Action Hero vs.

Tragic Hero:
First Blood, Cultural Criticism, and Schelling’s Theory of Tragedy
Balázs Sánta
_______________________________________________________HJEAS

“Oh man, is anybody winning?”

(Hal Shaper, “It’s a Long Road”)

We live in an era of the popular classic: contemporary subjects are getting

reinterpreted from classical perspectives borrowed from the history of ideas.
Many critics have studied contemporary popular film-cycles, such as Star
Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.1 These inquiries of popular
movies, besides calling attention to the relevance of philosophy and
aesthetics, offer new interpretations, or reformulate already existing ones in
contemporary fashion and language. I explore such a popular classic, First
Blood (1982), directed by Ted Kotcheff, and the theme of violence on the
screen in this spirit, treating the work from the perspective of German
idealism and two of its major figures, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
(1775-1854) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805).
First Blood, based on David Morrell’s novel of the same title, features
a fictive but still iconic Vietnam veteran’s lonely armed struggle for freedom.2
Its success is due, among others, to actor and co-screenwriter Sylvester
Stallone’s performance as John Rambo, a former Green Beret (a member of
the US Army Special Forces). Critics have deemed the ensuing sequels on the
average “shoot-’em-up, one-man-against-the-world action flicks” (Snider),
and the major blockbuster second part “a testosterone-and-adrenaline
cocktail that struck a chord with Cold War weary movie-goers” (Berardinelli).
As Nusair contends, the latter started a line of “increasingly cartoonish
follow-ups,” helping to create the image of the serialized action hero intended
for endless consumption. The story has so far culminated in the fourth
installment, John Rambo (2008).3 I argue, however, that in First Blood, the
presentation of the protagonist falls closer to the image of the classic tragic
hero than the cartoonish figure of the sequels.
Due to the movie’s prestigious place in the thematic history of
American cinema,4 Rambo’s iconic status in popular culture, and his seminal
role in the creation of Hollywood’s mainstream heterosexual white male, First
Blood seems to be an over-researched topic. Most interpretations adopting a
cultural studies approach, however, have their interests outside the dramatic
structure of the film. They are concerned with the protagonist’s story as a

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 23.2. 2017. Copyright © 2017
by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
reflection of US history, cultural memory, or culture politics, and pay little
attention to the construction of the dramatic character of Rambo.
While German idealism may seem anachronistic as an all-
encompassing framework for a post-Vietnam War movie, there are certain
thematic and structural points of intersection between the film and this
critical context. This approach explores the relevance of Schelling’s and
Schiller’s ideas for the study of masculine heroes in cinema. By doing so, the
paper also broadens the reception of First Blood and remolds the concept of
popular cinema. Rather than concentrating on strictly filmic devices, this
analysis serves more of a study on narrative structure (cf. Holmlund,
“Masculinity,” and Jeffords). I contend that the psychological, moral, and
social elements of the veteran experience can be fruitfully related to the claims
Schelling and Schiller make about the tragic hero.
The veteran experience is an essential part of cultural memory in the
United States. Every November 11, called “Armistice Day” until 1954, and
Veterans Day later, is dedicated to honoring the sacrifice of soldiers since the
end of World War I. As Zsolt Gy ri, in a different context, observed about
the cinematic representations of the Great War, the visibility of veterans has
both therapeutic and cultural functions, for instance, in bringing a facet of
history stained with violence closer to the public through memories of the
soldiers and their drama (160). He argues that the veteran, converted into a
consumer product, becomes “a myth, an idealized national hero” (Gy ri 162),
even an idol to look up to, especially in popular filmmaking. The image of
the veteran, typically a male having passed the test of physical survival, is also
culturally engendered to suggest a dominantly male experience.
The heroic depiction of survival indeed emphasizes masculine
virtues, as Chris Holmlund observes in his volume dedicated exclusively to
Stallone: “as screenwriter and performer [of First Blood], he helped launch a
new kind of ‘hard boy’ action hero and re-established traditional values,
promoting a rugged, macho individualism that was nevertheless in tune with
the times’ emphasis on fitness and vigilante defense” (“Introduction” 2).
Rambo’s figure as action hero has become a consumer product, and found
its way into iconic status and commercial success within a cultural context
that put increasing significance on the glorification of masculine charisma.
The Rambo films of the 1980s are, no doubt, the products of a then-
prevalent Hollywood tendency to make the white male body, as Susan
Jeffords asserts, a conspicuous spectacle in its own right:

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 Throughout this period, the male body—principally the white male body—
became increasingly a vehicle of display—of musculature, of beauty, of
physical feats, and of a gritty toughness. External spectacle—weaponry,
explosions, infernos, crashes, high-speed chases, ostentatious luxuries—
offered companion evidence of both the sufficiency and the volatility of this
display. That externality itself confirmed that the outer parameters of the
male body were to be the focus of audience attention, desire, and politics.
(245)5

