, the movie did not earn back its production cost, with a gross of less than $54 million.

(source) Suggested explanations for low revenues for the third Rambo movie, mostly include the contrast between American foreign politics of the late 1980s and the intense anti-communist message of Rambo III.

The story continued where Rambo left off, with Rambo trying to make a living in Thailand. While working for a Buddhist monastery, Rambo is visited by

Colonel Trautman who asks Rambo to help him on a resupply mission for

Mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan. Trautman tries to convince Rambo that this is the right thing to do, by showing him several pictures of Afghan civilians suffering from Soviet oppression. Rambo refuses because he does not feel the suggested Soviet genocide is part of his war and that any effort would be energy wasted, referring to the Vietnam War: “Do you really think we can make a difference? … It didn't before.”131Trautman leaves for Afghanistan without

Rambo and gets captured by Soviet forces. When Rambo gets word that his

130 Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, 466. 131 Peter MacDonald, Rambo III, Action, Adventure, Thriller, 1988.

48 former commander was captured by the Soviet Union, he decides to set aside his pacifism and go on a covert mission to rescue him.

Rambo arrives in a small Afghan town named Khost and immediately bonds with the Mujahedin. After an airstrike attack on their position, the super soldier and two rebels infiltrate the Soviet base and try to rescue Trautman.

After a failed team-effort attempt, Rambo tries it again the next morning, this time being on his own. The second time around he is able to rescue the Colonel, just before he was supposed to be tortured by Soviet Colonel Zaysen and his right-hand man, Kourov. In their escape, Rambo and Trautman easily kill a

Spetsnaz special forces team and Kourov, before being stopped by a large military force. When Rambo decides to fight the army, which includes tanks and an attack helicopter, the Mujahedin show up to help their American ‘friends.’ In a climactic ending, Rambo crashes a tank into the helicopter of Colonel Zaysen, practically ending the fight. After saying goodbye to the Afghan rebels, Rambo decides to leave for home.132

Screenwriter and actor Sylvester Stallone stated after the release of the film that he wanted to portray the situation in Afghanistan as realistically as possible:

“I wanted to make this Rambo, because it’s a very serious and true situation in the world, that’s going on. And it’s a very political situation. And I thought that it’s a story that should be told, and it’s very realistic. And I don’t want Rambo to [portray] what is not realistic, I want something that’s very truthful.“133

But in contrast to the relaxed tensions between the USSR and the US, the film showed a direct confrontation between the two countries. The film contrasted

132 MacDonald, Rambo III. 133 SYLVESTER STALLONE....video Rare Rambo 3, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu2QxY3Ifmg&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

49 the rapprochement policies of Gorbachev and Reagan and instead showed a

‘heating up’ of the Cold War. Therefore, the movie cannot be seen in line with the foreign policy of the Reagan administration in 1988.

In a television interview, Stallone stated that making a political statement in film, is as important as providing entertainment: “If you can make a statement and also entertain… that’s the most important thing for me.”134 But, this statement surely did not reflect the foreign policy of the Reagan administration in 1988. Namely because the violence and aggression towards the Soviet Union in the film contrasted the pragmatic policies of the Reagan administration.

Consequently the question now becomes: if Rambo III does not follow the ideology of Reagan, then to what extend does it still reflect neo-conservative ideology?

The Insignificance Of Democracy

The story is set, just as its predecessor’s, outside of the United States, mostly in enemy territory. The previous Chapter explained how Fukuyama’s first principle of neo-conservatism, namely “belief that the internal character of regimes matters and that foreign policy must reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies,”135 paralleled the portrayal of American liberal democratic values that Rambo conveys and the image of Vietnamese society, its government, and its military. Although Vietnam in 1985 and Afghanistan in 1988 both had pro-Soviet governments, Stallone chose this time to focus on the opposition of

134 Sylvester Stallone - RAMBO III - Interview 1988 - Sub ITA, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJowxoQMQ64&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 135 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

50 the local government, rather than on its supporters as was done in Rambo II. In fact, the only Afghan supporter of the pro-Soviet (communist) Democratic

Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) who is visible in the entire movie is the shop assistant from the beginning of the story.

Interestingly, the Mujahedin are depicted in a positive manner, while they certainly do not represent “the deepest values of liberal democratic societies.”136 After all, the term ‘Mujahedin’ is used by Muslims to describe a

“struggle in the path of Allah against non-Muslim forces,”137 a description that does not bring to mind American values such as freedom of religion and equality, to name just two.

