by Jesse Walker
“Of course,” she said. “The so-called Manson murders were actually orchestrated by military intelligence in order to destroy the counterculture movement. It’s no different from the Special Forces in Vietnam, disguised as Vietcong, killing and slaughtering to make the Vietcong look bad.”98
Krassner started getting drawn into Brussell’s worldview. When he finally met three of the Manson killers, the women asked him who really ran the country. Pulling a pyramid-shaped seashell from his pocket, he launched into a rap about secret societies, organized crime, military intelligence, and the corporate world. Serious conspiracy stories began to rub shoulders with The Realist’s investigative satires, including a 1972 piece by Brussell on the Watergate affair.
Krassner began to think that people were following him. Once, on a bus, he became convinced the man sitting in front of him was in the CIA. To let the guy know that he was on to his game, Krassner pulled out a ballpoint pen and started clicking it like a telegraph, saying “Paul Krassner calling Abbie Hoffman” over and over. (Krassner later told Hoffman, a prominent Yippie, about the incident. “Oh, yeah,” Hoffman replied. “I got your call, only it was collect, so I couldn’t accept it.”)99
“I had wanted to explore the Charles Manson case,” Krassner later wrote, “but ultimately I had to face the reality of my own peculiar darkness. Originally, I had wanted to expose the dangers of Scientology, but instead I joined a cult of conspiracy. . . . I thought that what I published was so important that I wanted to be persecuted, in order to validate the work. In the process, I had become attached to conspiracy.”100
Krassner’s return from paranoia didn’t end his interest in conspiracy theories. It just grounded it. “I was able to examine more closely in terms of what could be a conspiracy and what could be misinterpreted,” he explained. “The way conspiracy people work, they start with a premise automatically—‘This is an assassination, not a suicide’—and then they go back and back through the facts and make them fit that conclusion that they already have.” Instead he tried to foster a spirit of “conscious innocence,” of approaching a mystery with “as little predisposition as possible.”101
In the meantime, he kept cracking conspiracy-themed jokes. When HBO hired Krassner to help write a comedy special in 1980, only one of his gags made it to the air: a Secret Service man ordering a drink he calls a Lee Harvey Wallbanger. The censors cut the next line, when the bartender asks, “Yes, sir, will that be one shot or two?”102
Thornley, for his part, managed to get drawn into the JFK assassination circus. Jim Garrison tried to get him involved in his investigation of the Kennedy killing, and after Thornley rebuffed the D.A., Garrison started suggesting that Thornley himself had been a part of the plot. Garrison put out a press release claiming that the Discordian had been “closely associated with Lee Oswald,” not just in the marines but “at a number of locations in New Orleans” in September 1963.103 Thornley gave a deposition before a New Orleans grand jury at the beginning of 1968, and the experience convinced him that Garrison’s team wasn’t interested in justice. Among other things, the team members seemed intent on pigeonholing him as a Birch-style conservative. “I explained several times to them that I am neither a traditionalist nor a nationalist nor a racist—that I oppose the John Birch Society and what passes today as political Conservatism,” Thornley wrote shortly afterward. “I went on to say that I am a ‘rightwinger’ in so far as I favor individualism, but my rightism is more anarchistic than authoritarian. They looked at me blankly, not seeming to hear.”104
As Garrison’s allegations spread through the underground press, Thornley put out his side of the story in every venue available to him. (The subscribers to Ocean Living, a low-circulation zine that Thornley helped edit, were surely surprised when the material they were used to—a typical article informed readers that plankton “can be gathered in nets and used as a nourishing foodstuff”105—was now mixed with statements by the assassination theorists David S. Lifton and Sylvia Meagher criticizing Garrison for his pursuit of Thornley.) Garrison was soon spreading the story that Thornley, who bore some physical resemblance to his marine friend, had served as a “double” for the accused assassin, posing as Oswald in the time before the president’s murder so as to create a false trail of Oswald’s activities.
