Back when Rocky was a real guy, not just a symbol

Rating: 8/10 (16 November 2013)

Everyone knows that Rocky represents underdogs, the American dream, the spirit of the Italian immigrant community, and Philadelphia. He represents those things so effectively that at some point in the history of the Rocky franchise the tail starts to wag the dog, and he starts to do things that might make sense for America itself to do—like waging the Cold War—instead of things that make sense for a soft-hearted, unprepossessing guy from the neighborhood to do. But watch the Rocky film that won the Academy Award and it's clear that the character as originally conceived by Sylvester Stallone is more than just a simple shorthand for the USA. For example, he's a little vain. He doesn't have much to show for himself after ten years in the lower echelons of the boxing circuit, but he does have an unbroken nose, and he's clearly "proud o' dat." He also notices when a poster of him has the wrong color scheme for his boxing shorts. The promoter replies, "It doesn't really matter, does it?" but to Rocky it does. He's obviously not as flashy as heavyweight champ Apollo Creed (and Apollo, it must be noticed, embodies in his own way American pomp-and-circumstance and American mythmaking), but he doesn't think Creed's a clown for the way he shows off. On the contrary, he admires Creed, and when he says that Creed "looks like a big flag" it's just a statement of fact, with no hint of censure. Rocky's love of animals is another interesting quirk. In a meat freezer his pressing question is who killed all the cows, and when someone sees his beloved pet turtles as potential meals he's not amused. As a boxer he probably feels more like meat or a bird in a cage than a human sometimes. These hints of depth in Rocky's character aren't there to be belabored and overanalyzed, though. They're there to help make him seem real, like people we know or can easily imagine to exist. After all, he's not just some one-dimensional cartoon in star- spangled shorts; that's supposed to be Creed. Until, perhaps inevitably, it is Rocky, in Rocky IV. But it wasn't always that way.