Sly Stallone and the Pulse of the People

You can tell alot about a society by its historical artifacts. That is obvious. But what is not so obvious is that pop culture, or "low culture" as the snobs would have it, is often just as often indicative of a society, or even more so, than more conventional barometers.

There are many who would call Sly Stallone a joke as an actor, an ancestor of Keanu Reeves, an idiotic cipher who stumbled into multi-million dollar franchises in which the lead actor's dialogue consisted primarily of a series of grunts and "woahs" interspersed with automatic weapons fire.

That assessment is true of Reeves, but not of Stallone. The man can act. And, more germane to this blog, he understood the pulse of the people. By "the people", I mean Nixon's silent majority, rather than any "people" I've ever met.

Consider Rocky. Best Picture 1976. Written by, directed by, and starring Sylvester Stallone, an absolute nobody to the Hollywood kingmakers.

What made Rocky brilliant was that the hero fell, but he never lost his dignity in the eyes of the audience. In all previous American blockbusters, the good guy wins. But at the end of Rocky, Rocky loses. The good guy loses.

And that was the Pulse of the People in 1976. The good guys had just lost for the first time ever. America had just lost its first war and they needed a way to make it romantic, to construct a narrative whereby they fought the good fight and lost fair and square, but lost nothing vital in the process. Rocky provided that narrative.

Stallone managed to capture the Silent Majority's psyche with two characters that appeared simultaneously in American cinema. Stallone's run of Rocky and Rambo is rivaled only by Harrison Ford contemporaneous run of Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

The character of John J. Rambo is an even more brilliant distillation of America's psyche that that of Rocky Balboa. When Rambo is given the top-secret mission of returning to Vietnam in the 80's to find proof that the Vietnamese are still holding American POW's, he asks the immortal question: "Do we get to win this time?"

Do we get to win this time?

Americans dropped more bombs on a tiny stone-age country than had been dropped by all nations combined in the history of war up to that point, yet they were convinced that they hadn't gone far enough, that some hidden cabal had restrained them and sold them out.

This is what America wanted. We would have won last time if the unnamed "they" had let us. The "they" in this equation is whoever the viewer wants it to be: the media, the liberals, the communists, the protesters, etc.

As America got over its temporary humility and embraced the Reaganist creed of credit card-fueled expiation, both Rocky and Rambo movies became increasingly simplistic and boorish, with Stallone getting progressively more oily, bronzed, muscle-rippled, and dialogue-deficient.

Just like most of US.