by Joel Golby
Rocky has to go the maximum number of rounds the fight allows. The man has ended a fight early in his career once, and that is only because he was afraid he would get too knackered and lose (III: again, a full twenty-four years before his final, all-rounds, televised fight). Every other time, Rocky will get punched in the head until the authorities tell him not to.
The first film we can immediately rule out of the running to be the Greatest Rocky Movie and Therefore the Greatest Movie Ever Made (hereafter T.G.R.M.A.T.T.G.M.E.M.), then, is Rocky III: despite having the first on-screen death and therefore the greatest funeral shot ever taken (Rocky, two completely black eyes, Versace-cut suit, aviator shades, not only the best funeral outfit ever worn but possibly the best outfit ever worn, and I’m warning my friends that if any of you die over the summer months, I am blackening both eyes and wearing aviators to your send-off—there is nothing about that you can do), III doesn’t dwell enough on father-son or son-father relationships*7: it exists in the gray zone between Rocky having made it and Rocky on the descent, grasping onto desperate fronds of love from his family. Rocky III is an erection of a film—Sylvester Stallone was cut into the shape of his life for it, and there are entire slo-mo scenes of him and Carl Weathers sprinting down a Miami beach, the camera literally zooming in on their rock-hard ’80s dicks bouncing around in short shorts—but there are too many red marks against it for it to truly thrive. Rocky finishes the final fight in three rounds? That’s not very Rocky. Rocky doesn’t tell any goofy jokes because he’s too depressed about Mickey dying? Again: not very Rocky. Loads of very racist jokes dropped by Paulie when he gets to Apollo Creed’s Miami gym? Not very Rocky. The worst Rocky film, I’m sad to say it, is Rocky III.
To consider the next couple of places we need to interrogate the Rocky movies on a number of different metrics.
HEY: WHO WOULD WIN A BATTLE ROYALE FIGHT BETWEEN EVERY ITERATION OF ROCKY FROM THE ROCKY MOVIES?
Do not worry about the logistics of this, just the outcome. We know from Rocky III, when Rocky has an exhibition match with an enormous, furious Hulk Hogan (as Thunderlips), and from Rocky V, where he had a bins-against-heads street fight with Tommy Gunn, that Rocky can exist outside the rules of boxing: that he does not need a single ring or a single opponent to fight. So every Rocky, 1976 to 2006, is for whatever reason in a ring and mad at each other. Rocky from Rocky V is first to die: his brain is the most fragile of all the Rockys, he is fully clothed, he has absolutely no motivation to fight, he’s wearing a hat. Rocky V is dead, now. Next is Balboa-era Rocky, who is fifty-five years old, who is eliminated because he is fifty-five years old: even in the Rockyverse, he would be pounded to death by any other iteration of Rocky, no doubt about it (the only fighter strong enough to beat Rocky—truly—is another, younger, sadder-about-death version of Rocky). I have to make a controversial admission and say Rocky from the original Rocky would be filled in next: despite being the hungriest of all the Rockys, and the youngest, he’s also the most raw, and has not developed the skills to fight a true ring-weary boxer yet (Rocky I only has one recorded win—against Spider Rico—and one technical draw: even the barely developed Rocky II would fuck him up). This leaves three remaining Rockys: II, III, and IV. Rocky III is a curious beast: he loses his first fight to Clubber Lang, then gets caught up in deep grief over Mickey, but after a make-or-break beachside pep talk from Adrian turns into the most in-shape-and-coming-out-swinging boxer of his career: Rocky III lurches from inept to world-beatingly insane. Rocky II has the technique, the belief, and the hunger, but he’s never really felt what it is to win, and his technique (head-head-head-head-ribs) is unlocked by Clubber Lang in the next film: he is Achilles, monstrously powerful but with one masterful flaw. Then you have Rocky IV, who is boxing for fucking America. The Rocky from Rocky IV can take the most punishment of all the Rockys—there is an argument to be made that the entire series of films is actually a sort of pondering on sadomasochism, and that Rocky’s frequent refrains of “Come on, hit me!” actually come from somewhere deeper, darker (Is Rocky, shorn of a dad, desperately looking for male authority in the ring? Does he want to be hit to feel something, anything? My theory: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. The dude lives to have his ass kicked.), and that reluctance to die when he’s essentially being punched by tank projectiles truly makes him a force to contend with. Ultimately, gun to my head, I’m saying III takes it—Stallone was in stunning condition for the filming of it, and it’s the first time Rocky puts on the famous, at-once-cursed-and-haunted Apollo Creed–loaned America-flag shorts, and they bring with them a sort of magical victory hoodoo—and he would take II and IV out over fifteen increasingly brutal and bloody rounds. But it would be a close one.