And yet the support of foreign ‘un American’ militant forces can be seen as being in line with the ideals of many neo-conservatives at the time. Similar to the foreign policy of Reagan in the 1980s, the film illustrates a US foreign policy that supports the Afghan Mujahedin with financial and military aid. President

Reagan, who is often seen as a neo-conservative138, filled this ideological gap with his most prominent political stance: anti-communism. To the pragmatic

Reagan, the anti-communist character of these ‘freedom fighters’ (whether the

Nigaraguan Contra’s or the Afghan Mujahedin) weighed against their lack of democratic values or even respect for human rights.139The contrast in ideology must have been clear for Reagan at the time, since he tried to brush away the seemingly incompatible alliance with the display of the Mujahedin at the White

House. In a speech to the nation, he assured the public that supporting them was

136 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 137 M. Y. Zaki and N. U. Shedenova, “The Social Changes of Women Status in Afghanistan.” 1 (2014): 101. 138 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 45. 139 Chester Pach, “The Reagan Doctrine: Principle, Pragmatism, and Policy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 1, 2006): 76.

51 a moral duty for the United States because "these gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers."140

The justifying of the contrasting ideologies and even cultures can also be seen in Rambo III. The common goal of defeating the communists stands central in the film and is the main bonding element between Rambo and the Mujahedin.

Furthermore, the film does not contain a single reference to the Islam and the

Afghan people refer to religious deity as ‘God’ instead of ‘Allah:’ “May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghans."141The result is that American audiences can sympathize easier with the Afghan characters, than when the cultural gap would have been too great.

The Antidote For Fifty Enemies Is One Friend

Rambo bases his judgment in Rambo III on morality, just as in the previous movies. His decisions are emotionally motivated, rather than rationally. This is reflected by his choice to go to Afghanistan only after he finds out that his mentor and only friend, Colonel Trautman, is being held captive as a POW by the

Soviets there. Again, Rambo’s decision to lend the military his expertise is based on him ‘doing the right thing.’

However, the photographs that were showed to Rambo before, which contained graphical images of the (fictional) Soviet genocide in the Middle-

Eastern country, did not convince him to get involved in the war. Only after he

140 Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 768. 141 MacDonald, Rambo III.

52 finds out that a personal friend is in serious peril, does he have enough motivation to go to Afghanistan. Therefore, Fukuyama’s second principle of neo- conservatism, the “belief that American power has been and could be used for moral purposes, and that the United States needs to remain engaged in international affairs,”142 seems to be based on issues that directly influence

Rambo, rather than far-flung events.

To be fair, once the action hero interacts with the local militias and civilians he does show that he is motivated by humanitarian reasons as well. This is illustrated in a scene where Rambo witnesses the Soviet violence against civilians first hand. One of the main Mujahedin warriors, a man called Massoud, tells Rambo: “Have you not seen enough death? Go! Go while you can! This isn't your war!" to which Rambo briefly replies: “It is now.”143

In spite of the build up of sympathy for the Afghan cause, it can be said that the main message of he film is protecting American lives, rather than saving

Afghan lives. This is illustrated by the ending, in which the fighting stops abruptly and Rambo tells his ‘new friends’ and his semi-adopted Afghan orphan that he “gotta go.”144 This quick departure, seen together with Rambo’s initial rejection to stop the genocide in Afghanistan, illustrates that Rambo is willing to die in order to save the life of his (American) friend, while saving Afghan civilians seems to be of secondary importance.

When seen together, his essential and inessential motivations form a

‘personal war,’ based on emotion. While in the beginning of the film, Rambo is depicted as a calm and friendly giant, he shows the audience another side of

142 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 48. 143 MacDonald, Rambo III. 144 MacDonald, Rambo III.

53 himself when the metaphorical ‘personal war button’ is pressed. Then, a perfect killing machine wakes up from his slumber to kill everyone and everything that even smells like a bad guy. In conclusion, Rambo, as the personification of

America’s foreign policy, does portray a belief in Rambo III that US power should be based on morality and “that the United States needs to remain engaged in international affairs,”145 but only if there is a very good reason to do so.

