The Rocky Fallacy
Last year, I went to see Rocky Balboa in the theaters. I’ve always loved Rocky movies, especially the first one, and I thought it was a great ending to the franchise. But as I sat there in the theater, it reminded me of how different it is to watch a Rocky movie with a crowd as opposed to watching it at home on TV. The energy from a Rocky crowd is both intense and infectious, almost like watching a real sporting event.
Stallone is very underrated as a writer and an actor. His ability to suck in a crowd emotionally and make them root for his character is incredible. You really get sucked into the movie and forget it’s fiction for a while. You really want all those assholes that put Rocky down and constantly ridicule him or try to crush his dreams to get their well-deserved comeuppance. You see Rocky struggling uphill against impossible odds and being shitted on by arrogant, petty jerks every step of the way and it reminds you of all the dreams you had or currently had that people shitted on. You see those arrogant assholes on the screen and get reminded of all those real-life pricks from your own experiences that just player hated from the sidelines of life and got great enjoyment watching your struggles and failures and twisted the knife and rubbed it in whenever they could.
But I started to wonder: does anyone watch Rocky and sympathize with the pricks? Same with those 80s movies where some obnoxious athlete bully, yuppie or preppy is ridiculing the underdog hero and trying to crush his dreams…does anyone watch those movies and identify with or even root for those guys over the underdog hero? Did anybody in the theater cheer when Johnny swept the leg in Karate Kid?
These types of bullies, peanut gallery picks and dream crushers must exist in some shape or form in the real world, or else these movies wouldn’t be so powerful in evoking emotion and recognition from us. And these movies are so popular and widely seen that it’s highly doubtful that jerks just avoid those movies, they have to be in the theater crowd or among the ones watching at home. Yet no one who watches these movies seems to ever think of themselves as the prick or bully. They all see themselves in the protagonist hero role, and that’s who they end up identifying with.
These movies appeal to our basic narcissism. We get to watch these movies and imagine ourselves as the hard-working dreamer. We get to imagine ourselves as the type of good, positive person who would chase a dream like Rocky against all odds, or at least be supportive of a Rocky and be on his side as he chases his dreams. But we conveniently forget all the times in real life that we were the criticizing, smug assholes, all the times we helped crush dreams. Those moments don’t support our positive fantasy image of ourselves, so we don’t pay much attention to those and play them down. We can go to a Rocky movie and think of Rocky as representing “us” and the sneering, condescending dream-crushing bad guys as representing “them,” but we can go to a restaurant that same night and crack jokes about the waiter and scoff at how stupid he is to actually think he’s going to make it as an actor along with the millions of other dreamers in town and ever be more than just a glorified grunt. The irony of these moments eludes us. A lot of times, the arrogant jerk is you.
See, the Rocky fallacy is simply this: it’s easy to root for an underdog when you already know beforehand that he’s going to win. This doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t give you moral superiority. It doesn’t mean you have faith in people (faith is belief in something, even when you have no proof or guarantees that your belief is warranted or will be rewarded). It doesn’t make you Rocky. It just makes you like the typical person. Those pompous jerk characters in the Rocky movie? They don’t know they’re in an inspirational feel-good movie called Rocky and that Rocky is the star of the whole thing. If they did they’d support Rocky from the very beginning just like the audience does.
When you watch The Pursuit of Happyness, it’s easy to have that sense of moral superiority by siding with Will Smith’s character…because you already know his risks are going to pay off. You feel good at the end because you feel your faith was rewarded and in some ways you feel your own urges to dream have somehow been validated, but truth be told you knew your belief in the character was going to be rewarded before even watching the movie. But in real life, you and your friends would probably badmouth and look down on someone in that situation at the bottom of his rope hoping against all odds to conquer the world of stocks.
Think about all those people who supported the Rocky character when watching the movies. How many of them scoffed at Stallone the actor when he had a string of flops and it seemed his career was washed up? How many of them laughed at him when he announced he was making a Rocky sequel, just like people laughed at Rocky when he tried to enter the big time after an unremarkable career as a washed up local boxer? That’s because unlike with the Rocky character, we had no guarantee Stallone would succeed in his comeback, and being supportive is always harder without guarantees.
I think this is why so many people hated Rocky V. It’s not the best in the franchise, that’s for sure. But when I saw it, I never thought it was as horrible as everyone claimed it was. It was as well-acted and well-written as any of the other installments. But now I realize why it received such backlash: because Rocky ended as a loser because he had no money or glory, despite winning the street fight. The faith the audience had was conditional: “we believe in you against all odds Rocky, and fuck any haters that say otherwise…unless you actually lose. Then we’ll turn on you too.”
Stallone made a fatal miscalculation with Rocky V: he overestimated the public and thought they “got” what he was trying to say all along. That the winning and the glory isn’t what matters, it’s never giving up the fight in the face of all adversity and being able to hold your head up at the end of the day knowing that you tried your hardest, regardless of the outcome. He had too much faith in his audience, not realizing that they never got that message. So he had to make a slight correction in Rocky Balboa and made Rocky a successful entrepreneur and gave him back some ring glory, and the fans all came back, once again buying into the myth that they were the kind of good guys that would never turn on someone for trying hard and ending up a loser.
Another great example of this is Eli Manning. Tons of people in New York made him a whipping boy for years. They laughed at how inferior he was to his brother Peyton. As he improved and stayed resolute and improved toward the end of the season, people gave a cautious optimism, but still scoffed at him to be safe. Even as the game progressed and he played almost flawlessly and the Giants were within striking distance to win the Superbowl, people I watched with kept saying “Oh man, he’s gonna choke. He’s a loser. Kiss this game goodbye. They’re gonna lose this, I know it was too good to be true.” And after that final play where Eli killed it and won the game, those people were jumping up and cheering the loudest. And I’ll never forget what one of those guys said: “WE WOOONNN!!!!! Whoooo!!!”
Think about that for a second. “They’re gonna lose.” “He’s a loser.” “He’s gonna choke.” But after he wins? “WE won!” Where was the “we” when the outcome was still in doubt? Why is it suddenly first person plural now? You can bet this guy is one of the people who watches Rocky and identifies with the underdog supporter and not the haters and jerks in the movie. And he’s wrong, because back in the real world if Eli starts off bad next season he’ll be the first badmouthing him again and calling his Superbowl win a fluke.
It takes a lot of character to support someone against all odds. It takes even more character to not be outcome-driven and still support them for trying hard even after they lose. Rocky movies provide us the risk-free comfort of fooling ourselves into believing we have that level of character and empathy and courage.
In reality though, that image of ourselves is often the most fictional part of the whole moviegoing experience.
