How ‘Rambo’ Mirrors the Changing Face of American Masculinity ~ Digital Library

It’s rare to find a film franchise that has revolved around a single actor for nearly forty years, but Sylvester Stallone has pulled it off twice. This week sees the release of Rambo: Last Blood, the fifth film in the series. US Army veteran John Rambo has been through tremendous changes in the 37 years since First Blood was released, and rewatching all of the movies gave us an interesting perspective on how film reflects and shapes culture.

Because there’s a lot to learn from Rambo (behind all of the bloody firefights and neck snapping), let’s take a journey through the franchise and examine what each one tells us about America’s men and wars.

First Blood

The initial outing for John Rambo is a very curious film, especially in light of what would come after it. Seven years after his discharge from the Army, Rambo travels to a small Washington town to visit a former Army buddy. When he gets to the ironically named Hope, Washington, he butts heads with the town’s sheriff, who books him on vagrancy charges. After cops abusing him in jail brings on Vietnam flashbacks, Rambo breaks out and fights the cops and the National Guard until his former mentor, Colonel Trautman, is brought in to try and talk him down. The movie ends with explosions and Rambo stopping himself before he murders the sheriff. At the end of the film, John Rambo is taken into custody, bruised but unbowed, sobbing in the arms of his mentor.

Although the film didn’t hit cinemas until 1980, David Morrell wrote the original novel over a decade earlier. It was inspired by stories he heard from his students coming back from Vietnam. He sold the film rights in 1972 and it took nearly a decade to produce the final product. In that time, a lot changed in American masculinity.

The end of the Vietnam war in 1975 drastically rearranged our perception of ourselves on the world stage. We didn’t return from Asia as conquering heroes – instead, men came back from the jungle haunted, scarred, unable to re-integrate into society. That’s the angle that feminist scholar Susan Faludi takes to examine the film in her book Stiffed, where she sees Rambo as a son looking for a father.

In Morrell’s novel, John Rambo kills a bunch of cops, full stop. The only police death in the movie is an accident. The book also ends with Rambo’s death, as he’s shot in the head by Trautman after killing the sheriff. Director Ted Kotcheff actually filmed that ending, but as he was consulting with Stallone the star’s populist sentiment won out and John Rambo lived to fight another day. That day would come sooner than either man would think.

Rambo: First Blood Part 2

A mere three years later, the second Rambo film would codify the action hero’s place in the American dialogue by sanding off his trauma, inflating his pecs and sending him back into the jungle that made him. After being imprisoned for several years, Rambo is sent to Vietnam to investigate reports of prisoners of war still being held there. He’s ordered to just take photographs and get out, but naturally once he’s on the ground Rambo just has to get involved and it isn’t long before he learns that the Soviets are in there arming the Vietnamese and forcing him to fight the Vietnam war over again — and win it this time.

Where the original First Blood was a tragedy, the sequel is a fantasy. John Rambo sheds his survivor’s guilt and PTSD to slaughter a bunch of Reds and then return to the States to lay into the cowards in Congress who sent him. This would become the Rambo of stereotype — an oiled-up, implacable soldier of true justice, morally pure and impossibly muscular.

The visual presentation of John Rambo himself would bear this out. In the first movie, Rambo is a man of normal size, usually clad in a green Army jacket, an improvised tunic, or worse a sleeveless T-shirt. Three years later, he’s swollen to absurd proportions, shirtless, each muscle on his torso standing out in stark swole relief. Even his weapons are larger than life — the lone soldier yanks a massive M60E3 machine gun off of a helicopter mount and uses it to shoot up a prison camp.

His influence would go all the way to the top — after the Beirut hostage crisis of 1985, President Reagan famously commented “After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time this happens.” Stallone’s soldier was now aspirational. We all wanted to be big and kill bad guys without flinching.

This would be the Rambo that wound up on animated cartoons and Nintendo games, and the slide into caricature would only get worse.

Rambo III

1988 marked the third installment of series with the deeply jingoistic gorefest Rambo III. When Trautman is captured on a mission to provide weaponry to Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, the one-man army John Rambo heads to the Middle East to blast away as many Commies as he can — 115 on-screen kills in total, making it the most murder-heavy movie of its era. Rambo now lives in a Tibetan monastery until he’s pulled back into action. Once he gets to Afghanistan, he’s denied help from the rebels and has to pull the “one-man army” routine once more.

