“Hey, kid—you ever think about retiring?”
“No.”
“You think about it.”
This exchange occurs early in the first “Rocky” movie, between the salty, wizened trainer Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith) and a big-hearted but disappointing club fighter named Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). To be clear, it is the old man who is encouraging the young man to wrap up his career.
Every moviegoer knows well that Rocky did no such thing—indeed, with the release, this Thanksgiving, of “Creed,” a new spin-off of the series in which he’ll serve as the trainer and inspiration to the son of his former opponent, Apollo Creed, Rocky is still in business. Among blockbuster franchises, “Rocky” stands out as surely the unlikeliest. How many other Part 7s can you name with nary a gun or spaceship in sight? In its very human focus, the “Rocky” series is, oddly, the closest analogue that American cinema has produced to François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle. But, whereas Doinel’s fictional life was defined, as any self-mythologizing Frenchman’s would be, in terms of his relationships with a series of stunning women, Rocky must measure himself always in his workplace: the ring. Across four decades, we’ve witnessed a full-blown, epic saga of a man perpetually considering, but never achieving, retirement.
Though every actor claims to fear typecasting, and many wriggle spectacularly at its encroachment (Johnny Depp has been wriggling for twenty-five years now), I suspect that most understand that it results from an ecstatic harmony between actor and character that is, in fact, their vocation’s pinnacle. Not every would-be Shatner finds his Captain Kirk, and fewer still, as Stallone did with Rocky, create and control that character themselves. Stallone wrote the six original “Rocky” movies and directed four of them. (“Creed” will mark the first time he has handed the reins of his universe to another writer.) Consequently, he has been in a remarkable position to shepherd himself through a shadow life, and to write large a fantastical autobiography of the man he might wish to have been.
Stallone himself, in interviews, comes off about as generous and self-aware as you could possibly ask a Hollywood megastar to be, which is still quite a far cry from Rocky’s saintliness. Over the decades, he’s indulged in all the predictable conspicuous consumptions, including human-growth hormone and testosterone. Three marriages, the latter two to models. A career checkered by several take-the-money-and-run flops lamentable enough that he must keep a quiver of self-deprecating jokes at the ready, should one of them be mentioned. I offer evidence of decadence not to damn him but merely to note that, living in an atmosphere of perpetual temptation, he has been vulnerable to it. Throughout, he has maintained in his imagination a place where he can scrub away any such blemishes on his soul, leaving only the simple, heroic Balboa.
Rocky is a man of many virtues, but above all he stands for determination, and this is clearly inherited from his author. In the pre-“Creed” cycle of six films, Stallone always gives himself two chances to tell the same story—as if, no matter how big it may have hit, he’s not quite satisfied with his first telling. The series is really a classic trilogy, with each installation in diptych form. The original “Rocky” (1976) and “Rocky II” (1979) tell the story of an ordinary, underestimated “bum” reaching deep down and discovering the champion within. The first film ends with Rocky losing, by judges’ decision, his fight against the heavyweight champ Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers)—but winning a more personal victory by “going the distance,” making it through an entire fifteen rounds in the ring as no previous challenger had. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture, rocketed Stallone to icon status, and won him fan mail, he has said, from the likes of Charlie Chaplin. In 1976, of course, boffo box office did not necessarily require that a sequel be made, but Rocky did return, in 1979, and the structure of his second movie, remarkably, mirrors the first. The major innovation—or correction—is that, in a high-drama rematch, Rocky defeats Creed. To watch the closing minutes of “II,” you’d swear you’re seeing the exact moment when the eighties emerged from the chrysalis of the late seventies. Personal victories and moral victories are no longer enough: the audience is now, unambiguously, supporting a winner.
The tone of the films and the feel of the character shift radically when we pick back up with him in “III” (1982). He’s adjusted comfortably to wealth. His sloppy hair has been tamed and reconstructed by some stern product of the era. His body has gone from solid and bulky—a heavyweight—to ripped, a gaudy sculpture for a new-money art collector. And, most strikingly, we’ve flashed forward, past the bulk of his professional career—a few shots of him defeating anonymous challengers blink by in a credits montage, set to “Eye of the Tiger,” but we never learn these men’s names, and none of these fights seem to have made much of an impression. Imagine! The greatest fictional fighter of all time, a man whose name is synonymous with victory, and the chapter of his life in which he actually reigns as champ registers barely as a footnote. But where would the drama be in watching someone merely maintain his dominance? No, the new journey that must be made in “III” and “IV” is that from hero to superhero. (This did seem to make perfect sense in the eighties.)
New Rocky, like old Rocky, perches on the verge of retirement, but a threat to his ego by the rage-fuelled, tiger-eyed Clubber Lang (Mr. T) lures him back. Apollo Creed had been nearly as sympathetic and charismatic as our hero, but Lang is all comic-book villainy. By nasty attitude alone he manages to produce a fatal heart attack in Mickey, the beloved trainer. Rocky loses to Lang, then finds his own tiger eye, with Apollo’s help, and returns to redeem himself, knocking Lang out in a rematch. It’s all very inspiring, if rather more brutishly efficient than the previous movies. (It is the only time we see Rocky vanquish his antagonist in fewer than a full fifteen rounds.) But Stallone must have sensed that he hadn’t gone far enough, so he tries it all again in 1985’s “IV,” this time having Rocky square off against the Russian super-duper-villain Ivan Drago, who seems to have wandered over from a henchman role in the Bond movies. Drago kills the next mentor in line, Apollo, and Rocky must pull off an impossible victory over a man who is essentially a state-of-the-art piece of Soviet military hardware. Naturally Rocky digs deep, wins, literally wraps himself in the American flag, and every real Rocky fan implicitly understands that this had at least something to do with the actual collapse of the Soviet Union, just a few years later.
