Or if you'd prefer, "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." (The Merchant of Venice; Act I, Scene iii.)
Sporting a title as graceful as a hyena with a shattered spine dragging itself to a waterhole, Rambo: First Blood Part II proffers despicable manipulation and revisionist history in place of serious consideration of America's reaction (even more than a decade after we got the shit kicked out of us) to the Vietnam War. We are sucked into 92 minutes of nonstop emptyheaded violence through the use of a greased icon known as John Rambo—ex-vet, sullen and angst-ridden survivor not only of a war "we didn't really want to win" but of the (real or imagined) disdain of a nation that "refuses to honor those of us who died for you."
As if you didn't know, Sylvester Stallone is Rambo. Or more precisely, Rambo is Rocky. Mike Hodel suggests that this is a film about revenge, and they might as well have staged it as a P.S. to the Napoleonic Wars if they thought Stallone would look good in tights. He's correct, of course. Thematically, it's the Death Wish genre, cast in jungle combat. But . . .
It's one hundred and seventy years since the Napoleonic Wars, and only twelve since the Nam. We don't ache in every tendon from the former as we do from the latter. So screw it as regards thematic rationalization. What we have to deal with here is pure fantasy twisted to the service of implanting and/or ripening a hateful, destructive Newspeak. Rambo is as real as Conan; and intellectually, I'd venture to say, the barbarian swordsman could spot Rambo three pawns and a rook, and still whip the vet with the Schoolboy Gambit.
In the previous Rambo film, based on a strong novel by David Morrell, the cranky Viet-vet is arrested for chickenshit reasons in a small town, escapes, lays out half the police department, is hunted through nearby woods and hills, demolishes state troopers, posse comitatus, and National Guardsmen utilizing guerrilla tactics he employed as the most fearsome weapon of Special Forces in Southeast Asia, and finally lays waste to the hamlet itself. Brought to book for his rampage, Rambo (get the suggestion of assonance-rambo/rampage?)* is talked down from the summit of his destructive fever by his former boss in Special Services, the always-watchable Richard Crenna.
In this second chapter of the Rambo Saga—which now has made so much money that there will fer shure be a Rambo III—this contemporary Myrmidon is in prison, making little ones out of big ones. He gets sprung by Crenna to tackle a one-man mission the purpose of which is to take photos of a VietCong prison camp (from which Rambo escaped during the War) in order to discern if they're holding GI POWs. He is strictly forbidden from attempting rescue of any such personnel, which naturally grinds Rambo's gears, and is offered to us as an allegory for America's alleged refusal to "go all the way" in Vietnam.
Silverberg suggests, in a display of lexicological wordplay worthy of Phil Farmer, that this assonance is only marginally likely, while it strikes him as possible that Morrell gave his vengeful fury the name Rambo as a homophone for Rimbaud, who was also a wild and crazy guy. This way lies madness.
Of course, there's a plot twist here—story by Kevin Jarre and screenplay by the omnipresent Stallone in collaboration with James Cameron of The Terminator fame—that sends Rambo off on yet another quotidian binge of mayhem during which he wipes out what appears to be half the population of the area. And this is what makes up the bulk of the film: free-fire zone elevated to the status of chanson de geste. Yankee pluck winning, in small, what it lost in large.
And in the process Rambo is submitted for our emptyheaded adoration as a fantasy construct. Stallone—photographed by director George P. Cosmatos (whom I encountered many years ago as Georgios Pan Cosmatos) all sweat-slick and pumped up to produce a creature both tumescent and iconic, a thing not-quite- and more-than-human, a poster-ready hunk guaranteed to create masturbatory longings in leather gays and feverish schoolgirls alike—is held center frame virtually every moment, the camera panning in sensual closeup across every last convex surface of deltoid, tricep and trapezius, not to mention the ever-popular latissimus dorsi. Like something fallen off a pedestal in Thrace, Rambo surges, boils, say rather ejaculates through this warrior-fantasy, glowing with Vaselined pectorals, as one with The Lone Ranger, Superman or the cinema image of Bruce Lee; the National Rifle Association's own Übermensch; the wet dream of every king-cab-riding, deer-hunting, longing-to-be-macho American redneck, slugging away brew after brew at the drive-in, pounding the steering wheel and screaming himself hoarse as Zorro Rambo wipes away his country's shame at having picked a fight it couldn't win, against a tiny adversary, that left names like William Calley to haunt us on Veterans' Day.
