nowned hyperbolic he-man body lat just about covers all necessary huirements for legend.

n these films, the only special ect to rival the stunts and ex- sions are the tricks they play with lity. They turn the mess into an erican victory. While claiming to e ‘‘anti-establishment’’ politics, scripts read like a Ronald Reagan dream. The Vietnamese are made pless in their country and the ericans are made into great guer- fighters. And that’s just the Binning of the_reality disappearing

he MIA films handily erase the sence of blacks among the erican troops. While over 60 per tof the U.S. armed forces were k men and boys - mostly boys - films all but overlook this fact. p in ten of the soldiers in prison p scenes is black, while none of MIAs, or the valiant heroes selves, are black. Still, these are the first films to play down the ifice and slaughter of those men order to pander to the juicy ographics of the white filmgoer.

uriously, these hawkishly pro- erican intervention films are being de by people with little personal plvement in the Vietnam War. Ted cheff, the director of First Blood 1 Uncommon Valor, is a Canadian. id Morrell, the creator of the

bo character, was also born here, as the director of the film of the e name.

ylvester Stallone, the actor and er who climaxes Rambo with the

choked lines - ‘’Hate my ntry? I’d die for it! | want what ry guy who came over here and led his guts wants...for our ntry to love us as much as we love

- is the very same Sylvester lone that sat out the Vietnam r, expressing his gung-ho patriot- by avoiding the draft during the war by working as an athletic h at a Swiss private school. He b spent time as an acting student, a some-time porn movie actor.

ome American Vietnam veterans finding Stallone’s new-found iotism too much to bear. ‘‘He

apparently feels he can represent all vets but we don’t like that,’’ says Eduardo Cohen of the Veteran’s Speakers Alliance, which has organ- ized pickets of California theatres screening the film. ‘‘He doesn’t know what we went through.

‘‘We, too, were brainwashed with similar. propaganda before the Vietnam war,’’ says Cohen. ‘’When we got to Vietnam we found it wasn’t like a John Wayne movie.’’

So did the people living there. But they may as well have been Indians in a John Wayne cowboy movie for all the care these movies exhibit for the Vietnamese people. Once again, the country becomes the backdrop for American suffering, American tri- umph, and American stories. In each film there are two types of Vietna- mese: noble assistants (one reason the U.S. was over there in the first place) and yellow horde (the other reason). Both types are amply killed in battle.

Rambo takes this good-race/bad- race split to an almost pornographic pitch. The only ‘‘good’’ Vietnamese Rambo sees on his mission is a woman guerilla fighter who gets blasted in the back not a half-minute after she and Rambo soul kiss; her only saving grace seems to be her ability to speak English. The Yellow Horde aren’t as culturally privileged, so all other Vietnamese are depicted throughout the film as less than human.

We are shown scenes of young girls ‘‘willingly’’ used for sex to demonstrate the perversity of the bad race. The soldiers exist as just so much target: practice for Rambo. Because the troops frantically, ner- vously screech at each other in a caricature of Vietnamese speech, they’re easier to keep depersonalized, easier to laugh at, and more fun for

Rambo to kill. The only Vietnamese man given any kind of personality is their shifty leader who shoots the ‘“‘good’’ woman in the back, and

Rambo blows him up with an explo- .

sive-tipped arrow to the gut.

The Russian troops in the film are treated no better, but their white (and therefore more preferable) — skin makes it more difficult for the film- makers to develop the same pitch of racism.

The film also resurrects a political belief very much in line with the world of Rombo Reagan, and that is the Domino theory. The ideology of battling communism at any cost has full expression in these films without really bothering to touch on the issue; these men are just out to rescue their buddies, and along the way happen to show what weak kneed liberals wrought by not letting them ‘‘win’’ the war.

It’s up to Red Dawn to put the real cap on what this Domino revivalism means. In that film, communism is the insidious cancer it was in the early ‘60’s, spreading from country to country like The Great Flood, having no relation to social causes such as a

‘the scripts read like a Ronald Reagan wet dream”

desire to dump oppressive regimes. The Nicaraguan revolution jumps its banks and engulfs Mexico in a few short years; the Green Party in West Germany causes the annexation of Europe. It’s not clear whether or not the NDP causes Canada’s compart- mentalization into 12 Soviet statesy

September 19, 1985 PAGE 9

d as the studios fall, one by one...

or whether the commie Liberals or PC’s take care of that with their ‘‘Socialized’’ medicine and crown corporations. Director-writer John Milius (Executive producer of Un- common Valor) leaves such Canadian scenarios up to the viewer’s imagi- nation but through his perspective, shared by the new gung-ho Vietnam War films, only a complete roll-back of the red tide will make the world safe for survivalists. It isn’t too difficult to see what that means if you’re living in Managua or the mountains of El Salvador.

The final equation goes something like this: take a newfound belief that

America never really ‘‘lost’’ the Vietnam war, add faith in these mythic military warriors, an

America-first attitude, and a willing- ness to separate a people into pure good and evil, and the sum equals a perfect climate for Central American invasion. If anything, the analolgy works too well. With the help of films like Rambo and Red Dawn, the first battles in the perception war are being fought right now, even here in Canada. Reagan’s men may be out to rewrite history, but one recent slogan of the political left may be applicable for the right’s causes as well: ‘’El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.’’ To which Rambo would just as eagerly rejoin, ‘‘Do we get to win this time?’’