Hybridized and Hyphenated Ethnic American Identity in Rocky IV : The Ordinary Whiteness of the American Action Hero in Reagan-Era Cinema.

The article analyzes the 1985 film *Rocky IV* as a cultural text that redefines American whiteness by presenting the protagonist, Rocky Balboa, an Italian American, as an ethnic white patriarch embodying hegemonic white masculinity during the Reagan era and Cold War. It situates the film within a neoconservative wave of anti-communist cinema that emphasizes American individualism and racial hierarchy by contrasting Rocky’s “ordinary whiteness” with the antagonist Ivan Drago’s “extreme whiteness,” coded with Aryan and Soviet symbolism. The film’s narrative and visual strategies reinforce Rocky’s hybrid ethnic identity as integral to his role as a family man and national hero, while maintaining normative hetero-patriarchal and racial social orders. Ultimately, *Rocky IV* exemplifies late-twentieth-century Hollywood’s recasting of white American identity as ethnically plural yet still invested in white male supremacy amid Cold War political tensions.