Winning The Cold War With Stinger Missiles

In continuance of the other two Rambo films, Rambo III does not contain any direct references to international law and its institutions. The international community is only mentioned twice in the movie. The first is in a piece of dialogue between the Mujahedin and Rambo. When Rambo asks the ‘freedom fighters’ for their help, they reply by saying that they would will give Rambo what he needs in exchange for international recognition of their troubles: “So, my friend, what we must do is to stop this killing of our women and children. If getting [Trautman] free, so he can tells to the free world, and tell what happens here, is necessary then of course we will help.”146The second is during a conversation between Trautman and Colonel Zaysen, in which Trautman accuses the Soviet Union of lying to the international community: “You talk peace and disarmament to the world, and here you are, wiping out a race of people.”147Besides these two references, the film does not mention international law and its institutions as a capable global authority, which can intervene in

145 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 48. 146 MacDonald, Rambo III. 147 MacDonald, Rambo III.

54 foreign issues such as genocide. Instead, the film portrays the capabilities and might of the United States as a global police force.

Overall the film portrays the same ‘if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself’ mentality as its predecessor. In line with the Reagan administration, the film explains that the US has been aiding the Mujahedin in order to counter the Soviet oppression. The setting is nine years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the story portrays a message that the anti-communist

‘freedom fighters’ are winning with the help of the US: “after nine years of fighting, the Afghan Forces are now getting their Stinger missiles, and are now beginning to hold their own against the Air-Strikes.”148 Since Stinger missiles are produced in the United States and were only used by Americans and their NATO allies at the time, this piece of dialogue from Trautman reveals that the United

States are responsible for the progress of the rebels. As a result, the film shows that the only successful way to counter the Soviet oppression in Afghanistan is by utilizing American military power.

Renewed McCarthyism

Chapter 3 explained that the fourth principle of neo-conservatism, “[a] distrust of ambitious social engineering projects,”149 can be difficult to link to a political frame in a movie because of its abstract nature. Similar to Rambo II, the third movie in the franchise does not show any domestic policies or references to them. In order to analyze if the fourth principle of neo-conservatism is present in

148 MacDonald, Rambo III. 149 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

55 the form of a political frame, there will also be looked at communism as the representative of an aversion towards social engineering projects. Therefore there will be looked at the depiction of communists in the movie and the intensity of anti-communism in Rambo III. And in the movie from 1988, there is plenty of anti-communism to look at..

In Rambo III, anti-communism is shown with a different character than in its predecessors. A significant break with the stories of the other two films can be found in the fact that Rambo does not encounter American resistance to his personal mission. Moreover, Rambo gets the green light to set up a rescue mission to his liking, within six sentences of pitching the idea of leaving. The disappearance of the American antagonist means that the Soviet Union is left as the only ‘bad guy’ in the film. In First Blood and Rambo II, both the communist forces and an American bureaucrat tried to prevent the protagonist from reaching its goal. That way, the movie provides the audience with an image of what is wrong with American society. However, in the third movie of the Rambo franchise, the screenwriters have abandoned this critique of American society to replace it with only one message: communism has ‘gotta go.’

Interestingly, the appearance of the Soviet soldiers in the franchise changed in the third movie. In the 1988 film, the Soviet soldiers are depicted with a much thicker accent than they were in the 1985 production. But the theatrical enthusiasm of Marc de Jonge, the actor who articulated the role of

Colonel Zaysen, is in line with other action films at the time. Linguist Lippi-Green argues that these emphasized accents have a function for the audience. She states that “film often uses language variations and accent to draw characters quickly, building on established preconceived notions associated with specific

56 regional loyalties, ethnic, racial or economic alliances.“150 In the film this means that the Russians are linguistically discriminated against, which helps to portray them as the ‘other.’

Besides the thickened accent, anti-communism in the film is portrayed in a similar manner as in the previous Rambo film. Communists are depicted as brutal and sadistic torturers, who did not pay attention at the shooting range practice during their basic combat training. In the film Colonel Trautman has a particular distaste of the Soviet Union: “over two million civilians, mostly peasants, farmers and their families, have been systematically slaughtered by invading Russian armies. Every new weapon, including chemical warfare, has been used to eliminate these people.”151 Trautman also sees an opportunity to directly confront Colonel Zaysen with the evils of communism, during his own interrogation: “The Kremlin's got a hell of a sense of humor […] You talk peace and disarmament to the world, and here you are, wiping out a race of people.”152

Another continuance in the depiction of the Soviet military personnel is the ‘hard bodies’ of most of the soldiers (Zaysen excluded) and the Spetsnaz commando’s. As in Rambo II, the main Soviet antagonist has a very muscular henchman that follows his every move. In both the second and the third movie,

Rambo ends up in a close combat fistfight with the representation of communist perfection. Rambo, as expected, prevails from the emotionless bulk of muscle because he is on the ‘good’ side.