As he fended off Garrison’s attacks, Thornley reconsidered his assumption that Oswald had acted alone in Dallas. In 1973, he read a feature in the Yippie tabloid Yipster Times that would later be expanded into Canfield and Weberman’s book Coup d’État in America. Thornley wasn’t just convinced: He began to suspect that he really had been involved in the assassination without his knowledge, a hypnotized zombie held in reserve in case something went wrong with the Oswald plan. He started typing up his speculations, boosted by new “memories” of things that he believed had happened to him years before, and he circulated the manuscripts among his contacts. After that, he perceived various odd events as the secret government’s reactions to those memorandums.
Some of the incidents would scare anyone: At one point armed bandits in ski masks had raided a party he was attending, stealing Thornley’s identification along with everyone’s else’s money. But Thornley was also capable of accusing his girlfriend of working for the conspiracy. He wrote to Greg Hill, “I am literally surrounded by the Intelligence Community, but after the first three attempts to murder me things seem to have cooled down and most of the spies now appear to be on my side.”106 At one point he became convinced that a coworker at the Sunshine Floral Company was really Robert Anton Wilson, “living incognito with [Timothy] Leary in Atlanta for reasons I obviously could not fathom.”107 He wondered whether the collapse of the New Left was caused by “foreign intelligence agencies . . . dosing organizers with a substance causing heart disease, thereafter maintaining control over them by means of a microwave device capable of instantly halting a Pacemaker.”108 By the 1990s, he believed that he was “the product of a Vril Society breeding/environmental manipulation experiment.”109
In the midst of this, the real Wilson cut off his correspondence with Thornley. It was hard, he told Gorightly years later, “to communicate with somebody when he thinks you’re a diabolical mind-control agent and you’re convinced that he’s a little bit paranoid.”110 Thornley continued to write, sometimes with wit and self-awareness, sometimes not. He spent the last few years of his life working at menial jobs in Atlanta and selling trinkets and essays on the street. It was a chaotic conclusion to a chaotic life—a darkly poetic fate, I suppose, for a man who worshipped Eris. “You know,” Thornley told Hill in one of his more lucid moments, “if I had realized all of this was going to come true, I would have chosen Venus.”111
10
THE GHOST OF RAMBO
On Wednesday we’ll sing patriotic songs and pretend I said none of the above.
—Good Guys Wear Black1
In the 1980s, the United States rediscovered its faith in its leaders. Or at least that’s the standard gloss on the era, and there’s certainly some truth to it. If the iconic political footage of the seventies featured Richard Nixon resigning, the eighties brought the nation’s TV screens a Ronald Reagan ad declaring it morning in America.
But the same cynicism about the government that powered a great deal of the seventies Left also helped elect Reagan, and that attitude didn’t disappear when the candidate became president. Reagan refused to attack Nixon for Watergate, and he called the investigation that felled the thirty-seventh president a “lynching” and a “witch hunt.”2 But as the liberal pundit Thomas Frank would later grumble, the Nixon scandals also “poisoned public attitudes toward government and stirred up the wave that swept Ronald Reagan into office six years later—and made antigovernment cynicism the default American political sentiment.”3 Reagan co-opted that cynicism, but he didn’t kill it. The skeptical seventies spirit didn’t disappear so much as it mutated into new forms and hid in plain sight.
One of the forms it took was the shirtles
s Sylvester Stallone firing a machine gun. When Stallone’s Rambo movies came to theaters, many critics hailed or damned them as a sign that the sixties were dead and a new patriotic moment had arrived. Far fewer recognized that they were watching a brawny, bloody descendant of The Parallax View.
There are three things people tend to forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was First Blood, a 1972 novel by a young literary scholar named David Morrell.4 It’s about a Green Beret called Rambo—the name was inspired partly by Rambo apples and partly by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud—who has come home from Vietnam and is tramping across the United States. It’s also about a sheriff named Will Teasle, who doesn’t want the long-haired, unshaven kid bringing trouble to his corner of Kentucky. Their conflict eventually engulfs an entire town, with countless people dying meaningless deaths. The book is told alternately from both characters’ point of view, switching back and forth until their identities essentially merge. In the end they both die.
