Style vs. Substance in the Rhetoric of Rambo
from The War that Won't Die

By Carol Wilder

He describes himself as a follower of Zen, a Buddhist. He is the son of an Italian father and a Navajo mother. He meditates daily. He has been celibate for fourteen years because "after the horrors he'd endured, sex had ceased to be an urge" (12, p. 69). Catch 22 is one of his favorite books.

Who is he? Surprisingly enough, this is Rambo. John Rambo. Sylvester Stallone Rambo. Second largest grossing film of 1985 Rambo. Notorious icon for the eighties. "Dey drew fuhst blood, suh" mindless death machine Rambo.
Confused? No wonder. The John Rambo character in its various manifestations communicates an impressive array of contradictory features, most notably between the narrative substance of the Rambo story and the hyperbolic style of Stallone's interpretation. Rambo's predecessor, First Blood, was a fundamentally sympathetic portrayal of Vietnam veterans, and the controversy that erupted upon Rambo's June 1985 release was puzzling at first. How did Rambo become an instant symbol of testosterone gone amok that even today inspires dozens of web sites, thousands of eBay transactions, and scholarly work such as Gordon Fellman’s Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)

When different levels of a mediated message appear inconsistent or contradictory, as is the case with Rambo, what messages prevail? When the apparent substance (text, story, plot, theme, narration, logos, denotation, digital/literal/verbal communication) of a mediated message is contradicted by its stylistic metamessage (context, image, icon, pathos, connotation, analogic/metaphoric/visual communication), what features of the message survive in the symbolic synthesis? And given the fact that style contradicts substance in the rhetoric of Rambo, what symbol has endured?
The Rambo industry contributed to making Stallone Hollywood's most "bankable" star in the late 1980s, commanding at $12 million per film more than twice the fee of his nearest rival. Stallone was considered the No. 1 box office star worldwide, and his movies grossed more than $1 billion from 1975 to 1985 (16). You may not like him or what he seems to stand for, but he is very hard to ignore as a figure in popular culture, even decades later. The impressive bottom line of Stallone's success suggests that he struck a most responsive chord in the pre-Gulf War psyche, however disconcerting.
Stallone himself spoke of his impact in a Rolling Stone interview. Stallone asserts that "What I try to do in films is to explore violence -- not so much exploit it, but explore it, use it for a positive means." Interviewer Nancy Collins responds"A lot of critics didn't see Rambo as a positive exploration of violence." Stallone:

I don't blame them. But it's important for everyone to get a sense of what's happening, especially when something has caught the imagination of the American public -- if for nothing else just to study why this has caught fire. I think the intelligentsia should understand that this country now is functioning on emotional energy more than intellectual energy (4, p.166).

An age of pathos? A culture beyond reason? A world where the only appropriate response to the paradoxical logos of so many lives committed to the arts of death is to deny logic altogether? This was the context of the rhetoric of Rambo, a cultural force so potent that during 1985 the President of the United States repeatedly cited Rambo as a role model.
The Rambo message in 1985 was scattered all over popular culture. As a receiver at the time of the movie's release, you might read the Rambo movie review in the newspaper, overhear colleagues in the hallway commenting about the movie, see on TV that Vietnam veterans were protesting the film in a neighboring town, walk by a display of M-16 Rambo water guns on a visit to the local toy store, see a political cartoon about "Ronbo" in the paper a few days later, and so forth. You might even actually see the Rambo movie or read the book, but it was hardly necessary to either see the movie or read the book to have a strong image of the Rambo icon.

The shape of the Rambo "message" emerged over time and space in an array of communication contexts. I was intrigued by Rambo immediately upon the film’s controversial release, and began collecting message bits, including any mention of the word "Rambo" from the briefest reference to full reviews. Through an accumulation of these memes, I could track the symbol as it spread like wildfire through popular culture, saturating the broadcast and print media. While such rapid diffusion is typically associated with "important" events, the ubiquity of the Rambo symbol within weeks of the film's release suggests that a message need not be important to spread quickly if it strikes a nerve in the culture.

