The Imperial Warrior in Hollywood: Rambo and Beyond

Carl BoggsNational University, Los Angeles

Tom PollardNational University, San Diego

Abstract The Bush years have witnessed the elevated militarization of American society,marked by expansion of the war economy and security state, an aggressive foreign policy,increasing incidents of civic violence, and a media culture saturated more than ever withimages and narratives of violence. The trends we identified in our book, The HollywoodWar Machine, have only deepened and show no signs of receding. The most successful andwidely-viewed films of 2007–2008, including several Oscar candidates, embrace darkimages of savage, often relentless violence, graphic depictions of killing, and celebrations ofsocial chaos. We argue that these trends, reflected in the ongoing interventions in Iraq andAfghanistan, have dramatically influenced the national psyche. Here we devote specialattention to two recent films that embellish strong patriotic and pro-military themes whilereaching mass audiences with messages that champion US imperial power: Rambo IV, aparticularly bloody recycling of the familiar 1980s Rambo episodes, and Charlie Wilson’sWar, a cinematic tale about well-intentioned US global designs in Afghanistan during the1980s. Looking at the four Rambo films as an ensemble, it would be difficult to find awarrior hero better exemplifying the virtues of American military action than SylvesterStallone, superseding even the legendary John Wayne. This motif converges with yetanother—transforming Vietnam into another “good war”—that has shaped an entire cycleof Hollywood films, up to the present, dealing with the Vietnam War.

Aside from intensifying economic crises and social decay, the President GeorgeW. Bush years have witnessed an elevated militarization of both the political andpopular culture, marked by escalating incidents of civic violence, rapid expansionof the Pentagon war machine, an aggressively imperialistic foreign policy, and amedia increasingly saturated with images and narratives of violence. The trendswe identified in our book The Hollywood War Machine have only deepened, andthey show no signs of receding.1 The markers are rather difficult to miss: twocontinuous, bloody wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, stepped-up “waron terrorism,” threats of a US armed attack on Iran, nuclear buildup, and growingsecurity-state power at a time of recurrent domestic mass killings, sustained highlevels of crime, accelerating instances of hate crimes, and a sprawling prison–industrial complex. Nothing here will surprise anyone vaguely familiar with a

1 Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine (Boulder: Paradigm Press,2006).

New Political Science,Volume 30, Number 4, December 2008

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/08/040565-14 q 2008 Caucus for a New Political ScienceDOI: 10.1080/07393140802486260

disintegrating American social and political scene. After all, by 2007 the US wasspending roughly $600 billion annually to feed its Pentagon colossus, not countinghundreds of billions (possibly trillions) more on the Iraq debacle—expendituresreaching nearly three-fifths of the world total and dwarfing such competitors asRussia (all of $21 billion), China ($81 billion), and North Korea (a menacing$5 billion).2 To maintain its unchallenged military supremacy, the Pentagon hasestablished ten unified command structures covering most of the planet. Since nocountry or empire in world history has even approached this scope of militarypower, it would be astonishing if the ideological apparatus did not operatenonstop to invest that power with maximum domestic popular support, in theabsence of which the burdensome risks and costs of war (and preparation for war)would surely be rejected by the general population. Lacking much in the way ofa state propaganda network in the US, these ideological functions inevitablybecome the province of the corporate media and popular culture.

As might be expected, therefore, the militarized culture we analyzed in TheHollywood War Machine—transmitted not only through movies but related faresuch as video games and TV—is today even more deeply entrenched in the socialorder. Is it a stark coincidence that the most successful and widely viewed films of2007–2008, including many Oscar candidates, embrace dark images of savage,often relentless violence, graphic depictions of killing, and celebrations of socialchaos against familiar narrative backdrops of hatred, betrayal, and revenge.Movies like No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, American Gangster, andMichael Clayton celebrate a violence that simultaneously reflects and influences thepopular Zeitgeist, the very dialectic we emphasized in our book. Commenting onthe 2008 Academy Awards, Patrick Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times,observed that “the fallout from the war in Iraq seems to have inspired a new waveof violence-tinged films.”3 Of course Iraq is just the latest US military venture toinfluence the national psyche in this manner. Hollywood cinema, today as in thepast, provides an enormous public forum within which politics and culturereadily converge.

The Hollywood war machine has itself moved into full gear over the pastseveral years, capitalizing on the post-9/11 American sense of a wounded,vengeful, but still very imperialistic nation prepared to set the world straight.A few cinematic examples will suffice here. Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave(2007) tells the story of four courageous American soldiers at the end of their Iraqtours of duty, sent on one final humanitarian mission to a remote Iraqi village. Theunit is ambushed, taking heavy losses—part of a narrative showing how well-intentioned US troops are suddenly torn from good deeds by a scheming, ruthlessenemy. In Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007), we encounter a team of US governmentagents sent to investigate the terrorist bombing of an American facility in Riyadh,Saudi Arabia, where frenzied attempts are made to locate and flush out Arabmadmen from their underground cells. In a final battle between good guys andbad guys at the entrance to a hideout, it is the good guys (led by FBI agents) whoprevail against difficult odds. Jesse Johnson’s The Last Sentinel (2007) depicts agroup of super-soldiers, highly-skilled warriors, assigned to protect “civilization”

2 Ana Marte and Winslow T. Wheeler, “The US Military: By the Numbers,” DefenseMonitor 36:6 (November–December 2007), p. 8.

3Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2008.

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against swarms of devious villains, although in this saga the heroes must dependon electronic advantages to ensure success. In Terminator-style action the goodwarriors learn to think and behave like machines for what will be the epic struggleto save the human race. In Henry Crum’s Crash Point (2006) a Strike Force teamfaces off against terrorists who have stolen a Ground Control Encoder that allowssomeone to hijack a plane by remote control. The (Muslim) terrorists plan to crasha jetliner into a secret US military intelligence base in Southeast Asia. The StrikeForce unit must locate and destroy the encoder to foil the terrorists and, in theprocess, avert a new world war. They manage to succeed. Peter Travis’ box-officehit Vantage Point (2008) depicts the assassination of a US president attending (whatelse?) a global war on terrorism summit in Spain. With the evildoers mercilesslyattacking the very citadel of American power, the crowd goes into shock and panicas the drama unfolds repeatedly from different angles. This Manicheistic narrativewas heavily promoted as a cinematic message alerting the American people tonew threats against the global order by seemingly omnipresent evil forces. In LiveFree or Die Hard (2007), Len Wiseman brings to screen a reprise of the Die Hardpictures starring Bruce Willis as New York City police detective John McClane,here taking on (and defeating) a group of sinister high-tech terrorists ready to hackinto and bring down US computer systems.

In our book we explored ultrapatriotic warrior motifs that transcend thecombat genre as such—a pattern fully visible today. In The Hunting Party (2007),directed by Richard Shepard, we have a documentary-style movie based on fourreporters’ search for an at-large war criminal in Bosnia, where they hunt down agroup of Serb outlaws, those same “ethnic cleansers” whom 79 days of US/NATOaerial bombardments in spring 1999 was meant to neutralize. Advertised heavilyby the US State Department as the “story of a lifetime,” the film ends as three ofthe journalists, anxious for revenge, locate a Serb war criminal and decide to inflicttheir own brand of justice on the spot. This formulaic plot takes us to a setting (theBalkans) where US and NATO geopolitical interests were challenged by the badguys, in this case barbaric Serbs. Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) focuseson the terror, death, and chaos following the 9/11 attacks, turning the ultimatenational catastrophe into an uplifting moment of heroism and patriotism. Stone’spicture, in which the erstwhile critic of US militarism turns into a cheerleader ofAmerican power, won effusive praise from both mainstream and rightwingpundits.

In the popular film Transformers (2007), Michael Bay revisits his fascinationwith technowar in a movie depicting combat between opposing robotic forces, thenoble and heroic Autobats versus the evil Decepticons, the latter repelled as theyassault a US military base in Qatar. A big, loud, violent film that grossed over $700million worldwide, Transformers quickly found its way into another profitablecombat video game. Rescue Dawn (2007) was released as Werner Herzog’scinematic tribute to US fighter pilots shot down on a mission over Laos during theVietnam War—a recycling of Behind Enemy Lines where the narrative centers onbrave US military personnel taken prisoner by an enemy, in this case the facelessand brutal Vietnamese. Similarly, Tony Bill’s Flyboys (2006) traces the adventuresof American fighter pilots (the first in history) as they align with the Frenchmilitary to defeat the Germans during World War I. While these pictures oftendeal only peripherally with military combat, they embellish familiar militaristicthemes: male heroism, battlefield camaraderie, superpatriotism, violent struggle

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of good against evil, noble US objectives, and glorification of high-tech warfare.The impact of these films has overwhelmed that of some important recentmovies—for example, Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007), Brian De Palma’sRedacted (2007), and Robert Redford’s Lambs for Lions (2007)—generally regardedas “antiwar” in that they depict particular US policies and actions in a negativelight. As well-crafted and powerful as such films might be, however, they areusually limited in one of two ways: either preponderant focus on the home front(as with the bulk of antiwar movies dealing with Vietnam), or a tendency toembrace the basic goodness of American policies and intentions. Similarly, DavidO. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), basically a caper picture set in Iraq, set forth anirreverent narrative but never questioned the efficacy of Desert Storm.

Two recent films deserve special attention for their embrace of strong pro-military themes and their capacity to reach large audiences with messagescelebrating US imperial power: Rambo IV (2008), referred to simply as Rambo,directed by the iconic Sylvester Stallone himself, and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007),directed by the stalwart Mike Nichols. Revisiting the three original Rambo pictures(1982, 1985, 1988), it would be hard to find a warrior hero better exemplifying thevirtues of American military action, superseding even the legendary John Wayne.The Rambo-inspired films are designed to evoke pride in and identification withthe US military, blaming defeat (in the case of Vietnam) on a series of bureaucraticobstacles and leadership mistakes, singling out liberals, antiwar protesters, anunpatriotic media, and civilian decision-makers as sources of failure and evenbetrayal. A valiant armed intervention against evil Communists was simplyrobbed of victory that Americans had every right to win. Within the framework ofthe “Vietnam Syndrome,” the idea that US defeat could result from a powerfulmovement of nationalists defending their homeland was (and is) apparentlyunthinkable. A central ideological function of the Rambo phenomenon has been toperpetuate this peculiar American mythology.