A proper fantasy for examination here, Rambo walks through fusillades of machine-gun fire, belts of bullets wrapped around his forearm, impossibly firing something that looks like an M60E1 machine-gun with one hand; and he sustains, if I recall correctly, one minor flesh wound. Never does the weapon track up and to the right, as such ordnance is wont to do, defoliating every rubber tree and banyan in the vicinity. Never does the barrel seize up when overheated by Stallone's visually dramatic but utterly fanciful long bursts. Never do the massed volleys of heavy and light armament fire touch this impossible avenger, not even at point-blank range. But Rambo cleans clocks on every side, blowing the little yellow men into the water and through hooch walls as if they were springloaded.
One wonders—if one wonders at all—if one isn't emptyheaded—how we managed to lose a war to these inept gooks or slopes or dinks or whatever the hell we're supposed to call Third World Peoples Arrayed Against Us: they can't hit a bull in the ass with a scoop-shovel, but our Sylvester needn't even aim to take out two or three of them with each round. Sort of the way John Wayne and Gene Autry used to snap off a shot over the shoulder from a galloping horse, and three firewater-crazed Comanches would tumble off their mounts, dragging the horses with them. (One wonders why we never beat the Seminoles. Hell, they didn't even have horses. Used to ride alligators, as I understand it.)
But this is all part of the fantasy.
As unreal as Starman or The Thing (remake version), and no less a misuse of the fantasy idiom for dubious ends.
Rambo Etc. is making megabucks this summer, and it is an example of empty-headedness difficult to deny. I admit to being swept up in the breakneck action, no nobler than the drive-in dolt whose camper bears the bumper sticker
MY WIFE YES
MY DOG MAYBE
MY GUN NEVER
and who will certainly go for the twisted "philosophy" that the only thing Rambo wants for himself, after rescuing the POWs and shooting down a latest-model Russian gunship, is that "America love us as much as we love America." I admit to the visceral punch of clever filmmaking, and I warn you that it is all artifice, as manipulative as Rocky and as slick as a De Palma knife-kill flick . . . and as detestable. It is, of course, these smoothyguts versions of otherwise-dismissible genre films, no more important than cartoons, conjured to go through us like merde through a merganser, wherein lies the danger. Emptyhead is as emptyhead does. Unthinking, all receptor and no intellect, we sit unprotected before the tsunami of counterfeit emotion, turned into empty vessels waiting to be filled by cheap bravado, bathos and sonic stimuli, becoming mere stipules for the walking vegetation of a vengeance parable.
That it is a man-eating plant never seems to occur to the brew-swillers or the teenage shamblers. But then, isn't that the essence of emptyheadedness?
Nowhere nearly as vile as Rambo Etc. but even more emptyheaded is the latest James Bond film, what I wearily perceive to be the eleven hundredth film in the endless series. (When the human race goes to the stars, there will surely be only three things of sufficient obstinacy-of-existence, from all that our species has produced, that will go with us: the little plastic beads that fall out of UPS packages no matter how you struggle to contain them; James Bond films; and Swedish meatballs.)
The menace this time is an uncomfortable-looking Christopher Walken, who should have known better. Oddjob this time is rock singer Grace Jones, who looks incredible (an
d has always, it seems to me, looked a lot better than she sings), but who ain't even a close second for deadliness to the late Lotte Lenya as SMERSH's liquidator, Rosa Klebb, in From Russia with Love. And as the nubbin from which the film grows is a minor Ian Fleming short story originally published in Playboy (under the more grammatical title "From a View to a Kill"), what passes for plot is the now-hoary Bond jiggery-pokery, with gags no more innovative or memorable than those to be found in the last half dozen. This film is pure Grub Street (look up the reference), and the very model of brainless. Running, jumping and standing still, with Roger Moore looking more exhausted and threadbare than ever before. It's a shame, really. Moore seems a right decent chap when he's being interviewed; takes it all with the proper modicum of unselfconscious parody; very little of the Colonel Blimp about him; the sort of elegant gentleman one would like to invite over for an evening of billiards and Mexican coatepec. And if you never saw him in a little adventure film called ffolkes, you might continue to believe, incorrectly, that he can't act with any depth of emotion.
