We’ve reached the VHS years.
There is a specific reason for which young Matt identified so hard with Rocky IV. That would be Rocky’s training montage in wintery Russia. I don’t particularly like boxing movies (outside of maybe Snake Eyes and Ali), but I watched Rocky IV countless times as a kid. Why? It snows a ton in the mountains and our household had a wood stove as our primary heating source, so the 7+ months of West Virginia cold weather required a neverending supply of split firewood, and many of my childhood memories are tied to winter. And I have distinct memories of pretending I was Rocky when I’d be splitting firewood or farting around in the snow, just because of that dumb training montage.
(John Matrix in Commando was another wood-splitting idol.)
But we split wood so often, and I thought about that Rocky scene so much, that now when I think about the movie, I think about woodsmoke and that cold garage with the gouges in the concrete from where the splitting maul would miss the wood. Those gouges are almost certainly still there, but the wood stove has long been replaced.
I don’t know how familiar you are with wood-burning fires. I’d imagine that most people have been near a campfire, and even if not, it is easy to conceptualize: you find some dry wood and pile it up and light it, and then you add another log to it every so often until everyone is asleep or has left.
Using this as the way that you heat your house requires a little more commitment. To start, the fire burns nonstop, day and night, for most of the year. If the fire goes out, your pipes might freeze. Second, that means it is burning even while you are at work or the movies or whatever, so there’s an ever-present risk of disaster. Third, a stove sufficient to heat a house is very big and uses radiant heat, so it is extremely hot up close but the heat fades rapidly even a few rooms over. Fourth, it emits a very dry heat, so the wintertime means dry skin, chapped lips, and bloody noses. Fifth, everyone and their clothing smells like wood smoke all of the time. Sixth, such a stove creates a massive amount of ashes that you have to remove once it is full (again, risk of disaster). And seventh, those ashes come from something, and that something, my friend, is a shitload of firewood.
This brings us to the eighth way that a wood-burning home stove differs from a campfire: one must spend the warm months accumulating firewood for the colder months. For a weekend at a campsite, you pay twenty bucks to the campground owner and they swing by on a Gator and drop off a few cords of split wood. For a home stove, and especially one in a working-class home, one must manually accumulate a whole garage full of firewood, which means trips into the woods to locate appropriate fallen wood. Then you saw the wood into pieces short enough to fit into the stove. Then you haul them home. Then you stack them. Then you split enough for a few days’ use, and stack those. Then you burn them, and split more, and stack more, and burn more, and split more, and—
So this is why I liked Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV. The other reasons? His black Lambo, the soundtrack, and that beautiful 90-minute runtime. Who has time for a longer movie: there’s wood to be split!
Other 1985 candidates (What a good year!): Witness; A Chorus Line; The Man with One Red Shoe; Brazil; Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome; To Live and Die in LA; Fright Night; Back to the Future; The Jewel of the Nile; The Goonies; Spies Like Us; Clue; Commando; Fletch; National Lampoon’s European Vacation; Pale Rider; Police Story; Silverado; Teen Wolf; A View to a Kill; The Man with One Red Shoe
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.