The original Rambo tagline read “STALLONE: This time he’s fighting for hislife.” Ted Kotchef adapted David Morrell’s popular novel about Vietnam veteranJohn Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), an elite Green Beret fighter and CongressionalMedal of Honor recipient who turns into a killing machine who can never adjustto post-war civilian life. Unable to hold a job, a depressed Rambo drifts from placeto place, eventually winding up at the town of Hope, Washington where he meetsa hard-ass sheriff who hates Rambo’s scruffy appearance and forces him out oftown, whereupon Rambo returns and is quickly arrested. Angered by horrible jailtreatment that includes beatings, Rambo escapes to the mountains where hefurther hones survival and warrior skills. At this point the vengeful former soldiersets out to prove the accuracy of a prediction by his Vietnam commanding officer,Col. Samuel Trautman (Richard Crenna) that Rambo will develop the capacity todestroy any and all forces standing in his way. Rambo disables cops and even aNational Guard detachment sent to apprehend him, one-by-one, using the sameguerrilla tactics employed by the Vietnamese. Within this cinematic discourseRambo emerges both as forgotten national hero and as the mythical misunder-stood vet who turns fate around by relying on lessons taken from the hated enemy.

In the second installment Stallone returns to Vietnam at the urging of Col.Trautman, hoping to locate and rescue American MIAs held at scattered hiddenprisons. Rambo breaks into one of the prisons and rescues a POW. Upon Rambo’sreturn Trautman asks pointedly “what do you want to do? Start the war again?

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Bomb Hanoi?” To ostensibly protect the Vietnamese government and perpetuatethe fiction that MIAs do not exist, Trautman allows Rambo to be captured and sentto a prison where he is tortured by Vietnamese and Soviet captors—an experiencethat transforms Rambo, once freed, into a one-man army ready to fight endlesswaves of enemy forces almost singlehandedly. He commandeers a Soviethelicopter to free the MIAs and transport them to Thailand. Granted a Presidentialpardon for past crimes, Rambo now settles into well-deserved retirement in themore serene enclave in Thailand.

Released in 1988, the third episode of Rambo, directed by Peter McDonald,carried the marketing line “The first was for himself. The second was for hiscountry. This time it’s for his friend.” In this predictable sequel, Rambo is foundamongst a group of Buddhist monks, where longtime mentor Col. Trautmanpersuades him to help smuggle hand-held missiles to the Afghan Mujahedeenbattling Soviet forces for control of the war-torn country. At first Rambo refuses,but then joins the combat after learning that the Soviets had captured Trautman,quickly morphing into a one-man rescue mission. Here as usual the Sovietmilitary is roundly demonized—no difficult feat—as barbaric killers prepared to“wipe out an entire race of people,” with troops shown bayoneting pregnantwomen and throwing babies into fires. Working under cover, Rambo infiltrates theprison holding Trautman and frees him along with several Afghan prisonersbeing tortured by the Soviets. Rambo and Trautman flee, with Soviet troops in hotpursuit and ready to dispose of the troublesome Americans once and for all. Atthat moment Mujahedeen fighters miraculously appear on the scene, destroy theSoviet forces, and free Rambo along with his mentor. At this moment we are givena scenario in which Rambo finally “gets to win this time,” a belated recognition ofthe heroic imperial warrior.

Turning to the 2008 version of Rambo, the battlefield scene is again Vietnam(“Burma” representing an obvious stand-in), which the film strives to embellish asa “good war” that audiences will realize was a perfect opportunity to finally rollback the Communist menace. Rambo does return to Hollywood after a longhiatus, still ready to take on all enemies as he maneuvers through a minefield ofbureaucrats, liberals, and weak patriots needing a lesson in masculine warriorpolitics. The renovated Rambo works to rescue Burmese medical personnel in themidst of civil war, where he takes on villains so barbaric that nothing less than all-out ruthless violence will suffice. Rambo is more than up to the task, killing withrelentless and often creative brutality. A more cartoonish figure than ever, Ramboretains his cinematic status as mythological hero, American to the core, whoseefficacy (and appeal) requires that he bring continuous death and destruction toforeign evildoers.

The cinematic tagline of the new Rambo reads “Heroes never die . . . They justreload.” Here Rambo, still in peaceful Thailand, rents his jungle boat to a group ofChristian missionaries led by Michael Burnett (Paul Schutze) and Sarah Miller(Julie Benz) planning to assist the Karen people of Burma (Myanmar) whom thefilm incorrectly portrays as uniformly Christian. (In fact they are equally devotedto Buddhism and Animism as well as Christianity.) River pirates commandeer theboat and demand that Rambo hand over Sarah for their sexual pleasure; of courseRambo refuses, killing the pirates and then explaining the pirates would haveraped Sarah 50 times and beheaded everyone afterward. Once the missionariesarrive at their destination, they are raided by the Burmese military during which

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a sadistic Major Pa Tee Tint orders his soldiers to pillage and burn everything insight and murder the inhabitants, sparing just a few missionaries to be latertortured. Thai officials hire mercenaries to rescue the Americans, persuadingRambo to ferry them to the site, where Rambo is able to put his awesome militaryexpertise to work—much-needed, of course, given the heinous character of theBurmese troops. The situation is so fraught with horrific violence that New YorkTimes critic A. O. Scott is moved to write that these villains “make the Vietcong inthe second Rambo movie look like paintball-slinging weekend warriors.”4 Thebloodbath that follows is predicable and formulaic enough.