HEY: WHICH OF THE ROCKY VILLAINS IS THE BEST ROCKY VILLAIN?
The best Rocky villain is Thunderlips from Rocky III, because he is basically Hulk Hogan just playing himself, brother, and also because Paulie hits him with a chair. But because this isn’t a licensed bout, I can’t count him, so we need to go back into the vaults: Tommy “The Machine” Gunn isn’t the best because he’s a punk kid who gets sunk in about twenty punches and there is not enough trash talk there to legitimize a beef—Rocky just beats the shit out of him to teach him a lesson (the first time, weirdly, that this ever happens in the Rocky films: there are a number of times when you would think Rocky could do with beating the shit out of someone to teach them a lesson, most notably Paulie in every single film, but also his son, repeatedly, who despite being played by a number of actors and written by a number of writers always, without fail, comes out as an asshole). Clubber Lang is an intensely scary motherfucker but ultimately comes up short, and when he’s sunk, he’s sunk in three, never to be seen or heard of again. Ivan Drago builds a sense of preemptive dread more than any other Rocky villain alive—He kills Apollo Creed, man! He kills him! By just punching him! He kills Apollo Creed!—but on beef alone, Apollo takes it. I almost took points off of Apollo for ultimately becoming Rocky’s greatest and best friend, which does sort of invalidate the villain arc a bit, but then I remembered in Rocky II when Rocky first retires from boxing and goes to work in a meatpacking factory, and Apollo Creed puts a full-page newspaper ad out where he superimposes Rocky’s head onto a rooster’s body and calls him “The Italian Chicken.” I mean. My guy. That’s incredible cage rattling, right there. “The Italian Chicken.” Doesn’t even make sense! A ridiculous thing to spend money on. Apollo is the best villain, which further legitimizes the first two Rocky movies as being T.G.R.M.A.T.T.G.M.E.M., and further invalidates III, where he turns from heel to face, from being any further part of this.
HEY: DOES PAULIE FUCK THAT ROBOT IN ROCKY IV?
Oh my god, undoubtedly. Perhaps you have cleansed this from your mind: Paulie, in Rocky IV, has a sexy-voiced servile robot, and he fucks it (the fact that Paulie fucks the robot is never actually addressed on-screen, making this noncanon, but he fucks that bot, man). Consider the evidence: Paulie, throughout the Rocky movies, actually acts as the series’s main running antagonist: in Rocky, he abuses Adrian, throwing her roast turkey out in a drunken rage; in II, he goes and shouts at Adrian for distracting Rocky by being pregnant, and in doing so forces her into an early labor, then a coma; in III, he swings for Rocky in a parking lot after Rocky bails him out of jail, then goes on later to be really, really racist; in V, he is the reason for the Balboas’ bankruptcy; in Balboa, he is grumpy; in Creed, he is dead. At no point is it really addressed why Rocky and Paulie are even friends in the first place*8, seeing as they have no real shared interests, that Paulie is a functioning alcoholic while Rocky is essentially teetotal, that there is a great age difference between them, that they don’t seem fundamentally to even get on. The only shared ground between Rocky and Paulie is that fundamental, primal, urgent need to not be thought of as a bum: when Rocky escapes bum-ville and ascends to the world championship, it casts a shadow over Paulie, under which he festers; Paulie never truly proves himself not to be a bum on
his own terms, and Rocky sees that and lets him ride in the back of his success car, letting him run corner for him and spoiling him with lavish gifts. Such as: the robot he fucks.
