In the late 20th Century, the name “Rambo” was practically synonymous with American military might. It had become a vehicle for valorizing the soldiers who were carrying out the United States’ increasingly interventionist foreign adventures and a balm on the bone-bruise of the Vietnam War, as well as an emblem of our moral (and muscular) dominance.
By the climax of 1988’s Rambo III, the character represented both American military involvement as a necessary, if uncomfortable, force of change in the world and the mythos of the rugged individual — the army of one who, through his inestimable courage in combating the forces of evil, achieves a superhuman stature.
With shooting wrapped on the fifth installment in the Rambo film franchise, set for release in 2019, it seems like a good time to look back on the series — how it came to be, and what its evolution and success reflect about American culture.
You see, the Rambo we came to know, the seemingly invincible shirtless warrior with an even sheen of sweat coating his rubberized skin, didn’t come to us fully formed. The John Rambo we meet in 1982’s First Blood, the first film in the series, is an emotionally wounded, morally conflicted veteran who engages in violence not out of honor or in defense of liberty, but as a consequence of the traumas he suffered while serving in Vietnam. It is a study in the domestic fallout from war, specifically the difficulty that traumatized soldiers often face in readjusting to civilian life.
Even in this first installment, however, the character received a Hollywood makeover when the story was adapted from a novel of the same name by David Morrell. And it’s worth looking into what this conversion might suggest about the broader culture that invited — nay, demanded — that these adjustments be made before the story was offered up to a mainstream movie-going audience.
Part I: How to make an American hero
Published in 1972, First Blood is a brief and brutal novel, one of unrelenting and unflinching violence, relating a nightmarish encounter from which no one involved is spared. As Morrell explains in the introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of the book, he wanted to write a story in which the guerrilla carnage of the Vietnam War is brought home to America. His chosen agent of destruction is a young Green Beret and former POW — John Rambo. A Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, Rambo wishes only to be left alone, and this is exactly what he tries to achieve for several months following his return to America. Instead he encounters hostility at every turn, which he manages to endure until he comes into the crosshairs of a small-town police chief, Wilfred Teasle.
Himself a decorated veteran of the Korean War, Teasle is initially unimpressed by Rambo, a twenty-something whippersnapper with shaggy hair and a scraggly beard. Teasle passes him off as an unkempt hippie who has somehow wandered into his rural Kentucky town. Pissed off that the kid repeatedly refuses to skedaddle, Teasle arrests him. When his deputies’ attempts to shave Rambo and cut his hair remind the veteran a little too much of torture he suffered as a prisoner in Vietnam, he fights them off and flees into the wilderness outside of town, where he stages a solitary campaign against the local law enforcement and the state police.
Broadly speaking, the film conforms to the narrative of the novel. The main plot points remain intact, and the cinematic John Rambo harbors many of the same demons as his literary counterpart. Still, there are critical differences that make the film go down a little easier than the book. The filmmakers were eager to add a hefty spoonful of sugar to First Blood’s strong medicine.
*Note: The next 20 or so paragraphs are one giant spoiler for both the movie and the novel, intended mostly for people who have seen the film but don’t know the novel. If you haven’t read or seen First Blood and don’t want to have the plot spoiled, you might want to skip to the next section break (those three bullets at the center of the page).*
To begin with, there’s the sheer body count. Sylvester Stallone — who not only stars in the film but co-wrote the screenplay — gives us a much less violent version of the character than we find in the novel. Stallone’s Rambo kills only two people in the course of the film, one of them accidentally, while David Morrell’s more cold-blooded version of the character takes out over a dozen police officers in his brutal campaign, plus one civilian (a man who is a father figure to Chief Teasle) and a handful of very loyal hounds. Stallone’s Rambo only exerts lethal force when he is pushed into a corner and has no other options. Morrell’s Rambo kills willfully, almost gleefully, and often unnecessarily. He seems eager to kill, sometimes in rather garish and gruesome ways. Though his plan is ostensibly to evade the authorities and flea to Mexico, his short-term objective is clearly to inflict as much damage as possible on his pursuers.