The fourth Rambo film enjoyed stupendous box-office success, especiallyamongst boys, young males, and even older men often heard cheering everyblood-soaked scene. In his review of the movie, critic Peter Rainer writes: “I sawthe film on its opening night in a mostly filled theater where every splatter wasgreeted with whoops . . . When his [Stallone’s] scowl hit the screen, the audienceswent wild, knowing that carnage could not be very far away.”5 The audiences hadplenty of opportunities, no question. No fewer than 236 human beings werebrutally killed in this Rambo (or 2.59 per minute of footage), compared withmeasly totals of 69 and 132 for episodes two and three. In one of the great moviecelebrations of militarized violence ever, human beings are bombed, blasted,stabbed, shot, blown up by grenades, incinerated by fire or flamethrowers,bludgeoned, stomped, beaten, beheaded, and tossed out of aircraft. Rambo alonekills 83 of the bad guys, perhaps short of a record but surely enough to uphold hisreputation as “the beast.” Some cynical observers have commented that Rambomight well have returned in the nick of time, calculating that he is the one warriorpersona able to deliver victory out of defeat in the latest catastrophic Americanimperial venture, Iraq.

Turning to Charlie Wilson’s War, we find a somewhat more nuanced, thoughstill unmistakable, rendering of well-intentioned US global designs in anotherstrategic area—this time Afghanistan, where in the 1980s the CIA gave massiveaid to Mujahedeen rebels fighting Soviet troops. Based roughly on true events,Nichols’ film depicts a maverick Texas congressman, Wilson, as he boldly flauntspolitical and bureaucratic obstacles to provide covert support for the “freedomfighters.” In this saga Wilson (Tom Hanks) works diligently and resourcefully toboost secret Mujahedeen funding from $5 million to $500 million, mostly bytrading favors with key congressmen. Wilson is depicted as a cocaine-sniffingHouston socialite inspired by patriotic frenzy and an obsession with rolling backthe Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Assisted by CIA operative Gust Avakos(Philip Seymour Hoffman), he throws himself into reversing the battlefieldcalculus as the supposedly invincible Soviet military ends up crushed by rag-taglocal militias suddenly transformed by their acquisition of high-tech weaponry.Nichols’ film makes the case that Mujahedeen victory fully depended on theheroics of Wilson and Avakos. Yet the film has little to say about what happened inAfghanistan once the fighting ended—that is, about the historical conditionsgiving rise to the Taliban and al Qaeda. While the narrative does reveal Americanoperatives dealing with fascists, tyrants, and drug-traffickers in their Cold-War

4New York Times, January 25, 2008.5Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2008.

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fixation on bringing down the Soviet regime, it also radically distorts history—andsimply omits essential context—where it really matters.

Charlie Wilson’s War presents the Mujahedeen as idealistic fighters for all that isgood and just in the world, as saviors of human freedom when in fact it was thesesame fighters—forerunners of the Taliban and al Qaeda—who upheld, then as now,a virulent jihadic fascism. The Mujahedeen were in fact championed by the US for noother reason than that they opposed Communist power. The problem is that the filmobscures this troubling historical connection, while the presumed beacons of libertywere shown as childlike in their innocence and helplessness (only to be rescued byUS largesse). Nichols frames his story, entirely consistent with Pentagon and CIAmythology, around the fiction that US intervention serves admirably to “liberate”backward peoples looking for just the right political tutelage and economic aid. Andwe see American personnel in the field working for humanitarian goals, while thebrutal Soviets are shown deliberately blowing away retreating Afghan civilians. Theoperation naturally depends on the tenacity of a few good Americans working,almost Rambo-style, to overcome one hurdle after another in the fight to dispose ofthe Soviet villains. The legacy of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” however, has turned rathersour as Afghanistan today remains occupied by another power (the US) and hasdegenerated into a cauldron of warlordism, chaos, drug-trafficking, and violence—asequel totally ignored by Nichols’ film.

As Hollywood film culture further descends into an ethos of violence andmilitarism, its exploits have often been superseded by the highly profitable video-game industry, roughly 70% of which market combat and action/adventureformulas that appeal to teenage boys and young men who buy millions of gamesyearly. A survey of ultraviolent video products just since 2005 would require fartoo much space here. Some of the most popular include: “Frontlines: Fuel of War”(2008), by THQ; “Medal of Honor: Vanguard” (2007), by Electronic Arts; “Call ofDuty: Modern Warfare” (2007), by Activision; “SOCOM Combined Assault”(2006), by Sony; “SOCOM 3: US Navy Seals” (2006), by Sony; “Mercenaries:Playground of Destruction” (2006), by LucasArts; “Medal of Honor: Airborne”(2007), by Electronic Arts; “Full-Spectrum Warrior” (2006), by THQ; and “SplinterCell: Double Agent” (2006), by Ubisoft. Many cinematic war spectacles have beenturned into video games, often with Pentagon assistance, as in the case of the 2008Rambo movie. The same patriotic and militaristic themes prevail today as before—one difference being that new technology allows for more realistic and“interactive” battlefields, which can serve as an even more powerful mechanismfor instilling warrior virtues in American youth.