Paulie melts, a little, under the servitude of his sex robot. He trains her to bring him cold ones and ice cream. She plays romantic music and he says that she loves him. Apollo Creed, who is on a suicide mission to die, is the only one freaked out by a robot that can move and talk and love at an advancement in technology that is far beyond what science is capable of even now, thirty years later (Paulie’s AI-enabled fuckbot is the greatest evidence yet that Rocky exists in a separate, fantasy universe to ours): everyone else is just happy that Paulie finally has found a lover and a friend. Rocky is a sexless movie series—Rocky’s committed Catholicism paired with the women-weaken-legs thing means the horniest Rocky personally ever gets is a moment where he takes his vest off in the first movie, and I’m pretty sure Rocky Jr. is conceived immaculately because there’s no way Rocky and Adrian fucked—so a sudden frisson of pure, electric sexual charisma jolts a room to its feet, which is why the sparks between Paulie and the robot he fucks are so significant. Consider the two Paulies: Paulie 1 (1976–1985), the first Paulie, screaming and yelling until the saliva comes out, pummeling with a baseball bat, and Paulie 2 (1985–death), serene and laid-back, practically postorgasmic with chill, eating ice cream in a vest. Does Paulie fuck the robot? Paulie fucks the robot like crazy. I would argue Paulie would have been dead by Balboa if he didn’t. Paulie’s fuck robot gives his heart the capacity to love, and by extension gives him ten more years his anger and smoking don’t deserve. Paulie hits that thing harder than Drago does Apollo.
THE FULL SPECTRUM OF MASCULINITY AS REPRESENTED BY ROCKY IN THE ROCKY MOVIES
The weird thing about Rocky is he is a shifting shape, a character who never truly settles as one. Compare the Rocky in Rocky, for instance, with Rocky II: in the first movie he is a lonely, unsettled human, chomping for change, urgent for something more; in Rocky II he is just spectacularly into God, just way too into God. In Rocky V, if we dial it all the way forward, he is just a very brain-damaged man who cannot pick up a single social cue: all of this is erased by the time of Balboa and Creed. Rocky anchors himself on two core tenets throughout: that he is sweet and empathetically thoughtful almost to a fault, and that he is extremely, extremely masculine. And one way or another, Rocky has managed to encapsulate the entire and full range of human masculinity—every facet and every flaw—across the seven movies. Every man alive should be able to see something of himself in Rocky Balboa. Here is every possible man:
Rocky: Wears comfortable soft knits a lot, deliberately flexes his arms over a pull-up bar in front of Adrian to make his biceps look better, filled with a fragile and easily shattered romantic intent, lonely + afraid.
Rocky II: Father, Husband, Provider, Coward, Fighter; ill-advisedly buys a sports car.
Rocky III: The Sexiest Athlete Who Ever Existed Is Sad Because His Dad Died.
Rocky IV: Rocky IV is essentially every bloke when his mate gets in a bar fight, i.e., converts quickly into a sort of barking dog who vows to chin the guy who started it, only in this case the friend is Apollo Creed (dead) and the bloke who started it is the hardest boxer in the world and you have to go to Russia instead of the alleyway outside if you want to finish the thing.
Rocky V: Ignoring His Actual Son to Instead Focus on His Other, Surrogate Son, Who Is Better at Boxing Than His Actual Son Is.
Balboa: Fallen lion who struggles w/ dwindling testosterone levels, plus also death of wife.
Creed: Just wants to read a newspaper and take forty-five-minute shits without anyone bothering him for anything.
If you have to ask, Rocky’s and my own masculinities cross in three ways: incredibly solid later-life hairline, Does Not Know How to Speak to Children but Tries Anyway, almost criminally bad with money.
A NOTE ON CREED
After rewatching it again recently, I have to admit that the most whole and perfect Rocky movie is Creed. It has everything: a busted father-son relationship, a surrogate father-son relationship, a boxer with it all to prove, a special scene where someone hands over Apollo’s assy old boxing shorts, a truly fearsome opposition fighter, a three-way montage scene, an unhorny romantic subplot, bizarre training methods, kids doing wheelies, the constant specter of death. The only thing it doesn’t have—and this is crucial—is Rocky Balboa being absolutely fucking tanked in the head, because in this film he is in his sixties and half dying of cancer. So for that reason, I have to disqualify Creed from even counting as a Rocky movie. If Rocky does not get punched in the head in the film—even once—then I am afraid that, though it inarguably exists in the Rockyverse, it is not a Rocky film. The objectively best Rocky movie cannot actually be counted as a Rocky movie.
WHAT IS THE BEST ROCKY MOVIE, THEN?
