Violence is the ultimate anti-violence

I’ve heard of cranky old timers, but John Rambo is a tad ridiculous. If he flies off the hook in backwoods Burma over wasted tugboat gasoline, just think of what happens when his Medicare benefits are canceled in Sun City.

Rambo, the fourth film in the decidedly ’80s action franchise, allows Sylvester Stallone a glorious return to a character who binged on violence and carnage in obscene amounts. (Don’t forget, though, only one person died in the terrific, initial Rambo film, First Blood.) Rambo might have even topped himself here with a movie that breaks any measurement scale normally used to gauge violence levels at the multiplex. In terms of blood and guts, dead bodies and corpse counts (236 by the way), decapitations and mutilations, the new Sly flick is almost unclassifiable. Simply put, Rambo might be one of the most violent movies ever created.

In case you’ve yet to witness the film: It opens with news photos of real dead people, then quickly launches into its blood-blown tirade with prisoners stepping on landmines, massacred villages, bayoneted children, gutted missionaries, ragged leg wounds, impalements, disembowelings, decapitations, archery fatalities, gooey head implosions, organ ventilations, exposed intestines, pulverized bone, splintery fragments of femur and pelvis, eviscerated torsos and, in an act of supreme ultra-violence, Sly gets behind a mounted cannon and shreds an entire division of enemy combatants with .50-caliber rounds. When characters are shot, the wounds eject not only blood, but entire chunks of meat and oozing matter. At one point, Rambo detonates a bomb so large it appears to destabilize the Earth from its axis. Few victims are spared, few limbs are left intact and few bullets are left unfired … Rambo goes to great lengths to achieve its bloodied nirvana.

It’s so violent I found myself questioning its purpose: Is this some kind of over-the-top joke? Is it a rite of passage for gorehounds who thought they knew bloody movies? Is it entertainment — the kind left to its own devious devices — that was simply led astray by its envelope-pushing director (Stallone)? Is it Rambo’s testament to his forgotten relevance after missing a decade (the ’90s) of action movies? Is this a catharsis for Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq?

Maybe yes to all of them. Or maybe another idea …

I’ve settled on an alternate theory entirely: Rambo is an anti-violence violence movie. It sounds like a contradiction, but hear me out. First, consider Sly’s own comments just this week on ReelzChannel, an Internet entertainment page, when he said his movie is based on real violence.

Here’s the whole quote: “[We’re] dealing with a real subject. As we are speaking right now, people are dying and being tortured in the most brutal fashion you can imagine, and this film will show that. If we’re going to do anything that actually uses this media, besides entertaining, it’s to perhaps save a few lives and bring awareness to this. Please don’t water it down. Yes, babies are being decimated, women are being raped … all that happens all the time. Just let it flow.”

I don’t buy his reasoning — that filmed violence of this magnitude is needed to shed light on real human killing continents away — mainly because the movie is so unrealistic, and realism is important when delivering a message to the world on behalf of an entire people’s struggle. (In regards to realism, for instance, bodies do not fly back 40 feet after being shot, an action cliché that was debunked on an episode of Mythbusters.) Also, the Burmese people are a footnote to Rambo’s finely honed skill of ending life — just consider the movie’s tagline: “Heroes never die … they just reload.” And as we’ve learned with ultra-violent movies such as Chaos and the Hostel series, simply showing this kind of death in an objective way is not art, but more like cruel voyeurism.

By topping himself and all his counterparts (and his counterparts’ children and grandchildren), 61-year-old Stallone has positioned what may be his last action film as the sacrificial lamb, the movie in which audiences question their thirst for blood. No doubt some people will froth with excitement at the beheadings and killings, and the tendons and muscle tissue that hang from the exploded cross-section of a man’s torso, but in the end Rambo will turn more stomachs — I heard one viewer respond with, “Well, that was traumatizing.” And as other films try to top Rambo, the action-movie system will collapse under the constant one-upping of the violence. The more violent the movies become, the more we will turn away.

After writing all this, I have to admit I enjoyed Rambo. I enjoyed it, though, because it was so beyond anything I’ve ever seen that I couldn’t help but laugh and amuse at its glorification of the almighty bullet. How ironic, I thought, that this movie takes itself seriously. Later, I felt very uneasy about the implications of “the most violent movie of all time.” Where do we stop with violence? How far do we allow it to embed itself in our films before we stop buying into it?

Rambo is the anti-violence violence movie because it draws a line in the sand. Ask yourself what side you’ll be standing on if Rambo is tame compared to the movies of 2009.

Methods of Violence
Movie violence can be warranted and justified. Not always of course, in which case it can be exploitive and unnecessary. Here are some different kinds of cinematic brutality and the movies that subscribe to its methods:

• Historical Violence — Sometimes for us to understand history, we must witness all of its ugliness. Surely this is the case for Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, which allowed us to see the things our history books weren’t always so clear about. Or consider another candidate for world’s most violent movie, The Passion of the Christ, which offered an image of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion that many Christians gloss over.

• Stylish Violence — Some movies embrace violence for an effect, be it a special effect or the overall stylization of a story. Sin City and 300 are hyper-stylized lessons in blood. Kill Bill used violence as a signature for its director, Quentin Tarantino, who had married a genre-bending plot to a salvo of diced limbs. Some movies use gore to reach technical benchmarks: Hard Boiled and Equilibrium were masterpieces of orchestrated gun battles, Dead Alive and The Thing toyed with creepy physical effects, and Planet Terror used oozing sores and mutated soldiers to pay tribute to a forgotten era of zombie slashers.

• Metaphorical Violence — Grisly fatalities and bloody casualties can dictate to audiences the descent of key characters or a whole people in general. Consider The Wild Bunch, with its all-out warfare by film’s close. The bloody sequence serves as a watershed moment for the Old West; it marks the passing of one era and the coming of another one, and it wouldn’t have worked without guns being drawn and lives coming to an end. Reservoir Dogs, another Tarantino movie, uses guns and bullets to show that there is no honor among thieves. Straw Dogs suggests that no violence can be emasculating and that the only way it can be undone is through a bloodletting.

• Exploitive Violence — Through this device, most horror movies spring. Often is the case that movies that employ this device do it for shock value alone, and it usually serves no greater good to the plot, if there is one. Consider Hostel and its sequel, the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Chaos or any of the films from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. They delight in suffering and cruelty, and they often exist for no other reason other than those.