He might have gone then to outer space, or time-travelled, or in some other way heightened his concept, but Stallone again kept ahead of the curve: in 1990, he delivered “Rocky V,” a “stripped down” Rocky that anticipates the days of “MTV Unplugged,” returning to the gritty streets of Philly; Rocky’s fortune has been embezzled by a shady accountant. He has technically retired, and is now mentoring a younger fighter, but the protégé lacks Rocky’s moral character and so Rocky must, in the end, beat him up. “Rocky V” is the redheaded stepchild of the series, one of the career stumbles that Stallone must joke amiably about, though clearly this one stings more than “Judge Dredd” and “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” The problem is that Rocky needs to experience a humbling, needs to accept that he is no longer the champion, but Sly’s head is way ahead of his heart here. He aims to bring Rocky back to the streets while himself remaining a resident of the stratosphere, and the disconnect sinks the movie.
Rocky went silent for sixteen years, until Stallone’s own star had fallen far enough—the early aughts saw him in barely released fare with titles like “Eye See You” and “Avenging Angelo”—that humility was no longer so abstract a concept. Now he knew how to tell the story he’d whiffed on in “V.” “Rocky Balboa” (Roman numerals now out of fashion) saw the sixty-ish former champ finding, implausibly, another reason to step into the ring with a current champ, who is thirty-plus years his junior—but this time the absurdity of it all is acknowledged, and carries a poignancy. The deaths of Mickey and Apollo, which seemed like expedient dramatic devices when they occurred, lend a haunting resonance to the film’s narrative masterstroke: the off-screen death, years earlier, of Rocky’s wife, Adrian (not at the hands of an evil boxer, thank goodness). When it begins to seem as though everyone you loved is dead, that’s not a dramatic device—that’s just aging. Now Rocky really is a bum again, and the laughable determination to keep going again means something. The denouement mirrors the original “Rocky”: he once again goes the distance, but loses in a split decision to the champ. This is, of course, extremely predictable, but in the same way that the final resolving chord of a Bach fugue is predictable: it is absolutely satisfying and entirely necessary.
In the final shot of the narrative, Rocky walks away from Adrian’s grave after sharing his final triumph with her, and, as he walks, he optically fades from the picture. It reads at first almost as a gentle relinquishment of the character; we might have expected to see Rocky fighting to the death (as he did in early, rejected drafts of “V”), but would we have ever imagined that he could simply fade away? Then, as the final credits roll, we see documentary footage of everyday folks, fans of the movies, running, as Rocky so often did, up the steps outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, holding their own fists aloft in triumph. The message comes into focus: Rocky didn’t just fade away—he was called up to movie Heaven, so that his spirit may now live on in each and every one of us. Now go back to the first shot of the entire epic, three decades earlier. The first image onscreen, the first face to appear, is not Stallone’s or any of his co-stars’—it is a mural of Jesus Christ.
Any egoist can build a monument to himself, but it is an extraordinary accomplishment to deify oneself—or, at least, the personification of one’s better nature—and have it move as many grown men to tears as the “Rocky” films have.
“The beast is gone now,” Rocky says at the end of “Balboa,” referring to his own ambition. But what of his creator? Cary Grant made his final film at the age of sixty-two, refusing all offers during the remaining twenty (apparently very pleasant) years of his life. No one, I suppose, ever confused Stallone with Cary Grant. “Balboa” was an unexpected hit at the box office, and so what was there to do except revive his other eighties franchise character, Rambo, for his own belated sequel/meditation on aging? And what, after that, except to launch a new franchise, “The Expendables,” with Sly crowding into the frame with a dozen or so of his other antique action compadres for some nihilistic action romps that come off like unusually violent celebrity roasts? The quips about these geriatrics’ obsolescence in the modern world come hard and heavy in the “Expendables” films (three now, with more promised), but they feel thin and disingenuous: it is perfectly evident that, even if it takes all of them together to do it, these guys still believe they should be dominating the box office. The beast is not going anywhere.
And now “Creed.” By all accounts, Stallone had every intention of sparing Rocky any further need to prove himself, but was lured back in by the passion of the project’s young writer-director, Ryan Coogler, of “Fruitvale Station” renown. It may also have proved irresistible that the plot seemingly provides another opportunity to redo the thorn-in-his-side “Rocky V.” Rocky once again will take on the mentor role, this time with the dignity to cede center stage, and the movie’s title, to his protégé, whose ass he will presumably not kick in the final reel. Indeed, the trailers show us an ailing Rocky in a hospital bed, so perhaps he will even pass away onscreen, per those initial drafts of “Rocky V.” As an ending to that 1990 film, dying would have seemed a mawkish cheap shot. Now it may well feel earned. But then, we’ve seen this character hover by the exit door before. Typically he takes about a half dozen or so movies to make his way through it. I prefer to imagine him hanging on, looking into the white light, with the great Burgess Meredith, as Mickey, gruffly calling from the other side: Hey, kid—you ever think about dying?