But Bond goes on and on, yet another fantasy superman, nattier (god knows) than Rambo, and quarts less oily; but no more a part of the mimetic universe than Tarzan, Conan or Sir Launcelot. Emptyheaded filmmaking long-since canonized and as exquisite an example of how preserved like a fly in amber these things become when they hit the rut of formula.
I go to them on the Everest Principle: "because it's there." But I blush to tell you I fell asleep three times.
And I've saved the remaining pair of emptyheaded summer films with which you'll be tempted for last, because I have some small personal stake in them. And because I don't think they deserve to be savaged as Rambo Etc. demanded.
The first is The Black Cauldron (Walt Disney) and I'm saddened to have to report that it is utterly and completely emptyheaded. The tip-off, I guess, is that nowhere in the credits will one find a listing for an author. More than ten years in the making, at a cost of more than twenty-five million dollars, and described by its producer as "the most ambitious animated production since Pinocchio," this is the 25th full-length animated feature from the Disney Studios; and it is a waste of time.
Pre-screening scuttlebutt had it that the animation techniques were the most extraordinary since the heyday of the Nine Old Men who worked with Walt on Snow White and Pinocchio and Fantasia. Scuttlebutt had it that since the leavetaking of Don Bluth and his cohorts, and the deaths or retirements of the remaining Old Men, it had become necessary for the new crew of young turk animators to rediscover the old tricks or invent new ones equally as impressive. That was the scuttlebutt and if, like me, you got wind of such rumors and, like me, you hitched your hopes to that sticking-place, you will be dismayed beyond the containing of such pain. I left the studio screening with a leaden heart. Jessie Horsting and Howard Green suggest I was revved too high. That there was no way my expectations could have been honored.
Well, maybe. Who knows?
All I do know is that I enjoyed the Chronicles of Prydain fantasies by Lloyd Alexander on which the film is based . . . but in no way slavishly or with that fan elitism that contends no film can top the original material; I was wide open to be dazzled or merely pleasantly entertained, whichever; I am not a recidivist who believes the best work of Disney is past and can never be topped.
And even so, I was bored.
It's not a bad film, it's merely a bore. There is nothing new here. The usual funny sidekick (but Gurgi isn't Dopey or Jiminy Cricket), the usual unisex hero and heroine (but Taran and Eilonwy aren't Prince Phillip or Cinderella), the usual pure-black villain (but the Horned King, for all his death's head and sepulchral wailing could never be, on the most evil day of his life, Queen Grimhelde the Wicked Witch or even Stromboli).
It is a flat film, and I think it is so flat because it was apparently not scripted. Illustrators went from scene to scene and the movie reflects that episodic method. Momentous events turn out to be passing fancies, magical implements are introduced and then are discarded as if all the hue and cry about them had been intended merely to rope you in, characters pop up and never payoff, and the clear intention of the producers to return to some small degree of the genuine fright we felt at the perils passim the first Disney classics is simply not realized.
I nodded off twice.
This seeming recurrence of filmic narcolepsy on my part disturbs me. Yes, I've been working hard, but who the hell falls asleep in either a Disney film or a James Bond adventure? I'll tell you who. Someone who loves movies and wants to be thrilled.
So it is with considerable joylessness that I report The Black Cauldron is empty, and the film is emptyheaded.
Which brings me at the final outpost to Stephen King's new film, Silver Bullet (Paramount). Based on Steve's Cycle of the Werewolf, with screenplay by Steve, directed by newcomer Daniel Attias, and produced by a charming and intelligent woman named Martha Schumacher, this is, I fear, one more in the litany of misses made from King product. Not as bad as Cujo or Children of the Corn or Christine, but as emptyheaded as any of the films I've reviewed this time, Silver Bullet hasn't much to recommend it save a few nice insights by Steve, two extraordinary performances by a young woman named Megan Follows and a little boy named Corey Haim, who play brother and sister, and a scene in a foggy forest that is cinematically enthralling.