150 Rosina Lippi-Green, “Teaching Children How to Discriminate: What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf.,” in English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (London: Routledge, n.d.), 81. 151 MacDonald, Rambo III. 152 MacDonald, Rambo III.

57 Rambo 2.5

In Rambo III the masculinity of Rambo takes on comical proportions. The first hour of the movie seems to be no more than a warming up for the killing spree that follows when Rambo takes off his shirt. The exposing of Stallone’s tanned muscular torso is the starting signal for a display of American triumph. Where he

‘only’ killed 33 enemies with his shirt on, he wipes out an incredible 45 adversaries with his shirt off. Similar to his adventure in Vietnam in the second movie, the personification of a one-man army does not seem to be showing any faults from that point on. After he patches up a massive gaping wound with nothing more than gunpowder, he gets rid of his shirt to reveal a body that

“could make Arnie Schwarzenegger wince.”153 Later, he takes out a fully trained

Spetsnaz commando team without much effort before taking on a whole Soviet high tech armed force.

The amount of violence in the production, which is by far the highest of the three films, illustrates the emphasis on militarism in the movie. For Rambo, as Stallone explains in a television interview, “war is natural [and] peace is an accident.”154The character Rambo makes the discovery in the story that he cannot escape his urge to go to war. And although he does display his skills in guerilla warfare, as is shown in the scene where he kills off the Soviet commando’s, he seem to have a preference for using high tech military equipment. Rambo uses a wide arrange of military weapons, probably to avoid

153 Candice Russell, “`Rambo III` Pyrotechnics Overpower Emotion,” May 25, 1988, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988-05-25/features/8802010121_1_afghanistan- trautman-rambo-iii. 154 Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone about Politics, Movies, Etc.

58 repetition from a Hollywood perspective, to achieve his goals. Moreover, when

Rambo positions himself in a Soviet tank, in what is possibly one of the most iconic scenes of the movie, he presents the audience with one of his main characteristics: Rambo is indestructible.

As in Rambo II, Rambo is an improved version of himself compared to his mental and physical state in First Blood. Besides some temporary physical obstacles, he portrays an image of a very fit war machine, which does not struggle to differentiate good from bad. He emits a belief that a strong military, which is prepared to use its capabilities aggressively, is necessary to achieve victory in foreign conflicts. This attitude, however, is not shared by the foreign policy of Reagan in 1988.

Three Years Too Late And Too Soon

While Stallone has said that he personally loved Reagan155, their ideas of dealing with the communist threat of the Soviet Union could not be further apart in ’88.

Reagan saw that the Gorbachev was compromising towards the United States, in order to renew the relations between the two superpowers. Although Reagan had openly called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” multiple times in the

1980s,156 he knew that it was time to compromise as well when the opportunity presented itself in the second half of the decade. This policy of rapprochement, however, is nowhere to be found in Rambo III.

155 Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone about Politics, Movies, Etc. 156 Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 268.

59 In the film, the Soviet military states that the USSR wants to “achieve a complete victory” in the war in Afghanistan.157 But only weeks before the release of the film, the choice to portray the Soviets as stubborn aggressors seemed poorly timed. The reason for this was that the film contrasted the political developments at the time surrounding the Cold War. The renewed détente formed a huge box office problem for Rambo III, since its main themes included the heating up of the cold war, which did not reflect the actual ‘cooling down’ period of rapprochement.158 This might also explain the disappointing turnout of audiences in the United States. The story would have been much more accurate to the global political environment, if it had been released in 1985.

Interestingly, if looked at from another perspective, the film seemed to be three years ahead of its time. The theme of ‘curing the Vietnam Syndrome’ is forcibly implemented in the story and takes up much of Trautman’s dialogue.