Viewed in this context, the externalities of the era (muscles, weapons,

and scanty one-syllable words for speech) provide fertile ground for gender
criticism informed by psychoanalysis. In “Masculinity as Multiple
Masquerade,” Holmlund takes two films from Stallone’s filmography and
weaves his analysis into the complexities of Joan Riviere’s, Jacques Lacan’s,
and Mary Ann Doane’s writing on masquerade, desire, and femininity. He
adroitly applies the arguments of these authors to the case of masculinity,
showing that the conspicuous visual display of virility is, in fact, a masquerade
consciously enacted in front of a heterosexual male audience.
Jeffords tracks a conversion of the 1980s’ male spectacle to a more
internalized and emotionally mature masculinity of fathers in the 1990s by
investigating the differences between Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2:
Judgment Day (1991). She notes that the first episodes of such emblematic
franchises as Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Rambo had, if only in passing,
alluded to spiritual complexities beneath the solid bodies. Rambo’s final
“impassioned outburst” at the end of the film, for example, although “largely
unintelligible” and held in check by the preceding scenes of explosions and
fighting, does reveal something of the protagonist’s emotional and mental
depths. Jeffords remains unconvinced, however, about the scene’s overall
significance, claiming that the film focuses more on the externalization of
these emotions than on “violent and destructive actions” (246).
While the truth of such interpretations should not go
unacknowledged, the predominance of masculinity-oriented readings should
by no means delegitimize other approaches to the film. Yet, it seems as
though the corporality of Rambo’s image constructed by the prevailing
regime in popular culture has pushed to the background the more abstract
and immaterial components of this image. The same is true for violence, the
“demasculinization” of which renders legible the symbolic expression of the
immutable struggle which constitutes an inseparable part of the universal
human condition. The differentiation between the violence of the tragic hero

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and that of the action hero—along with the parasitic dependence of the latter
on the former—reveals the assertive cultural logic of mainstream cinema and
its insistence on a consumable image. Analyzing First Blood as a tragedy on
screen according to the logic of German idealism, addresses the film as a
vehicle for ideas, patterns, and themes that supersede the image of its
protagonist as only an object of consumer society. In order to present the
arguments for this view, first some background for the framework of the
analysis is in place.
A central assumption of modern thought, especially at times of peril,
such as armed conflict, is that human existence is tainted by an underlying
paradox between being free to make moral decisions, on the one hand, and
being constrained regarding the outcome of our choices, on the other. This
empirical contradiction is usually expressed as a tension between free will and
necessity or fate. Schelling’s work on transcendental philosophy and
aesthetics was inspired partly by this paradox. His philosophy evolved from
the 1790s through the early 1800s, at a time when Europe saw an eruption of
ideas—of freedom, and of the necessity to reassess old social hierarchies—
put into violent action. The French Revolution and its resonance throughout
the Old Continent, followed by the Napoleonic Wars, gave birth to systems
of thought and politics now considered to be foundational to modernity. It
was amid such historical circumstances that Schelling devised his system of
thought with a focus on human knowledge, freedom, and existence.6
In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling articulated a
system that would later inform his treatise of the philosophy of art, “the true
organon of philosophy” (14). He sets up an opposition between nature and
freedom, the former characterized by a (metaphysical) unconscious, while the
latter, by the conscious mind. These two he views as identical in, what he
calls, the “absolute” or “the primordial self” (221). Schelling’s notion of the
unconscious may be associated in tragedy with (“blind”) fate, while the
conscious mind with that of the tragic hero. As he argues in System of
Transcendental Idealism, these two are essentially identical. Necessity (“the
objective”) is a set of outward limitations on the tragic hero’s will (“the
subjective”). The peak of tragedy will turn out to be the recognition that these
two elements are, in fact, two sides of the same coin—the absolute self.
According to Schelling, tragedy’s purifying effect is brought forth by this
recognition, that the hero’s own aspirations (what ought to happen) and
necessity (what actually happens) ultimately collide, and are reconciled as two
aspects of the same primordial intention of a metaphysical being. This is
what, as Schelling maintains in The Philosophy of Art, tragedy as a particular

