Rambo - Hollywood Vietnam | Renegade Cut

much of the cultural landscape of the United States in the late 70s and 80s was shaped by the catastrophe of us interventionism in Vietnam in the 60s and early 70s popular culture in the United States typically portrayed Vietnam differently than it portrayed more victorious conflicts Hollywood Vietnam films usually remain agnostic as to the underlying causes of the conflict or us justification for intervention which is different from the more glorious portrayals of the US military in other films it is an outlier at least in that regard films made in the u.s. about Vietnam focused on the consequences and trauma but in these seemingly critical and skeptical depictions of the conflict the consequences and trauma were predominantly that of the US military their trauma their consequences not the trauma or Consequences thrust onto the Vietnamese these films even satirical films are still from the perspective of American recruits and draftees not the Vietnamese these films sometimes portray the effects of this moment in history negatively but the vast majority of those portrayed as being negatively affected are Americans the aggressors portrayed as the victims nevertheless real litigation of Vietnam through popular culture is still more critical of the conflict than any other instance of u.s. interventionism one film series bucked that trend Rambo a film series that begins with trauma albeit exclusively American trauma and spirals out into revenge fantasy the Rambo trilogy in the 1980s relitigate Svea Tom and reframes the greatest failure in truth the greatest failure is that this intervention of choice did not need to happen was built on a lie and countless people needlessly perished in Rambo the greatest failure is only that the United States lost this is codified in first blood to Rambo when the titular character asks the central question of the series and unambiguously positions its politics do we get to win this time that is the Rambo series restorative justice but only for the aggressors of the conflict the invading Americans in first blood often regarded as the best of the series John Rambo is harassed by local police and due to his post-traumatic stress disorder he reacts to their hostility with his own he escapes and the police begin to track him in a scenario not unlike Rambo service in Vietnam critics sometimes look at first blood through rose-colored glasses this film is not as overtly jingoistic as later films and Sylvester Stallone's performance particularly his monologue at the end paints the picture of a sympathetic veteran who was only doing what he was told unlike later films first blood remains agnostic on the justification for US intervention what these same critics fail to see is that first blood does not throw stones at us interventionism they throw stones at the peace movement Rambo's monologue at the end brings up a common myth about the peace movement in the u.s. during that time the myth that returning servicemen were spat upon this has long been debunked by Jerry Lemke's book spitting image myth memory and the legacy of Vietnam Lemke himself a Vietnam veteran wrote if spitting on veterans had occurred all that frequently surely some veteran or soldier would have called it to the attention of the press at the time indeed we would imagine that news reporters would have been camping in the lobby of the San Francisco Airport cameras in hand just waiting for a chance to record the real thing if that is they had any reason to believe that such incidents might occur Lemke's research actually found the opposite the peace movement was the natural ally to the suffering servicemen who had been drafted into a conflict that never needed to happen the peace movement usually did not protest individual servicemen they had friends who had been drafted the peace movement instead protested the conflict itself and President Richard Nixon the spitting was an urban legend that had never not once been confirmed by a servicemen to have actually happened to them it always happened to a friend of friend somewhere it's an urban legend and First Blood helped popularize it this combined with the demonizing portrayal of the North Vietnamese in rainbows flashback muddies the water about what First Blood is trying to communicate and who it blames for Rambo's trauma alex has of little white lies once wrote his climactic speech about returning veterans being spat on by maggot hippie protesters at the airport hinted at a conservative heart and with Ronald Reagan having been just voted into the White House by a landslide it was the latter that most struck a chord with the American psyche the u.s. never should have been involved in Vietnam in the first place a brief history might be helpful Vietnam had been colonized by the French since the 19th century in 1940 Japan invaded Vietnam to fight the Japanese political leader Ho Chi Minh form the Viet Minh or the League for the independence of Vietnam following Japanese surrender to the Allied powers in 1945 French educated Emperor Bao Dai was in charge of Vietnam the Viet Minh didn't want an emperor so they seized Hanoi and declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north France backed Emperor Mao died because they wanted to one day take back control of the country the two sides fought the North won and French rule and influence finally ended in Vietnam the two sides signed a treaty in Geneva in 1954 splitting the nation but setting up elections to unify Vietnam in 1956 however anti-communist Nodine diem of the South wasn't having any of that and Ho Chi Minh remained president of North Vietnam President Dwight Eisenhower committed the us toward backing South Vietnam and the CIA meddled in foreign affairs to further the economic influence of the US because that's what the CIA does know diem Jemez anti-communist security forces cracked down on alleged northern sympathizers in the South arresting roughly 100,000 people many of whom were brutally interrogated and killed the CIA helped this happen by the 1960s the US had begun helping South Vietnam even more patrolling along the surrounding ocean the US and North Vietnam had an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that depending on your