Stallone Vs. Springsteen

Which Dream do you buy?

Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone are the two great working-class heroes of American mass culture. Springsteen had the best-selling album of 1985 and Stallone had the second most successful movie. On the surface, they share stunning similarities of biceps, bandannas, American flags, Vietnam themes, praise from President Reagan and uplifting feelings of national pride. Bumper stickers proclaim, Bruce--the Rambo of Rock.

But beneath the surface--and between the lines--these two American heroes of the Eighties are sending opposite messages. They are subtly pulling the 18-to-35-year-old generation toward two competing visions of the American future.

Stallone's Rocky and Rambo films--especially the latter--are about violence and revenge in a context of fantasy. Rambo never (continued on page 188)Stallone vs. Springsteen(continued from page 117) pays a price in body bags or pain or blood or doubt or remorse or fear. The enemy is stereotyped and therefore dehumanized. The emotions Stallone liberates are hostility and aggression: Audiences come out of the theater wanting to kick some Commie ass in Nicaragua.

By contrast, the essential human feeling Springsteen liberates is empathy--compassion for the common man trapped in the dead-end world of the hourly wages. The realistic words of Springsteen's best songs are about the hurt of unemployed workers; about reconciliation with estranged parents through understanding their lives; about staying hopeful even though experience falls short of the American dream.

In Rambo, Stallone depicts the Vietnam veteran as a killing machine, a deranged, rampaging executioner. In Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen depicts the Vietnam veteran as neglected--wanting to be reintegrated into society as a normal person but getting the brush-off from a bureaucrat at the Veterans Administration. Recall the misunderstood and misheard words of the Springsteen anthem:

Got in a little hometown jam,So they put a rifle in my hand.Sent me off to a foreign landTo go and kill the yellow man....Come back home to the refinery.Hiring man says, "Son, if it was up tome...."Went down to see my VA man;He said, "Son, don't you understandnow?"I had a brother at Khé SanhFighting off the Viet Cong.They're still there; he's all gone.He had a woman he loved in Saigon--I got a picture of him in her arms now....

The difference between Stallone and Springsteen is perhaps best illuminated by reading an essay George Orwell wrote in 1945, before either Stallone or Springsteen was born. In the essay, Notes on Nationalism, Orwell makes a distinction between nationalism and patriotism and then suggests that they are, in fact, opposites:

By "nationalism," I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can confidently be labeled "good" or "bad." But secondly--and this is much more important--I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism ... since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By "patriotism" I mean a devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power....

It can plausibly be argued, for instance--it is even probably true--that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism.

Stallone as Rambo snarls, "Damn Russian bastards" and kills a few more. Springsteen introduces This Land Is Your Land, the first encore at all his concerts, as "the greatest song ever written about America," and then reminds his fans, "Remember, nobody wins unless everybody wins." That's one difference between nationalism and patriotism.

Stallone manipulates Americans' feelings of frustration over the lost Vietnam war and helps create a jingoistic climate of emotion in which a future war might be welcomed. Springsteen asks us to honor the neglected and rejected Vietnam veterans, so that we won't glide gleefully into the next war without remembering the real cost of the last one. That's a second difference between nationalism and patriotism.

"It's a right-wing fantasy," said Stallone, talking to Time about last summer's big hit. "What Rambo is saying is that if they could fight again, it would be different." He added that he was looking for another "open would" as a site for a sequel, possibly Iran or Afghanistan.

Ron Kovic is a paraplegic author and Vietnam veteran. As an honored guest at Springsteen's opening-night concert last August at the Giants' stadium in New Jersey, Kovic told reporters, "I've been sitting in this wheelchair for the past 18 years. And I can only thank Bruce Springsteen for all he has done for Vietnam veterans. Born in the U.S.A. is a beautiful song that helped me personally to heal." The difference between looking for another open wound as a movie backdrop and creating music that is healing--that's a third distinction between nationalism and patriotism.

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Congressman Lane Evans of Illinois is an ex-Marine. "Rambo," he says, "is dangerous because it is dishonest about reality. It creates the myth of a superhuman, invincible macho man as the quick-fix solution to all our international problems. Stallone is saying to people that the answer is always to send in a rescue mission of former Green Berets and commandos. That is certainly not the remedy for complex situations like Nicaragua."