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kind of verbal art explores. “The essence of tragedy is . . . an actual and
objective conflict between freedom in the subject on the one hand, and
necessity on the other” (251).
In order to set necessity up against freedom, Schelling asserts,
misfortune must be imposed on the tragic hero—more specifically, an
adversity inflicted on the protagonist who, in the past, was fortunate and held
in high esteem: “[t]he subject of tragedy is a person who is exceptional as
regards neither virtue nor justice, and who does not fall into misfortune as a
result of wickedness or crime, but rather as a result of error” (Philosophy 252).7
The hero falls due to the tragic error or transgression he commits, which will
ultimately lead to the encounter between his free will and necessity. In
addition, Schelling draws an important distinction between ancient and
modern tragedy. While in the former it is the arbitrary and indifferent will of
the gods that embody the power of fate, this function is taken up either by a
more personal deity in the Christian era (as in the plays of Calderón), or
history (as in Shakespeare). Rambo’s story belongs to the latter category.
The veteran coming home to find nowhere to settle down and build
life anew after the war has to confront the binding necessity of the law
(however unjustly applied by a small-town sheriff), with the only means he
has to his advantage: violence (his tragic error). By unleashing it on the
community long lulled into peace, he is forced to commit the same kind of
transgression Schelling speaks of, and to enter a conflict reminiscent of what
is present both in classical Greek drama, as well as in Shakespeare’s
plays that will escalate into a quasi-archetypical story of challenging fate.
For my argument, the central element of Schelling’s theory is how
free will and necessity come to terms with each other in First Blood and give
rise to the tragic hero in Rambo’s character. In a situation where “fate itself
makes the guilty person into a transgressor,” Schelling explains, the
transgressing protagonist—in spite of being a plaything of destiny, which
would otherwise serve an ethical excuse—must be punished, “precisely in
order to show the triumph of freedom” (Philosophy 253). In classical drama, the
tragic hero is born as the protagonist chooses to “atone voluntarily for this
guilt—guilt imposed by fate itself” (Schelling, Philosophy 253), so that necessity
may be overcome at the same time as the person is overcome by necessity.
As Schelling concludes, “[t]his is the most sublime idea and the greatest
victory of freedom: voluntarily to bear the punishment for an unavoidable
transgression in order to manifest [one’s] freedom precisely in the loss of that
freedom, and to perish amid a declaration of free will” (Philosophy 254).

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 The paradox constituting the essence of tragedy for Schelling is that
the hero gives up his freedom out of free will—in other words, surrenders it to
fate in a gesture that, paradoxically, vindicates freedom precisely this way.
What makes a tragic hero and grants him the grandeur of the sublime is that
he suffers to lose freedom only to gain it, much like what Rambo commits
himself to when, after using violence, he finally gives himself up to the law,
the only option for him to abandon his haunting role as a man of war.
In his treatise, “On the Sublime” (1801), Schiller contends that there
are two ways a human being may assert freedom in the face of opposition or
violence: “when man opposes violence with violence, when he as nature rules
over nature; or ideally, when he steps out of nature and so, in regard to
himself, annihilates the concept of violence.” Schiller calls the first option
“physical culture,” a masculine strategy well-illustrated by Stallone’s films in
general. It often happens, however, that fate brings such a plight on the
human soul that it is incapable of vindicating free will through violence and
is left with the second option: “to annul altogether a relation, which is so
disadvantageous to him and to annihilate as a concept the violence, which he
must in fact suffer” (Schiller). Schiller expects essentially the same of the
tragic hero as Schelling, that is, voluntary subjugation to the powers of
destruction or fate. Asserting morality’s ideal independence from the world
of actual phenomena ascribes to the hero a “frame of mind” Schiller calls
sublime, while the aesthetic cultivation of the moral ennoblement of such a
hero is identified as “moral culture.” Because of the way First Blood portrays
its hero as an agent of violence, Rambo wins our respect initially by prevailing
in “physical culture.” Eventually, however, the protagonist fully qualifies as a
tragic hero by annihilating violence in a moral sense.
The film’s structure is defined by three twists in the protagonist’s
attitude toward his situation. Soon after the opening scenes establish the
physical as well as the spiritual setting for the film, Rambo bears grievances
of spiritual defacement when the town sheriff, acting dubiously on the duty
of peacekeeping, orders him out of town. Rambo’s initial civil resistance
marks an awakening need for liberty and self-assertion in the face of state
power practiced excessively and unjustly. His arrest and the ensuing injustices
suffered at the police station prompt a shift in the story: undue violence
suffered is superseded by apparently justified violence effected on the self-
conceited officers. As the story continues, violence becomes the central issue
and spectacle of the film, which is coupled with a verbal-spiritual act of
detachment from the norm: the veteran even refuses the orders of his former

