by Andrew Rihn
Boxing is about pain. It is a night out for the carnivore in us,
the hidden beast who is hungry.
Thomas Boswell
I’ve seen the movie Rocky far more times than I can count. Despite the repeated viewings, there are two scenes I regularly misremember.
The first is the opening shot. Set in a church’s social hall, a boxing ring has been set up for a series of “smokers” under the name “Resurrection Athletic Club.” Before craning down to show Rocky fighting a pug named Spider Rico, the camera opens on a painting of Jesus on the church wall. My memory says the painting is of the Crucifixion, but I am mistaken. Although the painting is of Jesus, it is not Jesus crucified. Instead, Jesus holds a Eucharist, offering Communion.
The other scene I misremember involves Adrian and her older brother Paulie. I remember the scene this way: Rocky is at their house for Thanksgiving dinner. Paulie is drunk and resentful and brandishing a baseball bat. He pulls the Thanksgiving turkey from the oven and with the bat he smashes the (ex)bird. But this is incorrect. I have conflated two separate scenes. Paulie does destroy the turkey, but not with his Louisville slugger. Instead, uses his hands to throw it into the alley (after saving a leg for himself). Paulie does wield a bat, but it happens later in the movie, at Christmas. Paulie hangs a wreath around the bat, and instead of a turkey, he smashes a tea set.
Rocky is a minor obsession for me. It has been for years. So what does it mean that my memory still fudges a few details? What can I learn from misremembering?
The Thanksgiving turkey is, in its way, something of the opposite. Defenestrated by Paulie, what once was living is now a diminished thing, a reduction. Not just an object, but an object of scorn, disdain, and derision. Paulie holds on to the leg bone, ragged and torn, waving it about. Flesh-made-meat, the turkey is something degraded, the abject, less-than-flesh.
Violence is inherent to both these scenes. For the turkey, this is obvious—the bird has been killed, cooked, and torn apart. The sacrament of Communion is not in itself violent until one recalls that Jesus broke the bread and spoke the words “Take, eat, this is my body” at the Last Supper, himself fully prepared for the violence of crucifixion and bodily death.
Speaking to the Catholic nature of her fiction, author Flannery O’Connor explains that violence in her stories is never the end itself, but rather a vehicle for revealing essential truths about her characters, truths obscured by the ordinary and everyday. “The man in the violent situation,” she writes, “reveals those qualities least dispensable to his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.”
She continues: “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.”
If O’Connor’s position can be said to be punching up, to represent “violence as greater-than,” then painter Francis Bacon may be emblematic of punching down, or “violence as less-than.” Severe and jarring, Bacon’s images do not present characters preparing “to accept their moment of grace.” Instead, he offers an unusually intense portraiture of flesh-made-meat. The lack of hesitancy or temperance startles his viewers. “Only by going too far,” Bacon said, “can you go far enough.”
Both O’Connor and Bacon present their works fully formed, as true believers, similarly firm in their differing convictions. Rocky is less definitive. It offers us an account of ambivalence, the struggle with this meat-made-metaphor. Both Paulie and Rocky are mired in a world of less-than. Rocky dreams of exceeding his circumstances while Paulie seems enamored by the violence and content to wallow in that diminished world.
A man is alive; meat is not. When Rocky apologetically describes working as a “leg breaker” for loan shark Tony Gazzo as “a living,” Mickey yells back at him, “It’s a waste of life.” When Gazzo’s driver expresses his dislike of Rocky, he calls him a “meat bag.” Rocky shows little commitment to this life. When Gazzo tells him to break a man’s thumb, Rocky refuses. Paulie, on the other hand, wants in. He asks repeatedly about getting a job with Gazzo; he is eager for that violent world. Rocky is no evangelist. He equivocates.
Rocky’s apartment is a pigsty. It is also full of blades, at least four knives to my knowledge. There’s a mattress tied around a pole, apparently a makeshift punching bag, with a giant buck knife sticking out of it, visible between Adrian and Rocky when he first brings her home In that same scene, he hangs his coat on the handle of a machete stabbed into the wall. And next to the mirror where he hangs several childhood photos, there are two US military trench knives, an M1917 and a Mark I. Rocky hangs that famous black fedora on the Mark I. His homelife is full of weapons, symbols of the violence of that world. In Rocky’s hands, the knives have been blunted, repurposed into something more than violence, something quotidian.
It is eventually Paulie who wields a knife in Rocky, using the blade as intended. He works at Shamrock Meats, and trying to be helpful in the ways he knows, Paulie cuts a steak and wraps it in butcher’s paper for Rocky. Later, while fighting Apollo Creed, Rocky himself goes under a knife. Rocky suffers a hematoma over his left eye, a swelling that blocks his vision. “Cut me,” he instructs his cornermen. They oblige by slicing the meat.
Francis Bacon: “Every time I go into a butcher’s, I’m surprised that it’s not me hanging there.”
Paulie would sympathize with the sentiment, I suspect. Rocky, too, might understand it, but he would raise a protest. In one of the most famous scenes, Rocky visits Paulie in the frozen meat locker of Shamrock Meats. There, punching a side of beef, Rocky breaks its ribs. A camera crew is brought in to film a puff piece on the local fighter. After slamming his fists into the frozen meat, the newscaster holds up Rocky’s left hand. The wrappings are soaked with blood.
We live with the fear that our body (and soul, whatever we believe that to be) will degrade into powerless, silent meat. We also live with the hope of becoming something more. Picking up on the difference between these two orientations is not always so simple. Cultural critic and author Maggie Nelson: “What looks like meaningful, divine suffering to one person often looks like brutal, preventable violence to another.”
Like many boxing movies prior, Rocky shows a character seeking to leave one type of life for another. Those films typically foregrounded fame, glory, and money as providing an entree to that new life. This is where Rocky breaks from roughly fifty years of cinematic tradition (or cliché, if you prefer). Money won’t change Rocky. Gazzo has money. Shamrock Meats has money. The world Rocky wants to escape isn’t concerned with something so fleeting as a bank statement. Rocky is looking for confidence. And comfort. And love.
I began this essay with two scenes from Rocky: a painting of Jesus presenting the Eucharist and Paulie throwing out a Thanksgiving turkey. The word Eucharist comes from the Greek eucharistia. It means “thanksgiving.”
I once saw a quote, attributed to Wyatt Earp, that destiny is what we are drawn to and fate is what gets in our way. Rocky sometimes gets remembered as little more than two hours of cliché. But in its cinematic suffering and violence, we also see the push and pull of opposing worldviews, violence punching up and punching down, the clash of less-than and greater-than, the clash of destiny and fate.
Rocky, ultimately, is drawn not to the butcher shop window, but the pet shop. Where the animals are alive. And where Paulie’s sister, Adrian, quietly works. He tells her corny jokes, even though the words don’t come easily to him. He practices his lines in front of the mirror, slowly, full of self-doubt.
In that mirror, he confronts the existential crisis that touches so many: the fear and the hope that we are either fated to this fallen world or destined to exceed it.