You Love to See It: First Blood

There have been a hundred parodies of Sylvester Stallone’s mush-mouthed delivery of John Rambo’s final monologue in First Blood. The actor’s huge, haunted eyes and phlegmy sobbing are certainly memorable enough to warrant riffing, but beyond the cheap laughs you can score off Stallone’s diction is the monumental emotional achievement the scene represents. Kotcheff’s movie understands the horror soldiers carried home with them from the Vietnam War, but all its poignant flashbacks and traumatized thousand-yard stares take a back seat to the sight of John J. Rambo, one of the world’s most elite killers, crying like a little boy and clutching at his one-time commanding officer while ranting that he wasn’t allowed to win the war, that he was jeered and protested when he returned, that on a quiet day on leave a little boy tried to kill him with a rigged shoeshine box.

Rambo’s recounting of his friend’s death in the improvised explosive’s detonation is one of war cinema’s most grueling and human stories, and the half-intelligible babble of Stallone’s delivery — far from hampering it — makes the moment. “He was screamin’ ‘I wanna go home, Johnny,’” the broken man sobs. “‘I wanna go home.’ and I says, ‘Alright, man, but I can’t find your legs.” Stallone’s voice breaks on that last word, twisted by grief into a high-pitched whine as he forces the words out ahead of a fresh gale of sobbing. The spectacle he describes is ghoulish enough on its own, but in his confusion, his inability to leave that moment or to understand it completely, is a brutal truth about the endless nature of war. Once you’ve scraped chunks of a loved one off of your skin, can you ever really go home? Can you ever stop looking back over your shoulder?

Over the course of First Blood Rambo wounds a number of men, but with the possible exception of an ambiguous scene during a car chase he never kills his enemies. Trautman, his commanding officer from Vietnam, tells sheriff Bill Teasle he and his men are lucky not to have been killed, but in the young man’s screams of anguish is the suggestion of another, deeper truth. Rambo has seen inside the bodies of his loved ones. He’s held their ruined flesh in his hands and tried to put them back together, like a boy shoring up a sandcastle as the tide comes in. His instincts may remain, his skills may be undiminished, but something inside him falters at the thought of leaving some other man to cry out that he wants to go home, that he just wants to go home, while someone who loves him says in numb, stunned tones that that’s alright, but he can’t find his legs.