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commander-in-chief to give himself up, and thus faces society’s challenge to
subjective freedom.
The film’s stunning display of fighting skills and physical abilities, the
matter of the second structural part of the story, has come to be associated
with Rambo’s figure due to Stallone’s notorious appearances in the sequels.
It also establishes the physical culture Schiller speaks of in relation to one
kind of the sublime. While this informs the cult of the action hero image, the
final turn toward moral culture in the eventual denial of violence will
contribute to the development of the tragic hero. At the dramatic peak of the
story, Rambo’s one-time superior orders him again to lay down his weapon.
The order softens into a pledge at the sight of the desperate warrior, who is
dramatically transformed into a victim of fate. By refusing further violence
and consenting to being vanquished, the role of the protagonist seems to shift
again from an agent of brutal but awe-inspiring power to a victim of legal but
repressive police measures. Yet, this act of self-effacement does not mean a
return to the role of the passive sufferer. This is, rather, the veteran’s ascent
to the status of the tragic hero, vindicating, as Schelling would have it, free
will by the paradox of a deliberate surrender to the objective necessity of fate.
(The sublime qualities of Rambo’s figure, however, got absorbed in most of
the sequels and their reception by the power of masculine culture in
consumer society, like physical prowess, martial dexterity, and endurance. In
short, the tragic hero has been assimilated and consumed by the action hero.)
In order to get a deeper insight into the processes sketched above, let
us observe more closely how the film unfolds. In the opening scene, Rambo
is walking down an empty road. Learning about the death of his friend,
Delmare, he feels bitterly alone, an experience thoroughly different from the
one he was used to as a soldier among his comrades. He wishes to consolidate
the past by coming to terms with his traumas, but hearing about his friend’s
death—an event representing, pars pro toto, the passing away of all human ties
to his past—undermines the veteran’s chances for communal relief.
Delmare’s death from cancer caused by Agent Orange, a chemical used by
the US in Vietnam, brings the horrors of war painfully close.
Rambo’s experiences are representative of Vietnam veterans in
general. As historian George Herring puts it,

Those Americans who fought in the war were the primary victims of the
nation’s desire to forget. . . . Vietnam veterans by the miracles of the jet age
were whisked home virtually overnight to a nation that was hostile to the
war or indifferent to their plight. Some were made to feel the guilt for the

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 nation’s moral transgressions; others, responsibility for its failure. Most
simply met silence. (274)

The silence Herring mentions can be associated with the bitter silence of the
woman Rambo meets at Delmare’s place (his mother perhaps), but, in its
proper context, it evidently refers to the indifference, even hostility, toward
veterans that people untouched by the horrors of war felt. In fact, ex-Vietnam
soldiers, many of whom “lost interest in working and had trouble keeping
jobs” (Barr 91), were regarded with suspicion. When Teasle, the small-town
sheriff (played by Brian Dennehy), sees Rambo from his car, wandering down
the road in a green coat with a US flag sewn onto it, he immediately acts on
stereotypes. “Y’ know, wearin’ that flag ’n’ that jacket . . . lookin’ at the way
you do . . . you’re askin’ for trouble aroun’ here, friend” (First Blood). This
attitude contributes to the unfolding of necessity in the movie. Teasle treats
Rambo with suspicion and malice, literally driving him out of the town
ironically named Hope, offending the man’s dignity and challenging his
fighter’s spirit.
Teasle sees Rambo in predefined terms, labeling him with a stock
identity at first glance, which the protagonist will eventually accept in
response to the hostility of society expressed in terms of law-enforcement.8
The man’s misinterpreted wandering or drifting apparently annoys the sheriff
and deepens his suspicion. The protagonist will indeed embrace this “drifter
identity” by acting out the role of the run-away transgressor. His alienation
from society will grow stronger by succumbing to what Schelling would call
the “objective necessity of fate”—he practically admits to being an outlaw.
Rambo’s first act of conscious resistance is to head back to town,
ignoring the sheriff’s “advice.” His initial refusal to answer Teasle’s questions,
but eventual consent to being arrested, however, underpins his intention to
keep his peace. Most police officers in the film behave as antagonistically as
Teasle, especially Art Galt (Jack Starrett), the head deputy and Teasle’s close
friend, who grows irritated at Rambo’s silent refusal to cooperate. Rambo’s
silence and, apparently, the fact that he served as a soldier ignite the officer’s
inclination to bully him, which explodes into downright sadism. Galt hits him
on the back with his truncheon and kicks him on the ground, and then
amuses himself by having Rambo “cleaned up” using a hosepipe.
The most threatening police procedure designed to adjust the veteran
to social norms would be to shave him with a razor. The sight of the razor
reminds Rambo of the knife he was tortured with in Vietnam, and brings

