“Somehow, you set the wheels in motion, now haunts our memories…”

Although I couldn’t verbalize it at the time, I felt a sense of confusion and betrayal as I left the shopping mall multiplex on a summer afternoon with my father in 1989– my only lasting memory of the day. We had just seen Ghostbusters II (1989). 

Ghostbusters II is the first movie sequel I remember anticipating. Ghostbusters (1984) was the very first movie we watched as a family– my father, my mother and me– after my dad brought home our brand new, front loading VCR. Even if the VCR was mostly bought to watch pornography in a comfortable setting, he was also excited to watch big Hollywood blockbusters months before they hit HBO. He was a movie guy. 

We rented Ghostbusters from a far away video store which, after returning the movie, we never patronized again– the VCR purchase allotted us one free rental. I was dazzled by the store’s bright lights and incredible selection. It was only the Thanksgiving prior that my uncle debuted his top loading VCR to the family after dinner. We watched Rocky III (1982). The atmosphere in his Italian immigrant living room– furniture wrapped in thick, sweat inducing plastic– was electric. In the Reagan 80s, the only thing more exciting than home entertainment was movie sequels.

I fell asleep before the end of Ghostbusters– the long drive home after all the excitement must have tired me out. My mother told me about the city wrecking marshmallow man over breakfast. I immediately watched Ghostbusters front-to-back twice in a row as the tape had to be returned that very evening under the far away video store’s punitive return policy– a contract requiring my father’s signature. It was a godsend when the movie finally aired on HBO, in what felt like a thousand lifetimes later, and my father captured it on VHS cassette. I couldn’t stop thinking about its sequel once the idea had been introduced to me, and yet, I felt a cold void in my soul after leaving the shopping mall multiplex that summer afternoon in 1989.

My father, to his credit, thought Ghostbusters II was just fine. After all, he was a movie guy.

***

People are sometimes more alive after they die. After someone dies, all points between past and present converge. The person they were before their lives fell apart becomes as relevant as who they ended up as after. Whatever success they managed to create becomes as meaningful as their failings, even if their failings came later and stayed longer. This is why awful people still get flowers at their funeral: they were once misguided teenagers; they were once lost young adults.  

The man I came to know as my father was not the man my father was before I met him. This mattered little to me growing up and more to me as an adult– things I came to understand the generalities of but kept locked away in a mental box I would occasionally pass and acknowledge while always ensuing it was kept under lock-and-key in the winding passageways of my brain cave. These thoughts were complex and upsetting– on long sleepless nights when the box would push its way to the forefront of my thoughts. I could never find a comfortable medium between feeling sorry for him– the pain I knew he carried; the fear and self doubt; the buried self-hatred– while contextualizing the anger I felt for his failing me as a father. 

He could have tried harder. 

My father had a sad life that negatively impacted the trajectory of my own, is how I would allow these thoughts to settle so I could get to sleep. On those nights, I’d feel the gravity of his eventual death. I knew his death would cause despair urgent enough to force attempts at understanding his life in its totality while still managing the anger I could never quite shake despite promising myself I’d get over it and move on; stay focused on the present with gratitude in my heart. 

On those nights when the box in my brain cave pushed its way to the forefront of my thoughts, I’d remind myself that none of it required immediate confrontation. That I could allow things to settle unresolved. That these ideas could remain messy and unreckoned with; puzzle pieces left askew. That my father’s death would be a long time from now, even when I knew that time was creeping along with ceaseless persistence. Sometimes you tell yourself lies just to get to sleep. It’s always a long time from now until the day it isn’t.    

Death is a confrontation. Death forces these ideas into the forefront of your waking thoughts: your father was a person before you were born, and this person matters as much as the person you came to know as your father. Something happened along the way to change things– to set his trajectory in stone– but this person existed and now death makes all things equal. 

Death forces you to sit down with these puzzle pieces and make sense of them.

***

Although I couldn’t have known it at the time– no one in my uncle’s gaudy living room that night could have– the Rocky (1976) film franchise told the story of how the remainder of the millennium would play out with incredible accuracy; Sylvester Stallone was prescient. The 1980s became a decade of linearity: what started off as good only got better, and if not truly better in the strictest sense of the word, things got bigger; everything became more. To understand the unsustainability of this– the damning glory of pushing things beyond the infinite– we can look to Stallone’s Rocky series as analogous.

Rocky (1976) was a quiet movie about an aging boxer lamenting having missed the opportunities he thought he deserved. When he lucks into a fight with the champ, after some initial trepidation– Rocky fears failure and the resultant crisis of ego– he decides to go at it with everything he’s got. Before the fight he creates a reasonable, quiet expectation for himself: he only wants to go the distance. Rocky doesn’t want to lose– not again, not this time. Rocky’s quiet lesson is in humility and acceptance: that the average man can make a nice, albeit unremarkable, life for himself by force of will. If he wants it enough, by blood and sweat alone.