The Betrayed Veteran/Victim

The character of John Rambo was introduced by David Morrell in his 1972 novel First Blood. Morrell, an English professor at the University of Iowa, presented Rambo as a sympathetic character who was subsequently featured in Stallone's 1982 film First Blood, praised by New Republic critic Alex Heard as "the definitive filmic study of the plight of Vietnam vets" (5).

The central conflict of First Blood arises when Rambo is unjustly harassed by a small town deputy out to flex his muscle. Once incarcerated and further provoked by the petty nastiness of jail, Rambo falls into a flashback of his POW experience in Vietnam. At this point all hell and hyperbole break loose, Rambo escapes, and soon has everyone up to and including the national guard on his tail. This play off of the lone drifter against the military establishment is the first place where the Rambo character becomes larger than life.

At a critical point in the First Blood story, Rambo's former special forces commanding officer Col. Trautman (Richard Crenna) appears, so he says, "to save the police" from Rambo. In the end of the book, John Rambo dies, given the coup de grace by Col. Trautman himself and securing his place as the wronged and sympathetic veteran/victim. In the film First Blood, Rambo lives, presumably to leave the door open for a sequel which became, of course, Rambo: First Blood Part II.
As a film, First Blood was a modest $27 million grossing success by Hollywood standards, and made no notable waves in the critical establishment. Stallone's portrayal of Rambo was as appealing as his script and the single scene where he articulates his anguish to Col. Trautman is powerful and oddly moving.

Apparently not able to leave well enough alone, Stallone claimed it was a letter he received from the wife of an MIA that inspired him to write the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II along with James ("The Terminator") Cameron. Note that David Morrell now becomes second string, and whereas Stallone adapted First Blood from Morrell's novel, this time around Morrell is writing the Rambo novel from the screenplay by Stallone and Cameron. Stallone considers himself to be, first and foremost, a writer.

The story of Rambo: First Blood Part II again centers on the betrayal of the individual (vet-victim) by the establishment. Rambo, imprisoned and assigned to rock chopping duty as a result of his First Blood escapades, is offered relief in the form of a reconnaissance mission aimed at determining the presence or absence of American MIA's in a particular camp. Unknown to Rambo, the mission is primarily a grandstanding move by the opportunistic Congressman Murdock , a man so lacking in principle that he even lies about his combat record.

It comes as no surprise that Rambo not only finds living MIA's in the camp, but pulls them out, only to be abandoned when Murdock orders the mission aborted. Murdock, of course, did not want Rambo to find evidence of MIA's, let alone live bodies. And Rambo, now twice wronged, escapes anyway. But not before:

His years of frustration released their total fury. The first time, he hadn't asked to come here. He'd been told to come. Because other people had their reasons, people who went to sleep at night between clean sheets, with their bellies full. It wasn't my war. But I fought it for them.
And it became an embarrassment to them, because they knew there'd been too many lies, and the way to undo a lie is to pretend it never happened -- so they made believe I'd never existed. And others called me baby-killer.
The second time, I didn't want to come here either. But they said they were willing to clean up the mess they'd made, to try to correct their mistakes. And someone had to get those prisoners back, because the people who slept in clean sheets sure as hell couldn't do it. So I fought their war a second time, and again they lied and did what they could to keep me from winning it and wanted to make believe I never existed (12, p. 139).

Similarly, when Col. Trautman learns of Murdock's betrayal, he exclaims that: "The mission was a lie, wasn't it? Just like the whole damned war! A lie!" (12, p.139)
One passage from the novelization of Rambo ( not explicit in the screenplay) is especially telling with regard to the long lost substantive message that may have been intended in this story. The following dialogue ensues after Rambo rescues the POW's who have been cut off from news of the world for more than ten years:

