America is a country that struggles with its short past, but when the sense of death becomes too distressing, yesterday's wounds begin to bleed again. There are many wounds, but only one has never healed: Vietnam. For American cinema, Vietnam is synonymous with guilt. It doesn't happen for all wars. On the contrary: The United States is a country that has never apologized to the Africans for having deported them as slaves, nor to the Native Americans for having exterminated them, nor to the Japanese for having bombed them with the atomic bomb. They are a country proud to have defeated Nazism (and this is right), to have beaten Saddam Hussein, to have saved half of Korea; they are a country where, if you go to the deep South, you will still find people proud of their great-grandparents who fought the North at General Lee's orders. America does not deny its wars and does not question its military class. With one exception: Vietnam.
Of course, they understood that it was an unjust war. In many cases it is true. But in many cases the problem is another: it is the only war they have lost. So the sense of guilt is twofold: the horror of an invasion war overlaps with regret for the defeat, and burning pain for having demonised those who fought it. If you think back to the whole filmography on Vietnam, there are not many films that “apologize” to the Vietnamese, but there are many that “apologize” to the veterans. The American pain can be shared: boys sent to Vietnam without even explaining to them where it was, what it was and why it had to be destroyed, returned home and found themselves facing a country that accused them of being murderers. The trauma must have been very strong and it is no coincidence that films about veterans are psychologically distressing, often very violent.
It was 1982 when Rambo arrived in the cinemas, starring Sylvester Stallone, already loved by the public for his famous performance as the boxer "Rocky". The film is an adaptation of the novel "First Blood" by David Morrell. The real film about the return from Vietnam is therefore Rambo. The first Rambo, that of Ted Kotcheff (1982), exciting: Hollywood launches a new kind of hero, the one who fights a personal war against society. Stallone is a former marine who has been transformed by training into a war machine, capable of responding to external stimuli only with violence, fighting the same society he defended in Vietnam. The society that humiliates and marginalises him, forcing him to fight to survive. Never has the cinema been so clear about the fact that war creates misfits who, faced with the difficulties of civil life, will be irresistibly inclined to recreate another home warfare, using the only weapon they have: their military training, their ability to kill.
