Fifty Years Later, What We Can Learn from Rocky
This summer, it’s expected that hundreds of thousands of visitors will travel from across the globe to Philadelphia to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary alongside several major sporting events. Many visitors will doubtless make a pilgrimage to the Philadelphia Art Museum’s steps to take a selfie or photo with the Rocky statue. And for good reason: Rocky, the underdog with a heart of gold, is a beloved cultural figure. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Italian Stallion’s big screen debut in 1976, the first in what would number (including the Creed movies) nine total entries. Despite continued cultural fragmentation and the fracture of mass media, the lovable southpaw has abided in the hearts of moviegoers for a half century.
The later entries of the Rocky films grow to WWE-levels of showmanship and larger-than-life characters, like Mr. T’s Clubber Lang and the brutal Russian Ivan Drago. Though these later films may be more fun, the first entry of the film is much quieter and, in terms of craft, character development and pace, a better movie. More important, Rocky, in that first movie, was eminently relatable to working Americans, from Philadelphia to the Pacific, who were doing their best during what was an extremely challenging decade marked by political violence, a slow economy, an extended energy crisis, and persistent inflection.
Rocky is an examination of faith in action. After a touch of the triumphal trumpets from the soundtrack accompany the title screen, the movie opens closed in on an icon of Christ, holding the communion cup and bread, before panning down to Rocky in a boxing fight. As most readers know, the reigning heavyweight champion Apollo Creed wants to put on a show to give people some hope, and he plucks Rocky for a fight.
Rocky is an underdog story where, keep in mind, he doesn’t win the belt in the final fight. But that was never his goal. For much of the movie, Rocky is a lovable goofball, telling jokes to Adrian and going easy on those whose debts he was paid to collect on. But the night before he fights, after visiting the empty arena where he will meet Creed in the ring the next day, Rocky wakes up Adrian. There’s no smile on his face, and, quite somberly, he says, “I can’t beat him. I can’t do it … Who am I kidding, I ain’t even in the guy’s league.”
But that doesn’t matter, Rocky goes on. He has a different definition of victory in mind. Endurance is its own triumph. “All I want to do is go the distance.” No one else answered every round’s bell in their fight against Creed. Calling to mind the apostle Paul’s guiding words that a life well lived is one in which the race is run with perseverance, Rocky’s words land with weight. There are no soaring violins or guitars playing in the background when he says them –-not even a tremor of Bill Conti’s immortal soundtrack – but there was still something rising in the American culture.
Fifty years ago, then as now, Americans wanted to feel good about themselves, but they were having a hard time to find some optimism. As Quentin Tarantino lays out in his book, Cinema Speculation, until the mid-seventies there weren’t too many heroes on the big screen, and on the little screen, “many people back then watched the news in abject horror.” Westerns were passe; so were World War II films. Instead, we got movie after movie with anti-heroes with cynical and abrupt ends – think Captain America and Bucky, blown away at the end of Easy Rider – by some anonymous yokel. (Easy Rider’s tagline: “A man went looking for America, and he couldn’t find it anywhere.”) Or Peter Boyle’s Joe goes on a rampage against the hippies, but tragically kills his own daughter in the process.
Rocky came at just the right time – right on the heels of one regular guy, Chief Brody, who saves the town from the shark (Jaws, 1975), and a year before another everyman hero from the backwater saves the galaxy in Star Wars (1977). These characters’ popularity were signals in the noise that, despite the malaise and stagflation, America was ready to be lead by sunnier, optimistic leaders. Their box office success presaged the historic landslides of Ronald Reagan’s campaigns.
Notwithstanding a Ted Lasso or Nate Bargatze here and there, our media has yet to produce happy warriors. A similar dearth exists among national political leadership. Yet fifty years on, we still root for Rocky as he survives round after round of Apollo’s hardest hits. As Apollo would seethe in resentment in the sequel, “I won – but I didn’t beat him!”
250 years later, many of us are still climbing those steps to stand next to the statue of the man who still stood at the final bell, in the hopes that we too, however many days we are given, may fight the good fight and finish the race.