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back traumatic memories of his captivity. This is the point at which he can
no longer suppress his instinct to hit back and breaks out. The flashbacks of
the pain he had to endure in the war shatter his self-control in a moment, and
he instinctively uses violence against the violators of his freedom.
Necessity as an ingrained drive of the hero now takes the concrete
form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The recognition of having
lost his former elite team of fighters and friends, complemented by his PTSD,
serve as constitutive elements in Rambo’s reaction to what happens to him.
His flashbacks may be seen as tokens of fate, inasmuch as fate is assumed to
be at work in his having had to live through the war, and now in having to
re-live it once more. Teasle and his team threaten to rob Rambo of the only
possessions he has left after Vietnam: peace and liberty. He realizes that in
order to salvage the latter, he must sacrifice the former. Mounting the fight
to assert his self-determination, he silently watches a frugal period of unlikely
armistice slip away. Consenting without a word to abandon civility (although
ever sparing the lives of his adversaries), he returns in mind, as well as in
action, to Vietnam: he is repossessed by physical culture, and the action hero
is thus (re)born.
While most policemen are hostile to Rambo, there is one exception,
Mitch (David Caruso), a young officer of presumably lower rank, who is not
inclined to treat Rambo as an underdog. He disapproves of the prisoner’s
maltreatment and, at one point, addresses him as “partner,” one of the few
expressions with connotations of respect and empathy that are in sharp
contrast with Teasle’s ironic “friend,” and Galt’s provocative “soldier.” Mitch
is also the only person who shows signs of genuine admiration for the former
Green Beret upon overhearing the radio conversation between police
headquarters and the pursuit team set to hunt down Rambo in the woods.
With an amazed smile, he acknowledges Rambo’s qualities: “I knew there was
something about that guy!” (First Blood; emphasis added). This “something”—
as the film has already illustrated by this point—is Rambo’s superior combat
skills, the attraction/appeal viewers seek and enjoy in action cinema and
which, similarly to Mitch, they approve with respect.
Although in Schiller’s notion of the sublime, the ability to defeat
agents of physical repression is seen as inferior to the true sublimity of being
able to succumb to them, physical culture now serves to establish the hero’s
“high esteem” from which he will eventually fall. Still, this high esteem,
achieved by means of physical violence what might be termed the mortally
sublime cannot be confused with that arising from the hero’s eventual

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refusal to put his abilities to his own advantage as a display of the morally
sublime.
Traumatic memories of Vietnam prompt the protagonist to repossess
his mastery of physical culture and deliver mayhem to the town of Hope.
Vietnam is literally unleashed in Hope, but also with hope: for, despite his
display of finesse and outstanding tactics, Rambo’s true desire is to leave the
warzone behind for good. He resists bloodshed as long as he can without
risking his life, and even tells Teasle that he spared his pursuers, although he
could easily have killed them one by one. (Art Galt’s fatal fall from a chopper
is only an indirect consequence of desperate self-defense.) This kind of
“merciful violence” already displays qualities of the morally sublime and the
associated attitude of self-denial insofar as Rambo, a killing machine, as
Teasle and his former commander later identify him, deliberately refuses to
pursue violence to its ultimate limit.
Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), the Green Beret’s former
commander in the war, links Rambo to physical culture as well. He makes a
dramatic first appearance when Teasle frustratedly exclaims in front of his
fellow policemen, “Whatever possessed God in heaven to make a man like
Rambo?” Unexpectedly, a remote voice, that of Trautman’s, answers him:
“God didn’t make Rambo. [All turn to look at the newcomer.] I made him. I
recruited him. I trained him. I commanded him for three years in Vietnam.
I’d say that makes him mine.” This sharp exchange between Teasle and the
Colonel forms an extremely powerful metaphor of both the soldier’s position
within American society and the veteran’s status in the post-Vietnam era.
Analyzing the same dialogue, Josephine Nock-Hee Park describes the
Green Beret as “a slave, an automaton programmed to kill” (163), while
Steven Johnston identifies him as the product of patriotic culture, one that
values self-sacrifice above everything: “Rambo came to life on the graves of
his uniformed predecessors, ready to follow them to their sacred destination
six feet under at Arlington” (79). In either event, Rambo appears to lack free
will and to be fully consumed by necessity and destiny; furthermore, he is
believed to serve malevolent supernatural powers: allusions to hell and the
“maker” of Rambo (“I made him”—“Who the hell are you?”) suggest that the
protagonist represents a force of evil and is, consequently, already fallen from
the outset. Given his extraordinary skills in combat and at infiltration, he
certainly is a fearful specimen of physical culture.
The fact that Trautman presents his apprentice in terms of a well-
designed killing machine and himself as an infallible engineer is marked by
his confidence in being able to predict what Rambo is going to do under

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specific circumstances. Not only does he agree when Teasle calls Rambo one
of his “machines,” and his “psycho,” but he actually encourages that view
when he describes the Green Beret’s skills at killing. Furthermore, the
Colonel is surprised that almost all of the officers are still alive. He advises
Teasle to allow the fugitive to escape from the woods, where the police keep
him surrounded, and arrest him somewhere in the country, after he has
calmed down. Although his assessment appears accurate about Rambo’s
capabilities, even Trautman is mistaken: Rambo is not a malfunctioning
killing machine, but someone on the threshold of achieving self-
consciousness and gaining the agency of free will.
Rambo’s eventual transformation from action hero into tragic hero,
his willing surrender to fate, and simultaneous repossession of free will is
underlined by Trautman’s gradual change of attitude toward his creation.
Whereas the Colonel identifies the revengeful police force that has
surrounded the building in the last scene as the obstacle to victory, admitting
another defeat in practical warfare, is not the real issue for the veteran. In the
last instance when Trautman speaks as his superior and hopes to vindicate
authority, he orders Rambo to stop while repeating, “it’s over, Johnny. It’s
over!” (First Blood). In reply, Rambo, who has kept silent for most of the film,
delivers a burst of speech, the importance of which has been denied due to
its virtual unintelligibility (Jeffords 246). Here is my attempt to capture it.

Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war. You
asked me, I didn’t ask you—and let do what the hell to do to win! But
somebody wouldn’t let us win! And I come back to the world . . . an’ I see
all those maggots at the airport . . . protested me, spittin’ . . . called me baby
killer an’ all kinds of bowl crap! Who are they to protest me, huh? Who are
they? Unless they’ve been me—I’ve been there—and know what the hell
they’re yellin’ about!

Trautman fails to appease the veteran, as there is no way to cool the anger
and pain that physical culture and the action hero image have covered up
during the rest of the film. The ensuing “it was a bad time for everyone”
sounds as the last cheap commonplace to pacify an infuriated Rambo.

TRAUTMAN. It was a bad time for everyone, Rambo; but it’s all past now—
RAMBO. For you! For me to be alive is nothin’! In the field we had a code
of honor—you watch my back, I watch yours. Back here there’s nothin’! . .
. Back there I could fly a gunship. I could drive a tank. I was in charge of

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 million-dollar equipment. . . . Back here I can’t even hold a job for ten
dollars! [Throws machine gun away, breaking window.] (First Blood)

These words do not eliminate Rambo’s frustration, only signal the willful
disposal of his warrior persona underscored by throwing the gun away and,
with it, his compulsion to use brute force.
Although these lines have been termed “clichés recycled as formula”
(Ebert), I maintain that the reference to the brotherhood of Vietnam veterans
is merely one of several possible starting points from which to build an
analysis. In its dénouement, the film features a hero on and beyond the
extreme limits of frustration in the face of social indifference toward the
veteran experience. Suddenly, we see a moved Trautman, his chin quivering
slightly, revealing compassion that has been denied the exasperated veteran
all through the film. His squatting down to the broken man and letting
Rambo take his hand reveals that it is only through sympathy, in its ancient
sense of suffering together, that one may salvage dignity after facing the fate of
inexcusable and irreparable distortions caused by war. This change of attitude
from an indifferent posture of suggestive knowledge to acknowledging
sympathetic respect represents Trautman’s homage to Rambo as a man of
others’ war.
The ending features the sharpest distinction between Morrell’s novel
and the film. In the former, Rambo is executed by Trautman. The original
ending of the film would have been the same (see Haflideson, Berardinelli),
but the fate of Stallone’s Rambo was eventually altered. The reason for this
might be that such an ending, according to the filmmakers, would have been
“too dark,” since “the audience had made too much of an emotional
investment in the main character’s survival for him to be eliminated,
especially at the hands of Trautman” (Berardinelli). Although producers at
the time were not intent on planning sequels, sparing the protagonist turned
out to be a profitable idea. A less materialistic motivation for the altered
ending, however, may be found in the hero’s final vociferations and
emotional collapse, with its moving agony that anticipate the pathos of the
last scene, showing Rambo cuffed up, followed by a sympathetic Trautman.
This scene suggests martyrdom that is analogous with the hero of modern
tragedy for the ultimate vindication of free will. The movie’s title song,
performed by Dan Hill, slowly captures the attention of the audience in the
final scene, together with the last cut to Rambo’s indifferent expression.
The story of Rambo, as told in First Blood, is punctuated with the
blows of fate. The loneliness felt at the absence of former comrades prepares

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the way for hostile blows in the home country. Pushed to the extremes by
intolerance, Rambo is tragically forced into the role of the Vietnam soldier
again. Though admiration for his skills is ensured early on through the effects
of masculine physical culture that create a sense of mortal sublimity around
him, his willingness to bear suffering helps us comprehend that which is
heroically human in his character. The tragedy of Rambo appears to express
a strange blend of freedom and fate, a dialectic that has been investigated by
many in drama theory, yet explained by few in such detail and acuteness as
Schelling and Schiller.
Claiming that the figure of Rambo in First Blood has a place in the
pantheon of Prometheus and Oedipus would probably strain an analogy too
far. Classical Greek drama, after all, has many explicit references to a
metaphysics that would be hard to associate with the universe of the Vietnam
War, 1980s Hollywood, or Stallone’s masculine cinema. Yet, Rambo’s
predicament and, especially, the film’s structure feature elements germane to
Schelling’s framework of tragedy and Schiller’s concept of the sublime. The
analogies I proposed illuminate the philosophical bearings of the
protagonist’s violence, and reveal the framework in which the frustrating
experience and identity politics of Vietnam veterans corresponds with the
rich cultural representations of the tragic hero. Recontextualizing the
protagonist’s “blows of fate,” however, in the latter context, does not weaken
the film’s cultural studies inspired readings; in fact, it suggests that the
universal struggle between free will and necessity ending in the paradox of
mutual victory and defeat is never a mere abstraction but enjoys a timeless
and imminent significance for culture and identity politics.9

Eötvös Loránd University

Notes
The essay is dedicated to the memory of Professor Géza Kállay.
1 Examples include Decker’s Star Wars and Philosophy, Bassham and Bronson’s The

Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, and Baggett and Klein’s Harry Potter and Philosophy.
2 I thank Dr. Zsolt Gy ri for sharing his ideas about First Blood with me.
3 I suggest that the fourth movie is closer in its aesthetic qualities and thematic

references to the first part.