The Colonel speaks of coming “full circle”159 in order to get rid of the sticky tentacles of the Vietnam War that haunt John Rambo from the moment he left

Vietnam. Trautman explains that the only way to ‘come full circle’ is for Rambo to reassert his dominance once more:

Trautman: “When you're gonna come full circle?” Rambo: “What are you talkin' about?” Trautman: “You said that your war is over. I think the one out there is, but not the one inside you. I know the reasons you're here, John. But it doesn't work that way. You may try, but you can't get away from what you really are.” Rambo: “And what is it I am?” Trautman: “A full-blooded combat soldier.”160

157 MacDonald, Rambo III. 158 Kellner, Media Culture, 83. 159 MacDonald, Rambo III. 160 MacDonald, Rambo III.

60 In other words: reasserting global dominance through militarism is the answer for getting rid of the mental trauma of the Vietnam War. The same kind of rhetoric can be found in a victory speech, given by George H.W. Bush after the

Gulf War in 1991. Bush was the first President after the Vietnam War, who claimed to have ‘come full circle,’ by exclaiming the following announcement: “By

God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"161

Furthermore, Rambo III implies something much more than just beating the Vietnam Syndrome. It suggests that the US has learned something from the war and that they now know how to prevent it in the future. This is explained in the following monologue of Trautman:

“You know there won't be a victory. Everyday, your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed, poorly equipped freedom-fighters! The fact is that you underestimated your competition. If you studied your History, you'd know this people never gave up to anyone. They'd rather die than be slaves to an invading army. You can't defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam! Now you're gonna have yours!”162

And with that statement, the burden of a never-ending war trauma is passed on to the Soviets to deal with.

161 Walter LaFeber, “An End to Which Cold War?,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (January 1, 1992): 62. 162 MacDonald, Rambo III.

61 Conclusion

This dissertation began with the presentation of a problem regarding possible political connotations of the Rambo franchise. Scholars and journalists often associate Rambo with neo-conservatism, even though Stallone calls the character of Rambo “politically agnostic.”163 Discussions so far about the connection between Rambo and neo-conservatism lack any substantial research on political frames in the Rambo franchise of the 1980s. Therefore, the goal of this dissertation was to find out to what extend the character of Rambo frames neo- conservative ideology in the American motion pictures First Blood (1982),

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III (1988).

This analysis is relevant because Rambo can have real consequences in

American politics, in the sense that the content of film can deepen our understanding of people, ideas, and problems in everyday life.164 The franchise, as part of popular culture, can influence audiences through political frames as explained by professor of Cinema Studies Ed Guerrero.165 These frames are in turn also a product of society because “commercial film [can also be seen as] a reflection of a large part of American political culture.”166

However, defining neo-conservatism forms a significant obstacle for the analysis, because of the intangible nature of the concept. Neo-conservatism is such a difficult concept to define because there have been multiple generations of neo-conservatives, with each their own characteristics and ideals, and politicians and intellectuals associated to the movement are never indisputably

163 Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone about Politics, Movies, Etc. 164 Franklin, Politics and Film, 6. 165 Green, “Review of Framing Blackness,” 47. 166 Franklin, Politics and Film, 9.

62 members of the neocon movement. The latter is a problem because some neo- conservatives are self-proclaimed members, while others are attributed to the movement without their approval.

In order to solve these two problems, the analysis is based on the idea that neo-conservatism has a nucleus, namely the four principles which are presented by Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama, and that this core can be supplemented with characteristics that are often attributed to the second generation of neo-conservatives. The four principles of Fukuyama, which are mostly based on foreign policy, are: (1) “[a] belief that the internal character of regimes matters and that foreign policy must reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies;”167 (2) “[a] belief that American power has been and could be used for moral purposes, and that the United States needs to remain engaged in international affairs;”168 (3) “[a] skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice;”169and (4) “[a] distrust of ambitious social engineering projects.”170

Furthermore, the supplementary characteristics of neo-conservatism of the

1980s are anti-communism, militarism, an aversion of leftist-liberalism, and a need to ‘cure’ the Vietnam syndrome in American society.

Although the Rambo franchise has often been put in relation to neo- conservatism, First Blood appears to be the exception to the rule. Only one of the four principles can be seen in the movie, namely a distrust of ambitious social engineering projects, because of its domestic setting and lack of references to

167 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 168 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 48. 169 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 170 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

63 American foreign policy. But in contrast to protesting ambitious government intervention, the film rather emits a message that American society and government should help Vietnam War veterans because they have great difficulty reintegrating into American society. In this view, Rambo can be seen as containing a frame that American society and government should change to prevent discrimination and injustice towards the ‘weaker.’ In short, the movie does not frame the four principles of Fukuyama.