Just a few weeks into filming, Stallone fired director Russell Mulcahy, replacing him with Peter MacDonald who had done some second unit work on the last film. It shows in the final product, which is incoherent and empty-feeling despite some pretty nice horse sequences. It didn’t perform nearly as well at the box office, either, as audiences were pretty action-saturated. While Rambo was the breakout muscle star of the decade, by 88 he’d been joined by movies like Robocop and Lethal Weapon that offered more intelligent, nuanced takes on the genre.

The timing for Rambo III‘s anti-Commie slaughter also couldn’t have been worse. Blasting Reds was box office mojo during the early part of the decade, but in 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev was transforming the U.S.S.R, softening its stance towards the West and opening it up to the world. By this point, Rambo was looking more like parody, and that depiction would continue through the next decade. 1993’s Hot Shots Part Deux features an extensive Rambo spoof sequence, complete with on-screen kill count and video game sound effects.

Rambo

It’s not surprising that John Rambo kept out of sight for the entirety of the 1990s. The popular culture of the Clinton years was primarily occupied by a very different approach towards masculinity. Blind patriotism wasn’t cool anymore, as the indie subculture had people questioning authority all over the place. Think of one of the decade’s most successful TV dramas, The X-Files, which both posited a country not worth trusting and a male lead who didn’t traffic in bulging biceps and hails of bullets.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, though, reawakened our thirst for bloody revenge on people who don’t look like us. Stallone himself directed 2008’s Rambo, and it remains one of the most interesting installments in the series. By this point, America had been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for years, and public sentiment was starting to turn pretty strongly against the conflict. So Stallone quite wisely stays out of the desert of the last movie and returns John Rambo to Southeast Asia.

This time around, though, Rambo is inserted in a conflict that the United States was explicitly never part of. And the carnage in this movie is very different. Sean T. Collins’ brilliant essay in Thrillist captures exactly why it feels so unusual: in the first three movies, Rambo moved with animal grace through his environments, using stealth and tactics to pick foes off. In Rambo, he dispenses with all of that. The lithe young soldier has become an immovable rock, and the movie’s climax sees him brutally shoot down foes with a Jeep-mounted machine gun, their bodies exploding into fountains of gore.

Rambo has become a monster, and the movie is in some way aware of it. It’s fascinating that this comes at a point in history where “toxic masculinity” was beginning to creep into the discourse, as men actively examined the social and cultural pressures upon them to behave a certain way. Rambo, the 80s avatar of manhood, was a perfect test case for the corrosive effects of that emotionless violence. But the most recent film would take those lessons and apply them to a very different world.

Rambo: Last Blood

11 years later, Stallone returned for another outing as John Rambo, and the most recent Rambo film is very telling in how it captures the concerns of American manhood. Rambo has relocated to the country’s latest battleground – the border with Mexico, which many politicians of a certain stripe are arguing is the most dangerous place on Earth because of the “bad people” coming across it.

In a post-Trump world, Rambo doesn’t want to dabble in foreign intervention anymore. Instead, the film stays close to home. Rambo has inherited property in Arizona and just wants to live there in peace, until a young woman he knows gets nabbed by the Mexican cartel and he has to once again kill a bunch of people to get her back. They follow him home, illegally crossing the border, and he slaughters them all, defending his home against brown-skinned invaders finally on American soil.

The first movie presented Rambo as a fragile soul capable of incredible violence, haunted by what he’d done and seen. That’s completely gone in 2019. Rambo – and Stallone – have hardened, calcified, into implacable lumps of death-dealing. Although there’s ostensibly a rescue mission motivating the new film, you get the sense that Rambo would have been called into action without the kidnapped girl. She’s just an excuse to start the murder gears turning.

Critical response to Last Blood has been scathing, with the flick currently hovering around 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. Particular ire is directed at the film’s stereotyped portrayal of Mexico as a cartel-ruled hellhole of lawless violence. The films have always engaged in “othering” of their enemies, but this one feels different in a culture where we’re seeing Mexican and South American people dehumanized and locked up in cages already. Rambo’s expression of bloody dominance already comes off as uncomfortable and sort of embarrassing.

Stallone has mentioned he wants to continue the Rambo series into more films, but it’s tough to think about where the character can go from here. Who will be the easily-demonized villains of the next few decades of American life that people will pay to see reduced into a bloody mist by machine gun fire? Or will we enter another decade where overt violence is seen as something to be avoided, not celebrated?

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