But what Stallone did with Rambo was brilliant in an opportunistic way. He replayed the war to give it a happy ending. In doing that, he raised false hopes among tormented M.I.A. and POW families that are destined to be crushed by real life.

"I came out of the movie angry," says Dr. Charlie Clements, an activist for Vietnam-veteran causes. "I came out of the movie feeling exploited as a veteran. I came out thinking that this movie exploits America."

Stallone himself escaped military service, thought he was eligible for the draft during the bloodiest years of the Vietnam war. (Springsteen did not serve, either. He was 4-F because of a concussion caused by a motorcycle accident. But the issue is not the courage to serve; it is the hypocrisy of not serving but promoting wars for others to fight.) Like John Wayne, Stallone became a celluloid hero with the help of stunt men and special-effects experts. The undisputed facts are these: Stallone was a girls' athletic coach at an elite private school in Switzerland from 1965 to 1967. From 1967 to 1969, he was a student in the drama department of the University of Miami. While America was losing the Vietnam war during the early Seventies, Stallone was making the soft-core flick A Party at Kitty and Studs.

In the November 8, 1976, issue of The Village Voice, Pete Hamill published a favorable profile of Stallone. The piece contained several revealing quotes from "America's Hero" about his ethics and lifestyle during the years when 58,000 of his countrymen were dying in Vietnam. Of his tenure as an acting student, Stallone said, "I learned it is actually possible to function without brain waves for two years." Of his tour of duty at the school in Switzerland, he confided, "I didn't want to ski. I just wanted to get loaded and play pinball machines. Essentially, I was the imported American sheep dog for these little lambs, these girls...."

Congressman Andrew Jacobs of Indiana was disabled as a Marine during the Korean War. When I asked him for his thoughts on Rambo, he deliberated for a moment and said, "The issue is hypocrisy, nothing else. I doubt if there are 20 of us in Congress who have ever faced a man with a rifle who was actually trying to kill you. Few of them here even have the slightest notion of the bone-chilling terror of war. It all reminds me of something the Twenties columnist 'Kin' Hubbard wrote: 'There is too much said about the glory of dying for your country by those who never tried it.'"

Nationalism, as defined by Orwell, is an intoxicating but essentially negative emotion, because it is, by its very nature, intolerant. It does not respect the rights of minorities or the dignity of neighbors. It is a will to power that negates complexity. Its most extreme avatars are monstrous lunatics such as Khomeini, Qaddafi, Botha, Farrakhan and Kahane.

The milder form of nationalism, as represented by Stallone, is less harmful. Stallone doesn't have Governmental power, and he doesn't push the issue; he usually retreats behind his movie character and tells most interviewers he is nonpolitical.

But the messages his images communicate to masses of impressionable young people sometimes do have damaging consequences. For example, the week Rambo, with its negative stereotypes of Asians, opened in Boston last spring, there were two incidents in which Southeast Asian refugees were badly beaten up by gangs of white youths.

In the more recent Rocky IV--which Stallone wrote, directed and starred in--the villainous foe is a Russian who fights dirty, takes illegal steroid injections and wears a black mouthpiece. Cleverly named Ivan Drago, he is depicted as a robotlike extension of the Evil Empire. Critics have written that it is the most simplistic and one-dimensional of all the Rocky movies. It lacks the interesting subplots and realistic blue-collar atmosphere of the original Rocky, with its loan shark and neighborhood gym; this time, Stallone literally and figuratively wraps himself in the American flag--proving that sequels are the last refuge of nationalists.

The worst features of Stallone's nationalism are the values it enshrines and reinforces: racism, violence, militarism and--possibly most subversive of all--simplicity. The convergence of these emotions can make war and foreign intervention seem like a sporting event. Or a movie.

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Bruce Springsteen's patriotism is rooted in a different set of values, apparent in his songs: the old-fashioned virtues of work, family, community, loyalty, dignity, perseverance, love of country. His fundamental theme is the gap between America's promise and performance and his resilient faith in the eventual redemption of that promise. He sees America as it is, with all its jobless veterans, homeless people and urban ghettos. And he retains his idealism in spite of everything, because his patriotism has room for paradox. At a Springsteen concert, one song makes you want to cheer for America, the next makes you want to cry for America--and then change it.