As the militarization of media culture proceeds—keeping pace with trends inthe larger society and foreign policy—some observers manage to take everythingin their stride, implicitly recognizing the centrality of violence to Americanhistory. Others, like the neoconservatives, might be expected to cheer suchdevelopments while also preaching the virtues of peace and rule of law. Somemainstream film critics apparently “see” what is taking place but seem unable tolink media content with social reality, as if culture evolves in a vacuum. Oneexample is a review of The Hollywood War Machine by Lawrence Suid and MichaelShull in the fall 2007 issue of the journal Film and History, which scolds us forarguing that certain Hollywood film cycles intersect with violent trends inAmerican society and foreign policy, stating we “have written a polemic whichaccuses Hollywood of creating and perpetuating a martial spirit in the American

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people” and that we falsely conclude “the film industry harbors rightwingconservative patriots.” Nailing down their critique, the reviewers add that “nofilm portraying the Vietnam War, except for perhaps The Green Berets, attempted toglorify or justify the conflict. We Were Soldiers Once [sic] saluted the bravery of thesoldiers but certainly not the war.”6

The review appears to be part misreading of our book, part deliberateobfuscation, part cluelessness about the nature of American politics. In fact TheHollywood War Machine never insists upon any mechanistic cause-and-effectrelationship between movies and politics, affirming rather a dialectical relationshipbetween the two where media culture both reflects and influences the larger socialarena. There is no apparent reason to exempt media representations of violence,warfare, and militarism that have become so endemic to American life—or, ifthere is, Suid and Shull ought to inform us what that might be. And we neverdefine cinematic representations as simply embodying a “martial spirit,” choosinginstead to look at the steady diffusion of film images, narratives, and motifs that,to varying degrees, enter into popular consciousness, social life, and politicalbehavior. Rightwing conservative patriots in Hollywood? There might well be afew such characters hanging around the studios, but the real problem is that“liberals” and in some cases even “progressives” are the main contributors to thepatriotic and militaristic ideology so prevalent today. From the critical–analyticalstandpoint we adopt, distinctions between liberals and conservatives essentiallyvanish, especially on questions of foreign and military policy. Indeed war-makingin the post-war US has been the handiwork of liberal Democrats at least as often as“rightwing conservative patriots” like Richard Nixon and the Bushes. The samegoes for filmmaking: Suid and Sholl ought to know that such directors as StevenSpielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, George Lucas, Edward Zwick, andRidley Scott—all authors of war movies—are well-known Hollywood liberals. Itmight be recalled that John Ford, director of many gung-ho, patriotic World War IIfilms, was enough of a domestic populist to make pictures like The Grapes of Wrath.

In their strange refusal to acknowledge linkages between media and politics,between the film industry and larger society of which it is a dynamic part, criticslike Suid and Shull are reduced to a narrow, mechanistic, one-dimensional view ofHollywood. Do they seriously want to insist that movies and kindred mediaproducts (TV, video games, the Internet, advertising, etc.) have no impact on theideas, beliefs, myths, and lifestyles of hundreds of millions of people consumingthese products daily? Could political life be impervious to the incessant flow ofvisual images and social messages disseminated by the most powerful, far-reaching media empires in human history? Highly unlikely, and no rationalobserver of the American scene would want to be identified with such nonsense.Could it be that media representations of violence, war, and militarism enjoy aspecial dispensation? Even less likely, and indeed Suid himself concedes this pointwhen, in Guts and Glory, he notes dryly that “films can influence audiences.”7 Infact Suid goes much further in his tribute to John Wayne as the great Americancinematic war hero. He writes that, largely on the basis of Wayne’s role in Sands ofIwo Jima, Americans found a man who personified the ideal soldier, sailor, or

6 Lawrence H. Suid and Michael Shull, Film and History 37:2 (Fall 2007), p. 99.7 Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image on Film

(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), p. xiii.

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Marine, whose “military image [continues] . . . to pervade American society andculture.”8 According to Suid, Wayne “did become the symbol of the Americanfighting man, the defender of the nation,” adding that “Wayne became the modelof the action hero for several generations of young males, representing thetraditional American ideal of the anti-intellectual doer in contrast to the thinker.”Indeed Wayne “became just as much a military hero, a frontier hero, and asupporter of God, country, and motherhood” as other traditional US icons, while“Marines often cited Wayne’s portrayal of [Sergeant] Stryker as the reason fortheir attraction to the Corps.”9 Suid notes that journalists covering the VietnamWar attested to the power of Wayne’s influence on US troops, concluding:“Wayne’s influence reached not only enlisted men but also the decision makersand officers in the field.”10 This is one of the finest validations we could find of themain thesis we presented in The Hollywood War Machine.