Rocky’s lesson is that it’s okay to be unremarkable– that an unremarkable life is worth fighting for. 

Rocky told a compete story and won best picture for 1976, but audiences weren’t satisfied… at least not completely. Feeling the gravity of the decade to come, audiences demanded a more grandiose sequel with a happy ending: audiences wanted to see Rocky beat the champ. Canonically, this undid the original’s quiet thematics. Rocky wasn’t supposed to win. 

Had his life gone differently, Rocky may have become a better fighter as a younger man but he failed to realize that, either by choice, circumstance, or a genuine lack of potential. Something happened to Rocky along the way to set his trajectory in stone and he ended up in a shithole apartment earning pennies while fighting chumps. Even if things could have been different, they weren’t. After ending up on the wrong side of thirty, a washed up bum of a fighter, Rocky lucks into an opportunity to believe in what could have been– wish fulfillment for the average joe.

With the excesses of the coming decade in horizon’s view, Rocky II (1979) gave audiences what they wanted: Rocky beats Apollo. Playing out like a retcon apology letter or a Choose Your Own Adventure (1979) styled alternate ending, Rocky II has the strange designation of a movie where the majority of its run time serves as filler content made to deliver a fake boxing rematch. The movie itself isn’t particularly good or interesting when taken as a whole, an academy award winner it is not, yet it delivers in spades on the promise of a feel good, Hollywood ending. It’s virtually impossible to not get full body chills when hearing Rocky’s celebratory, movie ending, “Yo Adrian, I did it,” as Adrian murmurs back– under the twilit glow of the television screen– “I love you…,” half-celebratory, half-overwhelmed with emotion, face fully stained with tears.  

Rocky II told a compete story– if you weren’t satisfied with the quiet subtleties of the award winning original, Rocky II completed your narrative journey with a big, loud sledgehammer. From a story perspective– from the perspective of Rocky’s exhausted character arc– there needn’t be any more Rocky movies, but that wasn’t how the 1980s were set to work and audiences were primed for an even bigger and badder Rocky– a more extravagant Rocky; a more refined Rocky; more Rocky.  

1980’s audiences were ready to want more of everything. 

Rocky III was perceived as unnecessary by critics at the time– a word they’d keep in their lexicon as a descriptor for many 80’s sequels to come. These critics weren’t entirely wrong from a theoretical perspective but completely wrong from almost every other: Rocky III tells a story as important as the original. The disconnect critics had was in misunderstanding Rocky III’s connection to the prior movies. Rocky III features Rocky Balboa in name only: gone is the slow witted, illiterate Rocky. Rocky is now a man of class and wisdom. The shy, withdrawn Adrian is replaced by an outspoken woman of elegance and glamor. Different characters, different movie– something no one seemed to notice at the time.

Rocky III exists as the original’s polar opposite. Rocky III tells a story of hubris; of overconfidence. We meet world champion Rocky who’s had ten bombastic title defenses and is ready to retire to a life of gaudy luxury. As he’s about to begin his retirement speech, after unveiling a giant, gaudy Rocky statue at a public press conference, he’s confronted by Clubber Lang, a brutal heavyweight brawler, who makes a public challenge to Rocky. Rocky, of course, accepts without hesitation. 

After the public spectacle, trainer Mickey tells Rocky he wants no part of the hulking Clubber – he won’t train Rocky for a fight that Rocky is sure to lose. When Rocky reminds Mickey of his ten bombastic title defenses, Mickey reveals they “was hand picked challengers”. Rocky’s success was not his own; Mickey was controlling things from behind the scenes. Like the desperate Casablanca Records early-80’s determination to will KISS back to their mid-70’s apex with fake news headlines and plenty of radio station payola, Rocky was a protected champion.

Rocky was a paper champion.

Rocky refuses to believe this and, instead, fully commits to his public image as the greatest of all time. If the newspapers and magazines are saying it; if Johnny Carson and the Muppets think so; if celebrities like being seen with him, it must be true. Ace Frehley never stopped spending money as the KISS ship sank because KISS said KISS was the hottest band in the world, and who was he to disagree? There’s always another hit record right around the corner even when there isn’t. Rocky believed Rocky was the greatest of all time because people said Rocky was the greatest of all time.    

Rocky decides to lean into his public image which has become the only thing holding his version of reality together. Rocky rents a hotel ballroom and fills it with gym equipment and a boxing ring. He wants to do all of his training for Clubber in public and with spectators. There’s banners and balloons, and tons of Rocky merch. With this, Rocky has painted himself into a corner: Rocky can’t take his training seriously. Rocky must believe that the false-self, media produced Rocky is the greatest of all time and always will be. 