However, this cinematic critique of American society and its government, does include several supplementary characteristics of neo-conservatism of the

1980s. Criticism of Democratic leftist foreign policies of the 1970s, for example, is shown in the portrayal of the ‘soft bodies’ of the police officers and the

National Guardsmen, in contrast to the masculine ‘hard body’ of Rambo. In this view Rambo represents how a superior military force can hurt the United States, when it is weak and unprepared. The film frames a criticism towards the leftist realist policies of détente in the 1970s, and offers an alternative in the form of

Rambo. The masculine hero is portrayed as resilient, masculine, dominant, and competent, which made it possible to do so much damage to his adversaries who were weaker on all fronts.

Another neo-conservative characteristic that is clearly shown in First

Blood is militarism. The film presents Rambo as an expert of guerilla warfare, who can handle himself in any situation. The character is objectified as the ultimate war machine that unfortunately “blew a gasket.”171The film, and in fact the whole franchise, clearly frame the common ideal among neo-conservatives of

171 Kotcheff, First Blood.

64 the 1980s that the United States should have large military capacities and the political will to use them, in order to retain global primacy.172

The supplementary characteristics of the movement in the 1980s are shown to a greater extend in the two Rambo sequels. For example, what is less visible in First Blood, but all the more in Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, are the intense anti-communism and the need to ‘cure’ the Vietnam Syndrome. In the two sequels, Rambo is portrayed as an improved version of himself. A one- man army that sets out a single personal goal, accomplishes that goal in a short amount of time, and comes home afterwards without any psychological baggage.

The second Rambo production, which is set and released in 1985, can be seen in line with a whole series of ‘return to Vietnam’ films, in which the hero makes up for the losses of the Vietnam War, by accomplishing his mission in the story.

In Rambo II, communists are presented as one of the two main adversaries of the story, the other being an American bureaucrat. In contrast to the first movie, Rambo actually kills (many) communists, while sparing the life of the American antagonist. While the antipathy towards communism was only visible in three flashbacks in the first movie, it dominates the story in the sequels.

In both sequels, communists are depicted as emotionless sadists, who cause nothing but chaos and destruction to their environment.

The main henchmen of the Soviet leaders in both films are also portrayed with ‘hard bodies,’ which reflect the fitness of the Soviet Union as the enemy superpower. The American antagonist in Rambo II, Marshal Murdock, is shown to have an unfit body in contrast to Rambo and the Soviets. Based upon the analysis of masculinity by social scientist Susan Jeffords, it can be said that the

172 Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” 5.

65 portrayed masculinity represents the contrast in the preparation for an eventual war between the two superpowers. The masculinity of Rambo can therefore be seen as the example of how the United States should prepare themselves for such a eventuality: resilient, masculine, dominant, and competent.

In Rambo III, the screenwriters (including Stallone) let go of the weak state of the United States by portraying Americans as unanimous and strong.

Furthermore, in the third film of the series communism is left as the only adversary and the Soviet soldiers are consequently portrayed as a caricature of themselves, to create a greater distance between them and the audience. This also means that the third Rambo film does not frame anti-leftist liberalism through the depiction of ‘soft (American) bodies.’ All in all, the film is more a praise for conservative ideals, than a critique of the political Left.

While Rambo II deals with the ‘curing’ of the Vietnam syndrome by returning to ground zero and showing how the war could have been won, Rambo

III emits a message that the syndrome is already a thing of the past. The story explains that Rambo has gone ‘full circle’ by breaking down in the first movie, facing his fears in the second movie, and moving on in the third. An important message that the two films show is that the psychological trauma of the Vietnam

War in American society can be overcome by a can-do proactive attitude towards abandoning the feeling of defeat after the war.

