Dahn dah da-da-dah da-da-DAH-Dahn-Dahn

In 1976, a down-on-his-luck Sylvester Stallone used the last of his cash to go see a boxing match.  As he watched two pugilists pound each other to paste, he got an idea for a movie, wrote a script, made enough cash to hire a crew, and made Rocky for 1.1 Million dollars.  The movie went on to win 3 Oscars, gross over 225 Million in its first year, and reinvigorated boxing for a whole new generation of fans.

I have a really visceral reaction to this movie - I love watching it.  When I hear that opening theme and watch the word "ROCKY" scroll sideways across the screen, I get goosebumps.  When Mickey comes over to Rocky's apartment and breaks down, and when Rocky finally takes him in and accepts him as his trainer, my eyes well up.  When Rocky, beaten and bloody, staggers his way through a mob of reporters and fans crying out "Adrian" like a bleating calf, and when Adrian answers and runs to him, my heart beats right out of my chest.  It's just beautiful to me.

That pet store broad

And yet, as a modern educated liberal academic post-modern guy, it's the kind of thing that I should at some level find repellent. Cinematographically it has aged well - the blood looks real, the punches connect, the camera work is understated and powerful - and of course the easiest and most popular read is that of an underdog story (Rocky coming up from under), and liking underdog stories has been part of every American citizenship test since 1784.  But for all that, there are two points of politic that seem a little harder to swallow now, nearly 34 years later.

For one thing, there's the racism.  There's enough cushioning here that this might not be readily apparent - after all, Apollo Creed actually wins the fight, right?  Black guy wins - how is that racist? The answer being that while Apollo Creed wins the fight, Rocky wins the movie. The whole point of Rocky's journey is in going the distance.  He knows he can't beat Creed, so he commits to "go[ing] the distance."  He just has to keep up and he's won, and he does, and in the end we know that he has come out on top.  Creed is left squabbling with the referee over the match proper.  He's left with the scrap of victory that the white contender doesn't even want anymore.

I'm about to die! 

The whole Rocky franchise coincidentally features Rocky beating the crap out of black people (or, just as problematic in Rocky IV, going off and avenging his beloved Creed, succeeding where the black man failed).  Rocky is the "Great White Hope" - in a sport dominated by blacks and Latinos,white boxing fans had come to feel disenfranchised (why there should be so many white MMA fighters and so few white boxers is beyond me - why one combat sport or another? I have no idea.). To white America, boxing was another aspect of daily life being "taken over," and they pined for their white champion to show that they could compete too.

They can't, by the way - the last white heavyweight champion was Ingemarr Johansson in 1959.

And so the second kind of icky issue with Rocky:  he's completely artificial.  For all his gritty "realness," for his man-on-the-street minimalist identity, he's little more than a pipe dream. Rocky Balboa is modeled in part on Rocky Marciano, but the boxing world of Rocky Marciano doesn't exist anymore - you can't just drown your opponent in blood and crush him with your falling body.  Form and technique count for something.

Gonna fly now

But that same boxing world exists for Rocky.  Even by the liberal weight classing standards of the 1970's, there is NO way he and Creed would be put into a ring together.  In wide shots, it literally looks like Little Mack fighting Tyson.  Horribly outmatched, he swings and lasts, he bleeds and bruises, and the fight is not called.  He digs in and manages to give as good as he gets until the match is finally ended and he can enjoy the healing embrace of his Adrian, and this is significant too - Rocky is no braggart.  He's humble and hardworking, earnest and quiet - he is the exact opposite of the loud, black, boisterous then-heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali (upon whom Apollo Creed is in part modeled).

It's not coincidental to me that Rocky runs up the steps of the Philadelphia museum of Art, then.  He is a work of art himself.  A fantasy, a daydream.  It's very much fitting then that in Rocky III they erect a statue of him on the front steps - that is just what he is: an icon, an image, a metaphor so obvious that the cinematic entity that is the Rocky movie franchise must recognize it.  As this movie is a work of fiction, we should expect a character, yes, a fictive construct like any other movie character. But as a character, Rocky Balboa is also an avatar of unfulfilled wishes and unsatisfied dreams.  Since America could not actually make a white champion, they had to invent one.  Like Nietzche's Ubermensch (and in turn, Hitler's Aryan), he is a myth, an idea - the best and most famous boxer in the world, and he's not even real.

Hug it out, bitch

So how to reconcile the inspiring underdog story with the rather depressing race and identity politics?  Long story short, forget it.  You read it, you can't un-see it now.  That was kind of a dick move on my part, but then the movie series itself has to fight with this as well.  Rocky and Creed start as rivals and then become friends.  Creed dies in an extremely Uncle Tom-ish fashion (he is not himself a "Tom," but rather, he exists only to die and so move the white character's plots forward) and Rocky avenges him.  There's some back and forth there.

The Creed-Balboa relationship is complex, but other black characters are either "helper figures" (Creed's trainer, Duke, joins Rocky's camp) or antagonists (Mason Dixon, George Washington Duke).  The only thing that ameliorates this rather glaring problem is the classic underdog story presented in the first film.  White or black, Rocky resonates, and the story itself would hold up well if the races were reversed, and furthermore, we can always be happy we're not watching Gladiator.

This move is TURRUBUHL

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