11:14:23
Below are screenshots from the new Netflix documentary about Sylvester Stallone, SLY (executive-produced by Stallone himself, another one of Netflix’s hagiographic celebrity portraits), in which Stallone and Quentin Tarantino discuss the First Blood (1982) original screenplay (and novel by David Morrell) before the character of John Rambo was rewritten and cleaned up. Lethal Weapon came out a few years later, which stars LAPD cop, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), formerly, we’re told at the start of the film, a Phoenix Program assassin, which is what Rambo is as well.
Was it suicide or were these former soldiers programmed to terminate themselves once they outlived their function, as Tarantino notes about Rambo? What do you do with a killing machine after a war is over?
Tarantino cloaks his outing of what and who Rambo really is, as does Stallone’s whitewashing of the original story (Wikipedia states: “Stallone used his clout to force changes to the script to make Rambo a more sympathetic character, including having Rambo not directly kill any police or national guardsmen; in the novel, he kills many, and having him survive at the end instead of dying as he does in the book.”). Interestingly, Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon does not do this. It lets its huge but brief revelation (disclosure) about Riggs sit with the audience. Even if they didn’t know what they are sitting with, it is deeply embedded into the characterization of Riggs and his mind control trauma, and cannot be ignored—at least as far as the first two Lethal Weapon movies are concerned. As Cathy O’Brien recently told Roseanne Barr: “In the early 90s, when we started speaking out about MKultra mind control, people had no point of reference for the information.” When it came to veterans, they called it PTSD, not Mkultra (see the 1990 movie Jacob’s Ladder for the CIA’s use of drugs and hypnosis for “unconventional warfare”).
Donner continued with this programming theme, making Conspiracy Theory in 1997, also staring Mel Gibson, where he goes even deeper into America’s Mkultra history.
