Rocky v The Wrestler: sport as genre, shifting ideology, and the doubleness of the sports film

Abstract

Each sport acts as its own genre (like horror, or the western), has its own rules, its own narratives, and can be understood only in terms of a constellation of other sports (rugby union makes sense because we can compare it to football, just as the musical is partly defined by film noir). Just as genre shifts, so too do sports as a result of rule changes, altered demographics, innovations in strategy, and other socio-cultural developments. This helps foreground the way each sport transmits its own forms of ideology; in Rocky, for instance, the genre determinants of boxing help create a very different version of the American Dream to The Wrestler. Representations of star athletes, which interrogate the way sport acts as an extension of the normative, also highlight how ideology functions ‘from below’. They often appear to promote conservative myths, yet typically dramatise a coming to terms with this ideology, or a modification of it. Sports films have an essential doubleness; they constantly make visible both ‘the Real’ and its fantasy construction, making even a classic sporting triumph film like Rocky both celebratory–and deeply unsettling–at the same time.