by Jesse Walker
The transition film was Ted Post’s Good Guys Wear Black (1978), a conspiracy movie that contained the seeds of the POW/MIA cycle to come. The story begins with an ill-fated effort to free some prisoners of war. The rest of the picture is a poor man’s Parallax View, with Chuck Norris and Anne Archer tracking down the plotters who sabotaged the mission. It’s no salve for Vietnam hawks: Early in the film, while teaching a class, Norris’s character calls Vietnam “a war that never should have begun, in a country we never should have entered,” adding that “the reasons for the war were beyond any rules of logic.” (At that point a bell rings, signaling the end of the class. Norris cracks a joke: “On Wednesday we’ll sing patriotic songs and pretend I said none of the above.”) But there are elements of another old narrative here, along with that familiar seventies story of the Enemy Above. As part of the Paris peace agreement, we learn, the North Vietnamese negotiator secretly demanded “a sacrifice” in which U.S. soldiers are killed. The line recalls the story colonial soldiers whispered about Governor Edmund Andros, that he had “brought them theither to be a sacrifice to their heathen Adversaries.” Ghosts of the Indian wars haunt the picture, and sometimes the symbolism is overt. Stateside, our heroes are trailed by a pair of Vietnamese assassins, one a man, one a woman; when the woman shoots a former CIA agent, she does it at the Squaw Valley ski resort.
In other words, the movie has merged the Enemy Above and the Enemy Outside.18 When he finally confronts the chief conspirator, a few hours before the villain is scheduled to be sworn in as secretary of state, Norris mentions one of the Vietnamese assassins: “At first I assumed he worked for them, whoever they were—but of course, they are you, and you are all one.”
It’s a bleak film that ends with Norris killing the would-be secretary of state. A friend in the CIA is complicit in the death and helps smooth things over; when the story is done, it’s hard to say whether you’ve seen a justification for revolutionary violence or just for another lawless covert operation. But the movie’s general opinion of the nation’s establishment is clear. When Norris and the grand conspirator have their first extended dialogue, the politician invokes a wilderness metaphor familiar from many tales of the Enemy Outside, then transfers it someplace new. “I understand, Major Booker, that you were quite a jungle fighter,” he tells Norris. “Well, this is my kind of jungle.”19
In First Blood Part II, as in Good Guys Wear Black, we learn that Rambo was never supposed to find any prisoners; he rescues them only by ditching the authorities’ plan and setting off on his own. (Morrell’s novelization of the film is even more skeptical about the government, with a scene in which Rambo chuckles darkly as he informs the disbelieving POWs that Ronald Reagan has become president. He “couldn’t bring himself to tell them that Vietnam was about to change its name to Nicaragua.”)20 Stallone doesn’t follow in Norris’s footsteps and have his character assassinate an American official. But Rambo does return to the computerized command center in the movie’s climax, and there he pumps pounds of ammo into its alienating array of machinery. It’s a violent, cathartic revision of an old sixties slogan. I am a soldier. Do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate me.
Like the previous picture in the series, First Blood Part II owed a lot to the western.21 But while the first film resembles those existential stories about a stranger entering a corrupt frontier town, Part II is about a cowboy who rides deep into the wilderness to save white captives from savage Indians. Complicating the racial dynamics, Rambo is now identified as a half-breed, part civilized and part wild: We learn that he’s half Native American himself (his other half—paging Gustav Hasford!—is German), and he has a brief affair with a Vietnamese woman. But you can still trace the core plot to the Indian captivity narratives that first flourished in seventeenth-century New England and have manifested themselves in the American imagination countless times since.
The movie may have had a more recent antecedent as well. In the late 1970s, a self-promoting soldier named Bo Gritz staged several unsuccessful efforts to rescue American POWs from Indochina. It is often claimed that Gritz’s exploits helped inspire First Blood Part II. Whether or not that’s true, the movie certainly had an impact on Gritz, who started to bill himself as the “real-life Rambo” after the film became a hit.
With that in mind, you can imagine two men walking away from the movie: Hollywood Rambo and Real-Life Rambo. Hollywood Rambo embodies the popular gloss on the eighties; he’s either a simpleminded jingoistic killer or a warrior-hero we can have faith in, depending on whether or not you like the Reagan years. Real-Life Rambo is a very different figure, a bridge from the Watergate seventies to the militia nineties.
Hollywood Rambo appeared in another picture, 1988’s Rambo III, in which he fights alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. It’s another bringing-Vietnam-home film, but this time Stallone is bringing it home to the Soviets. (In this one Colonel Trautman—the same man who warned Sheriff Teasle about those body bags—informs the Russians, “This war is your Vietnam, man. You can’t win!”)22 Hollywood Rambo got his own TV cartoon, Rambo and the Forces of Freedom, in which he works for a military peacekeeping unit and battles a global conspiracy called S.A.V.A.G.E. This is the Rambo of “Rambo foreign policy,” the Rambo of popular memory; it is invoked by both the fans and the foes of Reagan’s bombing raid over Libya and Oliver North’s illicit efforts to aid the Nicaraguan Contras.