So the pressing question is not whether but rather how and to what extent thecontent of motion pictures and other media forms influence mass publics.Contrary to the simplistic view put forth by apologists of the corporate media,influence generally moves along quite diverse paths—for example, people mighttake initiative or actively engage in violent behavior, they might participate asfollowers, they might lend their support in some fashion, or they might simply goalong with violent or militaristic agendas out of indifference. Mass publics havebecome increasingly desensitized to the constant flow of violent images. There areno mechanistic causes and effects underlying any of these complex outcomes. InThe Hollywood War Machine we explored dozens of mainstream films, many ofthem blockbusters, that celebrated some aspect of militarism: extreme andrepetitive acts of violence, male warrior heroes, gallant US battlefield exploits,technological warfare, superpatriotism tied to noble American pursuits, thetargeting of demonic enemies, and so forth. These motifs define not only combatfilms but other genres such as action/adventure pictures, sci-fi movies, Westerns,and historical dramas. We argue, further, that these same motifs deeply influencethe larger culture, society, and foreign policy—an argument that nowadays, afterseveral years of Bush and the neocons, should draw little controversy. Of coursesome might choose to ignore this dreadful state of affairs; more likely, they arelittle troubled by it, even as the culture industry and US global behavior havefollowed almost identical patterns. While no one yet possesses the tools toaccurately measure media influences on popular consciousness (just asconsciousness itself remains difficult to measure), the contention that mediaculture exerts little or no impact on public attitudes and behavior hardly follows.

The deeper problem, we believe, is a growing media and popular indulgenceof the militarization of American society. Within the political culture, orgies ofmedia violence have become just another American pastime, like baseball andhunting—practices now fully taken for granted. The parade of ultraviolent warmovies, action/adventure films, and combat video games might be viewed as justa little harmless diversion, with few consequences for adult behavior. Others havebeen less sanguine about images of violence and warfare in the media. PresidentRichard Nixon, managing the Vietnam carnage, once said he relished seeing

8 Ibid., p. 116.9 Ibid., pp. 129–130.

10 Ibid., p. 132.

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Patton again and again, moved by that and similar uplifting combat films, whilePresident Ronald Reagan could not hide his enthusiasm for the 1980s Ramboseries, repeating the warrior’s famous utterance (about Vietnam) that “we get towin this time.” In his book Ronald Reagan the Movie, Michael Rogin quotes Reaganas saying: “Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do the next time thishappens.”11 Of course Reagan could do little about Vietnam, but he could (anddid) preside over a series of proxy wars in Central America costing tens ofthousands of lives. It was ultimately left to the first President Bush to finally kickthe “Vietnam Syndrome” (or so he boasted) with his momentous Desert Stormvictory over the powerful Iraqi military. As for the second President Bush, hisinspiration came from watching Black Hawk Down (2002), worth several viewingsin the buildup to the real war against Iraq where, presumably, “we get to win thistime” (finishing the job his father started in 1991).

In the case of Vietnam, Suid and Shull—like other mainstream critics—seem tohave forgotten that Hollywood has produced an endless stream of patriotic, pro-war movies about the US in Indochina, with The Green Berets (1967) only the first ina long cycle of films justifying American intervention, many fixated on post-warfantasies of reversing the original national experience of defeat and humiliation.The Rambo trilogy, as we have seen, transformed Sylvester Stallone into anAmerican warrior icon whose popularity derived from heroic efforts to reversethe “Vietnam Syndrome” in the field of cinema. Few Hollywood films—at leastbefore the 2008 recycling of Rambo—so powerfully fuse warrior myths of maleheroism, patriotism, stab-in-the-back revenge fantasies with epic struggles againstdemonic enemies. In an absurd twist intelligible only in the context of US imperialarrogance, it is the Americans—not the Vietnamese—shown here to be fighting forliberation. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner write, moreover: “The film[Rambo, 1985] rewrites history in such a way that it excuses American atrocitiesagainst the Vietnamese.”12 These precursors to later ultrapatriotic, militaristicHollywood films would have far greater resonance amongst mass audiences thanall the purportedly “antiwar” Vietnam pictures combined.

As a mythic figure in American popular culture, Rambo has come to signifythe superwarrior with roots in the Western frontier, reappropriated for theVietnam and especially post-Vietnam eras. As Bruce Franklin writes, he

incorporates one of America’s most distinctive cultural products, the comic-bookhero who may seem to be an ordinary human being but really possessessuperhuman powers that allow him to fight, like Superman, for truth, justice, andthe American way, and to personify national fantasies . . . No wonder Rambo canstand invulnerable against the thousands of bullets fired at him, many from point-blank range, by America’s enemies.13

The Rambo episodes packed theaters with viewers cheering wildly at every slayingof a Vietnamese or Russian—repeated two decades later with the new and

11 Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press,1987), p. 7.

12 Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica (Bloomington: University ofIndiana Press, 1988), p. 214.

13 H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other Fantasies (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 2000), p. 194.

