The tagline for Rambo, released in 2008, was plastered across the movie poster in heavy, bloodred lettering HEROES NEVER DIE… THEY JUST RELOAD Sly Stallone’s vein-popping biceps and pectorals pushed the words outward to the passerby, suggesting that the statement was not up for semantic discourse analysis, just a fact of manhood in America. A slogan like this claims its cultural cachet from boys who became men under the tutelage of Stallone: boys like me, now in our thirties, who recall Rambo as the undefeated war vet, who recall the rites of passage we underwent and the images of courage we imbibed, though our own biceps never looked quite like his. If we lift the words away from his veins, though, and examine them against a whitewashed wall, we discover an eerie stare of consternation, subterfuge, and denial looking back at us: we discover words that struggle to find themselves in a world beyond two dimensions.

HEROES NEVER DIE. Possibility number one: Heroes are not human. Human beings have a finite capacity for blood to pump, for oxygen to circulate, for body parts to function. If heroes are unable to experience death, they must be of a species evolutionary scientists have yet to discover, or have discovered but have kept hidden due to governmental restriction. Possibility number two: Heroes are human, but they never experience death in its metaphorical rendition; they continue to live forever because of their innate heroism. Nothing can kill what they have come to represent. See: Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Socrates, Sojourner Truth, John Rambo. Possibility number three: Heroes die physically and metaphorically, but they choose to accept neither. They somehow deny the very possibility, living in such a way as to assume that their every action reverberates for eternity, their every word leaks from a perpetually dripping faucet. They are everywhere. They are everything. When they do die, physically and metaphorically, their brain waves cease, so they are never forced to cognitively reconcile with the fact of their own death.

THEY JUST RELOAD. Possibility number one: Heroes, when close to death, are able to hold the reaper at bay by reloading their firearms, the act of which enables them to, in effect, shoot Death itself and remain fully alive. Possibility number two: Given the flippant addition of the word just, becoming a true hero is...