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Redundancy and Ageing: Sylvester Stallone’s Enduring Action Star Image

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Lasting Screen Stars

Abstract

Donnar explores the action star image of Sylvester Stallone across five decades. Scholarly focus on Stallone’s ‘hard-bodied’ ‘muscularity’ underestimate the persistent importance of redundancy and ageing throughout his career, particularly since his breakthrough role in Rocky. Stallone’s action star persona is chiefly defined by his characters’ perceived cultural, economic, and professional redundancy, and its longevity lies in his repeated identification with downtrodden white masculinities. Ageing is a similarly under-theorised feature of Stallone’s star image, from the first Rocky to recent franchise revivals of Rocky and Rambo and The Expendables series. Donnar concludes Stallone’s comeback is again associated with vulnerable, ageing white masculinities and nostalgia for American cultural, economic, and political certitude and ascendance following the ‘war on terror’ and the global financial crisis.

Thank you to Chris Holmlund for early conversations and encouragement in the formation of the essay.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Holmlund notes the complexity of Stallone’s demarcation as ‘white’, with Tasker (2014, p. 250) arguing that Rocky’s status as an Everyman outsider whose struggles, ‘suggesting tropes of self-invention in the context of American mythology’, establish the Italian American as representing the nation, well before the Cold War conceit of Rocky IV (1985). The equation of Stallone’s iconic characters with the nation and their struggles with traditional white masculinity marks another fundamental aspect of his star image. It is likewise evident in the characterisations of the oft-abandoned lone warrior, John Rambo, who is otherwise attributed mixed ‘Indian’ German heritage.

  2. 2.

    For example, the third instalment of The Expendables more directly engages with elegy and loss, with the shooting of one Expendable compelling Barney to dismiss the rest, fearful (and hoping to avert the inevitability) that they will meet the same fatal end as preceding members.

  3. 3.

    Boyle and Brayton (2012; see also Tasker, 2014) likewise explore the first Expendables in relation to notions of ‘expendability’ in post-recession America.

  4. 4.

    This reading of Stallone’s revival has admittedly been encouraged by Stallone’s repeated comparison of Rocky’s life with his own age and desire to remain relevant, observed in Gates (2010) and Ramaeker (2014).

  5. 5.

    Holmlund notes that Rocky also thematises maturing emotionally, or ‘growing up’, especially in relation to his courtship of his later wife.

  6. 6.

    It is also evident in his franchise revivals of Rocky and Rambo. However, outside the franchise revivals, which profit on the accumulated weight of their history, only Stallone’s multi-generational, all-star collective, The Expendables, have succeeded, with Bullet to the Head (2012), Grudge Match (2013) with Robert De Niro, and Escape Plan (2013), with Arnold Schwarzenegger, failing commercially and critically.

  7. 7.

    Ramaeker (2014, p. 49) even identifies this shift in the use of more dispersed cross-cutting in the climactic battle in Rambo (2008), positioning the aged Rambo as one amongst a team of mercenaries rather than a lone warrior.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, UK

    Glen Donnar

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  1. Glen Donnar
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Languages, Linguistics and Fil, Queen Mary University of London, LONDON, United Kingdom

    Lucy Bolton

  2. Queen Mary University of London, School of Languages, Linguistics & Film, United Kingdom

    Julie Lobalzo Wright

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© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

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Donnar, G. (2016). Redundancy and Ageing: Sylvester Stallone’s Enduring Action Star Image. In: Bolton, L., Wright, J. (eds) Lasting Screen Stars. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40733-7_18

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