Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: David Morrell

“It’s Over, Johnny”: The Thrill Is Gone in “Rambo: Last Blood”

September 24, 2019 / / 14 Comments

The following article discusses story details of Rambo:  Last Blood.

In the lead-up to Creed (2015), the New Yorker published a fascinating analysis of the six Rocky movies, arguing that they can be viewed as a trilogy:  In Rocky (1976) and Rocky II (1979), the Italian Stallion goes from nobody to somebody; in III (1982) and IV (1985), he mutates once again, this time from hero to superhero; Sylvester Stallone then sought to extricate the champ from the excesses of Reagan’s America (the robot butler, anyone?), setting up Rocky’s ignoble return to the streets of Philly in Rocky V (1990), then credibly reestablishing him as an underdog in Rocky Balboa (2006).  It was this iteration of Rocky—the purest version—that Stallone reprised in Creed and Creed II (2018), in which an aging, widowed, streetwise Rocky acts (reluctantly at first) as mentor and trainer to a young protégé.

Sylvester Stallone in “Rambo: Last Blood” (2019)

Sly’s other signature role, troubled Vietnam vet John Rambo, has had no less of a winding road through the past five decades when it comes to his ever-evolving characterization:  The self-hating solider of David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood was recast as a sympathetic hero in the 1982 movie of the same name, who in turn became the jingoistic superhero of Rambo:  First Blood, Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988).  It was only in his belated fourth cinematic adventure, Rambo (2008), that his prototypal literary temperament atavistically asserted itself:

You know what you are, what you’re made of.  War is in your blood.  Don’t fight it.  You didn’t kill for your country—you killed for yourself.  God’s never gonna make that go away.  When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.

Rambo’s inner monologue in Rambo (2008)

Upon ending the prolonged moratorium on both creatively depleted franchises in the aughts, Stallone didn’t “retcon” some of the lesser entries in the Rocky and Rambo series, but rather embraced them as part of both heroes’ long emotional arcs:  Just as Creed II redeems the hokey jingoism of Rocky IV, Rambo IV acknowledges that the previous sequels glorified violence—gleefully, even pornographically—and burdens the protagonist with the guilt of that indefensible carnage, refusing to let him off the hook for it.  The inconvenient mistakes of the past aren’t expunged from the hagiographies of either of these American icons for the sake of a cleaner narrative—an increasingly common (and inexcusably lazy) practice in franchise filmmaking, as evidenced by recent “do-over” sequels to Terminator and Halloween—but instead seed the conditions in which we find both Rocky and Rambo at the next stage of their ongoing sagas.

So, in Rambo:  Last Blood (2019), which sees the itinerant commando back home at his ranch in Arizona (per the coda of the last movie), the big question I had going into the film was this:  Which permutation of Rambo would we find in this story—the one about what happened after Johnny came marching home?  What might Rambo, who has always served a cultural Rorschach—first as an expression of the political disillusionment of the seventies, then recruited in the eighties to serve as poster boy for the Reagan Doctrine—tell us about ourselves in the Trump era?

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Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

February 27, 2018 / / 58 Comments

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars:  The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed:  what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation?  If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then?  How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”?  And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

 

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this:  George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences.  When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career:  how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from.  The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers.  (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites).  Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War.  As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows?  The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

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A Survivalist’s Guide: The Continuing Relevance and Reinterpretation of Rambo

September 4, 2014 / / 12 Comments

Here I am—intrepid screenwriter—gearing up to embark on a dizzying new adventure in my writing career:  my first full-length novel—a work of historical fiction (with supernatural twist, of course—the change in venue isn’t indicative of revamped storytelling sensibilities on my part!).  In a plot convenience straight out of a first-draft screenplay, Writer’s Digest recently hosted a novel-writing conference here in Los Angeles; among the seminars offered was a “Historical Fiction Boot Camp”—taught by no less than bestselling author David Morrell, who introduced the world to Rambo in his inaugural novel, First Blood (1972).  I’d have likely attended the workshop regardless, but given that on my most recent vacation I lazed on the beach and read three Morrell novels in a row, the happenstance of it all seemed too providential to dismiss.

During both his seminar and keynote address, Mr. Morrell spoke with endearing candor about his life’s experiences and path to becoming a writer, much of which you can read about—if you haven’t had the pleasure to hear him speak in person—in his 2012 essay Rambo and Me:  The Story Behind the Story.  If the man feels in any way that he lives in the shadow of his first—and most iconic—creation, one wouldn’t suspect as much from chatting with him, which I was lucky enough to get a chance to do.  As a child of the eighties, Rambo holds profound nostalgic significance for me; I went through a phase (as my dearest childhood friend can lamentably attest) in which a plastic jade Buddha amulet dangled totemically from my neck and I responded to any conversational overtures with nothing more eloquent than a sneering curl of my upper lip.  Mr. Morrell was gracious enough to answer my Rambo-related inquiries—with a smile; not a sneer!—and recounted some of his experiences on the development of the third and fourth films of the franchise.  The behind-the-scenes history of the storied movie series has been well-documented in the thirty-odd years since the first entry’s initial release, but to hear tales of the productions from the horse’s mouth was a thrill to rival any of Rambo’s breathless derring-do.

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