"What's it like? In the world?"
Rambo hesitated.
"Well?" Banks asked. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing." Rambo couldn't bring himself to tell them. It would be too much. A sin. "Home? It's just the same," he lied. "The good old U.S. never changed."
"Come on, man. It must have."
"Sure. In a way, I guess. Ronald Reagan's president."
"Ronald . . .? Wait a minute. You don't mean the movie actor."
"Yep." Despite his agony, Rambo had to chuckle. "Death Valley Days himself."
"Well, holy fuck."
"Yeah, I said that many times."
And Rambo couldn't bring himself to tell them that Vietnam was about to change its name to Nicaragua. Or that the sound of John Lennon's 'Give Peace a Chance' had changed to the rattle of sabers.
And maybe that's why Luke Skywalker's light sword was so popular. The clean depiction of war. If you had your head cut off, you got a new one. In the movies. Yeah, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and the movies. No, he couldn't tell them about Nicaragua. It would be too much (12, p. 236).

While various interpretations may be extracted from the First Blood and Rambo plot and characterizations, it is virtually impossible to see them in the pro-war pro-American light cast upon them by Ronald Reagan's co-optation of Rambo as an anti-Communist saber-rattling symbol. Indeed, no less a source than Sylvester Stallone strongly refuted charges of anti-Soviet bias in his films when he stated in a recent interview that Rocky IV was pro-Russian at the end.

And in Rambo I didn't sit there and say that every Communist should die. What did I say? What did I say? Stallone angrily pounded an exercise bench. I put America down at the end! I put my own country down. I said I wanted it to love me as much as I love it. Don't they [the critics] listen to the end of the movie? Do they leave before it's over? (3, p.35)

Stallone's sentiments notwithstanding, the fact remains that Rambo the symbol has developed in ways quite apart from the substance of plot and characterization.

The Chauvinistic Veteran/Avenger

In the month following its June 1985 release, Rambo grossed $100 million at the box office, making it the third most successful opening gross in history to that date, behind only Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Return of the Jedi. Almost immediately the film's "novelization," with 800,000 copies in print, made the New York Times best seller list, and Rambo was accorded that operational definition of an American cultural phenomenon of its time -- an hour on the Phil Donahue television show.

Reviews were mixed, to say the least. Andrew Kopkind writing in The Nation called it "at once hilarious and disgusting" (8). Paul Kael's New Yorker review argued that "director George P. Cosmatos gives this near-psychotic material -- a mixture of Catholic iconography and Soldier of Fortune pulp -- a veneer of professionalism, but the looniness is always there" in this "wired-up version of the narcissistic jingoism of the John Wayne-Second World War pictures" (6). Kael was also among the first to make the point that the movie exploits both Vietnam vets and MIA families with its "comic-strip patriotism." Richard Schickel wrote in Time (13) that "this childhood dream of glory" vulgarizes a demonstratable anguish," and shames it for doing so. And Variety underestimated what it termed this "overwrought sequel" to First Blood by suggesting (wrongly, as it turned out) that "the production's risible, comic book heroics seriously qualify its box-office durability."

Foreign critics were no kinder. James Tye, Director General of the British Safety Council, called Rambo "truly sickening," and "96 minutes of mindless violence." India banned the film outright because of its anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnamese bias. Soviet critics condemned Rambo as "war-nography," alleging that it is part of 'a deliberate propaganda campaign to portray Russians as cruel and treacherous enemies," while other Soviet sources reported that "despite the official Soviet criticism of Stallone and his movies, Moscovites interviewed recently said that videocassettes of Stallone films were among the most sought after by Russians who own video players." It has also been reported that Rambo was a smash hit in Beirut and that the Nicaraguan Contras took to sporting Rambo-style dress following the film's release.

Rejected by critics and embraced by record audiences, Stallone received two contradictory awards in early 1986: The Golden Raspberry Award for the worst in motion pictures, and Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club Man of the Year award. Vietnam veteran Paul Atwood was among 100 veterans and Asian Americans who picketed the Hasty Pudding ceremonies, saying "We are protesting the award and, by implication, Stallone's work. We think that rough, tough, Rambo would have puked his guts out if he had to face what we did." (Stallone spent the war years in college as a gym coach in a girl's boarding school in Switzerland. He claims he tried twice to enlist and was rejected once for bad hearing and once for bad feet. Whatever the case, real life Rambo never saw basic training let alone combat despite being in the prime age group for Vietnam service.)