perspective was either instigated by the u.s. being where it didn't belong or due to the actions of the North Vietnamese then after things had settled the u.s. lied about there being a second attack this was long suspected but only recently confirmed by Declassified information and a report by an NSA historian new documents and tapes revealed that there was no second attack on US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964 in fact the evidence confirms the deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort what happened these falsified reports misled Congress and was the pretext and justification for u.s. putting boots on the ground in Vietnam the US had economic interests in having all of Vietnam commit to capitalism they feared losing influence and that a domino effect would occur unless they forced Vietnam to succumb to their economic system and that's why and how the u.s. intervened in Vietnam Rambo first blood to traffic's in a now disproved conspiracy theory that following the end of US intervention in Vietnam there were thousands of servicemen captured behind enemy lines and that for years even decades after they suffered as POWs prior to the Richard Nixon administration the u.s. armed forces used a different classification for servicemen who could not be accounted for KI a bnr this classification reported the near certainty that if a servicemen x' body could not be found said servicemen was either a casualty or in extremely rare cases only missing president nixon needed new propaganda to popularize an unpopular conflict his administration spun the idea that since servicemen were missing that meant they were almost certainly prisoners during the conflict some servicemen were taken prisoner of course but by changing the classification to Pio wmia with powa 'king Top Billing the implication for the public was obvious this implication remained in the the consciousness even after us withdrawal and after all prisoners were released according to Nathan Smith of the outlined this transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one trading public support for sympathy it didn't matter why we were there in the first place our boys were there and by god we were going to do anything to get our boys home the reality is that following said withdraw no US servicemen have ever been confirmed to still be prisoners conspiracy theorists claim that roughly 2000 servicemen were unaccounted for in Vietnam and associated theaters throughout Indochina but that is not confirmation that they remain prisoners sadly it means they were casualties in truth the vast majority of servicemen and missing in action during US military operations over the past century we're simply casualties whose bodies could not be recovered or identified here are some statistics cited from m.i.a or myth-making in america by historian h bruce franklin in nearly all armed conflicts servicemen are lost without being identified more than 78,000 fighting the Axis powers alone that constitutes roughly 19 percent of casualties in Korea bodies that could not be recovered or identified is a similar 15 percent of casualties when P owm ia conspiracy theorists list the 2255 unaccounted for a servicemen they claim that that must mean they are imprisoned somewhere in Indochina somehow even out of the reach of sophisticated satellites that can track everyone on the planet they see this as a smoking gun but in reality that is a considerably smaller 4% of casualties in all conflicts servicemen are missing because their bodies could not be recovered or identified missing does not equal imprisoned without evidence and there simply has been no evidence whatsoever from the same book years of espionage interrogation spy flights satellite observation and even rays on suspected sites have produced not one piece of tangible evidence of their existence this last assertion might infuriate many believers because they are certain of overwhelming evidence some could immediately cite a specific example of tangible evidence such as the secret Fort Apache photograph the existence of which can be denied only because of an elaborate government conspiracy has been concealing it from the American public this elaborate government conspiracy in turn has become another crucial component of the myth and arguments about its existence lead-in ever widening spirals to broadest significance of the myth itself in First Blood Part 2 John Rambo and his superior officers discuss the conspiracy theory at length but when they speak of these mysterious prisoners they do so matter-of-factly as if it were a foregone conclusion by the time the film had been made the conspiracy theory had already permeated throughout the nation due in no small part to the changing classification of Bo wmia and other attempts to change the public image of armed forces however in a case of art imitating life and life in turn imitating art this film and others like it helped maintain the conspiracy theory keeping it alive throughout the eighties the truth is not one missing servicemen was ever confirmed to have remained a powa u.s. withdrawal after decades of investigation even cheerleaders for the cause in the US government were eventually resigned to admit that Vietnam really did return the POWs after all outside of the occasional disproved hoaxes such as with the documentary unclaimed the theory has little lifeblood among those who have done even a cursory examination of the topic yet the flag still waves and some of that is almost certainly due to the fictional exploits of John Rambo in the film Rambo is released by Colonel Trautman on the condition that he find evidence that POWs are still alive Rambo is told not to rescue them himself but nobody tells Rambo what to do so he just does it anyway his superior officer Murdock doesn't actually want to pressure our real rescue for political reasons this feeds into the part of the conspiracy theory that in addition to Vietnam hiding the truth about these secret POWs the US government somehow is to accept when it's the entity that's pushing this theory in the first place of course then they are trying to recover the POWs except whether or not conspiracy theories without tangible evidence require the theorists to switch