The films of Sylvester Stallone

 

The Films of Sylvester Stallone was read by Brian Freedman at the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus, on March 27, 2004.

The movies of Sylvester Stallone have always been pretty formulaic, and there are certain things you can count on in each of them. A beautiful woman who secretly lusts after Sly; a bad guy whose comeuppance is guaranteed to be both brutal and graphic; and a scene in which our stocky Italian hero is both shirtless and oiled up, and either training for a big fight, or making crazy monkey-love with the woman who had been lusting after him since the beginning of the movie. The examples of each are limitless, once we get past the artistic integrity of the first Rocky movie. And even in that one, Adrian, the quintessential swan in schlump-y pet-shop-worker’s clothing, secretly has it for Rock-ster from the get-go.

So, really the seeds were planted way back in 1976. But once they were given that special Hollywood water and sunlight, there was no stopping their double-time germination. A perfect example of this is Rocky IV— a film which features nearly all the Sly-film requisites— from the death of Apollo Creed at the hands of the indestructible Russian tramp Ivan Drago, to its extended gay-porn-like training sequence in the wilds of Northern Russia, to the steamy look of desire from Brigitte Nielsen (who here plays Drago’s voluble wife), who shoots in Rocky’s direction every chance she gets, as if she were saying, merely with her eyes, that if it weren’t for this damned Cold War, she’d jump him right then and there, and have ice-melting Commie sex with him in a second.

The point, really, is this— much like those poor people who live beneath high-tension wires, or the brave souls who were employed by the company that was contracted to clean the Chernobyl reactor site, regular exposure to the films of Sylvester Stallone can be hazardous to one’s health. Especially if that person to whom we’re referring is a thirteen-year-old, whose Saturday night diet consists of nothing but. I, of course, was no exception, and Sly eventually got to me, too. What, I began asking myself, made so different from the characters that got laid on my TV screen every Saturday night? It wasn’t as if Stallone was ever that great looking. And he even spoke like a punch-drunk bar-brawler from somewhere in Jersey.

The answer, then, was clear— muscles. He had them— he got laid. I had none, and I got none. The solution was simple— I needed weights and a training program. And after a few months of hard work and aggressive calorie-consumption, I too would be fucking Brigitte Nielsen in a boxing ring.