Rambo became almost an instant icon during the summer of its release, elevated to the highest levels when President Ronald Reagan, upon the release of 39 American hostages in June 1985 said, "After seeing 'Rambo' last night, I know what to do next time this happens." Several months later, pleading for tax reform, Reagan said, "Let me tell you, in the spirit of Rambo, we're going to win this thing." These extraordinary references by an American president attest to the power and ubiquity of the Rambo phenomenon.

In June of 1985 both Time and People published accounts of what immediately came to be called "Rambomania." Vietnam veterans groups on both coasts, including Vietnam Veterans of America and the Veterans Speakers Alliance, picketed theaters showing Rambo. The War Resisters League protested on several occasions at Coleco Industries corporate headquarters in West Hartford, Connecticut, calling the company's Rambo doll "extremely racist, extremely sexist, and extremely simplistic."

Many public figures commented upon the Rambo phenomenon. Former Vice President Walter Mondale urged students at Brown University to avoid romanticizing war and violence, warning that "Rambo may be strong, but he is also a fool." Mondale suggested that in Rambo "complexity is blown away by simple violence," admonishing his young audience to "be careful, for this is history's most difficult lesson." Charles Haid, a Vietnam vet who played Officer Andy Renko on Hill Street Blues, called Rambo "entirely unrealistic," "an irresponsible fantasy," and "the shame of our industry." then-U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, a Medal of Honor recipient in Vietnam, stated that the movie "didn't tell about the war as I knew it. It made it look fun." Given the revelations in 2001 about Kerrey’s Vietnam service as a Navy Seal, one thing for sure is that it wasn’t fun.

Pulitzer Prize winning author David Halberstam, speaking at a Rambo colloquium at Stanford University, argued that the message of the movie presents the "exact reverse of the real message of the Vietnam War," calling Stallone's statement that he made the film in support of Vietnam veteran's "an obscenity." Halberstam termed Stallone a "cinematic Joseph McCarthy" and mocked the film's "this time we can win" theme as "a very real example of how to obliterate history, to summon the worst kind of emotion." Halberstam argued that "the film wipes out the most important lesson of the war -- that the world is pluralistic, that not everybody wants what America has to offer, and that non-white people can be as brave as Americans and, on occasion, braver." Halberstam urged his audience, "do not lightly let something as odious as this pass -- feel insulted...and as you read more about Vietnam, I hope you will be as offended as I am" (17).

In the six or so months following Rambo's June 1985 release, not a week went by without some reference to Rambo in the popular media. With little effort, I collected nearly 200 such references from sources as diverse as People, Time, Mad Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The National Enquirer, Inside Sports, and numerous newspapers. During this time period a wide range of Rambo merchandise also appeared: t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers ("This Car Protected by Rambo"), the "Rambo Coloring and Activity Book" (find the matching assault helicopters), weapons sets (bows and arrows, guns, knives, grenades), headbands, and even Rambo "Action Peanut Butter Cups" and Rambo "Black Flak Bubble Gum," for the ultimate in mixed messages.

The Rambo symbol also appeared in many cartoons. Satellite TV Guide published a cartoon close to Thanksgiving 1985 depicting a TV watcher with hatchet in hand and a turkey visible outside the window as he says to his wife, "Let me watch a little more of 'Rambo' and maybe I can do it." The Funky Wunderbean strip showed a combat-geared dog with the caption "Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail, they said, could stop the mail. But they didn't figure on Rexbo." Mad Magazine presented a full spread on "Dumbo: More Blood Part II." Farley had a Christmas 1985 strip where a family stand viewing a window display of elves, teddy bears, Mrs. Claus making cookies, and the Rambo doll "Bam! Bam! Rat-Tat-Tat! Eat Hot Lead Commie Elves!! Buda-Buda!!" Bloom County's penguin Opus pounded on a foreign ship shouting "Out! Let Cutter John out, you . . .you Rambo torturers."

