ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with variations among the plot structures of three films, Uncommon Valor, Missing in Action, and Rambo: First Blood, Part Two. In all three films the metaphor for the state of the country in the aftermath of the war is captivity, a condition experienced literally by the passive agents of redemption, who are the Missing-in-action (MIA). The symbolic captivity of the country is represented as the result of a collective refusal to confront and overcome an inglorious past, of which the MIAs are the lingering trace. The MIA films make the project of self-fashioning depend more on a neoromantic critique of authority at home than on the destruction of an alien other. The heroes of the MIA films are also veterans, ill at ease in society. All three MIA films understand themselves as offering a critique of a market society, but their critique is distinctly one-sided.
