New Battle, Where Rocky Leads Fight
A nation can no more choose its poets and heroes than it can its villains and criminals. Sylvester Stallone, the unlikely poet who emerged in 1976 to boost the American psyche, is back. We are lucky to have him.
When he first came on the scene, his resume lacked a degree from any of our better institutions of higher learning. He had spent three years at the University of Miami. To say he lacked traditional good looks was an understatement. His enunciation of words most resembled the yammering of a bulldog. If his face was known at all, it was best remembered for threatening Woody Allen on the car of a New York subway in "Bananas."
But in the year of the bicentennial celebration of America's Declaration of Independence, Mr. Stallone changed America. Mr. Stallone created a character who was bigger than he was or ever could be — Rocky Balboa, a down-on-his-luck boxer surviving in a city that had seen better days: Philadelphia. One could say that while Mr. Stallone drafted the words that became Rocky, Rocky created Mr. Stallone. Mr. Stallone's injection of Rocky into the American mind gave the country a dose of optimism at a time when it was most needed. The resonance of the Rocky stories, old and new, struck a chord with me, as it did with Michael Moore, who wrote in the Capital Times: "A vast audience in 1976 hungered for an image of hope."
Remember what the world was like in 1976. America had just been humiliated in Vietnam. Images of the evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon draped the nation in shame. Inflation was on the rise. The Rust Belt suffered. Hard hats went jobless. Working class white ethnics in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland felt a particular sense of grievance. If New York was chaotic and teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse, Philadelphia was in almost worse shape, a formerly great city held together only by a tough-guy mayor. The prevailing spirit of the land, both for the country and the individual, was defeatism.
Into this mix of malaise, Mr. Stallone dropped a stilted and strangely old-fashioned tale of a boxer offered a chance at redemption. Much of the original movie is slow and lacking in light. Rocky wears outdated horn-rimmed glasses when he needs to read a list to perform an odd job for a local mobster. His love interest, Talia Shire, in real life the somewhat regal sister of Francis Coppola, is a shy basket case, covering her head with the kind of wool cap you would expect to see in a halfway house. Rocky's training takes him through the streets of his city and famously up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That run up the steps became both visually iconic and personally symbolic: Reaching the top of the steps meant that an individual had fought the good fight, met his goals, reached for his dreams.
Rocky is back just when America needs him. Once again, the country is politically polarized. The war in Iraq has brought back the gang of defeatists, now dressed up in suits and ties as realists. The soldiers are away at war, their families at home for the holidays. Much like when the original Rocky came out, glib, hip, and cynical political dramas are becoming the rage. Back then, it was "The Parallax View," "The Candidate," and "Three Days of the Condor." Today, it is "Syriana," "The Good Shepherd," and "The Constant Gardner."
The current film, like the old, offers glimpses of an America far away from the fancy people. The 1976 movie was filled with the gritty local tavern, the loading docks, the church social hall, the meat warehouse, a small tight-knit enclave of blue-collar Italians and Irishmen, and a crusty, tough-as-nails Jewish old-timer of a boxing manager. So, too, with today's film: The aging Rocky owns a restaurant hosted by a pregnant Latina; the dishwasher is an old fighter; the cooks are Mexican chefs who play their music loud, just like in a real kitchen, and the young, smartmouth, Irish girl from the street-corner, now has a biracial son with braids.
What other nation can produce a Rocky? America, even now, is the one land in the world where a last-to-first, rags-to-riches, failure-to-success story can really play. Mr. Stallone knew what he was doing when he linked his hero to America's 200th birthday. The historians, critics, and even some politicians may not all agree, but the country is still exceptional.
At the close of the film when the credits rolled, a voice behind me asked if I am a film critic. He had seen me taking notes during the movie. He was concerned that I might be a reviewer, another pinhead out to pan it. I turned to face him, and he told me the critics got it wrong. Wearing a blue Coast Guard baseball cap, he informed me he was in the service. What did he think his fellow servicemen and women would think of the movie? "I think they'll love it, sir," he said.
Mr. Gitell (www.gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