One feature of Rambo that inspired many satirists was the way that the second syllable "bo" can stand as metaphoric ground to just about any figure, such as in Gary Larsen's "Rexbo" and Mad's "Dumbo" cited earlier. Predictably, a "Ronbo" poster with Reagan's head on Stallone's body was one of the first "bo" creations. Colorado Governor Richard Lamm earned himself a "Lammbo" cartoon in the Rocky Mountain News. "Farmbo" depicts Grant Wood's American Gothic farmer on Stallone's body. Bizarro by Piraro introduced "Bambo: First Fawn Part II . . .Finally! Violence the whole family can feel good about!!!" On Capitol Hill in 1985, the Gramm Rudman fiscal legislation was dubbed by its opponents "Grammbo." Another "Grambo" is found on a greeting card with the caption "She is Fighting a War Against Old Age." Then, of course, there was "Rambose," a Houston nightclub decorated with grenade launchers, camouflage netting, and .50 caliber machine guns. In several cities one can send a "Rambo-gram" to friend or foe. Last but not least comes, naturally, "Rockybo," the sequel to Rocky/Rambo wherein Stallone beats himself to death, as the joke goes.

Decidedly more ominous ws the way in which Rambo was marketed heavily to children and tied into the increase in privately owned weapons. By all accounts, during the 1980's, Americans became armed to the teeth not only with handguns (an estimated 2 for every 3 households), but also with military-style assault weapons (an estimated 500,000 in private hands) (10). This personal firearms build-up was echoed in children's toys, which were increasingly combat related. Rambo and Commando toys alone accounted for more than $200 million in sales through only the end of 1985. Mom and Dad were shooting them up, too, as reported in tabloids like the Weekly World News, which reported that "every Saturday night, hubbies and wives and dating couples flock to the BulletStop where they get their kicks playing Rambos and Rambettes by blowing away targets with the terrifying firepower of machine guns" (7). And while it must be noted that the Rambo character did not light this fire of violence, it certainly contributed to fanning the flame by providing a symbol that appears to be simultaneously mindlessly violent and harmlessly comical.

Perhaps the most disturbing single reference to Rambo I found appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle report by Paul Libertore with the lead "Stalker May Be A 'Rambo Gone Awry'" (9). The "Night Stalker" was a particularly vicious serial killer who displayed "gratuitous violence" that indicated that he "delights in the victims' suffering." Libertore reported: "The Night Stalker may be a 'Rambo gone awry' who learned to kill in Vietnam, a forensic psychiatrist said yesterday. "'He may very well be a Vietnam veteran with a grudge, and Vietnam may be where he broke down initially and learned to kill,' said Dr. Martin Blinder, well known for his psychiatric testimony in the Dan White murder trial.

As it turned out, the Night Stalker was 24-year-old Richard Ramirez, who was barely out of elementary school when the Vietnam War ended, and thus Vietnam had nothing whatsoever to do with his grisly deeds. But what is interesting is that here we have the Rambo character, whom Stallone alleges he developed to help the image of Vietnam vets, used as a symbol by a high credibility source who wrongly links the Vietnam vet image to a series of brutal murders. The double disservice done to vets by the reckless arrogance of this sort of speculation is typical of the double bind of Vietnam combat veterans' experience and allows us to perpetuate one of our favorite national scapegoats at the same time we seek to mythologize him as a hero.

Whatever may be said about the symbolic dimensions of the Rambo character, one thing the symbol clearly has not carried beyond the text/script is the sympathetic image of the betrayed veteran/victim. Among the many Rambo message bits collected for this chapter, not a single usage of the Rambo image conveys what is demonstrably the central substantive theme from which the character emerges. Indeed, the symbol that Rambo has become carries quite the contrary image: that of a mindless mega-bodied super-patriotic killing machine, totally lacking in conscience or political sensitivity, virtually preverbal, and powered by pure adrenaline. This degenerate stereotype would mean one thing if it was abstracted from a fantasy figure such as the "He-Man" cartoon character, but the disturbing fact remains that the Rambo character presumes to be based upon real veterans who thanklessly fought in a real war and who for the most part view the dark revisionism of Rambo as a further insult.

