The Rambo image’s cultural legacy is more anarchistic and countercultural than communistic and revolutionary. Che is certainly an important figure in countercultural hero worship, but the specific Che poster is more important as a symbol of Marxist revolution.

And in that case I do think you hit a lot of the same notes and shortcuts that you use in your There Will Be Blood film score piece — you have a combination of form and function, and you don’t want to lose one at the expense of the other, but it’s an acceptible shorthand to say that the printed poster medium is more communistic than the graffiti stencil medium.

Condensed adaptations of the Che poster more suitable for stenciling than the original – but they lose some of the iconography as well. You lose the dramatic eyes, for one, which are important in terms of humanizing and motivating the image. Note that Rambo’s eyes are almost completely obscured.

You wouldn’t paint Stalin or Mao like this. Their influence is too specific; their call to action is too purposeful. I think Che straddles the line more, but the famous poster is definitely on the Marxist side of things. You’re elevating a proletariat hero to the level of a king or Christ-figure – you’re not smearing him on a wall.

That being said, the poster does seem to invite some comparison between Rambo and Che, if we assume that the “readership circle” for which it is intended knows about Che’s image directly and doesn’t really know Bansky except as a gut feeling (and again I hesitate to give Bansky too much credit; I’d have to dig out a book on the history of the medium to really trace the images and techniques). The position and orientation of the head suggests it, even if very little else of the image is that similar.

It just also piles a lot of baggage on top of that comparison, including the difference between anarchism and communism, which is pretty big.

That was where I got the sense of negativity.