ARTS
Cinema
Rambo
(`15', selected cinemas)
The sneering torso
Peter Ackroyd
Perhaps the most notable, if under- employed, faculty of Sylvester Stallone is his voice; on the few occasions he deigns to use it, it sounds like an ancient vehicle reversing from a gravel drive into a lake. And then there is his walk, although it is not so much a walk as a rather aggrieved stalk, as if he has just received an enema and is looking round for a nurse. Such little tricks are clearly designed to produce an image of toughness and taciturnity, but this straining after effect is so overt that it becomes theatrical — almost what used to be called 'camp'. The possibilities for the ludicrous are compounded by the fact that Stallone himself has somewhat feminine features, framed by the sort of long hair which is now favoured only among the prison population; his over-developed pec- toral muscles also lend him a peculiar femininity so that if he becomes here, as he does, a god of the jungle he is perhaps closer to the hermaphroditic deities of the Yorubas and the inhabitants of Dahomey. Of course he is designed to be the complete male, and the advance publicity empha- sised the muscles rippling below what seemed to be a layer of melted fat and was in fact his arm; but in Rambo the cult of the body beautiful is wholly for the benefit of the male sex, who can apparently admire all those biceps and triceps without im- Pugning their own sexuality. There may be less excitable people who also find something of interest in the plot, which on this occasion concerns the efforts of Rambo — apparently a combat veteran — to find and liberate certain American prisoners-of-war still being held in North Vietnam. He is a hybrid of James Bond and Tarzan so, as a result, his adventures afford ample room for certain fantasies which we have come to associate (though not exclusively) with the United States — In particular the extraordinary fascination with technology combined with an almost Primaeval attitude towards human beings — and for the use of certain techniques which are similarly associated with the American cinema, principal among them being a magisterial command of tech- nique united with gross sentimentality of theme.
As such it is designed to satisfy the more Primitive, or at least most enduring, re- sponses of the cinema audience — sus- pense, surprise and violent adventure being the staple ingredients here. But there is nothing peculiarly ignoble about that and, despite the fuss which some of the more hysterical commentators have pro- voked, there is no scene in Rambo which is as offensive as the coy violence of the Bond sagas or the gratuitous slaughter in any contemporary 'horror' film. A typical `seg- ment' might find this overblown creature wading through shallow water and clutch- ing what looks like a skipping rope in his ample mouth; a little Vietnamese soldier then appears, looking anxiously at the jungle foliage before being lassooed, shot and all but disembowelled by our enraged hero. I gather that the general reaction of American audiences to such scenes was to stand up and cheer; but I am glad to report that in the Classic Cinema the only re- sponse was one of laughter. This was not the product of callousness (at least not in the more expensive seats), but suggested a proper recognition of the essential theatri- cality of the whole enterprise. The villains are so obviously stage villains, among them the wonderfully inexpressive Steve Ber- koff, and the dialogue is of such a sensa- tionally banal nature, that the cinematic business (if one may use a stage expres- sion) is clearly only a cardboard vehicle for the presentation of a few simple feel- ings: 'What we call hell, he calls home,' is how one of those feelings was pithily ex- pressed.
And it is the very simplicity of the film which acts as the source of whatever power it possesses. The direction is slow, almost stately, and so much money has been spent upon production that even the most blood- thirsty audience will become aware of the care which has been taken to create pre- cisely the right visual effects. The direction is so slow on occasions, in fact, that the action seems almost ritualised and the film becomes a series of scenes and gestures which are designed for an emblematic purpose. In the process Rambo ceases to be a combat soldier and is presented as some minor deity, an American household god who represents courage, fidelity and all the other attributes of the instinctive life. In other words, he is a contemporary version of the noble savage — with the added romance inherent in the fact that he also carries incredibly expensive wea- pons. And does any of this do any harm? American veterans have accused Rambo, and Stallone himself, of misrepresenting the Vietnamese War. But no feature film ever made, including In Which We Serve, The Killing Fields or Apocalypse Now, does anything but distort the nature of real battle: that is the purpose of such films, after all, since their task is to make adventure out of contemporary events. Rambo is hardly a sanguinary exception to this general rule. It is more difficult to decide if the heroic presentation of vio- lence has a detrimental effect upon an audience: let us just say, for the moment, that the comic-strip clichés of the film contain that violence within a recognisable and even predictable format. Stallone, Rambo, villains, Vietnamese jungles, elaborate weapons, patriotic sentiments all then become part of the same process — they are all innately theatrical, and I suspect do as little harm as the stage blood of an amateur production of Sweeney Todd. There are moments, too, when Rambo is genuinely exciting.
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