And Real-Life Rambo? In the late 1980s, Gritz continued to build on that suspicious post-Watergate mood, accusing the intelligence community of connections to the drug trade and speaking to audiences of both the radical Left and the radical Right. In 1992, he ran for president, drawing support from the precursors to the militia movement. His core constituency was a bunch of angry patriots, many of them veterans, who said they loved their country but feared their government. Later in the nineties, their rallying cry would be the confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal police at Waco, a conflict that was retold in two very different ways. For the authorities and most of the media, it was another version of the captivity narrative, with the ATF and FBI unsuccessfully attempting to rescue children from a sexually depraved death cult. In the alternative story, the police were the villains and the confrontation was a massacre, part My Lai and part Wounded Knee. Like the Mormons of the nineteenth century, elements of the populist Right rewrote the American story with themselves in the role of the Indians.23
There are people—real people, not archetypes—who stopped playing one Rambo role and took up the other. Tom Posey was the head of Civilian Material Assistance, a paramilitary group that trained and armed the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s. Both the CIA and the National Security Council were aware of Posey’s activities and encouraged them. But with the end of the Cold War, Posey’s anger shifted from the government in Managua to the government in Washington, and he started hatching plans for a revolution at home. He was thinking along these lines as early as 1990, but after the deaths at Waco his rage intensified.24
Meanwhile, the 1997 documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement includes footage of cops in camouflage gathered outside the Branch Davidians’ compound before the feds’ final assault. A Klansman turns up in the middle of the standoff to offer his services in stopping the group’s leader. “Give him an ultimatum, give him a deadline,” he suggests. One officer declares himself “honed to kill.” A buddy compares him to Rambo.25
Which of the two Rambos prevailed? When the Cold War ended, Stallone’s movies lost their hold on the culture and decayed into eighties kitsch, while distrust of the government intensified and crossed what used to look like sharp ideological lines. When the wounds of 9/11 were fresh, the outrage of the heartland populists turned outward again; it was a moment made for Hollywood Rambo. After a while, the failures of the Iraq occupation drove many of them back to an antigovernment stance; the spirit of Real-Life Rambo was dominant again. And with the Obama era . . .
Sorry, we’re getting ahead of ourselves; we aren’t qui
te ready to cover the Obama years yet. But as long as we’ve taken a detour to the twenty-first century, let’s pause to consider the fourth Rambo movie, released in early 2008. The critics mostly disliked it, deploying such phrases as “enough jingoistic imperialism to make Kipling puff up his chest with pride”26 and “the Schindler’s List of B-list butchery.”27 (If you’re going to be compared to a movie about Nazis, I guess Schindler’s List beats Triumph of the Will.) David Morrell was more impressed, calling it “the first time that the tone of my novel First Blood has been used in any of the movies.”28
For the most part I’ll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its taciturn protagonist. But the film does show a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.
The fourth film in the Frankenstein series was called The Ghost of Frankenstein. The fourth film in the Rambo franchise is ghostly as well: After an absence of two decades, both the series and its protagonist feel a little undead. An early version of the script pitted Stallone’s alter ego against a right-wing American paramilitary group—sort of a Rambo vs. Rambo scenario. But the finished product takes us back to Southeast Asia instead. When we return to Stallone’s character, he is a numb man hunting snakes for a living in Thailand. Vietnam is deep in his past, and the country’s more recent wounds don’t seem to have touched him—the word Iraq appears nowhere in the movie, and neither does Al Qaeda, Islam, 9/11, or bin Laden. The writer/director/star told Ain’t It Cool News that he had taken this approach because “the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President’s lap declaring ‘The world is now safe, Chief’ would be a bit insulting.”29 I don’t doubt Stallone’s sincerity, though World War II–era GIs didn’t seem to mind the fact that Superman, Captain America, and the rest were fighting alongside them in the comic books.30
Instead we get a one-man humanitarian intervention in Burma, where brutal soldiers have seized a group of missionaries tending to Christian villagers. Rambo sets out to rescue them, arriving just in time to save a young woman—the closest we have to a female lead—from a rape.
In other words, Stallone has returned to the classic Indian captivity narrative. Remember Richard Slotkin’s summary of the archetypal captivity story:
a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. . . . In the Indian’s devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian’s “cannibal” Eucharist. To partake of the Indian’s love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.31
There are films that intelligently explore the racial and sexual anxieties that underlie this tale. The most famous is John Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers, in which the captive woman does not want to leave the Indian community; her would-be rescuer, a complex antihero played by John Wayne, would rather kill her than watch her become an Indian.32 The 2008 Rambo, by contrast, merely adopts those old anxieties as its own. The woman prisoner is almost comically pure, kind, white, and blonde, while every Asian character except one—a thoroughly Westernized mercenary who was obviously raised in the United States—is either a victim or a savage. When the original Indian captivity narratives enjoyed their peak of popularity, Slotkin writes, “It almost seems as if the only experience of intimacy with the Indians that New England readers would accept was the experience of the captive (and possibly that of the missionary).”33 Rambo gives us both, and little more. It doesn’t seem to have anything to say about the country’s scars in Vietnam or the Middle East. Or rather, it doesn’t until the final scene, when Stallone does something unexpected.