More important, however, than the amount of violence is its motivation. Rambo’s reason for going to war with the police undergoes an insidious shift from the novel to the film. To begin with, the literary Rambo deliberately and persistently provokes his antagonist, Teasle, returning to his town repeatedly after being escorted away. He is just waiting for Teasle or his men to push him over the edge, almost baiting them to give him an excuse to attack. Granted, Teasle is out of line in driving Rambo out of town without cause, mistaken or not in his assessment that the kid is a vagrant; but there’s no question that Rambo is looking for trouble. His own inner monologue reveals that he’s asking for it. “In fifteen towns Goddamn towns this has happened to me,” Rambo tells himself. “This is the last. I won’t be fucking shoved anymore.”
Though Teasle acts inappropriately, he and his town end up on the receiving end of Rambo’s ferocious guerrilla campaign not only as retribution for their own actions, but by the sheer bad luck of being the straw that breaks the tormented soldier’s back. By contrast, Stallone’s Rambo returns to the town only once after being driven out, at which point the police chief sees fit to bring him into the station. Teasle (played with flinty relish by Brian Dennehy) is unquestionably the aggressor.
All this, however, is mostly a matter of the action being compressed for the film, a common trait of cinematic adaptations. The first consequential change occurs at the police station, when Teasle’s men are attempting to shave Rambo and cut his shaggy hair. In both the novel and the film, the encounter triggers flashbacks of torture he suffered as a prisoner of war. In the book, however, while the officers taunt Rambo, they don’t descend to the level of physical abuse. Yet Rambo responds to their assault on his person by wresting the straight razor away from one of the officers and summarily eviscerating him with it. He then runs naked out of the police station as the officer dies, his guts spilling out of his belly. In spite of Rambo’s psychological trauma, this murder is clearly incommensurate with the officers’ provocation.
By contrast, in the film, one of the officers chokes Rambo with a billy club as another officer — eyes glinting with malice — approaches with the razor. Rambo, clothed in this version mind you, responds by fighting off the officers with his fists and feet in a frankly somewhat lame fight sequence. Tellingly, the police chief, Teasle, is not present for the encounter in the film version. Put a pin in that point — I’ll return to it in a bit.
So on the one hand we have a tortured soldier who responds to a perceived threat (not even a threat to his physical safety, mind you, but to his dignity and comfort) by viciously murdering a police officer. On the other hand we have a tortured soldier who responds to an actual physical assault with a comparatively restrained counterattack. Short of using aikido throws or the jedi mind trick to subdue his attackers, Stallone’s Rambo could hardly manage to do less harm in his escape. He throws a punch or two and breaks a couple of windows, and that is about the extent of it.
Later, during the long hunt sequence in the forest that is the centerpiece of the plot, Stallone’s Rambo deliberately spares the lives of multiple officers — a show of restraint that would have been unthinkable to the main character of the novel.
But, again, it’s not so much the amount of harm the character does as it is the justification for his actions. The novel presents Rambo’s actions without justification. In fact, the author persistently reinforces the notion that Rambo’s actions are not supported by anything other than the cold, inhuman logic of war. Rambo himself acknowledges as much in his inner monologue — or inner dialogue, I ought to say — the more civilized part of him unsuccessfully cross-examining the killing machine that has taken over the command center of his brain. The author tells us early on that it’s “Too late to stop his mind from completing the circle. Once again he returned to the war.”
Toward the end of the book, the military officer who oversaw Rambo’s training, Colonel Sam Trautman, enters the scene to aid the police. He delivers this message to Rambo over the radio:
“Rambo, listen to me. I know you can hear me. Listen to me. I want you to stop and surrender before they kill you. I’m helping them because I don’t want you killed. If I thought there was the slightest chance of you beating them, I’d gladly tell you to keep on the move. But I know you can’t get away. Believe me, I know it. Please, while you still can, get up and get out of this alive. There’s nothing you can do.”
Hearing this, Rambo says to himself, “Watch me.”
Compare this terse response to Stallone’s almost teary-eyed plea in the equivalent scene from the film:
“They’re all dead, sir… Baker Team — they’re all dead… Berry’s gone too, sir. Got himself killed in ‘Nam, didn’t even know it. The cancer ate him down to the bone. I’m the last one… All I wanted was something to eat, but the man [Teasle] kept pushing, sir… They drew first blood, not me… They drew first blood.”
This is a man determined to justify his actions. However damaged or hardened he may be by his lingering psychic wounds, Stallone’s Rambo is working with a moral calculus that is simply missing from the novel. The phrase “first blood” is never even used in the text of the book, leaving the title deliberately ambiguous. David Morrell explains that, when he conceived of the book, he wanted the reader to “identify with each character and at the same time feel ambivalent about them. Who was the hero, who the villain, or were both men heroes, both men villains?”
