Why Rambo?

WHY RAMBO?

Brian Nienhaus

At a recent lecture in Ann Arbor by Dr. Benjamin Spock, a member of the audience asked an interesting question about the media. I would like to repeat that question here and then offer some observation in response.

The question was simply expressed and familiarly vague. Fifteen years ago, the questioner began, we were at the height of a widespread movement against the war in Vietnam. As a reflection of those times, the anti-war film MASH was recalled. But then the war ended, and as the country variously recovered or forgot that experience, the screens began to burst again with the steroid flesh of the likes of...Rambo! Why Rambo, for heaven's sake?

While the portrayal is a bit overgeneralized, I think the imagery does invoke some troubling issues which, if forcibly reduced, might read something like "Do we really learn from the past?" or "Why do so many folks seem to worship war and death?"

Now Dr. Spock did not address the question directly, but he did make a few statements about our need to recover from the experience of Vietnam. He stopped short of connecting Rambo to the social healing process, so I will take the discussion up from that point.

Even if it's not entirely accurate, the idea of a wounded nation in need of healing is a useful one. Millions were directly affected by the Vietnam War, and millions more were left emotionally affected or affronted by its memory. The image of a nation with a wound holds together. It's only when Rambo comes in that we have to recall the fiction of the device.

The plain fact is that forms of recovery vary. Different individuals, families and collectives will come to grips with that experience in their own ways. Some regrettably, have been able to carry on by forgetting, and others, even more regrettably, by becoming angry and grabbing at the idea that revenge is the answer. But many, many others recover by learning - at the very least that we have not yet figured out how to protect the dignity and actuality of human life, and in other instances by learning much more about the strategies and interests that result in the killing of people. Who are the people who kill? For what reasons? Through what mechanisms? Here you find active forms of recovery, and commitment toward the prevention of needless tragedies.

Rambo, then, is clearly not the road to recovery. But here another source of uneasiness arises from that question, and I'll be brutally short in presenting it. While many people have chosen a path of education and action, the fact is that a large majority of others seem to have not. Rambo, after all, is a very popular movie. Millions of folks across the country have paid four and five dollars to see it. At the bottom of all this is the unsettling notion that maybe Rambo is "what the people want." All the machismo, mindless revenge, stupid heroism...if that's what plays in Peoria, maybe we are a country of mindless little dirtballs, incapable of working together toward a better world.

You know the old clichés: People never learn. It's a dog-eat-dog world. You have to reject them all the time. With sequel after sequel of the Rambo genre breaking box office records and receiving the blessings of our President, the stream of denials of the dirtball hypothesis begins to leave one with a schizophrenic residue.

The residue is not easily washed off, but it can be done. First, one gravely misunderstands our mass media system if one buys the notion that such material satisfies human needs. More accurately, movies like Rambo represent the form of social recovery that a powerful sector of the commercial media would like most of us to adopt. Why? Well, if they can get folks to interpret Vietnam as a problem to be resolved in terms of individual catharsis or revenge, then some pretty big people - known in most instances as juridical people or corporations - will have that much more room to operate.

Why, then, don't people reject films like Rambo ? In a city like Ann Arbor, where the choice of media offerings is atypically rich, it is easy to forget the more general situation. Across vast spaces of this country, the choice for many is between Rambo or Miami Vice, or if getting out of the house were the whole point, between Rambo or nothing at all. And this means, among other things, that the left does not reach the general public, and hasn't done so in this country for over fifty years.

Ours is a society of commoditized news and entertainment, but more than this, it is a society of commoditized leisure time. Those who are not highly educated, upscale, or professionals of one sort or another must allow their time and attention to be gathered up by media firms and then sold to producers of consumer goods in order to receive the bulk of their information and entertainment. This puts most folks at a tremendous disadvantage: the media find out bits and pieces of what people might be attracted to, or of what seems to be missing from their lives, and from this very shaky base the media's interests as commercial firms take over. So folks seem to be tense, restless, or alienated? We can put them through the wringer with a flashy action flick. And another. And another.

With no reasonable alternatives the majority of the U.S. public must put up with a steamroller of a media system, a system which never goes to bed, never takes vacations - never stops - in its pursuit of its own interests, which in this short space I can only leave to your imagination.

Beyond an understanding of the travesty of the Rambo phenomenon, I think this discussion reveals a very hard reality to those seriously interested in altering our foreign policies. In the battle to "educate," as I have heard the term used in local meetings of the politically active, we are overwhelmingly outnumbered. Education in this sense is really persuasion, and our side and our messages cannot compete with those of the commercial media, unless we really understand what we're up against.

If you read Agenda regularly you probably already understand these observations all too well. Where to go from here is a tremendously difficult question, but inroads have occurred. I believe it no coincidence that Seattle, the first city to adopt a proposal similar to our Proposal A, also has an organization that dedicates itself to public relations for the left. As a start, we need to find out what those who deal with the commercial media have learned in terms of strategy in those few instances where some successes have been had. But beyond this we need to work out an understanding of how media really work in the U.S., if we are not to be deterred by dirtball imagery or false hopes of effective media coverage. I'll write Seattle; anyone else interested?