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improved Rambo. During the 1980s the nation was inundated with Rambowarrior goods such as action dolls, walkie-talkies, water guns, pinball machines,and sportswear not to mention TV cartoons and video games. A Rambo TV cartoonspecial, designed by Family Home Entertainment for ages 5–12, transformedRambo into “liberty’s champion,” a skilled warrior engaged in global strugglesagainst evil. There were even “adult” video spinoffs featuring pornographicimages of Rambo.14

The Rambo spectacle remains a larger-than-life force in American popularculture, good for patriotic rebirthing as well as corporate profit-making at a timewhen we were told the society was immobilized by the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Theformulaic motif of rescuing POWs from evil Vietnamese Communists becamealmost standard Hollywood fare, beginning with such crude embellishments ofUS militarism as Uncommon Valor (1983) and Missing in Action (1984)—bothvehicles of cartoonish heroism set in Indochina. Advertisements for Missing inAction trumpeted: “The War’s Not Over Until the Last Man Comes Home.” Otherpictures included POW: The Escape (1986) and Operation Nam (1987), producedabroad but featuring American actors, along with a series of mass-marketed POWrescue novels written by Jack Buchanan, the first appearing in 1985 as MIA Hunter.The central protagonist of these novels was former Green Beret Mark Stone, who“has only one activity that gives meaning to his life—finding America’s forgottenfighting men, the POWs . . . and bringing them back from their hell on earth.”15

Yet another component of this inverted narrative was the mass slaughter carriedout in Cambodia after the US exodus, depicted in macabre detail by the popularmovie The Killing Fields (1984), where the carnage is presented as if years of USarmed intervention had nothing to do with Khmer Rouge bloodbaths thatfollowed. Other mainstream pictures—far too numerous to explore here—servedin varying degrees to “glorify or justify” the war, many listed in Jeremy Devine’sVietnam at 24 Frames a Second.16 These include Hanoi Hilton (1987), anothersympathetic depiction of the mythical POW saga replete with diatribes againstJane Fonda, Swimming to Cambodia (1987), a takeoff on The Killing Fields horrors,Platoon Leader (1988), The Expendables (1988), Crossfire (1988), Hard Rain—The Tet(1989) and Air America (1990), a Mel Gibson vehicle glorifying the work of CIApilots in Laos during the Vietnam War.

A more recent Hollywood movie, We Were Soldiers, dramatizes Americanheroism in a critical 1965 battle against North Vietnamese forces in the bloodyValley of Death. Indeed this overdone combat saga almost perfectly fits theparadigm of Hollywood militarism, another in a long history of formulaic warmovies that adheres to every rule and cliche. Gibson, as Lt. Colonel Hal Moore,leads a unit of US troops facing off against a stronger Vietnamese enemy. Faithfulto the Hollywood mode, the Americans are seen in their multifaceted, texturedsocial realities, the home front ever visible, while the Vietnamese appear only assteely, one-dimensional (though skilled) soldiers. All the longings, fears, andanxieties of US military families are dramatized with flourish, while theVietnamese—well, they are very good fighters who, however, are inclined to

14 Ibid., p. 195.15 Quoted in Ibid., p. 195.16 See Jeremy M. Devine, Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1995), pp. 371–374.

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charge the Americans en mass, suffering great losses. We Were Soldiers cuts backand forth between combat zone and home front, allowing viewers to see thehuman casualties of war through American eyes. On the eve of battle we hearflowery patriotic speeches, with Gibson providing an emotional sendoff to anethnically-diverse mix of troops (pointedly including Asian-Americans)assembled to face monolithic yellow hordes—the same faceless enemies thatwould be blown away and burned alive in scene after gruesome scene. NorthVietnamese officers appear on screen as frightening villains from central casting—cold, harsh-talking, authoritarian—devoid of any home-front softening. Nowonder The Rolling Stone magazine referred to the picture as “an unabashedly pro-military look at the first major battle of the Vietnam era.” The film is alsounabashedly racist in its crude portraits of the Vietnamese. While US geopoliticalaims might have been soft-pedaled by director Randall Wallace (also author of thewretched Pearl Harbor script), there would be no question left in the minds ofviewers about the heroic battlefield ordeals and exploits of American troops. If,four decades later, patriotic discourses about the Vietnam War tend to be slightlymuted, that is to be expected as a simple cost–benefit analysis long ago suggested,even to war managers like Robert McNamara, that the venture became fartoo costly.

We now arrive at that well-known cycle of reputedly antiwar Vietnam films—many harshly critical of the military establishment—first appearing in the late1970s. These movies contained graphic images of human pain, suffering, disgust,and, ultimately, skepticism about war itself. The list is familiar: Coming Home(1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), Full-MetalJacket (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), and Casualties of War (1989) amongst the mostrecognizable. Without question these movies held out a more jaundiced view ofthe Vietnam debacle, some of them well-received by audiences and critics alike.Such fare would never be confused with the xenophobic Rambo episodes.

