After the Berlin Wall came down, Rambo retired and the Terminator was reprogrammed. But with Trump in the White House and Putin in the Kremlin, theyre back on duty
We live inside the fantasies of old white men. In 2019, with the world in the grip of nostalgic strongmen, it makes sense that cinema would offer us the twin returns of Rambo and the Terminator, musclebound relics of the cold war 1980s. And so in the same stretch of autumn, Sylvester Stallones murderous everyman John Rambo has faced down the Mexican cartels in Rambo: Last Blood, with Arnold Schwarzenegger set to save humanity from cyborgs in Terminator: Dark Fate.
It might pass for melancholy two hugely wealthy actors in their 70s, bodies defiantly racked and pumped, Vladimir and Estragon on protein shakes, grimly refusing to retire. Then again, why would they? A crowd can still be pulled. Their influence runs deep into the present (the entire modern gym industry owes a piece of itself to the bermensch self-improvement first championed by Schwarzenegger). But for their new movies, the present is not the point, the young are not the audience. The target demographic stretches from those who were teenaged in the 80s to the stars generational peer group.
If reference to Donald Trump is obvious, the connections are many. The personal brands of all three men overlapped for decades in the grey zones of showbusiness. While Stallone stopped just short of an endorsement for the president, the association between the two New Yorkers born a month apart in 1946 has been long and friendly. Schwarzenegger, a year younger, enjoyed a similar affinity, embracing Trump at a primary debate in 2015 before taking over his role as host of The Celebrity Apprentice. (A later falling-out involved both politics and ratings.)
But Trump is just one among a global order of authoritarians whose personas are rooted in old action movies. In Italy and Brazil, the wild populism of Matteo Salvini and Jair Bolsonaro brought predictable comparisons. (Rambo Bolsonaro Trained To Kill! is the title of one YouTube tribute.) Surreally, last years Singapore summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un involved a faux blockbuster trailer created by the US National Security Council, featuring Stallone visiting the Trump White House. The actor, it was reported, is a favourite of North Koreas leader. Vladimir Putins hometown St Petersburg has hosted an exhibition of Stallones art, after a fondness for photoshoots of shirtless gunplay had already established a shared aesthetic.