theories when one becomes inconvenient but then come back to it when it is more convenient for our country to love us as much as we love it First Blood Part two is a beloved film among conservatives rewriting Vietnam not as a conflict to maintain us a yemeni but as a battle between the goodies and the baddies and the baddies were the ones holding the goodies hostage in hollywood vietnam the vietnamese are not the victims only the americans are victims you must know the truth you must know that your ideals are within realistic grasp and then pursue them with a vengeance that was a character that can represent a certain section of the American consciousness and through the entertainment also be educational and that's why I think this this movie is this quite pertinent in that fact and has a lot of validity Rambo 3 picks up three years after the previous film left off Rambo is now living in Thailand and he apparently spent all his time getting swole Colonel Trautman visits Rambo and gives him a new assignment help the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fend off the Soviet Union much like First Blood Part 2 Rambo 3 takes some facts from real world politics and cleans them up to make the u.s. look better Jacob Knight once wrote of this First Blood Part 2 becomes the quintessential representation of American foreign policy during the Reagan years perhaps this is why Rambo three full-on literalized Reagan's ideology as it takes down a filmic Cold War representation of the evil empire in First Blood Part two the imprisonment is maintained with the help of the Soviet Union but in Rambo 3 the Soviet Union is and Center some background may be necessary Russia had a long-standing relationship with Afghanistan dating back to 1919 following the Russian Revolution in 1947 the Soviet Union began giving large amounts of aid economic assistance and military hardware to Afghanistan a military alliance began on a regular basis in 1956 and strengthened throughout the 70s the United States concerned about their loss of influence in the region began supplying rebels in Afghanistan who were opposed to Soviet influence for this reason and others tensions rose in 1979 the Soviet Union took greater control of Afghanistan effectively an invasion and the u.s. began an even greater effort towards supplying the rebels the Mujahideen with arms enter Rambo 3 the film presents u.s. interventionism as the cure for communism years later the US would be the invaders in Afghanistan making this moment some unfortunate unintentional foreshadowing you sure don't want to stay you'll find good foreign tourists maybe next time yikes Rambo 3 once again tries to relitigate Vietnam while barely referencing it if the film had any self-awareness it would recognize that the Soviets invading Afghanistan and the Mujahideen fighting back is akin to the u.s. invading Vietnam and the Communists fighting back but Rambo 3 does not see it that way instead it frames the Soviets as the North Vietnamese since they are both communists the Mujahideen as the southern Vietnamese and the US as well the u.s. valiantly fighting for the south much like in First Blood Part 2 John Rambo allows the u.s. to win Vietnam at this time just on different soil by the end of the second movie the prisoners are brought home and by the end of the third movie history is rewritten and the conflict in Vietnam is symbolically won in another country Galen Stutler and David deser in an article from scraps from the loft once wrote the pain of history it's delimiting effect on action is often seen a political a cultural and national liability there for contemporary history has been the subject of an ideological battle which seeks to rewrite to rehabilitate controversial and ambiguous events through the use of symbols one arena of ongoing cultural concern in the United States is our involvement in Vietnam it seems clear that reconstituting an image a memory of Vietnam under the impetus of reaganism appears to fulfill a specific ideological mission the right wing films especially Rambo most clearly demonstrate the strategy of mythic substitution or displacement Rambo demonstrates a cultural parallel a luxury aiding in the symptoms of a desperate ideological repression manifested in the inability to speak of or remember the painful past a cultural hysteria in which violence must substitute for understanding victimization for responsibility the personal for the political will walk out of this film being entertained and if you can make a statement and also entertain that's the most important thing for me it should be noted that throughout the second and third movie Rambo's post-traumatic stress disorder has seemingly vanished God is the weary broken man who fought for his country under false pretenses now Rambo is a one-man slaughter machine the US military loved this army recruiters were reported to have put up Rambo posters to encourage young people to enlist Rambo rewrote military history but also furthered the US military contemporaneously President Ronald Reagan in a comment just before he addressed the nation in the Oval Office was caught on a hot microphone saying boy after seeing Rambo last night I know what to do the next time this happens Reagan loved Rambo referencing it again when promoting his tax plan in fact when I think of all the good people who've pleaded with the federal government for years to clean up our tax structure I am reminded of a recent very popular movie and in the spirit of Rambo let me tell you we're going to win this time we're going to win this time that's what John Rambo says he wants at the beginning of First Blood Part two and that's the Rambo series the victimization of the US military while taking no responsibility for its victimization of others the idea that the tragedy of Vietnam was not that it happened but only that the United States lost a misunderstanding of that moment in history and an attempt to office Cait and rewrite that history and we're trying to make this as realistic as possible so to do this has been a difficult affair Troutman is taken hostage in Afghanistan and it's interesting because no other reason on earth kick Rambow to move to go after the one person who listen to him more than anyone else

