ABSTRACT
Rocky, the film that made Sylvester Stallone a star, is deceptively simple. Shot on a relatively low budget in the streets of Philadelphia, the film tells the story of a palooka from the neighborhood who gets an unexpected chance to contend for the world boxing championship. The film's title prepares the viewer for a forthright film, an earthy story of hard realities. This topos of "authenticity" provides the hard stage for the central narrative: the story of one man's painful rise from squalor, minutely detailed and told in strict chronological order, push-up by push-up. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue that the stability of any set of representations depends upon the stability of the social order. When the social order is stable, the dominant discourses, value systems, and accompanying symbolic systems are also secure. Rocky symbolically resolved the crisis of wage stagnation by blaming the genuine woes of working class European Americans on the civil rights movement.
