PTSD In The Film 'Rambo: First Blood'

Intro

The medium of film is just like every other medium. It has the ability to influence people. In an audience that desperately needs to be influenced to change, it’s a rich opportunity for a piece of media to take advantage and bring that audience something they may have not known they wanted in the first place. The setting is America fresh off the embarrassment that was the Vietnam war. America is at a truly low point, still ignorant of mental health that now countless of its people suffer from and also in disbelief of how things turned out. Then enters Rambo: First Blood (1982), a film following the PTSD induced rampage of a Vietnam veteran ending in a vulnerable moment between a broken soldier and an empathetic colonel. This film was

PTSD is a recurring and key thing in this film as the protagonist, Rambo, is riddled with it. The very cause of Rambos rampage is sourced from factors that have triggered his PTSD which enabled him to go berserk in the film. The depths of Rambos trauma is fully explored during the scene where Rambo exposes himself to Trautman and the audience during his breakdown, saying more words during a 4 minute scene compared to the rest of the movie. Rambo tells Trautman about a person he met during the war that had dreams and aspirations to follow after everything settles, but then that person blasted out of Rambos life after trusting a child who rigged a shoebox to explode on him. It seems like Rambo inherited that person's dream but instead of driving around in a cool car, it’s fumbling around trying to find that person's legs as the rest of his body slogs around him. “I can't get it out of my head. A dream of seven years. Everyday I have this. And sometimes I wake up and I don't know where I am. I don't talk to anybody. Sometimes a day - a week. I can't put it out of my mind.” Rambo is affected deeply by his trauma and at this point he is incapable of going through everyday life without guidance

Stuart Hall, a British Sociologist, suggests in his essay “Encoding/Decoding” that ideas and messages are encoded into a media text by its producers, and then decoded by the audience. Hall categorizes these audience understandings into three types: dominant/preferred readings, negotiated readings, and oppositional/subversive readings. This theory proposed by Stuart Hall is important in this film's historical reading because it explains several possible intentions of the producers regarding the Vietnam War and America's role in it. Historical revisionism is the phenomenon referring to any attempts to rewrite something that has happened in the past. Rambo: First Blood (1982) is a film from the perspective of America after the Vietnam War in which the preferred readings idea of changing past history seems more appetizing than the accurate portrayal of the past. A few years before the film's release, America withdrew from the Vietnam War as it proved to be too costly. This withdrawal was seen more as a whimpering surrender by the West. Rambo himself can be interpreted as walking historical revisionism, from his ability to his dialogue. Portrayed as an unstoppable force, Rambo is the only example of a soldier sent to Vietnam from America that we see active in the film. Despite declaring that Rambo is the best of the best, the film still