21/11/2025
On the frigid evening of Friday, November 21st, under the amber glow of streetlights, my parents ushered me into the venerable Volvo station wagon—that quintessential chariot of the middle-class American experience. Our destination: the hallowed halls of the Commack Multiplex, where a profound, life-altering cinematic event awaited: the premiere of Rocky IV.
To term this merely a "film" is to undersell its seismic cultural impact. It was, rather, a 90-minute hyper-stylized testament to the decade, an aggressively curated audio-visual manifesto that blurred the lines between cinema and music video. As a child, its raw energy and unapologetic spectacle seized my nascent imagination with a fierce grip that few contemporary works could rival. Whether by sheer patriotic osmosis or a deliberate, calculated cultural conditioning, the spirit of the era was indelibly etched upon my consciousness.
There was a time, a fleeting, precious epoch, when our national identity seemed fiercely, yet uncomplicatedly, aligned. Our collective gaze was fixed across the geopolitical divide, facing the colossal, formidable shadow of the Soviet Union, embodied by the terrifying, steroid-enhanced colossus, Ivan Drago. Drago was not merely an opponent; he was an allegorical representation of the monolithic, detached "other," the embodiment of an ideology we were taught to fear and to conquer.
This celluloid drama exerted a profound, almost architectonic effect on my worldview. To be an American in 1985 was to exist in a state of soaring, perhaps naïvely, exhilarating pride. It was the era of Hulk Hogan's gospel of "Real American" virtue, a mandate to "take your vitamins and say your prayers"—a cultural preparation for engaging with the heroic iconography of Rambo and Captain America. Say what you will, but the wellspring of patriotism was deep and overflowing.
Forty years hence, I lament the dispersal of that singular focus, that united front. Was it merely the slick varnish of jingoistic propaganda? Was it the infectious, optimistic rhetoric of a Ronald Reagan-led promised tomorrow? The complex forces are debatable, but the core certainty was this: We had a champion. A singular, indefatigable figure who, despite all insurmountable odds, would fight not for a title belt, but for our collective honor, for the moral integrity of the United States. To my seven-year-old self, this meant everything. It was the genesis of a fierce, nascent sense of national pride I had never before possessed.
Art, when viewed through the softening, subjective lens of rose-colored nostalgia, can be a notoriously tricky mistress.
Yet, I remain unswayed. The critical prism is strikingly simple: Rocky IV is, incontrovertibly, a cinematic masterpiece—a perfect, crystallized artifact of its time.
It is impossible to articulate the palpable, kinetic energy of that experience to those who were not present. On that cold November night, the air in the theater crackled with a shared, unspoken conviction: that hope was not a distant dream, but a tangible possibility, merely one round away.