Yet Hollywood cinema never took these “antiwar” movies beyond a distinctlyAmerican experience that could be, and was, exploited for all its (domestic)psychological, aesthetic, and political value. Defeat, humiliation, and angerbecame the stuff of great movie traumas—but only for Americans, whether on thebattlefield or home front. From time to time we see glimpses of actual warfare, yetthe personal and social fallout is confined to US troops in the field, returning vets,family members, and a home front debilitated by loss and disillusionment. Inthese ethnocentric dramas, victim status is reserved for the same Americans whobrought to the Vietnamese one of the most terrible holocausts of modern times. Infilm after film the Vietnamese people are invisible or, where visible, amount tofaceless backdrops to more pressing American concerns in which war, defeat, andhumiliation serve as the material of home-front psychodrama. Referring to one ofthe most egregious of these fiascos, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Franklinwrites that it “succeeded not only in reversing key images of the war [i.e., itsunpopularity] but also in helping canonize US prisoners of war as the mostsignificant symbols of American manhood for the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond.”17 Infact the film was targeted by antiwar protesters when it appeared in theaters.When Cimino was asked by a reporter how he felt about audiences cheering whenUS soldiers were shown killing Vietnamese captors, he replied: “I think it testifies

17 Franklin, op. cit., p. 15.

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to the fact that there’s a lot of pride in this country . . . We’ve been defensive toolong about feeling positive about this country.”18 He later said The Deer Hunter was“an antiwar film but not a political film,” adding that his characters “are trying tosupport each other. They are not endorsing anything except their commonhumanity.” As Peter Biskind writes about the film, it “has few scruples aboutkilling Vietnamese; the sadistic, cackling monkeys with dollar bills clutched intheir paws deserve what they get. What the film doesn’t like is Vietnamese killingwhite American males and exposing them to emotional and physical trauma likeRussian Roulette.”19 Karen Rasmussen and her co-authors observe that “ . . .Vietnam films cast war and the resulting Vietnam Syndrome as a catastrophicillness befalling the warrior. The resulting discourse of healing the warrior is atherapeutic rhetoric that functions symbolically to reinstate the honorable imageof the [US] warrior, thereby reconciling the Vietnam experience socially.”20

Hollywood filmmaking, like American political culture in general, managed tosteamroll over Vietnamese history and politics, then as now. A close scrutinyof reputedly “antiwar” pictures reveals a distinctive flaw: none challenge thereckless use of US imperial and military power, none question the legitimacy ofUS intervention spanning an agonizing 14 years, and none accurately depict thehorrors experienced by the Vietnamese. To be sure, one can identify plenty of“mistakes” and “excesses” in Washington and on the battlefield that hindered UScapacity to “win” the war, and the costs (that is, American) turned out to be far tooburdensome relative to feasible ends. And a few bad deeds can be attributed to UStroops that, under battlefield pressure, sometimes lost control of their senses. Asfor the imperial agenda itself, well, it was well-intentioned if not always expertlyplanned or managed by the Kennedy liberals and their successors. Viewed thusly,whether any specific film set out to “glorify” the Vietnam catastrophe—or offereda more jaundiced view of the imperial venture—is entirely beside the point. MostAmerican viewers will simply come away thinking that the war was a great, costlytragedy filled with missteps that future, wiser US leaders ought to avoid asthey undertake new foreign interventions. Few Hollywood films dealing withVietnam—Born on the Fourth of July is one that comes to mind—have evertranscended these narrow limits.

The final destruction of a seemingly durable European colonial system was anepic moment of modern history, but that reality never surfaces in any Hollywoodfilm on the Vietnam War, even the most “progressive” of them. To ward off thatdefeat the US conducted a brutal war of attrition, a barbaric project that eventhe most “antiwar” mainstream pictures have managed to obscure. The mostpowerful war machine in history was repulsed by a Third-World liberationmovement, an event represented in American political and media culture as acrisis of the national psyche in which poor suffering Americans became the truevictims—a motif akin to portraying slave owners or Nazis as debilitated victims ofthose very people the slave owners and Nazis set out to dominate or destroy.

18 Quoted in Peter Biskind, “The Vietnam Oscars,” Vanity Fair, March 2008, p. 278.19 Ibid., p. 279.20 Karen Rasmussen, Sharon Downey, and Jennifer Asenas, “Trauma, Treatment, and

Transformation: the Evolution of the Vietnam Warrior in Film,” in Marilyn J. Matelskiand Nancy Lynch Street (eds), War and Film in America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland andCo., 2004), p. 89.

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Despite such media fabrications, however, American society would never be thesame. As Franklin writes:

Looking backward, historians of the future may recognize that this war machinewas, up to that date at least, the most stupendous achievement of American culture.By defeating this war machine, the people of Vietnam not only exposed the mythof its invincibility but also ignited a series of wars within the culture that hadcreated it.21

It might be expected that the Vietnam War would eventually force a nationalrethinking of US global behavior but, as the present Iraq debacle shows, nothing ofthe sort has occurred. Nor has the Hollywood war machine been overturned oreven moderated—one reason that any serious rethinking process has never gottenoff the ground. Nor, unfortunately, have we seen an end to silly commentariespretending there is no linkage between the actuality of war, militarism, andviolence and a media culture that celebrates that actuality. Turning again to thewave of popular ultraviolent movies throughout 2007 and 2008, a comment byTony Gilroy, writer-director of Michael Clayton, perhaps best captures the mood:“Maybe what you’re getting is a ghostly, forensic glimpse of what has happened inour culture.”22 With this in mind, we can speak confidently, if also sadly, of astubborn post-war US militarism that shows no signs of disappearing from thescene—in Hollywood or in Washington.

21 Franklin, op. cit., p. 130.22 Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2008.

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