In the movie, the titular phrase is forcefully and unambiguously interpreted for the viewer. The police are the aggressors, and Rambo — even if he goes too far in his response — is essentially in the right.
You see, the filmmakers were operating under a different set of imperatives, both artistic and ethical, than the novelist. It was supremely important to them that Rambo’s actions — while painful to watch — are not only comprehensible but justifiable. If Rambo is to be marketable, he needs to be the unequivocal hero of the story, not just its protagonist. If he is to be the hero, the audience must not only identify with him; the audience must like the character and approve of his actions.
Interestingly, perhaps loath to vilify a small-town police chief, the filmmakers extend a similar courtesy to his antagonist, Teasle. While Dennehy’s performance is appropriately unyielding and stern, the film outsources the worst of his provocations to his subordinates. As I mentioned before, Teasle is not present when the deputies torment Rambo at the police station, prompting him to run away. In the novel, Teasle is not only present for the assault, he then leads the charge into the woods, insisting that they not wait for daybreak, lest the state police intervene and take the mission out of their hands — and there’s no mistaking that for Teasle, this is a mission.
The most perverse transformation, however, occurs to the supporting character of Art Galt, the officer who, in the book, Rambo disembowels in the police station. In the movie, Galt is transmuted into a sadistic instigator, defying the chief’s orders by attempting lethal force on Rambo. He gets his comeuppance when he falls to his death after Rambo throws a stone at the police helicopter Galt is riding in. Galt, you see, has stumbled into a narrative universe in which the good guy (Rambo) only kills when provoked — and then only accidentally — and the bad guy (Galt) is necessarily punished for his misdeeds. Granted, he dies in either case, but in the book his unheralded demise at least elicits our sympathy.
The action of the novel is driven to such wild extremes because Rambo and Teasle are both willing — even eager — to escalate the situation. Morrell explains, “The final confrontation between Rambo and Teasle would show that in this microcosmic version of the Vietnam War and American attitudes about it, escalating force results in disaster.” The action of the movie, on the other hand, proceeds in spite of both men’s attempts to de-escalate, an effort made difficult, again, by the treachery of the supporting cast. Stallone’s Rambo even tries to put a stop to the violence early on, explaining unsuccessfully to the police that Galt’s death was an accident. He didn’t mean it. In the book, a rifle-wielding Rambo deliberately shoots the helicopter’s pilot.
The filmmakers give us a film that exists in a moral universe with clear boundaries between good and evil, the only ambiguity being that there may be a good guy on both sides. The opposition between the two characters gets out of hand because of the rash actions of a few bad actors, not because of their own maladaptive operating principles — principles borne of perversities in the institutions and culture in which their character has been forged.
The filmmakers insist on giving the audience a moral landscape that is easy to navigate.
This inclination has deep roots in Hollywood, reaching back over half a century prior to the release of First Blood, to the adoption of The Motion Picture Production Code in 1930. Also known as the Hays Code, the production code was a set of standards designed “to maintain social and community values in the production of silent, synchronized, and talking motion pictures.” The code was willingly adopted by the Hollywood studios and enforced through the mid 1950s. Devised as a method of self-regulation that would allow the studios to avoid scrutiny from the government (scrutiny that might in turn shed light on their shady business practices), the code expressly forbade a wide range of behaviors on screen.
For instance, the exact methods used to commit crimes must never be presented, lest they inspire imitation. Illegal drug traffic must never be presented, and the consumption of alcohol must only be shown insofar as it is essential to the plot or to characterization. Obscenity and vulgarity (broadly defined) are off-limits, as are a number of sexually inappropriate images, including sex perversion, seduction or rape, scenes of actual child birth, and… [deep breath]… miscegenation. White slavery, which must never be treated, is also rather confusingly categorized under ‘sex’.
However, the production code didn’t stop at enumerating specific deeds that could not be depicted on-screen. It went so far as to dictate in what narrative light various misdeeds ought to be framed. Adultery, for example, though sometimes necessary to the plot, must never be justified or presented attractively. Religious figures must never be presented as comic figures or villains. And, of course, the use of the flag shall be consistently respectful.