The greatest of all time needn’t fear challengers to his throne– he can be king of the night time world forever.

Clubber defeats Rocky with vicious immediacy. Clubber is what Rocky once was– a young, hungry fighter. Clubber is what Rocky never was– a man taking advantage of his prime. Even worse than Clubber, reality crushes Rocky’s fighting spirit. In the shadow of brutal defeat, Rocky encounters former foe Apollo Creed who wants to train Rocky for a Clubber rematch. Apollo wants to take Rocky back to the beginning– to detach the fighter in Rocky from the overhyped image; to break Rocky down until all that’s left is what’s real. 

Apollo wants to give Rocky his edge back– to give Rocky the eye of the tiger.

***

People are sometimes more alive after they die, because they lose all rights to privacy. The living are left with the task of sorting through their belongings– creating order from chaos in the literal sense. My father wasn’t a hoarder in the sense that he could have been on a TLC show, but he didn’t like throwing things away. He was a saver. As a child, my parents’ basement was a goldmine of dusty porno mags and interesting junk, but as an adult it’s become another looming problem. I knew it would need to be reckoned with someday in its dusty totality; another lonely obligation for the only child. After my father’s death, I would come to spend my nights chipping away at it piece by piece. Dismantling the history we endured. 

Admittedly, a lot of what’s in the basement is my own and not terribly well kept. This is a shame. An unforgivable sin of the pop culture memorabilia collector. A lesson we thought we learned from hearing the horror stories of silver age comic book kids who trashed their million dollar collection when they decided to grow up. Who maybe still have a trampled copy of Fantastic Four #8 (1961) saved accidentally– saved incidentally, as a reminder of what could have been. A reminder of how their cherished memories of childhood transmogrified into a big time cash grab– one they regret not being able to partake in. They don’t miss the paper artifacts of their adolescence– the adolescence they grew up and moved on from– only the lost potential of profiting from their adolescence. These are the people who grew up to manage the Reagan 80s.

Only we didn’t learn from their mistakes. As teenagers, were weren’t careful to preserve everything we owned because we viewed our generation’s eventual relics as lesser than what came before, even when considering their future potential. We understood only the past as something that could hold value; as something that could hold meaning– that their adolescence was more important than what ours was destined to become. Our adolescent culture was destined to remain of lesser importance in perpetuity– the books were closed. A newer issue of Spider-Man #1 (1990) could never become as valuable as an old issue of The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (1963), even in sentimentality.

Our present was not as important as their past.

It’s difficult for a child to decide what to keep of a deceased parent’s belongings. You can’t keep everything, but throwing things away feels like little pieces of their death happening again and again– only, you’re the one doing it this time. You’re deciding. You’re severing what’s left of the relationship. You’re erasing them. 

A lot of what’s kept in the basement is from the life my parents had before I was born. My father’s “Salesman of the Year” awards won in succession during the late 70s– I never knew him to be a successful salesman. His motorcycle helmet from when he was a biker– he once biked across the entire country. His dismantled model airplanes from when he was an “aeromodeller.” Furniture he built from fucking lumber that I always assumed was store bought. All of these things that were important to him, that he was proud of, that I feel no personal connection with– at first blush all of it is garbage to me.

I never saw him fly a model airplane. I’d always known it as something he used to do before me, but didn’t do anymore after me– like everything else in his life. The basement is a dirty pile of shit because he gave up working on the house around the same time he gave up on everything else. You’ll know the time a homeowner has given up on their dreams by looking at when they stopped working on their home. It’s like counting the circles on a tree stump. The house became my father’s decaying castle. 

Maybe he tried to balance suburban life, having a family, and maintaining a career but alcoholism got the better of him. Alcoholism became his defining trait.

I never saw him fly a model airplane, but my mother was happy to share these stories after he died. These stories suddenly mattered again– these stories felt real to her again. These stories of the adventures they had together. The times he’d lose track of one of his planes and they’d go searching the countryside for it by motorcycle long into the night. Times in their apartment before they bought the house. Happy times. 

Times before me. Times before my mother’s cancer. Times before he couldn’t hold a job. Times before alcoholism became his defining trait. Times before me.

I have this reoccurring nightmare that I’m at my kitchen table, eating dinner with my parents in 1992. Like all dreams, the dream is ephemeral and surreal. I’m at once an adult and an adolescent; that part of adulthood that never quite leaves adolescence. My father is drunk– his face red, his eyes vacant. By the turn of the decade, the pieces of his personality that represented fatherhood had eroded into a mechanism necessary for his own survival. If he didn’t have a son to dominate and a wife to serve him, what did he have left?  

