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Rocky IV
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Let’s consider a popular mid 1980s film that is
undoubtedly less funky than Prince’s Purple Rain (1984), but
no less important or symptomatic – Rocky IV, starring, written and
directed by Sylvester Stallone. This film is fascinating not because it is
particularly good (although neither is it particularly bad – certainly a vast
improvement on the first two Rambo films of 1982 & 1985), but for
the way it contrives to make the most contradictory statements as if nothing
strange was going on.
Most commentators have assumed that Rocky IV is rabidly anti-Russian. But it
both is and isn’t – and between the poles of that duality hangs an incredibly
skilful and complex semantic game.
Rocky IV resounds with a series of key events – a scene, a line of dialogue, an
action, a look – that successively, and suddenly, keep redefining the terms of
the game. Is the film critical of Russia? Not the Russian people (look at the
way they, too, come to love Rocky), only the Russian State Apparatus; and even
then, not the Premier (who applauds Rocky’s peacemaking speech), but only his
vicious right hand man. Is Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) the evil embodiment of
this state apparatus? You’d think so at first, judging by the way he kills
Rocky’s best friend, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in the ring, the way he
trains, and the unappreciative look he flashes at James Brown singing “Living
in America” (!) – but no: he, too, is his own man, an individual like Rocky.
(“I win this fight for me!”, he declares – echoing the words of the very person
he killed.)
The central moment of Rocky IV is the quick two-step it executes that switches the
positions of Rocky and Drago: “Drago is not a machine, he’s a man!”, Rocky is
told in his corner of the ring; while in the other corner Drago (in Russian,
with subtitles) remarks, “He’s not human, he’s like a piece of steel!” Now,
that’s nifty semantic footwork on any film’s part.
In addition, this may be the first boxing movie able to simultaneously assert that this
particular bloodsport is both glorious and disgusting in equal measure; it does
so by triggering a sacrificial myth of monumental proportions (Rocky: “I guess
us two guys killing each other in the ring is better than twenty million people
killing each other in a war!” – and the crowd goes wild with applause).
But perhaps the funniest piece of schizo-logic in the
film is to be found at the level of its editing. In a strong, ominous,
unambiguously anti-Russian moment of the film, Stallone cuts the action of a
grim man-of-the-State lifting his spy binoculars to his eyes in exactly the
classically Russian fashion – in a caustic, parodic quotation of the way Sergei
Eisenstein would have edited it back in the 1920s. But what is the rest of the
film – all that freewheeling rock video editing, that free association of shots
from four different Rocky films, that
fascinated emphasis on texture and surface, that play on the purely formal
aspects of image and sound – if not an inadvertent homage to the distant,
Soviet originators of this current cinematic style … precisely
Eisenstein, Vertov and Co.?
© Adrian Martin January 1986 |
