“I really want to write Mr. Stallone a letter and tell him how much I love his movie,” says Deb Sokolow. But, “it’s really Rocky I love. It’s not Sylvester Stallone.”
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When Sokolow, a graduate student in fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute, sat down in early September to watch a videotape of Rocky–one of her favorite movies–she wasn’t planning on turning it into an art project. But after a few viewings she says she “fell in love with the characters” and became obsessed with wanting to understand what they were thinking. She studied the film daily for a month and a half, taking copious notes on the plot, and last week she installed a detailed five-by-nine-foot diagram titled Rocky and Adrian (and Me) at SAIC’s Gallery 2. The piece analyzes–through circles, boxes, arrows, charts, and tables–the love story of small-time boxer Rocky Balboa and Adrian, the shy pet-shop clerk played by Talia Shire. It includes an 18-scene flowchart displaying the “Time and Location Sequence for Rocky and Adrian’s Burgeoning Love,” with color-coded graphs of the characters’ “comfort levels” (Rocky in red, Adrian in aqua), a “Rocky and Adrian Table of Dissimilarities,” pie charts illustrating “Rocky’s mind space” and “Adrian’s mind space,” and an “Index of Rocky’s Key Phrases for Seducing Adrian.” In a section titled “Rocky’s Love Philosophy” Sokolow quotes some of Stallone’s dialogue from the film: “She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps. I don’t know.”
Sokolow’s documentary interest in interpersonal dynamics isn’t just limited to fiction and films. She says she’s a compulsive voyeur–keeping notebooks full of conversations she overhears on the el and in public bathrooms. “So much of the time I feel like I’m in a movie,” she says. Sometimes on the bus she imagines she’s on her way to visit a character she feels she knows from a film. “I just picture myself being added to the story.” With Rocky and Adrian (and Me), she fulfills this fantasy by inserting a few tangents and subplots starring herself into the schematic. The branching plots are outlined in boxes of text, with explanations like “I don’t give a better rubdown but Rocky likes me more than Adrian,” “I need to make Rocky think that Adrian’s a whore,” and “Adrian’s not going to like that.”
