John Rambo: Fictional Persona Who Bespeaks Many Issues

    I just watched the last movie yesterday, now mid-way through July 2025. It came out six years ago. Stallone was old then! How old is he now? Quite the career in story telling and entertainment, Sylvester. He just turned 79 this month. Born in 1946. Like a couple of the parents of my family, born in 1944. They turned 80 last year, in California and Indiana. We love our octogenarians. 

    Rambo is one year away. From eighty. He was riding towards a mountain on a horse in 2019. A Vietnam veteran and a man constantly haunted by his past. He is a fictional symbol and representative of of the United States, of troops deployed, of the human and the vindictive or protective spirit that lies within us.

    What is my take on this persona, this battle hardened and tortured soul, a tactical genius and trained killer weapon, yet sensitive and bruised warrior? Who has created him? Why does he exist? What does he mean to us, if anything. Each film suggests a few things.

    A quick pre-view, if I may.

    First Blood:  John tries to return home from an awful, bloody, Vietnam experience. Fellow Americans, especially the local Oregonian police, who should be more sympathetic or at least empathetic, show him cruelty and malice. John does what he needs to survive. He resorts to his animalistic, primitive, killer instincts. His former commander is summoned to reign John in. The battle of the soul of John Rambo resembles the battles of the United States in Southeast Asia for a decade and half. What happened? Who were we really fighting? Ourselves? A Communist bogey man in a little known tropical nation had the greatest and freest power on earth caving in on itself.

    This film came out in 1982, when we in the West and the U.S. were still wrangling with and turning over the meanings of the Vietnamese conflict (not a war?), the greater war of the "Cold", the Cold War against the Communist threats of the Soviet Union, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, and other ever-growing threat from Latin America, Africa, and the rest.

    Who were we, us free capitalists and republican democrats of the so-called "free world"? What does it mean to be free? Is there always a poor underclass, and how do we live the best way, to achieve the highest society? Do we always have to fight and combat militarily to make our world what we want it to be? Are there always the "Other" bogeyman, the foreign threat and masses that threaten our ways of peace and prosperity? 

    And what of the inner soul?

 

    My parents went to the theater to see this movie. That surprised me. It was not the last of my surprises by my parents in my youth and formative teens. I saw the film maybe a few years later... Perhaps when 15 or 16, older and more mature than my 11 year-old self when it released. Stallone was Rocky, too, of whom I had fully imbibed his heroic status and stance as man of sheer might and will.

    Okay, the above was longer than anticipated. The rest of this post will be briefer.

First Blood Part II John returns to Vietnam to save our forgotten, captured heroes. John is a war machine. We are still dealing with the after affects of Vietnam when this sequel debuted in 1985. I saw it in the theater, age 14.

Rambo III. In 1988 we were pitched against the Communists in Afghanistan, fighting with the mujahidin against the evil Soviets (as Rocky had done in the boxing ring). Were the Muslim holy warriors a side prop to what us red blooded Americans hoped to do?

Rambo: 2008. What? Twenty years (yes, two decades!) come and go and poor John is still stuck in his head and heart, living as a blacksmith in Vietnam? Good meaning Christian folks look to do a charitable mission in repressive Burma, Myanmar. They need a guy. John knows it is him. Where else can evil be found after the Communist threats have subsided world wide? Good old, plain autocratic despots of the newer, darker, more obscure, South East Asia. Cruel and unusual killers in the forlorn jungles off the grid. John must go there, and tally up souls.

    Rambo: Last Blood: 2019. John has made it back to his home in Arizona, after purging most of his demons eleven years before, leaving the genesis of his personal trek, his Iliad of emotions and soul quenching drama. And trauma. But now he has a niece that he considers his daughter, and she must seek her own path in the border of Mexico, where John is inextricably connected due the evil men down there.

    We must look into the ugly underbelly of our closest foreign neighbor. What is wrong with us, when we cannot protect our most innocent? John faces more demons, embodied in Spanish speaking monsters.

    Where can we find peace, John?

    To be determined.

    We thank the makers of John Rambo, who show us some of what we are, and where we have come from. An American hero, rugged individual, an anti-hero, a reflection of who we can be, and what we wish to avoid.