Our relationship deteriorated. He didn’t talk to me, he talked at me. He spent time ordering me around. He spent time criticizing me and giving awful, drunken advice; barking awful, drunken orders. Ghostbusters II was the only movie we’d see together for twenty-five years, and he was a movie guy.

By the turn of the decade alcoholism became his only trait. For his long stretches of unemployment, he’d drink all day. He wielded fatherhood like a blade to offset the shame he felt in allowing his life to fall apart. By this time my mother all but hated him. Their relationship unraveled with vicious immediacy and constant fighting; mean fighting; terrible fighting. There’s a particular terror in experiencing this alone; these things that no one else can ever know. 

My parents slept in the same bed, and we had dinner every weekday night at the kitchen table, although I had wished we didn’t. By the time my mother got home from work and had dinner ready, the sun had set and the sky was dark. My father would sit with us, hardly conscious– his face red, his eyes hateful. He would tell my mother her cooking was shit. That dinner was shit. He’d scrap the food off his plate with his utensils, hardly able to keep his head up. My mother would berate him, call him a useless drunk, tell him he’d be better off dead.

As the 1990s trudged forward with merciless persistence, this became all we had together. Like a reoccurring nightmare, this scene repeated every night of my adolescence. The same words were said in the same order– maybe only exaggerated as time went on, bordering parody like Bob Crane doing dinner theater. Every day I’d come home from school and between Disney Afternoons and Must See TV lineups, I’d watch my parents hate their lives over dinner. 

***

I couldn’t make sense of Ghostbusters II in 1989, specifically how it didn’t manage to exceed the original in every way. Confusion permeated my subconscious in nameless shadows. I didn’t have the language to explain my sadness.

Hollywood wasn’t supposed to let you down– I never experienced disappointment before. Hollywood movies were the cream of the crop; the best of the best. Hollywood movies were supposed to deliver in spades where maybe Saturday morning cartoons missed the mark. Once you realize no one ever takes a hit in G.I. Joe or that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reset after every episode like nothing happened to them at all– no memory; no scars… That Batman (1966) faces toothless peril at the end of the first part of every two-parter but always manages a supposedly impossible escape at the start of the second… you understand television to be a lesser medium.

But movies were the real deal. The Real Ghostbusters (1986) were a prima facie fraud– a watered down facsimile. The actual, real Ghostbusters were on the big screen. Ready to return to action in their second epic adventure. One that had silently promised to be bigger and better than the first. Bigger and better, as all things went in the Reagan 80s, and right at the tail end of the decade; what should have been the biggest and best. With the 1990s in horizon’s view, the nine-year-old brain could hardly fathom what incredible delights were in store… unfathomable, if only Ghostbusters II didn’t poke a hole in that logic– in ways I wasn’t ready to understand. In ways I couldn’t consciously acknowledge.

The world I was born into isn’t one that could disappoint– it wasn’t supposed to disappoint; it wasn’t made to disappoint– this is how a child understands the world around himself; the esoteric, hidden adult world. A child believes in nothing more than the functionality of that world. The idea that promises made are promises kept; the idea that adults will inherently do the right thing when given the chance. That the tiny glimpses captured of the complex system known as modern America– helmed by our nation’s proud, stoic grandfather– was something we could believe in; something we could depend on. Our parents existed as avatars of righteousness– their decisions were made with only our best interests in mind.  

Contemporary Hollywood promised topflight quality– this is how a boy born at the dawn of the decade understood the movie industry. When your favorite thing– your favorite character, TV show, or video game– got made into a movie, the memetic presumption made was that of elevation. When you saw “the movie” added as a tail-end differentiator to any product’s title, you knew for certain that whatever the thing was had achieved a degree of cultural significance far greater than anything without the prestigious designation. The existence of “the movie” legitimized a product in a way inaccessible by any other means.

Movies were serious business.

As it followed, if your favorite movie was big enough to warrant a sequel, that designation, in itself, legitimatized the movie above all others sequeless. Movie sequels were a big deal. Every kid knew the Star Wars (1977) trilogy was a big deal because it had three movies that told a single, epic story. If a kid’s favorite movie ended up with a “Part 2” attached to its title as a tail-end differentiator, there wasn’t a nine-year-old boy on the planet who wouldn’t be excited beyond the capacity for rational thought.

Yet I left the shopping mall multiplex that summer afternoon knowing I didn’t like what I had seen. Knowing in my heart that what I saw wasn’t good. The first Ghostbusters was about a shapeshifting god of destruction being summoned to New York City by an esoteric cultist architect who designed a skyscraper to function as an antenna to attract and concentrate spiritual energy and bring about the apocalypse. A fucking end of the world cult built into a slapstick comedy that culminates with a giant walking marshmallow– that the Ghostbusters shoot with lasers until it explodes.