In case it weren’t obvious, there is a religious underpinning to all this that we don’t usually associate with Hollywood today. As Thomas Doherty, a professor at Brandeis University, points out in a 2006 article in The Washington Post, the Hays Code was “no mere list of Thou-Shalt-Nots but a homily that sought to yoke Catholic doctrine to Hollywood formula: the guilty are punished, the virtuous rewarded, the authority of church and state is legitimate, and the bonds of matrimony are sacred.”
It is not just the actions themselves but the motivation for the actions that are important. We must never sympathize with an immoral character; by the same token, any character we are encouraged to sympathize with must behave in a consistently ethical fashion.
For instance, the plot of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca hinges on a murder committed in the past by one of the main characters. In order to comply with the Hays Code, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation made the killing accidental. It would have been far too unseemly, by Hollywood standards, for a character with whom we identify to have gotten away with murder.
The Hays Code was largely a collusion between Hollywood studio heads and leaders within the Catholic church, who were often invited to approve material before it was distributed. It was an ironic bit of symbiosis, but effective enough while it lasted. Given the sanction of the church, the studio heads got to keep the government out of their hair, while the church got to use this groundbreaking popular medium to promote traditional values.
Although the production code was abandoned in the 1950s, eventually being replaced by the ‘voluntary’ rating system that’s still in place today, its spirit never entirely fled. Even as standards of content became far more permissive and the explicit depiction of sex, violence, and strong language became pervasive in the late 20th Century, the default sorting of characters into white hats and black hats remained entrenched in popular filmmaking.
While the 1970s, with its slew of anti-heroes and nauseating takes on war and political corruption, signaled a temporary retreat from this dualistic worldview, the essence of the philosophy expressed in the Hays Code came roaring back in the 1980s — only this time, it was sporting some heavy artillery. Where the Hays Code sought to yoke Catholic doctrine to Hollywood formula, the new, unofficial code sought to yoke American political doctrine to Hollywood formula.
First Blood languished in Hollywood for over a decade before a clever producer figured out what to do with it, converting it from a gruesome tale of the insanity of war into one that was marketable because, while it remains difficult to behold, it ultimately sanctions American values — or at least the story we tell ourselves about our values.
“We don’t hurt them until they’ve hurt us.” That’s the narrative the film is peddling, one that is anathema to the message of the book.
Now, I want to give the filmmakers some credit here. In a number of ways, the movie improves upon the novel. The story is less blunt, more nuanced. The novel is a bit indulgent with the violence, giving over to shock value at times. The film puts Rambo in the forest with only a hunting knife, forcing him to show his mettle by laying booby traps for his hunters. This an ingenious move that heightens the tension of the action sequences.
The filmmakers also made the smart choice to have the action take place seven years after Rambo’s return from Vietnam rather than a few months after he was discharged. He enters Teasle’s town after visiting his buddy from Vietnam, who is now dying from complications of the chemicals he was exposed to in the war. This backdrop adds some depth and resonance to the character’s journey. The audience sees from the first scene that he is the last surviving member of his unit and that, years later, he’s still unable to adjust to civilian life. That’s a stirring emotional premise. The film version of First Blood also personalizes the relationship between Rambo and Colonel Trautman, making it an almost paternal arrangement. It’s not surprising that Sylvester Stallone had a hand in developing these added elements. Stallone knows how to play on his audience’s emotions. Even the less, shall we say, prestige-oriented of the Rocky films never fail to deliver an emotional KO.
The only emotions evoked by First Blood the novel are outrage, excitement, and fear.
If the filmmakers had left it at that — if they had made a more emotional and entertaining, if less problematic, film adaptation of a pretty good action novel and not taken it any further — I probably wouldn’t bother to write about it. But, as we all know, they didn’t leave it at that. There have been three more movies in the series, beginning with the awkwardly titled Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985, then Rambo III in 1988, and a much later addition, simply titled Rambo, in 2008.
The second and third installments ratchet up the violence to staggering extremes even as the character is transformed from a damaged Vietnam vet terrorizing a rural town into a full-fledged action hero, whose motives and actions may not be impugned because he is fighting for America.
Whether or not you agree that this development is morally and artistically repugnant, the conversion had identifiable real-world consequences. Ronald Reagan said that, after watching the second Rambo movie, he felt he would know what to do the next time they had a hostage situation. That’s a bit frightening, as the filmmakers’ aim was clearly not to reflect how complex political and military decisions ought to be made in the real world and certainly not to educate the president on how to act. Their responsibility, as they saw it, was to entertain the audience. Full stop.
