Rocky Reimagined
All love stories follow a similar structure. Two people are destined to be together, but there is something keeping them apart – a conflict that is only resolved when the lovers are ultimately united. One movie that doesn’t get enough credit for being the love story that it truly is: the original Rocky.
In that movie, an unknown, seemingly washed-up boxer from the bottom rung of society gets a random once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fight against the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Will he be able to prove himself in the ring through sheer force of will, or will his own self-doubt, ingrained through decades of economic and social degradation, consume him and lead to failure?
Rocky’s professional journey is chronicled through six movies (plus two spin-offs), but it is the original Rocky that establishes the key emotional element of the story, namely his relationship with his wife Adrian. Their relationship is the heart and soul of the franchise.
In Rocky I, Adrian is introduced as the sister of Rocky Balboa’s best friend, Paulie. Rocky is considered the smarter of the two friends. In fact, next to Paulie, Rocky—who is already fighting his 64th skull-pounding fight at the beginning of the movie—is Stephen Hawking. Interestingly, when the movie opens, Paulie is considered the smarter of the two siblings. You see, his sister Adrian is going on thirty years old and has a part time job cleaning up cat shit in a pet shop. She is also impossibly shy, basically mute, and to add insult to injury there is a rumor about her travelling around town. What is the rumor? Do you remember?
If you guessed that people believed that she was a slut or a whore, you would be wrong. No, the word on Paulie’s sister was that she is mentally retarded.
But our hero, undeterred, woos her anyway. In his informed but admittedly unprofessional opinion, Rocky concludes that her cognitive abilities are squarely in the normal range.
The would-be lovers go out on a date. They go ice skating. They get to know each other, or at least Rocky talks a lot about himself. It’s cold enough for Rocky to be wearing gloves, but not cold enough for those gloves to extend to the tips of his fingers. Rocky brings her back to his apartment. She does not speak much during the date other than to say in no uncertain terms that she does not want to be in the apartment alone with Rocky. But Rocky persists, lays on the charm, and they end up having sex.
One might say that the second most reckless thing Rocky does in Rocky I is step into the ring with the undisputed, undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World. The first is to knowingly have sex with a woman who may or may not be mentally retarded.
Rocky wakes up the next morning to learn that for some reason the undisputed, undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World, Apollo Creed, wants to fight him. The fight will take place in five weeks. And for this Rocky will be paid $150,000. (As an aside, the elderly trainer at the gym, who to this point in the film has been nothing but wantonly cruel to Rocky, is now nice and wants to be his trainer. I’ll bet he would. Fuck that.)
Can we just reflect for a moment how utterly improbable this turn of events was for Rocky Balboa? His lifetime boxing record includes 20 losses. Apollo Creed has 46 wins, zero losses. Rocky is 30 years old. He lives in abject poverty. For context, Rocky earned $40.55 for his last fight, a knockout victory over Spider Rico, a local boxer of questionable ability. He was selected by Creed largely because of his ethnic nickname. It goes without saying that Rocky didn’t exactly earn this life-changing opportunity.
This is the crucial moment of the film, and from here we can consider two possible interpretations. The first is that the rest of the movie, and the next five, are exactly as they appear on film. Rocky received a lucky shot and capitalized on it. It happens. But there is another way to understand them, an interpretation rooted in the utter improbability of everything that happens from this moment forward. Maybe more than just improbable, though. Maybe… an outright fantasy? Bear with me, but what if everything in Rocky, and the next five movies, plus the three spin-offs, is all just a psychodrama taking place in Rocky’s mind? Could it be that Rocky, a fundamentally moral man, has just had sexual relations with a woman whom many believe to be mentally disabled, and is so consumed by shame and guilt that he suffers a psychic break? Did I mention that he’s fought in 64 fights to date, and flat-out LOST twenty? And that he’s just rolled the dice that Adrian was probably just shy.
Needless to say, from this moment forward, the movie proceeds down a decidedly different path. It is a path that starts that morning and extends throughout the entire Rocky franchise. He fights the undisputed, undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World and lasts 15 grueling rounds. He then fights him again and wins, which makes hims the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World. He fights Mr. T. Twice. He fights Ivan Drago. He ends the Cold War. You see where this is going.
And all throughout this cinematic journey, Adrian is not only decisively NOT cognitively challenged in any way, but she is smart, glamorous, beautiful, verbose, worldly, wise. She wears fur coats. She doesn’t need glasses anymore. She gives Rocky advice, “We have everything but the truth. What’s the truth, damnit?!” His boxing opponents covet her sexually. She is a model wife, mother, psychologist, and advisor. Turns out Rocky had it right all along.
To be clear, I’m not saying he didn’t. I hope he didn’t, because that is a beautiful story. I’m just saying that there is at least a small possibility that the bulk of the Rocky franchise might as well have taken place in a snow globe.
And really, how else are we supposed to explain the robot butler?