With the image of Manhattan covered in melted marshmallow screen burned into my nine-year-old brain, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ghostbusters II. 

Ghostbusters II was surely going to be epic in ways I couldn’t begin to understand…  

Ghostbusters II is about a painting that tries to possess a baby. At the end of the movie, the Ghostbusters fight the painting. Not the world ending god of destruction at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper, they fight a fucking painting, in a museum, so that it doesn’t possess a baby. 

In Ghostbusters II, if you don’t care about the baby, the painting, or the same characters doing the same things, all of it feels hollow. Worse, the Ghostbusters’ proton packs are replaced with slime-filled Super Soakers to make the movie less violent and more kid friendly– something no kid asked for and no kid wanted. Also, the sign outside the firehouse is the movie’s logo: the cartoon ghost with the circle-backslash “no symbol” over it, holding out two fingers to signify Ghostbusters II. Why is this immersion breaking logo in the actual movie? What pandering, commercial horseshit. 

Although I couldn’t verbalize it at the time, Ghostbusters II hurt me in a way that I wasn’t ready for; Ghostbusters II hurt me in a way that I wasn’t going to forget. Ghostbusters II was my first experience with disappointment– profound disappointment. Ghostbusters II was the first time the world let me down. The first time I couldn’t rely on the myth of modern America: an overwhelmingly positive trajectory where good things only got better; where everything in life worked itself out for the best– where the future was something to anticipate and and embrace; a place of positivity; a place of hope. Ghostbusters II was first time the adult world had let me down. That you couldn’t count on the people in charge to do the right thing– they were human; they were weak; they were fallible. Ghostbusters II wasn’t there for me. Ghostbusters II betrayed me. 

***

People are sometimes more alive after they die, because part of the process of coming to terms with their death involves telling their stories. Death forces these memories out of the subconscious and into the forefront of your waking thoughts– into the forefront of your day, these memories now carry a sense of urgency; of necessity. Death is a séance; death is a conjurer. Death shapes and animates our memories– these monstrous emotions hiding in shadows– turning them into words and stories. Words and stories that hang in the air to be analyzed, and processed, and understood. Telling these stories helps make sense of death for those left living.

The man who set up my Nintendo Entertainment System and felt the same shock and awe while experiencing Super Mario Bros. (1985) for the first time was the same man too drunk to come to my first grade wrestling meet– I looked into the sea of parents, noticing only my mother and even then, I knew why… This same man built me a gorgeous red and yellow lemonade stand out of fucking lumber for my seventh birthday party yet never bothered to help me drag it to the curb and teach me to use it. He bought me a chemistry set for Christmas– his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry degree ready to pay off– and never helped me take it out of the box; the same for the woodworking kit he bought me the next year.

In our later years, he’d lament how I never managed to pick up any of his skills– his every day handyman, fix what’s broken kind of dad stuff. His electrician skills. His ability to open up the hood of a car and tinker around with the engine. If I were ever asked to help with these tasks as a kid, I’d stand around holding things while he’d sweat and curse. I never learned any of these things because he never taught me, and I didn’t care enough to ask. 

For a long time, the latter half of this equation would bother me. My father had his half-hearted attempts at fathering. He tried to be there. I wanted him to be there. He ultimately couldn’t will himself to a place where he could be there. For a long time, I would blame myself for not making more of an effort to conjure his parenting into existence. I could have asked him to help me use the lemonade stand, or the chemistry set, or to show me how to make a fucking bird house. I could have asked him how to fix a toilet or what the fuck he was doing under the hood of my mother’s buzzing ‘89 Corolla– what ended up as my first car. How to fix dry wall. How to do anything. I could have tried harder to spend time with him, even with his big, fat, red face; even if he was piss drunk at 1pm.

For a long time, I would think that I could have saved him if only I were different. These thoughts– Bruce Wayne’s intrusive interior monologue, a mystery even the world’s greatest detective couldn’t solve– would keep me up at night…

How many times would I have had to ask? How many times before I resented his alcoholism too much to bother asking?

A story my mother has come back to often was about my father growing up. My father had a difficult childhood. His father abused him. His mother never loved him, and she would tell him so both as a child and later as an adult. His parents would fight viciously in front of him and his sister– fights that would often end in rape. There were also things my mother wouldn’t tell me. Awful things. I’d never ask.  

When he was old enough they sent him to boarding school. They didn’t want him around. When he got back, he met my mother. They met at a wedding for mutual friends– he wouldn’t leave her alone until she shouted her phone number into his ear over the loud wedding band. She figured if he managed to remember it, she’d go on a date with him.