David Morell had literary, even philosophical, aspirations in writing his novel. To the extent that the film served a purpose beyond pure entertainment, it was, as author Steve Berry writes in an essay on First Blood for the collection Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads, “to aid an emasculated America to feel good about itself again.” David Morrell’s novel was an attempt to take stock of the domestic consequences of the overseas atrocities perpetrated by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Hollywood’s treatment of Rambo, especially in the 1985 and 1988 installments, is an attempt to absolve the nation of its shame and horror at those very atrocities.
Indeed, were it not for the film, there would have been no sequels to the novel, which ends with Rambo being unceremoniously executed by Colonel Trautman, the military officer who had overseen his training. He is killed by his creator. And Morrell has acknowledged how heinously the filmmakers perverted his vision of the character in the sequel, saying recently, “By Rambo 2 and 3, he’s a poster boy for joining the military. He’s delivering lines like: ‘Sir, do we get to win this time?’” His response was to become “kind of stoically adjusted. I thought of the novel as one train track, and Rambo publicly as another train track. Sometimes I joke that I’m Rambo’s father, and the character grew up and did stuff that I have nothing to do with!”
That’s an interesting analogy, but it strikes me as a bit odd considering the author agreed to write novelizations of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III after the movies’ releases. His stated reason is that he wanted to at least lend some insight into the character’s internal life as this alternate narrative played out.
Okay.
But I can’t help imagining that there were more than a few dollar signs attached to Morrell’s decision. Was it his prerogative to profit from the franchise’s continued success? Sure. Why not. But his choice to write those sequels was nonetheless a capitulation to the changes the filmmakers made to the character, and capitulating to those changes countenances — if not outright defends — the moral and artistic obscenity that became of Rambo.
And it gets worse.
In 1986, midway between the release of the second and third Rambo films, this new American hero found his way to the small screen as well, in the form of an animated series — Rambo: The Force of Freedom. At the recommendation of child psychologists hired by the production company, all references to the Vietnam War and the character’s having been a POW were expurgated from the story. They scrubbed it clean. Rambo is now “liberty’s champion,” an “honor-bound protector of the innocent” who leads an elite fighting force against the terrorist organization SAVAGE. The whole 65-episode series plays like an extended, unironic cut of the song “America, Fuck Yeah!” from Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s satirical film Team America: World Police.
Rambo’s resonance may have diminished somewhat in the new century, apart from 2008’s Rambo and the upcoming fifth installment. But just when we might have thought the character had subsided if not disappeared as a cultural and political touchstone, in early 2017, the Army introduced a 3D-printed grenade launcher — an efficient, cost-effective instrument of close-range combat. Depending on your political leanings, it is either awesome or terrifying. The Army is calling it a Rapid Additively Manufactured Ballistics Ordnance, or RAMBO.
Part II: Living in a world where everyone is right
“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” — Harold Pinter, 1958
People have had opinions for as long as human beings have been thinking and making judgments, and those opinions have coalesced around agreed-upon ideas for as long as we’ve been organizing ourselves into communities.
But something shifted fairly recently in the long timeline of human thought and culture.
Postmodernism arose in the mid-20th Century as a diverse intellectual movement that rocked philosophy, the arts, and various forms of criticism. It’s a difficult term to define, in no small part because of its own aversion to rigid definitions. We can identify some common features of postmodern thought — suspicion toward universal claims about reality (or even the rejection of the idea that there is an objective reality), dismantling of conventional critical frameworks and methodologies — but it’s hard to pin down its essence. That said, playwright Harold Pinter came pretty close to a concise expression of the postmodern inclination when he wrote in 1958, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”
The promise — or some might say the threat — of postmodernism lay in its effort to upend the conventional but ultimately illusory certainties of Enlightenment thinking. The postmoderns sought to expose the prejudices and power structures that underlay our methods of obtaining and disseminating information, to scrutinize not only the conventional conclusions drawn by philosophers and social scientists but the legitimacy of the mechanisms used to arrive at those conclusions. Critics of the postmodern project charged that, unchecked, it would lead to rampant relativism, to a moral and cultural free-for-all where nothing can be said to be more right, good, or true than anything else. We’re talking not only value pluralism but truth pluralism, a world in which anything may be true but nothing is TRUE.
There may have been some validity to these concerns. The presence of phrases like ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ in our current cultural discourse indicates that conventional notions of truth are under assault in contemporary society.
