Dissecting Rambo

David Morrell Discusses The Icon He Created.

By Elaine Bergstrom

Novelist David Morrell looks not one bit like a pumped-up, anger-fuelled, out-of-control one-man-force of lethal destruction, but he does know a thing or two about that -- having created the character John Rambo in his novel First Blood, and in the novelizations of the subsequent films in the popular franchise.

I first met Morrell at Chicon V, the 1991 World Science Fiction Convention. We were sitting next to each other at a mass book signing. As we waited for the doors to open, we discussed, among other things, how the incredible shades of gray in his novel First Blood shifted into the very black-and-white morality of the blockbuster film starring Sylvester Stallone.

Recently, I had a chance to see Rambo, the latest film in the series, which Stallone also produced and directed. Set in Myanmar (called "Burma" in the film, possibly as a nod of support to resistance groups who still prefer the ancient name for their country), the film reveals the intense repression of isolated Karen Christian tribes by the military junta in power. In the film, John Rambo is in self-imposed exile in Thailand. After he ferries a group of Christian missionaries on a clandestine trip into Burma, he is drawn into the conflict there. Though Rambo is a whole lot older than he was in 1982, the film captures the character Morrell created in ways the jingoistic second and cartoonish third films did not.

Connecting with him at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., it feels almost as if we are continuing the conversation we started some 17 years ago.

When the film first hit theaters, Myanmar was far off the world's scope. Sadly, following the cyclone, that's not the case any longer. Why is Rambo set there?

David Morrell: When Sylvester started to research the movie, he phoned various places, like the State Department and Soldier of Fortune magazine, to find out the worst place in the world in terms of a repressive regime. Everyone agreed that Myanmar was at the top. Maybe the DVD release of the film will help make a difference.

I remember when we first talked, I had just read First Blood and commented how different the tone seemed from that of the film.

The book was written during the Vietnam era and the country was polarized by the war. Universities had shut down. There were riots, things like that. The book was written to replicate that kind of conflict, as if Vietnam in miniature were occurring in the United States. Rambo is a medal of honor recipient who hates what happened over there, who hates what he found out about himself -- that one of the few things he's good at is killing people. So he's basically a very pissed off individual. And he comes into conflict with the police chief who had been a war hero in Korea, and is a kind of Eisenhower Republican. He's old enough to be Rambo's father and he was trained in conventional warfare as opposed to the guerilla warfare Rambo was trained in.

When I was writing that book I was also teaching at Penn State and one of the books we were required to teach was the Last Days of Socrates. And there's a big speech that Plato has Socrates make in which Socrates says that nobody does evil intentionally. Now that's not quite true, I think some sociopaths do get pleasure out of that, but those we might call a normal rational person get into extreme behavior for what they consider to be defensible reasons. So I wanted to show how these two people were basically doing what they did for reasons that were understandable in their world. But if we step back to look, we say, "What's the matter with you people?" Which is sort of how I felt about what was happening in the Vietnam era -- all the riots and what-have-you in the U.S.

I was born and raised in Canada, and when I wrote First Blood I was only a Canadian citizen (Note: he now holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship). In those days, you signed loyalty oaths and it was understood that as a visitor you could not have political opinions. So the trick in writing First Blood was to create an anti-Vietnam book and also deplore what was happening the country but to do it in a way that didn't look like I was being political. And that's why the book held on and is still published and read 36 years later, because it doesn't feel like it is mired in that moment in history.

The book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the '70s and into the early '80s. And then the movies came out. The first one was pretty safe. It basically just took the plot and changed it a little and modified the character so he was no longer angry, but a victim. The movie was very successful. Then in 1985 the second movie came out and [Rambo] had been turned into a jingoistic figure. ... Reagan identified with Rambo in a very big way and frequently mentioned Rambo in press conferences. On one occasion he joked that he had seen a Rambo movie the night before and now he knew what to do if there was ever a terrorist hostage crisis. (laughs)

And at that point, they stopped teaching that book in high schools and colleges. About the same time, I was in Britain on a book tour and the U.S. had bombed Libya and the headline in a British newspaper I read said, "U.S. Rambo Jets Bomb Libya." So it got politicized. And then the third movie injected Rambo into the Afghanistan issue. I think the second movie has a lot of fun to it, as a kind of cartoon experience. The third one was kind of, I believe, dull. Of course, the timing was awful. The day the movie came out was the day the Russians left Afghanistan, so it had no timely quality whatsoever.

Sylvester had called me two years ago to talk about the fourth movie and what he wanted to do. He had two thoughts about it. One was, none of the movies captured the anger, so to speak, or the despair of the novel. This time around he was going to capture that in this film. The second thing was, he felt that perhaps the second and third films glamorized the violence in a way that he wasn't happy going back to. And this fourth movie was going to be ultraviolent in a shocking way that would try to replicate what the violence would be like in real life. He would use this in order to show the impact this would have on the character -- how this would deaden his soul. So we had this conversation and we went off.

{When Rambo was released] I didn't know what to expect [but] it had some really stupid villains in it.

originally published — June 2008

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