They married and lived together in a little apartment. Once they saved up enough money, they bought a house. My father was doing well then. He was sales manager in a “Fortune 200 company” (as per a copy of his resume I found in the basement). Drinking was probably considered part of the job, a delicate balance my father was able to temporarily strike. 

A year after I was born, my mother’s cancer diagnosis was too much for him to handle. His drinking went from excessive to out of control. He was afraid of losing his wife– an idea he couldn’t process. A idea that swirled around in his brain, undoubtedly causing feelings of confusion and betrayal. Feelings that he couldn’t quite verbalize.

She said a turning point between them was a time when he was too drunk to take her to her cancer treatment. She had to drive herself, she told me, stopping to throw up along the way.

Throughout my life, my mother would tell me these stories to remind me that my father wasn’t a bad person. Maybe she needed reminding too. That he wasn’t a bad person– that he just maybe didn’t always do the right thing… and as time went on, as the crushing weight of the nihilistic 90s descended upon our formerly idealistic nation; our never quite idealistic, but maybe just good enough little family, some things were lost for good.

Stories you can play through, and replay in your mind, on sleepless nights. Hoping just once to put them in the right words, said in the right order, for it to be satisfactory; for it to be good enough– maybe not the best ending, maybe not catching all the nasty Augers while saving Kelly and the girls, but just good enough to stop playing it over and over again; good enough to be done with it.  

***

I have this strange knack for tying commercial art to its year of release. Ask me the year of release for any movie sequel between 1980 and 2000 and I’ll nail it. Without Googling, I know Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is 1985, just one year after the original, for instance. I can do this trick with rock albums released during this time span as well, like White Zombie’s Astro Creep: 2000 (1995) or Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood (1989). I like tying things to their release year and understanding them in the proper context, yet I can never seem to remember that Rocky IV (1985) wasn’t a 1989 movie– everything about Rocky IV screams 1989.

The joke about Rocky IV is that it was the final word on communism as global force. Shortly after its release the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union was broken up and defeated, and the joke is that Rocky IV was so bright and so sharp that communism blew up because Rocky IV was so powerful.

Rocky manages this by defeating monster Soviet fighter Ivan Drago, in his home country of Russia, and in the process of doing so wins over the live crowd with his indomitable fighting spirit. The (formerly?) communist crowd cheers Rocky’s victory and chants his name. Balboa then gets on the microphone to acknowledge his new fans and praise them for their implicit acceptance of democracy and capitalism:

During this fight, I’ve seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that’s better than twenty million. I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change.

The Berlin wall fell in November of 1989. In my mind, Rocky IV was a late spring release that same calendar year. His defeat of Drago, and symbolic defeat of communism, carried such incredible, immediate urgency that it managed to not only be prescient of the Soviet Union’s fall but serve as catalyst. With such indomitable momentum, the wheels of history trudged forward powered by Rocky fucking Balboa.

But this wasn’t exactly how things played out– Rocky IV was released in 1985. Even if it actually influenced the fall of the Soviet Union, these things take time. 

Rocky IV contains not one, but two full fledged music video montages– “No Easy Way Out” and “Hearts on Fire.” The movie also features other extended scenes with entire songs: “Living in America” (featuring a choreographed sequence with James Brown and Apollo Creed) and “Burning Heart.” With so many songs, it feels as though the music is driving the movie; with two montages that function as music videos, it’s not hard to see how influential the success of MTV was on the making of Rocky IV. Again, this screams 1989 to me with the tropes of the MTV music video very well set in stone and part of the public lexicon by that point. However Stallone was, again, ahead of his time.

Yet I can’t escape the idea that Rocky IV should be a 1989 movie. It should be the final word from a flawless decade– the collapse of communism was very clearly the 1980’s season finale. The cool, MTV-powered Rocky IV punching the Berlin wall to pieces. Punching the Soviet Union to death and asserting bold American supremacy. That was how the 1990s deserved to begin. 

But that isn’t reality; that isn’t how things happened. Ghostbusters II was how the 1980s ended. Leaving a shopping mall multiplex feeling betrayed and confused, and as Rocky Balboa reached the highest of heights, as Reagan’s idealistic 80s turned nihilistic 90s, Stallone gave Rocky brain damage in Rocky V (1990).

With no higher height than ending the cold war through boxing, Stallone attempted to make Rocky V grittier and more realistic– a smaller movie with more personal stakes. Stallone likely saw this as a return to form, bringing the movie back to its roots (and even hired the director of the original Rocky, John G. Avildsen). Since Rocky IV was ostensibly Rocky Balboa saving the world and changing history, it left little else for the character to do short of fighting aliens or boxing the devil. It made sense for Stallone to take Rocky back to his Earthy, Philadelphian roots. A smaller story for Rocky made sense on paper.