4 (Post-)war narratives from the 1970s display a number of tendencies, including

portrayals of the war proper (Go Tell the Spartans, 1978; Apocalypse Now, 1979; Streamers, 1983;
Purple Hearts, 1984); and of anti-war sentiments (Hair, 1979; Return of the Secaucus 7, 1980;
Hamburger Hill, 1987). Returning to Vietnam to settle some unfinished business was another
popular subject (Uncommon Valor, 1983; Missing in Action, 1984, also directed by Kotcheff;
Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1985). A number of films offered an overarching treatment of the

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Vietnam phenomenon from recruitment or training to the war’s aftermath (The Deer Hunter,
1978; Birdy, 1984; Full Metal Jacket, 1987). First Blood, featuring the trials and tribulations of a
former commando soldier, belongs to the theme of exploring the veteran experience, along
with films like Heroes (1977), Coming Home (1978), and The Exterminator (1980).
5 Jeffords’s examples include, besides the first three Rambo movies, the Dirty Harry

films with Clint Eastwood (1971, 1973, 1976, 1983, and 1988), Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first
Terminator movie (1984), and Bruce Willis as John McLane in Die Hard (1988). This
Hollywood trend is often associated in politics with the ideology of conservative nationalism
under the one-time actor Ronald Reagan’s two terms as president (1981-1989).
6 A roommate of Hegel and Hölderlin in his youth, Schelling turned from his initial

interest in Christian theology to nature and what lay beyond. He sought to construct a
metaphysical system that would link human reason—the guiding principle of the
Enlightenment—with an absolute source of all being and knowledge other than reason—a
central idea of Romanticism. In sum, Schelling’s philosophy aims to explore “[t]he idea that
the world is both objective and yet somehow subjective” (Bowie, Introduction 72), which
presents the problem of “coming to terms with the ground of the subject’s relationship to
the object world” (Bowie, “Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Shelling”). Indeed, Schelling’s The
Philosophy of Art heavily relies on the author’s concept of the relationship between the (finite)
subject and an objective or absolute world (12, 16-19).
7 Schelling shares this conviction with Aristotle, who first formulated the character

of the tragic hero: “pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man
like ourselves” (Aristotle XIII).
8 Rambo is formally charged with the crime of vagrancy, “the offense of persons

who are without visible means of support or domicile while able to work” (“Vagrancy Law”).
9 It is not mere critical improvidence that this link has remained unexplored, while

more attention has been given to the character of Rambo as the archetypal macho warrior.
The arguments here reveal the traumatic foundations of his violent virility that feed into both
personal psychopathology and the discontent manifested by post-Vietnam War social
frustration. What keeps the Rambo-legend alive is the ever-increasing doses of adrenalin his
screen violence offers. Kotcheff’s film reminds us that even legends came forth in flesh and
blood, and that the cult of the action hero has its roots in the culture of tragic self-awareness:
the universal warrior is a culturally maintained fantasy of the patriarchal-masculine order
which is, in fact, in crisis.

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Barr, Roger. The Vietnam War. San Diego: Lucent, 1991. Print.
Bassham, Gregory, and Eric Bronson, eds. The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy:
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---. System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: U of
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“Action Hero vs. Tragic Hero: First Blood, Cultural Criticism, and
Schelling’s Theory of Tragedy”
Balázs Sánta

The paper explores the possibility of analyzing Ted Kotcheff’s 1985 film, First
Blood, the first piece of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series, from the
perspective of dramatic structure as conceived in Schelling’s concept of
tragedy and Schiller’s notion of the sublime. Perplexing as this critical context
may appear at first, the paper argues for a reassessment of the movie’s
aesthetic qualities as its protagonist is placed between Hollywood’s male-
gendered stock figure of the action hero and the more complex character of
the tragic hero, familiar from classical drama. Taking account of Rambo’s
reception in recent cultural studies discourse regarding gender criticism and
American post-Vietnam War cinema, the essay attempts to show the
correlation between some of the aesthetic tenets of German idealism and the
consequences of a close-reading approach to this popular classic. (BS)

Migrants and Disaster Subcultures in the Late Anthropocene: An

Ecocritical Reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels
Éva Federmayer

