Okay, sorry for my time away sports fans. Let’s pick up where we left off.
In the last two posts, I’ve discussed the inversion at the heart of sports movies — how the screen serves as a window and a mirror, telling a story in opposition to a viewer’s expectations and perspective. Rookie of the Year is about a kid who’s bad at baseball, Major League is about how serious our National Pastime is, and Necessary Roughness, it turns out, is a fairly frivolous movie intended for leisure that’s pleasant and easy to watch—that is, neither Necessary, nor Rough (nor an Empire, which if you ask me is a damned shame).
And there’s my segue. Guys in green shirts.
This week, I’ve delved into the True Meaning of Rambo in preparation for his (brief) return from irrelevance. Today, I’ll close the series out with a quick look at two great characters Mr. Stallone originated — one has his own statue, and the other languished in condemnation for 20 years. We celebrate the one who feeds us dreams, and we condemn the one who shows us ourselves.
Above all else, America is dedicated to the proposition that “what happened to other countries isn’t going to happen to us.” As such, our variations on the tragic hero struggle to buck free of their core restrictions, often with startling results.
John Rambo (the movie hero and cultural icon, inseparable from Sly Stallone) is an example of one such effort — The Reverse Tragic Hero.
Our old buddy Rambo’s got the best poster for a new movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a pretty good work of graphic design (I love how Rambo’s mullet forms the drips of a hasty paint job), but more importantly, its manufactured message blunders its way close to honesty, which is something we rarely get from movie posters.
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