Rocky V goes like this:   

After Rocky returns from Russia battered and fatigued and is diagnosed with brain damage, he’s forced to retire. Along the way, Paulie was (for some reason) in charge of the Balboa estate and (somehow) loses all of Rocky’s money– the Balboa’s are back to being poor, just like the first movie. Rocky decides to re-open Mickey’s gym and discovers heavyweight prospect Tommy Gunn. Balboa rediscovers his passion for boxing by training Gunn. Along the way, Gunn is seduced by Don King-copycat, boxing promoter George Washington Duke who convinces Gunn that he needs to fight Rocky. More things happen, and then Rocky and Tommy Gunn have a street fight. Rocky wins and the movie ends.    

Rocky V (1990) was a critical and commercial failure. People didn’t want a gritty and down-to-Earth Rocky movie, but the emerging 90s demanded it– Rocky IV’s sensibilities were already ostentatious to the average American even if they didn’t know it. With the collapse of the Soviet Union feeling like old news, and the perception of American exceptionalism at a place between a smug assumption and a total afterthought, the culture shifted from aspirational to self-critique. Was American life as rosy as we liked to think? 

George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989– Ronald Reagan, he was not. While Bush dominated the ‘88 election over helmet wearing idiot Michael Dukakis, Reagan was an impossible act to follow. Bush lacked Reagan’s impeccable charisma; Reagan’s toasty, crocheted blanket by the fireplace with hot cocoa and melty s’mores-esque warmth; Reagan’s firm and believable sense of command: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” 

Bush could never have romanticized government funded space exploration as beautifully as slipping the surly bonds of Earth and touching the face of God– not Bush, no way. While Saturday Night Live (1975- ) had several actors parody Reagan, none of them were immediately ironicized like Dana Carvey’s portrayal of George Bush. It was funny, and it resonated, because everyone knew George Bush was a joke. George Bush was the Ghostbusters 2 of presidents.

Bush knew he had a near-Herculean task ahead– that it was his job to not only continue the trajectory that Reagan had set in motion but attempt new heights for a new decade. Like Stallone with Rocky V, Bush wanted to simultaneously look back on what made the Reagan 80s great, with a back-to-basics return to form, while looking ahead to forge new ground and define what a 1990’s America could be. Bush called for social reformation– a cultural return to form focused on “family values,” while simultaneously forging forward with a brand new, post-cold war, world conquering patriotism.

This twofold game plan failed miserably for single-term President George Bush. Operation Desert Storm (1991) was a war that no one asked for nor understood; whose goal and purpose was only vaguely clear. While the country’s mass media attempted blunt force patriotism– you will follow this war; you will Support Our Troops– the sentiment was hardly grass roots. It certainly did nothing positive for the public image of the Bush administration.

The Gulf War was just another thing on TV, and TV was quickly changing. Cable television was becoming ubiquitous. You were the weird kid at school if you didn’t at least have basic cable– thirty channels including MTV and VH1 (Disney and Playboy were extra). The newfound normalization of cable television as an expected facet of middle class American life meant networks now had to compete with cable television shows. Cable television shows had slightly less restrictive content. Cable television could get away with programming “specifically designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17,” according to TV Parental Guidelines (1997), when compared to their network counterparts… which meant the networks had to kick things up a notch if they didn’t want to be replaced.

The 1980s were a decade of linearity– where what started off as big only got bigger. If everything became more in the most literal sense, the 1990s were left little room to continue this expansion so gears had to be shifted. In the 90s everything became more explicit. The 90s were a decade of boundary pushing: a decade where media content was darker; more sexual; more grotesque. If network TV was tasked with competing against less restrictive cable television programming, things had to become more vulgar and the fledgling FOX network set its mission statement to be cable-like content on broadcast television. 

FOX became vulgarity TV.

Married… with Children (1987) was FOX’s answer to cable– the show pushed established boundaries in both content and message. Married…with Children debuted at the tail end of the Reagan administration, and its grim thematics would shape media representations of the American family from that point forward. 

Married… with Children took a decisively different tone from the other competing network family sitcoms. While the Seaver parents had a handful of rambunctious but good natured, all American kids who maybe got in a spot of trouble during any given episode’s twenty-three minute run time, it was the wisdom of Mike and the heart of Maggie who reeled them in by the end… and we all grew a little bit from their lessons even if getting there was painful. Family Ties (1982-1989) featured hippy parents who somehow ended up with a republican teenage son! They’d bicker but they’d end up getting along in the end, each learning from the other. In Diff’rent Strokes (1978-1986), rich, white Mr. Drummond learned to be poor and black from his two adopted sons who, in turn, learned to be rich and white. The hallmark of the 1980’s network sitcom was good natured learning.