But it isn’t going the way the postmoderns envisioned, or how their critics feared. Oh, no — it’s far worse.
We live in post-postmodern world. A world where everyone is right.
Where each of us is right, that is, and no one else is right — except, of course, the folks who agree with us.
What a privilege we enjoy, to all be right, no matter how much we disagree. And what an outrage, for everyone else out there to be so grossly, so flagrantly, so sickeningly wrong.
The way we perceive things today and how we conduct our political and cultural discourse certainly has a whiff of relativism. But a true commitment to relativism demands that we acknowledge that contradictory viewpoints are as valid as our own. And most of us today will be damned if we’re going to do that. Rather than encouraging skepticism, the diversity of viewpoints available today increases our certainty in the correctness of our own views. The piling on of divergent views encourages us to make narrow selections among those views — and then to become dogmatic about our selections.
I like to call this The Rambo Effect, because we can make out the shape of the phenomenon in the development of Rambo through the first three films in the series.
The Rambo Effect is more or less the inverse of the better-known Rashomon Effect. The Rashomon Effect derives its name from Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, in which four witnesses to a crime offer contradictory accounts of the same event. As Professor Robert Anderson explains in his essay “The Rashomon Effect and Communication,” the Rashomon Effect arises from the presence of differing perspectives, combined with “an inability to disqualify any particular version of the truth, all surrounded by the social pressure for closure on the question.”
A corollary to the Rashomon Effect is that as more information is introduced — as the narrative becomes more complex — the observer becomes less and less confident about the definitive truth of the matter.
From an artistic perspective, while The Rashomon Effect may be stirring when applied to a relatively brief narrative, it’s difficult to sustain over a longer arc. See, for instance, the Showtime series The Affair, which tells a rather convoluted tale of desire and betrayal through two and later four contrasting perspectives. After a couple of seasons of the show, my mind was no longer able to support all the conflicting accounts, and I found my memory of the events coalescing around a single, coherent version of the narrative. This is what our minds like to do, which is what makes The Rashomon Effect so captivating in small doses (as it creates dramatic tension and aesthetic fascination by disorienting us and frustrating our desire for clarity) but also so unworkable in the long run.
The folks behind the Rambo movies seemed to get that The Rashomon Effect in unsustainable, giving us instead a portrayal of the character that becomes more definitive, less ambiguous, over time.
This is what I call The Rambo Effect: The belief, reflected in the narrative conceit of the Rambo franchise, that our knowledge of an event, person, or situation becomes more clear as information is added.
This is, of course, largely a fiction, a comfortable illusion that appeals to our fretful desire for clarity, our deep desire to believe that we see things the way they really are — not only in the realm of facts but of ethics. The Rambo movies tell us that we don’t need to question our beliefs and our values. And the more we find out pursuant to the question, the less we need to question things. The more we learn, the more our certainty will increase… regardless of whether the new information actually agrees with what we believe to be true.
In 2006, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined the term “the backfire effect,” describing a version of confirmation bias by which one becomes more entrenched in one’s beliefs and opinions when presented with evidence that challenges those views. We all fall prey to this, the story goes, and researchers at USC’s Creativity and Brain Institute have begun to identify the neural pathways at work in the backfire effect. The Rambo Effect, in one respect, is the result of the sustained application of the backfire effect, when its consequences become inscribed into a person’s worldview, leaving their minds all tattoo and scar tissue, impervious to revision (though there may be yet more layers of ink lain over the whole mess). But on another level, it constitutes either an intransigent refusal to believe in the backfire effect (“That doesn’t apply to me.”), thus confirming the backfire effect’s victory; or, on a still higher plain of un-reflective gosh-wow irony, it may constitute a spirited embrace of the backfire effect (“Sure it applies to me — and you know what? I don’t give a damn! Your evidence doesn’t matter, ’cause I know what I know.”). Either way, the individual marches forth proudly, intoxicated by their incorruptible sense of certainty.