Springsteen conveys compassion for the casualty, for the ordinary person who may not be articulate. His empathy is for men with "debts no honest man can pay." From his immense pride in his home town comes a homage to closed textile mills and "Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores." Out of his populist patriotism comes his affection for people who feel "like a dog that's been beat too much" and his reconciling respect for his working-class father:

Daddy worked his whole life for nothingbut the pain.Now he walks these empty rooms, lookingfor something to blame.

These songs are social, not political. They don't offer platforms, slogans or rhetoric. They don't imply easy remedies and they don't endorse politicians. Springsteen himself says he has not voted since 1972, and he is enrolled in no political party.

But despite his stance of electoral alienation, Springsteen writes songs that make you want to be a better citizen, if you borrow your sense of citizenship from the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Bill of Rights. And he lives those values. He sings, "And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card"; he has also donated $20,000 to a Pittsburgh soup kitchen and food bank run by Local 1397 of the steelworkers' union. And he contributed $15,000 to a health clinic outside Tucson because it was giving free care to striking Phelps-Dodge mineworkers after the company cut off their medical benefits. During 1985, Springsteen made donations of more than $1,000,000 to populist groups. The man has an instinctive purity.

Nor is his bonding with Vietnam veterans a calculated commercial alliance. In 1980, at a time when the vets were still shunned rejects from a war everyone wanted to forget, Springsteen began, without any publicity, to donate funds to Vietnam Veterans of America. In 1981, he gave a benefit concert that raised $100,000 and kept the organization alive. That August night, the stage was lined with vets in wheelchairs, and Springsteen talked to his audience more intimately than he had ever done before. And he sang unforgettable renditions of Who'll Stop the Rain and Bye, Bye, Johnny that had vets weeping and cheering at the same time.

"We would not exist if it were not for Bruce Springsteen," says Robert Muller, the president of Vietnam Veterans of America. "My hope is that ten years down the road, he'll run for President."

There are disturbing racial images in Rambo--and perhaps in the most recent Rocky sequels--but Springsteen's bands have always been integrated. And in an interview published in the December 6, 1984, issue of Rolling Stone, Springsteen spoke with intelligent candor about his own racial attitudes:

I think it's difficult, because we were all brought up with sexist attitudes and racist attitudes. But hopefully, as you grow older, you get some sort of insight into that and--I know it's corny--try to treat other people the way you would want them to treat you....

What unites people very often is their fear. What unites white people in some places is their fear of black people. What unites guys is maybe a denigrating attitude toward women--or sometimes maybe women have an attitude toward men. And these things are then in turn exploited by politicians, which turns into fear--knee-jerk fear of the Russians or of whatever ism is out there....

Like, some of our economic policies are a real indirect kind of racism, in which the people that get affected most are black people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum. And I think somewhere inside, people know this--I really do. They don't fess up to it, but somewhere inside there is a real meanness in using things this way.

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Springsteen and Stallone, two messiahs of American mass culture, two muscular men--tugging this country's flag in different directions.

Sylvester Stallone, at bottom, is a faker, feeding us fantasies as therapy for our national neuroses. He is appealing to the dark side that exists in all of us, the part of us that wants to get even with everyone who has ever gotten the better of us, the part that finds it easier to understand a stereotype than an individual, the part that dreams of vengeance that never fails and never leaves an aftertaste of guilt.

Bruce Springsteen appeals to the best in all of us. His songs ask us to forgive the sinner but to remember the sin; to respect one another but to question authority; to refuse to compromise our ideals ("no retreat, no surrender"); to keep growing but to continue to love our parents and our home towns; to feel a responsibility for sharing with our countrymen who have less property and less power.

"I think what's happening now," Springsteen told one interviewer, "is people want to forget. There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran--we were beaten, we were hustled and then we were humiliated. And I think people got a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what's happening, I think, is that need--which is a good thing--is get-tin' manipulated and exploited....

"One of the things that was always on my mind was to maintain connections with the people I'd grown up with and the sense of community where I came from. That's why I stayed in New Jersey. The danger of fame is in forgetting."

"Like John Wayne, Stallone became a celluloid hero with the help of stunt men."