The very name Mason Dixon, based directly on the line dividing northern states where slavery was illegal and southern states where slavery was legal, draws upon long and complex histories of slavery, freedom, emancipation, and the Underground Railroad. Dixon is a wealthy fighter who lives and trains in gentrified parts of the city. The plot with Mason Dixon poignantly explores how minority histories become commodified and sanitized when sports are used to assist in urban renewal. These two stories contain different ideas of what history means and what the relationships between sports and history are in different parts of the city.
The ex-champ is now a restaurant owner struggling to overcome depression and find self-worth on the anniversary of his wife’s death. The second story is the one of Rocky Balboa. He is known to have skill but no heart, and many boxing fans and commentators think he chooses weak opponents to hold onto his title. The first is the story of Mason Dixon, a heavy-weight champion who recently defended his title but is still looking to be seen as a legitimate fighter in American culture. Rocky Balboa begins with two seemingly separate plots.
Rocky Balboa contains a populist message that ordinary people should not have their cultures obliterated so that rich corporations can make more money by transforming urban areas into leisure zones for the middle and upper classes. The film poignantly explores how the cultures of urban working-class, ethnic, and minority neighborhoods are at risk because of urban renewal, and the film offers a way for these histories to fight back against the corporate interests looking to gentrify depressed areas. The film might offer us a glimpse into the crisp, clean, and beautiful gentrified spaces where a boxer trains, but Rocky Balboa’s power comes from its commitment to showing run-down and decaying areas of the city. It is set in three distinct areas of Philadelphia: a gentrified neighborhood where the heavy-weight champion, Mason Dixon, lives and trains, the working-class neighborhood where Rocky grew up and to which he has moved back, and the graveyard where Rocky’s deceased wife, Adrian, is buried. The film tells a charming slice-of-life story about an aging Rocky who has moved back to his working-class neighborhood and is battling with depression after his wife’s death and his estrangement from his son. But after watching Rocky Balboa, I wasn’t just pleasantly surprised to see that the film was good I found this film to contain value in the way it explores the nefarious ways that sports have been used in urban renewal projects. I cringed at the thought of Rocky Balboa reducing social relations to what they were in Rocky IV, a film that suggests the Cold War could end if Russians became as honest as Rocky. I wondered if there could be characters as campy as Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago. I, admittedly, decided to watch it to indulge my fondness for bad taste.
#Rocky balboa speech reaction series#
Coming at the end of a film series that had degenerated into useless portraits of cartoonish characters and simplified visions of social issues, the 2006 film Rocky Balboa probably attracted very little attention from progressive film critics.
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