It isn’t immortal literature, but it’s an intelligent thriller. It was respected enough to be assigned occasionally as classroom reading, though “by the mid-eighties,” Morrell later wrote, “the controversy generated by the films had caused teachers to shy away from the book.”5 Morrell’s Rambo is more loquacious than Stallone’s. He is also more of a cold-blooded killer, picking off policemen who pose no real threat and enjoying the thrill of battle. He’s one of the first manifestations of what would become a media stereotype: the deeply damaged Vietnam veteran who has trouble adjusting to the home front and finally snaps. In real life, Americans who survived that war have been more likely to be married, college-educated, and gainfully employed than other members of their generation.6 But in popular culture and the press, they were often portrayed as time bombs waiting to explode.
You can’t blame Morrell for that. His Rambo is a well-rounded character with his own motives for what he does, not a cookie-cutter copy of a movie cliché. Morrell meant his story as a metaphor for the culture war breaking out at home while another war raged in Southeast Asia. “The final confrontation between Rambo and Teasle,” he wrote, “would show that in this microcosmic version of the Vietnam War and American attitudes about it, escalating force results in disaster. Nobody wins.”7
When First Blood became a movie in 1982, both the story and the metaphor changed. Rambo became more sympathetic: He kills only once in the film, a slaying that is both accidental and an act of self-defense. Teasle, in turn, grows less appealing. Brian Dennehy’s textured performance keeps him from being entirely one-dimensional, but he’s still a redneck sheriff pointlessly persecuting a war hero. His officers mistreat the man in jail, and the film compares their abuses directly to the torture the soldier received as a prisoner of war. It’s clear that Rambo is a little crazy—by the end of the movie, he’s more than a little crazy—but it’s also clear that viewers are supposed to root for him. “My intent was to transpose the Vietnam war to America,” Morrell complained. “In contrast, the film’s intent was to make the audience cheer for the underdog.”8
But there was more to the movie than that. That’s the second thing people forget about the Rambo films: The first one is explicitly antiwar and surprisingly radical. Director Ted Kotcheff’s earlier credits include North Dallas Forty, a jaundiced take on professional football, and Fun with Dick and Jane, a crime comedy that mocks middle-class materialism and the corporate world. First Blood continues in that antiestablishment vein.
The film opens with Rambo learning that one of his war buddies has died of exposure to Agent Orange. He wanders into a small town, and almost immediately the sheriff starts to harass the soldier: “Wearing that flag on that jacket, and looking the way you do, you’re asking for trouble around here,” Teasle tells him. The reference to the flag may seem to signify intolerance toward veterans, but the second clause adds the implication that Teasle doesn’t like Rambo because of his appearance—that is, because he looks like a hippie drifter. When the sheriff’s men finally find out that Rambo is a Green Beret who served in Indochina, one of them exclaims, “Jesus! That freak?”9
This identification of Rambo with the counterculture is a residue of Morrell’s novel, which was partly inspired by a news report. “In a southwestern American town,” Morrell recalled, “a group of hitchhiking hippies had been picked up by the local police, stripped, hosed, and shaved—not just their beards but their hair. The hippies had then been given back their clothes and driven to a desert road, where they were abandoned to walk to the next town, thirty miles away. . . . I wondered what Rambo’s reaction would be if, after risking his life in the service of his country, he were subjected to the insults that those hippies had received.”10
The most jarring thing about the movie’s politics comes later. Everyone remembers Rambo’s much-quoted soliloquy at the end of the film, the one where he complains about “maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby killer.” What isn’t quoted as often is a conversation between Teasle and Colonel Sam Trautman, the Special Forces officer who trained Rambo. Trautman describes his student’s immense skills as a fighter, and he suggests that the police should defuse the situation by letting Rambo escape, waiting a few days, then putting out a nationwide all-points bulletin and picking him up later. Teasle refuses.
TRAUTMAN: You want a war you can’t win?
TEASLE: Are you telling me that two hundred men against your boy is a no-win situation for us?