Channel: Renegade Cut

Views: 129,639

Rating: 4.8989005 out of 5

Keywords: renegade cut, rambo, rambo ii, rambo iii, sylvester stallone, john rambo, movies, film, platoon, full metal jacket, rambo review, rambo analysis, rambo scene, rambo last blood, rambo clip, rambo explained, rambo ending, rambo 1982, rambo last blood trailer, rambo trailer, first blood, first blood part ii, rambo 2019, rambo scene first blood, rambo helicopter, rambo vietnam

Id: kgrv78IvGD4

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/catpissfromhell]

I love Renegade Cut. I've been watching his videos every week, even when its about shit that i dont really know anything about (like the Star Trek).

I think my favorite is the one about fight club. Seriously, check it out.

[u/IllCaesar]

I figure it's worth pointing out that the first incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was also a sham. The captain told his personnel to fire a "warning shot" and the North Vietnamese, who made a habit of telling U.S. naval patrols (think Black Panthers following cops around to make sure the cops don't start getting fucky) , took it as an act of open hostility and returned fire. The warning shot was left out of the official report and. When the truth was uncovered it was classified until about a decade ago.

[u/Mister_Dink]

This video is great, and really encapsulates my feelings on how we talk about Vietnam.

We have so much media (even great, phenomenal media like "the things they carried") that's so centered on American suffering in Vietnam.

We're culturally willing to admit that 'our boys' got sent into the meat grinder by aweful politicians. We're willing to call them the victims of the war machine. Popular American media, however, still treats the native Vietnamese resistance like aliens. Like they, or their children who got napalmed, aren't the victims. It's sickening.

[u/Pikachu760]

The whole reason why we went to war with Vietnam was from mostly corporate reasons. In my opinion this issue any one of the five or six presidents in between when Vietnam happened should have been impeached over the lies that happened in the Gulf of Tonkin.