Tommy Gunn (Tommy Machine): The apprentice who traded his mentor for a promoter and a belt

On the night he wins the heavyweight title in Rocky V (John G. Avildsen, 1990), Tommy Gunn knocks out Union Cane in the first round and storms out of the press conference. The reporters do not ask him about the fight but about Rocky Balboa: to them he is a paper champion, because he has never beaten the man who taught him. Tommy explodes. He has won the damn title, he shouts, and they think he is a bum. Beside him, George Washington Duke, the promoter who lured him away from Rocky with cars, money and a title shot, gives him the recipe: he must challenge Balboa and, if Balboa refuses, insult him, dog him, humiliate him, do whatever it takes to get him into the ring. That is how Tommy ends up in the bar in Rocky’s neighborhood, with Duke and a live television crew, and the challenge ends in a fight in the middle of the street that Rocky wins. The kid from Oklahoma who had turned up with nothing at Mickey’s old gym, whom Rocky took in and trained after coming back from the Soviet Union brain-damaged and broke, reached the goal before earning the recognition he expected it to bring. Robert K. Merton’s strain theory has a name for that way of arriving: innovation.

// The theoryGoals and means

In “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938), Robert K. Merton adapted Durkheim’s concept of anomie to American society. His thesis is that American culture promises success to everyone, the so-called American dream, but the social structure distributes unequally the legitimate means to achieve it: education, connections, money. That gap generates strain, and people respond in five ways: conformity, accepting goals and means; innovation, accepting the goal but using illegitimate means; ritualism, giving up the goal but following the rules; retreatism, abandoning both; and rebellion, replacing them with others.

// The subjectA kid in a hurry

Tommy is not a classic villain. He is a young man of humble origins who sees boxing as the only way out, and Rocky as the father he never had. His betrayal springs from impatience and insecurity: he needs recognition, and Duke gives him the recognition Rocky made him wait for. But the title does not bring him what he was looking for, because the public does not accept him. His final fight with Rocky is not for money or the belt but to prove he is somebody. The film presents him as a warning about what ambition without roots does to a person.

The street fight has a detail that lights up the whole shortcut. Tommy starts by knocking Paulie, Rocky’s brother-in-law, to the ground, and Rocky finally agrees to fight. When Tommy goes down for the first time, Duke rushes to stop everything: Tommy Gunn, he shouts, only fights in the ring. The promoter who had told him to humiliate Rocky now wants to protect his investment, and that line sums up the deal: the title, the cars and the contract came with an owner. At the end, when Duke threatens to sue him, Rocky knocks him onto the bonnet of a car and asks what he plans to sue him for. Nor is what the film shows through Tommy the material deprivation Merton had in mind, because by the end of the story Tommy is rich. It is another kind of strain: the distance between the success the culture promises and the respect that is supposed to come with it. Tommy has the belt and lacks the respect. Robert Agnew, who in 1992 widened strain theory to take in humiliation and the loss of what one values, would find a better example in that press conference than in any robbery.

// The crackNot everyone in a hurry offends

Merton’s theory explains Tommy’s ambition well, but it has a well-known limit: it does not say why, among all the people who suffer the same strain, some choose innovation and others conformity. Rocky himself came from the same poor neighborhood with the same ambition, and chose another path.

Moreover, Tommy does not commit a crime in the strict sense until the street fight, which is more a brawl than a crime. What he shows is a form of moral deviance, the betrayal of someone who helped him, more than criminal deviance. Merton had property crime in mind; applying his theory to disloyalty requires stretching it.