I was sick the other day, and so in the middle of the afternoon found myself under a pile of blankets, drinking decaf and watching Rocky. The broadcast was intermitted by commentators – a high-pitched brunette and two dudes who talked loosely about the movie while playing poker – for reasons never explained but nonetheless obvious. Being a long-time fan of Rocky (ie, a hetero-normative male who grew up loving sports and with a youth pastor whose favorite analogous reference to the love of Jesus Christ was the bull-headed persistence of Rocky Balboa during his training) I knew some things about the film. i knew that one of the best, most fiery and true and romantically charged exchanges of all time went like this.
[Adrian is trying to get to Rocky in the ring]
Rocky: Adrian!
Adrian: Rocky!
Rocky: Adrian!
Adrian: Rocky!
Rocky: Adrian.
Adrian: Rocky.
Also I knew that Sylvester Stallone had shot the film on a super-constricted budget over a period of 28 days. But the card-playing cable hosts did impart something new to me: Stallone wrote the Rocky screenplay in three days. Inspired by having watched Ali beat the snot out of some little-known white dude, he sat down and in three days had a completed script. The idea of writing at that pace did not take my breath away. What came closer to doing so, however, was the thought of re-imagining a here-and-gone event, a transitory happening in the career of one of the world’s least definable athletes, and creating something that entirely new. And, in the pantheon of film, utterly lasting. After Rocky I had a nap, switched directions on the couch, and read Once in Europa. My mind, metaphorically prone as it is, soon drew on two things: holding John Berger’s book up against the three days that yielded Rocky, I realized it was pretty impossible to accurately imagine the pace at which Berger wrote, but it felt like he got maybe two sentences per week, by which I mean that the truths his work elucidate seem so big that they’d only come sufficiently into focus for the eye of a guy who’d honed his attentiveness and learned extraordinary patience, like a Buddhist monk; and, second, it struck me that Stallone’s shift of focus from Apollo Creed (the character parallel to Ali) to the shambled life of the underdog, with his reclusive girlfriend and her alcoholic brother, is near-exactly the kind of storyline Berger would be drawn to. This turned out to be a fun line of thought, for how different would the story of Rocky Balboa look if relayed to us by John Berger, if he’d spent a summer sleeping on the matted trundle bed of Rocky’s couch, working 12-hour shifts flaying beef at the processing plant where Balboa came to train and punch the hanging carcasses?
He was standing motionless in the garden in front of his house. Across his body he was holding a spade. He had been like that for ten minutes. He was looking at the earth just ahead of his boots. Not a grain of soil stirred. [from The Accordion Player]
This passage is evocative in the most patient of ways: a long shot setting up the scene, with a stillness that promises the movement to come. And it captures something that Berger’s work fairly demands of the reader. A willing patience.
It seems the overall themes of Berger’s writing in the first two parts of his trilogy come gradually but more comprehensively into focus of the course of Once in Europa. And there is at least one noteworthy thematic parallel to the story of Rocky Balboa, for that movie defined American movie-land’s fixation with the underdog. Berger portrays so acutely the story of the small town, the village and its decline, the gradual breaking apart of traditions – both holy and habitual – and within that picture the capacity, over just a few generations, to succumb to the pressures of a modern life, and in doing so yield the immensely more personal smallness of the old village world for the bigger fault lines of the new.
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