But there’s a wrinkle. If you knew about the backfire effect before reading this, there’s a decent chance you heard about it from a video posted on The Oatmeal by illustrator Matthew Inman in May, 2017. That’s how I first became familiar with it. The video crystallizes the concept as good animation is apt to do (much as the animated version of Rambo distills the character’s heroic Americanness to its cask-strength essence). Trouble is, Inman overstates the prevalence of the backfire effect, a fact acknowledged by coiner Nyhan himself on that ultimate arbiter of 21st-Century certainty, Twitter: “FWIW idea that backfire fx always happen = not even true in our initial study. But I’ve revised my priors a lot as we & others did more work”. That is to say, the original research didn’t suggest that everyone falls prey to the backfire effect all the time, and further research conducted by self-described backfire-effect “acolytes” Tom Wood and Ethan Porter (of Ohio State University and George Washington University, respectively) found that it doesn’t even happen to most people most of the time. According to Wood and Porter’s research, what does seem to happen is that, rather than refusing to believe facts that contradict their presuppositions, individuals absorb these new data into their existing worldview. Even if it’s an uncomfortable fit.
“As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?” — Harold Pinter, 2005
For many Americans today the Rambo Effect is more than a mere delusion, a tacit belief in a wrongheaded way of thinking. For perhaps a plurality of 21st-Century Americans, it rises to the level of a conviction, an article of faith, and even a point of pride. There are so many facts on offer that we can simply, and proudly, cherry pick those that affirm our views and proceed boldly with these facts in hand. Because, as Pinter put it, “there are no hard distinctions between […] what is true and what is false,” we get to decide what is true for us — and then sink our teeth in and demand that others conform to this truth.
But this isn’t quite what Pinter had in mind. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 2005, he draws a clear line between the treatment of truth in art and in society. He says about his earlier comment, “I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?” As citizens, we must be discerning and critical about our notions of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy.
Pinter embraces relativism in art while insisting on a clear-eyed rationalism, with no tolerance for deception, in political and civil discourse.
We might understand The Rambo Effect as an unholy union between rationalism and relativism, a toxic commingling of two tendencies that are meant to occupy separate spheres. Real, reliable knowledge is not only attainable but increasingly accessible — just look at all the information and analysis out there! I get closer to certainty as I gain more information to reinforce my presuppositions (and all information now reinforces those presuppositions). That’s the rationalist end. The relativist influence comes in my assertion that my beliefs and opinions are every bit as valid as yours — though, in an Orwellian twist, it turns out that while my views are as valid as yours, your views are probably not as valid as mine. So what we have here is not pure relativism, but relativism spiked with a strong decoction of certainty. And what results is a cocktail of virulent dogmatism.
Americans in the 21st Century have elevated this individual phenomenon to the societal level. We have made it a national pastime. We revel in the exponentially increasing abundance of media that process information to conform to our predetermined perspectives, the atomization of social media, and the increased efficiency of customized newsfeeds. The more contrasting accounts we read about an issue, the more certain we become that our interpretation is the correct one — and the more convinced we become of the worldview that interpretation supports. Millions of social media users now believe in a psychological “backfire effect” that the cited authors never actually proposed, and they are so keen on believing in it because it seems to explain the other side’s stiff-necked imperviousness to reason and research. Never mind their own obstinacy. And never mind the fact that this effect is itself largely a fiction, or a misconstrual of the better established phenomena of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. The supposed research serves the narrative. It buttresses our worldview.
And what else is social media for if not to make its users feel right? What is its raison, its purpose, if not to validate us, to affirm that we must be right because so many other people give the ideas we adhere to their digital stamp of approval? This is not only what we do, but increasingly who we are. The Rambo Effect has become our national emblem. We are a nation of people who all know they are right.
In America today, we are bombarded with information, with conflicting accounts about everything, a panoply of truths suited as minutely to our intellectual inclinations as the offerings on PornHub are to our libidinous appetites; but rather than splintering and ultimately dissolving our belief in a single, coherent, objectively verifiable truth, the onslaught burns away our uncertainty, cleansing us of any doubt. We are convinced that, in the midst of this maelstrom, we alone are the steadfast and courageous defenders of integrity and truth. We rise like John Rambo in the climactic battle sequence of Rambo III — a peerless soldier who, after single-handedly defeating an army of Afghan militants, emerges from his tank the lean, triumphant, unambiguous apotheosis of his potential. The crucible of battle, rather than destroying Rambo, clarifies and elevates him, eliminating any doubt in the viewers’ minds about what they are witnessing: a true American hero.
And that is how we all now view ourselves — as heroic in our certainty, our clarity, our superiority to our fellow passengers, whom we regard as intellectually and morally disingenuousness for failing to see things the way we do.
We are all Rambo. God bless us… and God help us.
* This article was adapted from Season One, Episode Four, of my podcast, Quite Useless. You can find Quite Useless on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. *
