theworsthorse.net: horsefeed

It sounds like the set-up for a joke. But, as posted here a couple of days ago, two Dharma-friends and I had plans to skip out of work on Friday the 25th to catch an opening-day matinee of what Sylvester Stallone is saying will be the last installment of his Rambo film franchise. Well, we went, and we’re glad as hell that we did.

You might be wondering why we’d be so pumped up to go see a hyper-violent action picture in the middle of a freezing work-day. Not the least of our reasons is simply that we all love a great action picture. And there’s no doubt that Rambo, with all its rock’em-sock-‘em glory, is a great action picture. It’s non-stop; not a moment of boredom in the whole thing.

Just knowing that it’s the fourth Rambo film, you could probably guess that the violence is pretty graphic. And that would, in fact, be a serious understatement. But the moments of outlandish, cartoony violence are actually few. Now, I’m not saying that Rambo is high art. That would be crazy. But it might not be so crazy to suggest that the film’s death and gore actually help it to broadcast what could be one of the more effective anti-war messages ever delivered via pop-culture. That partially depends, of course, on what kind of box-office it does. My guess is that it will be the #1 movie in America this weekend. But then again, if audiences stay away from it like they did with Rocky Balboa (the final installment of Stallone’s other big franchise), it will likely just be written off as a mis-step.*

So: is Rambo anti-war? Well…

As Sylvester Stallone told Howard Stern this week, the final film was in no way the one he’d first set out to make. (Stallone was Rambo’s director and one of its two co-writers.) Originally, he had a story worked up that would uproot Vietnam vet John Rambo from a fairly domestic situation in his home in Arizona and take him into Mexico, where his guerilla acumen and macho would be put into play. But Sly wasn’t feeling it; he wanted to do something more urgent.

So he made two phone calls: one, to the United Nations, and the other, to the offices of Soldier of Fortune magazine. He asked each a simple question: what place on earth is the most hellishly violent, and yet isn’t really well known for being so? Due to its raging, decades-long civil war and the incredible cruelties of the Myanmar military junta against its people, Burma took the cake.

Stallone educated himself about the situation there and revisioned the film, hoping to make something much more than an action picture. Accordingly, Rambo is actually somehow educational. It’s perhaps sad to say, but even as someone who’s been following what’s been going on in Burma for a while now, this movie, with its incredible violence and documentary-derived editing style, helped me to better understand and process the immense suffering there. It may not be high art, but it was in this way (among others), artful.

Rambo’s depictions of violence against Burma’s Karen people are what’s particularly interesting here; essentially, there’s nothing romanticized, nothing “Hollywood” about it. There’s no glossy “Kill’ ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” fun here. We see a village of innocent civilians massacred. We see rape. We see limbs, heads, and entire bodies ripped to shreds and exploded. Stallone wanted to make people understand the enormity of the atrocities going on in Burma, and these images do just that.

On the other hand, Rambo is inconsistent with its treatment of violence and its consequences, as all action films must be. After all, a fully even-handed treatment of violence and its consequences doesn’t make an action movie; it makes a war movie. And war movies don’t get nearly as many asses into movie-theater seats; they’re bummers. So when John Rambo and the gang of mercenaries he’s joined with get their shots in against Myanmar’s bad guys, the violence is every bit as explicit. But the tone has shifted: a junta officer who’s sadistically toying with displaced and terrified villagers in one moment gets an arrow shot right through his head in the next. And everybody cheers.

As a culture, we tolerate and welcome this kind of visual violence as not just entertainment, but something cathartic. It’s a safe way, we reason, to purge aggression without creating real-world harm. This is problematic, though, in the Buddhist view, which holds that everything we do, say, and even think is the cause for a corresponding effect. When everybody cheers because someone gets it in a movie (even if that someone is a “bad guy”), what are we really doing with our minds? Is it okay because we “know better”? Or are we neglecting a commitment to Right Thinking, and thereby giving affirmation, consent, and power to those parts of our minds that can contribute, directly or not, to real-world harm?

For many people — Buddhist and otherwise — questions like these have clear answers. They’ll stay away from movies like Rambo. Due to their own taste, aversion, or personal policies, they don’t want to see these kinds of images and won’t support the people who create them. That’s admirable. No doubt. But I’m not one of those people. The answers have never been clear for me, so I’ll keep asking questions and hope that the positive things I do in the world outweigh the negatives ones that I may do with my mind.

Maybe I’m fooling myself. But the fact is, I’m neither proud nor ashamed that my Dharma-friends and I were able to withstand – and even enjoy (if that’s the word) – Rambo’s blood-n-guts attack. Yes, we hooted and hollered when the movie’s fictionalized bad guys got what was coming to them. But I’d be willing to bet that all three of us are even more concerned than before that the good and very real people of Burma get what they deserve, too.

* Prediction Update: Rambo actually came in second (18.2 million) for the weekend; Meet the Spartans was first with 18.7 mil.