TRAUTMAN: You send that many, don’t forget one thing.
TEASLE: What?
TRAUTMAN: Plenty of body bags.
A small but committed guerrilla force humiliating a larger power that doesn’t comprehend the fight it’s in—the comparison to Vietnam is obvious. It’s also a little discomforting, because it puts Rambo in the role of the Vietcong. Morrell was wrong: The movie does transpose the Vietnam War to the United States. It just does it in a radically different way from the novel, and with radically different implications. It asks the audience to cheer for a guerrilla hero.
That was surprisingly common in the superficially right-wing cult movies of the eighties. Consider John Milius’s Red Dawn (1984), in which a small group of Colorado high school jocks battle a Soviet occupation. The film outraged liberal critics, but farther to the left it had some supporters. In a witty and perceptive piece for The Nation, the socialist writer Andrew Kopkind called it “the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers,” adding that he’d “take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary situation I can imagine.”11 The sole sympathetic character among the occupying forces is a Cuban colonel with a background in guerrilla warfare. At one point he tells a Russian officer, voice dripping with disgust, that he used to be an insurgent but now is “just like you—a policeman.”12 Increasingly sympathetic to the Coloradan rebels, at a key moment the Cuban allows two of them to escape.
First Blood drew from several other genres as well: the redneck movie, the revenge movie, the war film, the western. One sequence, in which the sheriff’s men track the fugitive soldier through the woods only to discover that he’s hunting them rather than the other way around, feels like a slasher flick, with Rambo in the Jason/Freddy/Michael Myers role. The difference—and it’s a substantial one—is that unlike the villains of Friday the 13th and Halloween, Rambo has the audience’s sympathy. In that, he’s more like the monster in Universal’s old Frankenstein series. Frankenstein was, in fact, one of the inspirations for the script: According to Susan Faludi, who interviewed several people involved in the Rambo sequence for her 1999 book Stiffed, Stallone “envisioned the drama ‘like the Frankenstein monster and the creator,’ a creator who ‘understood what he made’ and ‘felt guilty’ for it.”13 (Stallone’s role in creating the Hollywood Rambo should not be underestimated. He cowrote all four films and directed at least one, perhaps t
wo of them—George P. Cosmatos, credited as the director of First Blood Part II, was reportedly a figurehead.)14
First Blood ends with a confrontation between Rambo, the sympathetic monster, and Colonel Trautman, his creator. As originally shot, it concluded with Stallone’s character committing suicide, but the test audiences hated to see their hero die. So the filmmakers changed the ending. The veteran was sent to prison instead, preparing the way for a series of sequels.
Like the monster emerging from the pit beneath the burning mill at the beginning of Bride of Frankenstein, 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II starts with the title character being freed from a prison that Trautman calls a “hellhole.” Dangling the possibility of a pardon, Trautman asks if Rambo is willing to go on a covert reconnaissance mission to find MIAs in Communist Vietnam. Rambo accepts with just one question: “Do we get to win this time?”15
So begins the movie everyone remembers; or, rather, the movie everyone thinks he remembers. If Stallone’s speech about the mistreated vet serves as a screen memory that conceals the more radical implications of the first Rambo picture, the hype and hysteria around the follow-up film have done something similar for First Blood Part II. Yes, it’s an ultraviolent story about a supersoldier refighting the Vietnam War. Yes, it implies that we could have won Vietnam the first time around if our hands hadn’t been tied by liberals back home. Yes, Ronald Reagan co-opted it, joking at the end of a hostage crisis, “After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”16 The word Rambo entered the language, in phrases such as Rambo foreign policy. Some veterans picketed the picture. One vet—Gustav Hasford, the author of the book that became the movie Full Metal Jacket—called it “Triumph of the Will for American Nazis.”17
All of which makes it easy to forget that the film is as cynical about the government as any 1970s conspiracy thriller. Indeed, the POW/MIA rescue genre, of which Rambo was merely the most popular example, evolved directly from those post-Watergate pictures.