Curious about the actual image people have of Rambo, I asked 82 people to free-associate a word list in response to the concept "Rambo." As expected, a high percentage (46.5%) of the total responses consisted of war-violence-death-negative imagery, with very few responses (5.4%) that could be positively connoted, such as terms like heroic-courageous-strong. Thus, assuming one evaluates war imagery unfavorably, the total responses were 9-to-1 negative for this sample, and in no case had anything to do with the sympathetic betrayed veteran/victim theme.

One intriguing finding had to do with the differences in response patterns between those who had seen Rambo the movie and those who had not. While the negative-to-positive word list ratios were about the same for both groups, those who had not seen the film generated a notably longer list of words, with a mean of 14.7 compared to a mean of 11.2 words for those who had seen the film. The most plausible explanation for this may be that while non-viewers have free rein to imagine anything they like in response to a stimulus symbol, viewers are restrained by the more specific depiction of the film itself. In any case one thing is clear: viewing or not viewing the Rambo film had a negligible impact upon one's ability to respond to the Rambo symbol. A critic who focused on the structure and text of the Rambo film would miss nearly all of its functional cultural significance, most of which is disembodied from the text per se.Style or Substance?

Several things can be said with some confidence about the Rambo message. For one, it is clear that Stallone's hyperbolic style prevailed over Morrell's more thoughtful substance in creation of the resultant Rambo symbol. In this case, style metacommunicates a message that contradicts and subsumes the substance, perhaps partly because the substantive message itself is awash in pathos, a dimension that plays well into the hands of non-discursive elements of style. The logos of the narration is there, to be sure, but is not salient compared to the "gut" tone of the story. Rambo's trope is hyperbole, and his canon is style.

Was Rambo a symptom of a neo-Ramistic age? An age where style became increasingly divorced from substance, where it was not who you were but who you seemed to be? If a soap opera actor in the 1980s could establish credibility in a TV commercial by announcing "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV," then the possibilities for reframing realities are impressive.

This triumph of style over substance may be in part a function of the simplifying tendencies of the mass media and may be in part a function of the militaristic Zeitgeist that Rambo played into in the late 1980s. The fact that much of the Rambo story is about going back and winning this time capitalized on the instant replay culture so splendidly summarized in Tom Shales' piece on "The ReDecade" (14). Shales argued that the time shifting capabilities of VCR technology means that "we're all getting used to larger and larger parts of our lives being illusory." "Ah," he continues, "it's that old media-theory talk about the line between fantasy and reality. In fact the talk is passe, because the blurring and the overlapping are things everyone is taking for granted now" (14, p. 70). If this is so, what does it mean for a movie to take us back (in fantasy) to win a war we lost (in reality)? Perhaps the Rambo generation was being readied for service by this conspiracy of collective amnesia which glorifies war and romanticizes combat. Or maybe any message is trivialized by the sheer magnitude of the information deluge of which it is a part.

One of the most provocative Rambo bits that came my way was part of an editorial that depicts a male TV viewer, with cigar in mouth and remote control/beer can in hand, sitting in front of a TV with videocassettes stacked on top labeled "Rambo" and "Mad Violence." The message on the screen reads "USA Raids Libya," and the caption has the viewer calling to his wife, "Heh Emma, get in here it's starting." The frame that distinguishes fantasy from reality is dissolved, and why not? TV is a great credibility/ reality leveler. Why should US raids on Libya be any more real to us than the adventures of Rambo? The "Contragate" revelations of late 1986 made these questions even more pertinent and Desert Storm was the perfect realization of the infotainment war. Ronald Reagan may have been the first president to make foreign policy decisions based upon the movies, but he was not the last.

The dangers here are obvious, not the least of which portends debasement of any sort of critical faculties. Sylvester Stallone did not, of course, create the mediated culture he so cannily exploited. Much less was he responsible for the blurred genres that came to characterize his prime decade. Even so, by portraying the betrayed veteran/victim with fraudulent hyperbole, Stallone himself became a betrayer, contributing in no small measure to the jingoism of the Gulf War that shortly followed.