4- Friday, August 2, 1985 - North Shore News

Rambo -- modern lone ranger

ONCE THEY’RE out in the theatres and on video tape, movies become collective, man-made dreams. They shape our fate more than we suspect, although it is in subtle ways that have yet

to be measured.

So when a movie like

Rambo, First Blood Fart I,

comes along, one ought to get out the old Rorschach blot test, Mlip open a dusty volume of Freud, or better yet, Jung, and ask oneself: So what do we learn about

the state of the American mass mind from this one?

Weill, we learn it hasn’t changed much. The old cowboy and Indian stuff stiii sells. In First Blood, Rambo got to run around in the bush near Hope, armed only with a knife: barefoot, shirtless, using guerrilla tac- tics probably first developed by the Apache against the U.S. Cavalry. He even wears a Geronimo-style headband.

Everybody must know the

story: played by Sylvester Stallone, Rambo is an ex- Green Beret clite squad behind-the-lines killer pro- grammed to resist pain and cold alike, who is picked-on by a small town sheriff after the war has been lost.

in Part Hl, Rambo goes back to Vietnam to rescue abandoned American Gils and nearly fevels the whole country. He is, in short, the embodiment of every heroic Cliche ever patched together to justify the miserable bot- ch-ups of war.

He is also Buck Rogers, armed in the end with Space Age weaponry. He is Tar- zan, zipping invisibly through the ferns. He is all

strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

He's good. Yes, sir. Manages, for instance, to bring down a deputy armed with an automatic weapon from a helicopter, just by throwing a rock. Although pursued by hundreds of missile-firing soldiers and police, he eludes them all, roars back to the town that rejected him, and nearly levels the whole place before surrendering to the officer who trained him to be a one-man army in the first place.

Salaries the

From Page 1 Management spokesman Rick Halliburton said the nurses demands are ‘“‘totally unjustified.”

‘‘They are asking for more than what 98 per cent of the nurses in. this province make,’”’ Halliburton said. “They're asking for roughly a-30 per cent increase in a year when no one is getting increases. The Ministry of Health has given no increase

to the hospital's budget.”

Halliburton said the nurses have been offered a 3.3 per cent increase for each of two years, which they have rejected.

B.C. Nurses’ Union spokesman Gerry Miller said the problem lies with the “employer that refuses to recognize prevailing rates and working conditions for longterm care throughout the province.” .

Miller said there was no

BOYS

the crafty native North American guerrilla fighters combined; the only thing missing is a feather. Yet he is also the Lone Ranger, inno- cent, but having to fell a misguided posse anyway.

And naturally, he is Superman.

A curious thing about the original movie, First Blood. ft was probably less violent than your average kiddie’s cartoon. One guy got killed. Quite a few got maimed a

issue

likelihood the nurses would take any job action this week.

“It is a standing policy of the union to guarantee essential services in all job actions where our members are employed,’’ Miller said. “We guarantee the safety of residents of Beacon Hill Ladge and Private Hospital.”’

Mediation at the West Vancouver lodge last sveek failed to resolve the conflict.

bit. By such standards as there are, that's Mickey Mouse. Except for a brief gross torture scene, you could let your kids watch it.

You wouldn’t take your kid to Part Il. By making no effort at all to explain the conflicting political beliefs of the protagonist, it ends up fortifying racist stereotypes of pitiless Asian enemies. A kid wouldn't be able to fig- ure it out.

Otherwise, as per be- fore, the warrior myth repeated its age-old message, to the beat of drums: an eye for an eye! Revenge! Glory! Power! Jt was hypnotic, atavistic, and therefore enter- taining. But, Lord, what a dreary message! Whatever happened to good vibra- tions?

On balance, though, Rambo is a harmless fairy tale. As with pornography, I think the negative influence of violence on the screen or tube is much over-estimated. There is actually not that much difference between Rambo blowing away a helicopter and Buck Rogers taking out one of Ming’s warships.

After watching Errol Flynn skewering bad ws in the rigging at the Saturday afternoon matinees of my childhood, the boys would all rush outside to swordfight with whatever bits of wood we could find. Not one of us, so far as | know, was ever overcome by the urge to run off and join up with some army so we could ex- perience the thrill of killing somebody. .

Glorifying violence? More likely, what is involved in a phenomenon like Rambois a subtle desublimation of vio- lence. It may even be thera- peutic. Certainly, the essence of any psychological cure is the act of bringing sub- conscious impulses, however brutish, to the surface. After that, they lose their power. The knots untangle. The pa- tient becomes saner.

Try to think of Rambo as

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a wound hvaling in the American psyche. If there's a bit of hallucination involv-

ed, that’s fair enough. While

they're blowing off steam watching Rambo, they're not out there blowing up the real world.

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