The American Dream Across Texts: Rocky and Sugar

 The end of Sugar comes abruptly and almost shockingly. The story the viewer assumes is going to unfold is cut short by the exact opposite of what they expected. Sugar runs away from his team and he doesn’t become a star. His girlfriend won’t acknowledge his calls and his mother is angry that he ‘quit’ baseball. Yet despite all of this in the last shot of the movie Sugar is happy.

From a technical standpoint the film expresses Sugar’s emotion in the final shot through acting and shot composition. Throughout the entire film, Sugar is often the only thing that is clear in his environment. Noise is distant and distorted, vision is blurred, and he often stumbles through the shot as if he has no idea what’s going on around him which is amplified by the hand camera used to record those shots that provides a shaky and surreal feeling further removing the viewer from the world around Sugar. At the end of the movie though Sugar is at ease, he smiles, and he fits into his team and the shot with a certain sense of belonging.

I think Sugar does succeed though in the broader sense of the American Dream. He took his chance at becoming a professional player and it wasn’t for him. He still provides for his family back at home doing something he loves in a pick up league surrounded by his friends.  Parallel to Rocky, who showed how the American Dream can manifest in success, Sugar shows how the American dream can end in mediocrity. It is important to emphasize that Sugar hasn’t failed to live up to the American Dream, despite not fitting perfectly into a fairytale and clawing his way up to the big leagues. He lives a life that he enjoys, works a craft, and still sends money home to his family.

Rocky and Sugar come in fairly sharp contrast to each other in nearly every way. Rocky is portrayed as a past-his-prime genius who never pushed his talent to become the best while Sugar is a mediocre young pitcher who struggles under pressure. Economically they are similar, both earning less than comfortable amounts but both manage to feed themselves and their family. However, Rocky doesn’t, and has never, seen his sport as anything more than a hobby, while Sugar has worked his entire life in pursuit of playing professional baseball.  This is important because it puts their goals into perspective. When Sugar fails, he resorts to any means possible to improve, often getting uncontrollably angry at his performance. What matters to Sugar is winning, climbing to higher leagues to earn more money. Rocky went into his fight with Apollo Creed expecting to lose but wanting to go the distance to prove to himself he was worth something. He didn’t fight for the money, and in the movie how much he will earn is mentioned sparingly.