Listen, I lied. I told you we would be adhering to structure and framework when judging this, but I lied. We’re going on personal opinion and personal opinion alone. The best Rocky movie is Rocky IV, because he fights a man so hard the entirety of Russia stands up and claps, because James Brown is in it in the maddest cameo in movie history, because if I can change then you can change, because Rocky grows a beard, because the montage is a pure ’80s electroshock hard-on, and because Paulie fucks the robot. The best Rocky movie is Rocky IV.
AND SO THE MORAL AT THE END
Why do I love Robert “Rocky” Balboa so much? I’ve sat gazing at the city beyond me while trying to think it through. I suppose the beating, pulsing heart of Rocky is a fear of failure, a fear of rejection, a fear of being found out: he only ever goes headfirst into that Apollo fight in Rocky to prove to everyone that he isn’t a nobody, that life hasn’t kicked it out of him yet, that he’s someone, worth something. He’s a candy-box-sweet slow-swinging idiot holding it down for a close-knit family he deeply, almost pathologically loves, and when everyone who means anything to him starts to die, he takes the anger and the hurt of it and buries it down, pummels it down inside himself, occasionally burbling up as a kind of wobbling self-rage, but most often coming out just in more desire, doubling out as more pride. Whenever something goes critically wrong in Rocky’s life (Adrian’s coma, II; Mickey’s death, III) he gives up entirely, and I admire that trait in a man. Rocky Balboa has been my most beloved sportsman for the last two decades of my life, and he doesn’t even exist. Rocky Balboa gets to the dizzy heights of the toughest sport in the game, and he does it without even really knowing how to box. That’s why I love the Rocky movies: as well as being erections-as-montages ’80s punch flicks, they are also about characters who contain multitudes, heart as well as iron. If he dies on-screen, I will sob until they have to escort me out of the theater.
I was in a bar recently watching a pay-per-view boxing event, and there was a man behind me in loafers and an ironed white shirt, and I immediately got the vibe off him that he both works in finance and does cocaine. “Yes, AJ!” he was saying, single clenched fist in the air, whenever Anthony Joshua, the winner of the televised bout, did a good punch in the head. He spilled an almost entire drink on my shoes and told his friend: “Thing about boxing, is,” he said. “Thing about boxing, right: it’s tactical, like chess. Boxing is chess.” We moved, we left the bar. I couldn’t deal with being near that.
But in his own high and irritating way, he was correct. “Boxing is chess” is something people who don’t know a lot about chess and only know a little about boxing say about boxing, but it does go some way to explain the tactical master class every boxer undertakes when he goes anything more than one round with a fellow pugilist. Boxing is an extreme athletic undertaking—your body is working at the absolute maximum a body can go out, for fifteen consecutive intensive rounds, and all this is happening while you are being punched in the face—but it’s also a mental one, too, as much about landing blows to psych your opponent out and gently guide them around the ring—wrestling, co
ntactlessly, for domination—as it is about moving your head quickly while someone is trying to punch it. Boxing at its best is physical, mental, and spiritual, all at once, a complete union of the body and the mind, coming forward as one to deliver one final, striking blow.
This does not matter in the realm of Rocky because at no point has Rocky confronted the real-world reality that boxing is as much a mental art as it is a physical get-to. Rocky in Rocky wins fights by being spirited and plucky, by being tough enough to get hit and then get up again, Rocky being a fighter of sheer endurance. At no point does Mickey take Rocky aside and say: Stop getting punched in the head, Rock. And say: If you box a bit smarter, against Apollo Creed, maybe your brain and motor functions won’t be irrevocably damaged for the next thirty-plus years. Every single Rocky canon fight is about being hit—hard, hard, hard—for like fifteen rounds, then in the last dipping into some deep, previously unseen well of sheer will, and getting light on your toes, suddenly, even though both your eyes have been bruised shut, and just swinging, baby, and yes, yes, God and Jesus, too: connect the punch, win the girl, spit out your blood, and anoint yourself holy, you are the champion of the world. I am saying that if Rocky were a film about soccer, then Rocky would be some sort of free-scoring forty-year-old phenomenon who somehow wins the World Cup without once consulting the tactics board. That if he were a cricketer, his tactic would be to face a hundred deliveries, then score some sort of astonishing multi-six on the last innings of the game. Rocky is a phenomenal boxer because he patently ignores arguably the most vital facet of the entire sport, and still becomes the champion of it. The moral of our story is: if you swing hard enough, you dumb idiot, you can achieve anything you dream of. The best Rocky movie is Rocky IV, but all the others are good, too.*9