The main difference in the depiction of militarism between First Blood and the two other Rambo movies of the 1980s is that it grows with every new movie in the series. With each movie Rambo gets hold of more and more military equipment, which also causes each sequel to include an increasing amount of violence. Rambo undergoes a transformation from an emotionally weak and

66 broken war veteran to a super soldier on steroids. In comparison to First Blood, in which he kills only one policeman by accident, Rambo is a real killing machine in the next two movies with 58 on screen kills in Rambo II and 78 kills in Rambo

III. But in all three films, Rambo is portrayed as an indestructible force, which emits a belief that a strong military, which is prepared to use its capabilities aggressively, is necessary to achieve victory in foreign conflicts.

What is most important, besides the supplementary characteristics of neo-conservatism of the 1980s, is that both Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo

III reflect the four main principles of neo-conservatism. The first principle, “[a] belief that the internal character of regimes matters and that foreign policy must reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies,” 173 is visible in the two sequels, if Rambo is seen as the personification of American foreign policy. This principle is the ideological element that sets capitalism apart from communism, good from evil, and Rambo from his enemies. In both films, this principle is visible through the glorification of Rambo and his ‘American values,’ which stand in contrast to the ‘un-American’ values of his foreign adversaries. Interestingly enough, Rambo finds a loophole for supporting the Mujahedin, eventhough their ideals are everything but American. Rambo weighs the anti-communism of the

Afghan ‘freedom fighters’ against the fact that they do not support American ideals (such as freedom of religion), and concludes that anti-communism is worth compromising ideologically for.

The second principle, the “belief that American power has been and could be used for moral purposes, and that the United States needs to remain engaged

173 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

67 in international affairs,”174 is most apparent in the two productions. If the character Rambo is seen as the personification of what the US foreign policy should look like according to neo-conservatives, then we see that this moral obligation to ‘do the right thing’ is a strong theme throughout the movies. Rambo illustrates this by to risk his “expendable” life for moral purposes abroad. At one point in the movies the mission transforms into a ‘personal war’ for Rambo, after which the use of military power is justified, as long as it is based on morality. In

Rambo II this turning point is the death of Co-Bao, while it is the witnessing of the Soviet genocide in Rambo III.

The third principle of neo-conservatism, namely “[a] skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice,”175 can be found to a lesser extend in the films of 1985 and 1988. The aversion towards international law and its corresponding institutions (such as the United Nations Security Council) is only slightly visible in the absence of references to them and the promotion of American force. The international community is mentioned in Rambo III, but only as a justification for

American intervention in Afghanistan. The movies represent an ‘if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself’ mentality towards intervening in foreign affairs. In both cases the motivation to do so is derived from the violations made towards human rights, by communists.

The fourth neo-conservative principle, [a] distrust of ambitious social engineering projects,”176 is difficult to attribute to the Rambo franchise because of its abstract nature. Unlike First Blood, the two sequels do not show or

174 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 48. 175 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49. 176 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 49.

68 reference any form of domestic government intervention. But the aversion towards social engineering and social welfare programs can be seen in the form of communism, which represents the ultimate neo-conservative fear of an intrusive government in both society and the economy. And anti-communism, as stated above, is indeed very apparent in Rambo II and Rambo III.

In conclusion, the Rambo franchise includes a significant amount of neo- conservative frames, but the amount and intensity varies per film. First Blood can better be described as a film that includes conservative frames, rather than neo- conservative ones, since it lacks the four principles of neo-conservatism as presented by Fukuyama. The supplementary characteristics of neo-conservatism that are visible are shared with other conservative movements at the time, which means that the film cannot be seen as a reflection of neo-conservative ideals.

After all, every eagle is a bird, but not every bird is an eagle.

The films Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III can be seen as emitting neo-conservative ideals, although none fit the all principles and characteristics perfectly. Besides the four principles of neo-conservatism, the two Rambo sequels also reflect most of the supplementary characteristics of neo- conservatism of the 1980s to a significant level. When put together, the two main messages of the two films are the battle against the weakening of American society and anti-communism.

It would be too much of a stretch to say that the Rambo franchise influenced the behavior of all its audiences with neo-conservative propaganda. It can, however, be said that the neo-conservative undertone of the Rambo series

‘activated’ and then reinforced certain neo-conservative biases, preferences, and

69 behaviors in viewers who already agreed with these ideals.177 But most of all, as

Franklin explains in his book Politics and Film, does the series reflect a large part

American society at the time. Audiences love to see entertainment that is in line with their own political ideas and in the case of this franchise; it was the politics of Sly.

177 Franklin, Politics and Film, 169.

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73 Illustrations

Figure 1

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