The Searchers concludes with John Wayne’s character turning his back on home and hearth and walking into the western landscape, unable to join the civilized world. Stallone’s movie inverts that: Rambo returns to civilization, hiking down an Arizona road toward the house where he grew up. As the old soldier strides down a driveway to his family homestead, the film finally seems to say something that resonates in an era of occupation and empire.
Come back from that violent foreign wilderness, it tells us. Come home.
11
THE DEMONIC CAFETERIA
The Cold War was supposed to end in a nuclear inferno that killed everyone. It wasn’t supposed to just have the air go out of it. And a deferred eschaton has unusual power. Culturally, we spent decades expecting that we were all going to die. The reprieve didn’t suddenly make everybody less pessimistic. It just turned that pessimism inward.
—Philip Sandifer1
It is June 1994, and Anthony J. Hilder is selling tapes at a convocation called The New World Order. Hilder, whom we last spotted passing out right-wing literature the night Robert Kennedy was shot, is now the host of two talk shows, Radio Free America and Radio Free World, that continue in the vein of the anti-Illuminati records he produced in the 1960s. Above him, two overhead projectors beam the covers of books about Masonic conspiracies onto the walls of the smoke-filled room.
It might sound like a gathering of the xenophobic Right. In fact it was a multiracial rap/rock concert in downtown Los Angeles, featuring Fishbone, Ice Cube, Ice T, and Body Count, among other performers. The event was organized not by a white man decked out in camouflage but by a black DJ called Afrika Islam, and the smoke thickening the air was not burning tobacco but burning marijuana.
In the 1990s, as the world’s cultures and subcultures traded and blended more easily than ever before, so did its schools of fear. Militiamen, hippies, black nationalists, ufologists: one group’s legends flowed freely into another’s. Figures on the right found ways to work flying saucers into their litany of official crimes and cover-ups. Activists opposed to drug-war abuses extended their outrage to Waco. Alienated African Americans discovered the conspiracy theories and curious legal doctrines of the sovereign citizens, a subculture that also overlapped with the world of white separatists.2
The 1990s were boom years for Enemy Above theories, even more than the 1970s had been. But while paranoia had reached the public eye through the front door in the seventies, enshrined by congressional committees and investigations in the country’s leading newspapers, two decades later it was a side-door affair, a phenomenon not of broadcasting but of narrowcasting. Its greatest engine was the Internet, which did not merely enable theories from outside the mainstream to reach a much larger audience; it gave those theories new opportunities to mix. The conspiracy subculture that had been developing since the Nixon era was now in full bloom. It was in the 1990s that Michael Kelly coined the phrase fusion paranoia, and it was in the 1990s that Michael Barkun identified a phenomenon that he came to call improvisational millennialism. Once it had been typical for a conspiratorial or apocalyptic vision to stick to a single tradition, Barkun wrote, but the eclectic new breed could “draw simultaneously on Eastern and Western religion, New Age ideas and esotericism, and radical politics, without any sense that the resulting mélange contains incompatible elements.”3
For decades, religious leaders had been complaining about “cafeteria spirituality,” a mentality in which people customized their beliefs, jettisoning doctrines that didn’t appeal to them and mixing in elements from other faiths. With the 1990s, cafeteria demonology came of age.
Meanwhile, the transition from one Rambo to the other took place. The Cold War came to an end, removing a potent Enemy Outside from the country’s psychic landscape and allowing many Americans to shift their fears toward the Enemy Above. The confrontations at Ruby Ridge and Waco hastened the process, as suspicions that had once been directed at Communists abroad and their alleged agents at home were redirected at federal police agencies
. The Enemy Outside didn’t disappear, but it became more diffuse: a ghostly, shape-shifting presence, more a generalized dread about globalization than a fear of a specific foreign power.
In the militia world, the most popular conspiracy theories held that Waco was a trial run for future assaults on independent Americans; that concentration camps were being built within the country’s borders; that foreign troops were being imported to impose the new authoritarian order; and that the destruction of local self-government by federal forces would be conjoined with the destruction of national self-government by global forces. When President George H. W. Bush described the post–Cold War world with the phrase “new world order,” a phrase that many conspiracy theorists had long associated with a plot to impose a one-world government, suspicious populists saw it as a sign that individual liberty and U.S. independence faced an imminent threat. If conspiracy theories reflect the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe them, these theories were what you’d expect from Americans concerned about a loss of freedom and sovereignty.
Those rising fears of the Enemy Above were met by a growing concern about the Enemy Within and the Enemy Below, as the centrist establishment adopted its own conspiracy theories about militias and other radical groups. Those worries went into overdrive in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh, a Desert Storm vet enraged by Waco, bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including more than a dozen kids in a day care center.
In the popular imagination, the militia movement was a paranoid pack of racists plotting McVeigh-style attacks. The historian Robert Churchill has called this “the narrative of 1995,” a story line in which “the militias and the Patriot movement took on the guise of a perfect, racist ‘other,’ and the threat they posed was best articulated by Morris Dees’ apocalyptic vision of a ‘gathering storm.’ ”4