Affected by a shocking concatenation of ecological, economic, and political

disasters, black, white, and multiracial characters in Octavia Butler’s Parable of
the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) seek to cope with apparently
insurmountable difficulties. These Afrofuturist Parable novels render a
disintegrating US society in the 2020s-2090s, which is torn by internal and
external chaos: it shows visible signs of pandemonium involving the crisis of
individual, communal, and ecological survival. This ecocritical reading seeks
to explore how Butler’s novels make up the fictional tapestry of an evolving
human risk narrative whose anthropogenic effects on the planet might threaten
an “ecological holocaust” (Charles Brown) unless fundamental green changes
spur radically alternative modes of thinking and living. Throughout this
paper, I am interested in how Butler’s texts address and construct the
interaction of the human and the non-human world to create a storyworld in
which distinct characters operate not only according to the logic of the
narrative in their local places and (semi)private/communal spaces, but also as
distinct configurations of the Anthropocene, that is, as agents of a larger story
of humans. (EF)

447
Donald E. Morse
Donald E. Morse, Professor of American, Irish, and English Literature,
University of Debrecen, and Emeritus Professor of English and Rhetoric,
Oakland University Michigan, has been twice Senior Fulbright Professor
(1987-89 and 1990-92), and twice Soros Professor at the University of
Debrecen. Author and editor of sixteen books and over one hundred
scholarly essays, he has lectured widely in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Among his books are The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American
(Praeger, 2003) and, with Csilla Bertha, Worlds Visible and Invisible (Kossuth
Egyetemi, 1994). With Bertha, he edited the first book on the Irish fantastic,
More Real than Reality (Greenwood, 1991), and published a collection of
translations of five Hungarian plays, Silenced Voices: Hungarian Plays from
Transylvania (Carysfort, 2008). With Kálmán Matolcsy, he edited The Mythic
Fantasy of Robert Holdstock (McFarland, 2011). His most recent edited book is
titled Irish Theatre in Transition from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Twenty-
first Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Since 1984, he has chaired the annual
International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2006, he received
the Országh László Prize in recognition of his service to Hungarian higher
education. Since 2007, he has been the editor-in-chief of HJEAS.
[[email protected]]

Imola Nagy-Seres
Imola Nagy-Seres, Ph.D. candidate, University of Exeter, does research in
sympathy/empathy in the modernist and contemporary British novel. She
holds a Master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the
University of Leeds and a Joint Honors degree in Hungarian and English
from Babe -Bolyai University, Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca). Drawing on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy, her current project
focuses on forms of embodied empathy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen
and Virginia Woolf. Her essay “Virginia Woolf and Ballet” (2017) appeared
on The Virginia Woolf Blog.
[[email protected]]

Balázs Sánta
Balázs Sánta, Ph.D. candidate, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, works
on his dissertation within the field of Victorian literature, concentrating on
Lewis Carroll’s and Edward Lear’s nonsense art with a view to correlating it
with twentieth-century English absurd drama. He received an outstanding
thesis award for his MA thesis, written on Tom Stoppard’s dramatic oeuvre,

453
from the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd
University. He has taught courses on the Theater of the Absurd and Beckett’s
drama, and published on Carroll’s Alice tales in HUSSE11(2014) and the
rhetorical structure of papers in literary criticism (IJELTS 3.2).
[[email protected]]

Nathaniel Sikand-Youngs
Nathaniel Sikand-Youngs, graduate with First Class Honors in American
Studies, University of East Anglia, was awarded the British Association of
American Studies Undergraduate Essay Prize in both 2016 (for an earlier
version of the essay that appears in this issue) and 2017. He completed his
year abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was supported
by the Joe Greenwell Scholarship. Among his other awards is the Ede and
Ravenscroft Prize for academic and extra-curricular achievement. He has
written for The Daily Californian (www.dailycal.org/author/nsikandyoungs) as
an online columnist and for the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library in
Norwich, England, as a regular contributor of stories based on their archival
materials (www.2ndairstories.com). He is currently preparing for
postgraduate study.
[[email protected]]

Judit Szathmári
Judit Szathmári, Assistant Professor, North American Department, University
of Debrecen, was a Fulbright Researcher at the Milwaukee Public Museum and
the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (1999-2000), and the D’Arcy McNickle
Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Newberry Library, Chicago
(2014). Her research interests include exploration of the urban experience in
contemporary American Indian literature, urban self-help organizations,
American Indian humor, and US Indian policy, with special focus on the post-
World War II period. She published a scholarly monograph, The Revolving Door:
American Indians in Multicultural American Society, in 2013 (Debrecen UP). Her
article appeared in HJEAS in 2002, and her review in 2013. She has been HJEAS
copy editor since 2014.
[[email protected]]

Wojciech Szyma ski

Wojciech Szyma ski, Assistant Professor, Department of History of Modern
Art and Culture, Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw, Poland. He is
an independent curator and art critic; member of the International Association

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Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.