The Unbearable Rambo-ness of Being

A remake of "First Blood," made by one man on a $96 budget, is ingenious, absurd and strangely poignant.

After seeing the movie, Oberzan stumbled upon Morrell’s book, and was similarly moved by the story. But in finding the novel, he also discovered Hollywood’s gross manipulation of the material — something that he wanted to rectify. For instance, the studio version minimizes the importance of the character of Sheriff Teasle. “The Sheriff is the full character, with an arc,” says Oberzan. “It’s Teasle who goes through the change, and that’s completely lost in the film.”

“It’s really a love story about fathers and sons,” continues Oberzan, “and the inability for fathers and sons to come to common ground.” In the book’s climax, to which Oberzan remains faithful, Rambo and Teasle murder each other in what he calls a “bizarre, twisted, violent beautiful redemption.” In the Hollywood movie, of course, Rambo survives to kill another day.

However faithful to the original novel, “Flooding with Love for the Kid” is also, at times, completely absurd — Oberzan plays every character himself, some with silly affectations or accents. The props are unashamedly lo-fi — a teddy bear stands in for a bird; a toaster for a police radio; a bathtub for a riverbed. And yet, the allure of the film comes from Oberzan’s total embrace of its imaginary universe. It’s as if we’re witnessing the tween-age Oberzan running around the backyard of his childhood home in Maine — if one evoked through twigs and leaves taped to his apartment wall — playing cowboys and Indians. But here the drama is more Shakespearean than adolescent.

“There’s definitely no sarcasm, no irony, at any point,” he says. Rather, the project is meant to question, “Where do you draw your line of suspension of disbelief?”

Unlike other fan films, then, that attempt to emulate the big-budget glossy Hollywood productions that inspired them (see, for example, the highly fan-sanctioned “Batman: Dead End”), Oberzan — not unlike Michel Gondry — wants to emphasize that production values shouldn’t matter when it comes to our enjoyment of the material.

“I will still make a slick $50 million version of ‘First Blood,’” he vows. “But it won’t be better than the $100 version I made in my apartment. It’ll just be different.”

“I’m not averse to action movies,” he continues. “What I have a problem with is people going to an action movie and saying, ‘That’s great,’ and then looking at my film, and saying, ‘That’s a piece of shit; that’s not a gun, that’s a broomstick.’ I have a problem with people not being able to distinguish the fact that they weren’t actually seeing a man on screen with a machine gun; they were watching Brad Pitt get paid $5 million to hold a prop to kill someone in pretend with ketchup. There’s not that much qualitative difference. It’s just that in Hollywood there’s more money.”

Oberzan has also, in some ways, subverted the cultural meaning of Rambo. His no-frills “Flooding with Love for the Kid” denies the viewer the cathartic death-trip spectacle associated with the franchise, along with the victorious guns a’ blazing comeback of its scarred protagonist. Though Oberzan might not agree, his Rambo is perhaps the truer action hero for the Obama age.

[Additional photo: "Son of Rambow," Paramount Vantage, 2007]

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