Beyond those minor joys, this is simply another feast of ghast in which heads are ripped from necks, vigilantes get half their faces clawed off, and a young woman is disemboweled. The story is pretty traditional, nothing much innovative after you've seen Werewolf of London or the original Lon Chaney, Jr. classic. The attempts at resonance with To Kill a Mockingbird can be credited to Steve, who knows what quality is, but laid into such a stock plot, they are likely to be lost on the sort of audience for which the film is intended.
A word about that audience. I saw this film at a special prerelease screening at Paramount. Steve was in town and was kind enough to invite me to see it with him. As we sat in the back of the theater on the lot, the seats filled by a carefully selected, demographically-perfect crowd of young people—I'd say between seventeen and twenty-five years old—Steve expressed mild surprise that the audience applauded the scenes of strongest violence. I was not surprised. I saw The Omen with just such an audience, and I know how they love their blood sports. Steve knows that, too. Maybe sometime soon I'll tell you about an encounter I had with kids at Central Juvenile Hall in L. A. that speaks to this phenomenon. But not right now. It's bad enough that I'm rewarding Steve's and Dino's courtesy with a negative review. Suffice to say, this film will no doubt make money, but it is emptyheaded summer fare, with a soundtrack of the sort that Tara used to call "rats digging their way to China" music.
As for this season's Spielberg offering, well, last year I warned you away from Gremlins; and those of you who heeded my gardyloo later thanked me. Some of you who sneered at my vehement contempt shelled out your shekels, laid out your lire, plonked down your pennies, abused your eyeballs, and later wrote me toe-scuffling, red-faced, abnegating appeals for absolution. This year, on the basis of utter emptyheadedness and a soundtrack mix that renders every line of dialogue to spinach, I warn you off The Goonies, which I will not mention again. Perhaps you will take a word to the wise this time. If not, well, caveat emptor and don't come crying to me. (The superlative E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is being re-released, however, and you're better served spending your hard-earned to see that Spielbergian wonder this summer.)
And so that you don't think I'm merely a cranky old fuck who is determined to follow in the footsteps of, say, John Simon, let me urge you to rush out immediately to see Ladyhawke and Cocoon, both of which are fresh and dear and worth the laying out of pfennig.
Also, ignore all negative reviews of Return to Oz, which I will review at length. Ignore Siskel and Ebert of ABC's At the Movies; ignore Robert Denerstein of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Robert Osborne of The Hollywood Reporter and KTTV; ignore my friends Leona
rd Maltin of Entertainment Tonight and David Sheehan of ABC-TV; ignore Jeffrey Lyons and Neal Gabler of PBS's Sneak Previews, and Janet Maslin of The New York Times. Shine 'em on, every last one of them. They are wrong, wrong, wrong in their looney denigrations. Return to Oz is smashing! For those of us who are familiar with the Oz canon of L. Frank Baum and those who lovingly continued the history of that special wonderland—even though we adore the 1939 MGM classic, watch it again and again, and know a masterpiece when we (and posterity) see one—the Judy Garland musical was hardly the definitive interpretation. And comparing the two films is sheer foolishness. And vilifying Return to Oz because it has some genuinely inspired moments of real terror on the grounds that the 1939 film had a purer heart, loses sight of the horrors MGM built into that movie. Or have you forgotten those damned blue, winged monkey monsters schlepping Dorothy into the sky as their buddies stomp the crap out of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman? No, my readers, turn a deaf ear to the boos and catcalls of the trendy critics who refuse to judge this absolutely marvelous film on its own merits. Take your kids, let them scream, let your eyes drink in marvels. Return to Oz is everything we hoped for.
Also, if Night of the Comet comes available on videocassette, catch up on what you missed when it was briefly in theaters, and treat yourself to the same kind of pleasure you derived from Repo Man. But these four films come with a warning: they may make you think. And that can be painful for the head what am empty.
Harlan Ellison's Watching Page 32