Married…with Children featured no such learning. Married…with Children wasn’t about the joys of middle class American family life– that for the average American man, having a wife, two kids, and a house with a two car garage was a commendable victory, no. Married…with Children was about misery; Married…with Children was about despair. Misery was the joke in Married…with Children, played again and again, in different wording that was arranged and rearranged in all different ways, with all different situations and set-ups, but would always circle back to the same core punchline: Al Bundy’s overt despair. 

Al Bundy was miserable with his family and his life. Housewife Peggy didn’t so much hate her husband but was constantly disappointed in his misery. Promiscuous daughter Kelly was an idiot. Loser son Bud was sexually unsuccessful. Al’s greatest accomplishment was in high school football, and he believes his life has gone downhill ever since. 

If the viewer had aspirations for their own marriage and children watching Married…with Children must have made them feel like unambitious dweebs. If the viewer was already married, with children, and took pride in this quiet, unremarkable accomplishment, watching Married…with Children must have made them feel like they were losers. Watching Married…with Children was demoralizing and the middle ground between aspiring family man and proud patriarch is where the show did the most damage. Married…with Children most affected the viewer who could relate.

It wasn’t difficult for the average man to relate to Al Bundy– marriage isn’t meant to be easy. It’s easy to get people to ruminate on the negatives of marriage. It’s easy to relate to Al Bundy, with his slut daughter and loser son. Annoying wife who wasn’t as hot as Al Bundy thought he deserved when he looked in the mirror and still saw the high school football hero– lamenting  having missed the opportunities he felt entitled to. It’s easy for Al Bundy to get lost in his collection of porno magazines or to sneak off to the local strip club after work to piss money away at a fantasy life he could pretend was his– a life he failed to realize either by choice, circumstance, or a genuine lack of potential. 

His own quiet, unremarkable life– a house with a two car fucking garage– wasn’t good enough for Al Bundy. Al Bundy was the anti-Rocky Balboa. 

It was easy for Al Bundy to wish away his family with every drink.

***

People are sometimes more alive after they die because they become your responsibility– their ghost lingers and haunts; taunting from a distance and perpetually out of reach. Bruce Wayne delivering endless soliloquies, long into the night, at two static headstones. There is no closing argument from the defendant, only rooms full of garbage to sort through from someone who maybe started their prolonged death about when you entered the story– my present was never as important as his past.

He could have tried harder, but he didn’t. I couldn’t have saved him, and I shouldn’t feel like I should have had to. 

There are no answers to be had and there never were going to be– no cheat codes or answer keys– those long nights spent pouring over the details were a waste. Even if you come close to putting the whole thing together, you end up stuck with a few extra pieces that don’t fit. That aren’t going to fit. It’s not meant to make sense, and part of coming to terms is understanding that; accepting that.

Why did he give up on everything? Very slowly at first and then all at once. Why did he prefer drinking to having a family? Why did he not get tough when things got hard– Rocky fucking Balboa licking his wounds while planning his come back. Where was his eye of the tiger? Why did he settle for letting everything around him decay? 

Why wasn’t a quiet, unremarkable life one worth fighting for?

Sometimes the only answer you can be sure of is what is– this is what happened, and there are no further answers to be found. No more questions, your honor. Maybe no further answers need finding. Maybe you already know the truth and the best thing is to just let it be.

Even if things could have been different, they weren’t. 

He did the best he could. 

Sometimes things are simply what they are.

***

A few weeks after leaving the multiplex feeling confused and betrayed, I found myself at Ghostbusters II again, this time with my friend Teddy. He hadn’t seen it yet. I tried to warn him– to tell him my story; to brace him for disappointment– but there’s just no telling a nine year old not to see Ghostbusters II. Movie sequels were a big deal.

So I endured it once more, and on second viewing it wasn’t any better– if anything, more flaws were revealed. Louis Tully becoming the fifth Ghostbuster– even if only temporarily; even if only unofficially; even if only spiritually– felt wrong. The Ghostbusters (somehow) making the Statue of Liberty come to life and walk across Manhattan, controlled by way of an NES Advantage joystick (somehow), felt wrong.

All of it felt wrong and there was nothing I could do about it. The world can be dark and disappointing. Adults can let you down. Maybe what’s best is to accept that sometimes things are simply what they are.

After the movie, on the walk out of the shopping mall multiplex to his mom’s old beater, Teddy told me what he thought of Ghostbusters II, “you were right,” he said, “that sucked. Let’s go play Contra.”

And we did.  

Follow me on Twitter @ KillToParty

Support KTP through my Amazon link

WELCOME TO HELL