If you just want to hear how compelling it is to watch Mickey Rourke come roaring back, or about the meat metaphors or play with real vs. illusion both in the ring and on the screen, or the high-spirited camaraderie amongst elder statesman The Ram and his fellow wrestlers, this is not the post for you.
All that is true but what I'm interested in Aronofsky's vision, since he's pretty successfully staked out a decidedly off-Hollywood position with what appears to be total creative control over artfully assaultive, the only big-time purveyor of the Antonin Artaud Theatre O' Cruelty-style movies. Is there a more ambitious "New York" voice in the movies right now?
If you've ridden the trainwreck of lives in Requiem for a Dream, where Aronofsky honed his capacity to create both dread and imagery even more scarring than you thought you'd imagined, and now witnessed Randy "The Ram" Robinson's bad steroid habit, you know that Aronofsky creates Hell on Earth. Imagine "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" where instead of killing an albatross the protagonist is cursed by his youthful success in the ring, but he never had the smarts to plan for anything other than what happened in the ring, no future.
It's impossible to adequately analyze the new movie without talking about the ending, so here's the
SPOILER SPACE
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The Wrestler has an open ending, but it's open in the way that the final scene of The Sopranos is open, i.e. it's implied that we're watching the final moments in the main character's life and that the next frame, the one a moment after the movie just ended, is that character's death.*
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It all started falling into place in the last act when Robinson screws up with his daughter. The rule of thumb is that whichever character goes through the biggest chance is your main character, but that if it's proven that a character ultimately can't change, then he or she dies, usually to end the movie. And, if nothing else, Ram's musical taste indicates that he hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.
This isn't an afterschool special about a man's redemption. It's about a guy who realizes there's no other place for him than in the ring, and that it makes sense to play there until he dies there. We're watching a pessimistic character study of a man's final days. He knows when he walks in, when he walks away from Marissa Tomei that he's not coming back to her world again. We know when he falters twice after dropping the Ayatollah.
And the final shot, projecting himself over our heads, is literally a swan dive. From his final monologue tribute to his audience it's a swan song.
So why go on this death trip? Does Aronofsky actually have something to say with it, and can we ask with the poledancing scenes as well?
The movie is a fable. It's a cautionary fable about how any of us can get caught short-sighted, but especially if we're all about the body, all about the adulation. If it's too late when we try to start thinking, chastised, beyond ourselves.
But it's particularly arresting at this moment of cascading unemployment, where the American Dream is turning into the American Hell-on-Earth for so many people. Which is interesting within the context of the patriotism of the wrestlers, from the American flag hung over Randy's trailer home bed to the wrestling ring righting of the 80's U.S. vs. Iraq conflict.
Whether or not Aronofsky is deliberately making a statement or just providing a credibly damning political context, it's a world where the simple may be physically powerful, but the simple have been duped. They've believed the hype, about what's valuable and about what's true. They willingly, joyfully, for profit participate in the denigration of the latter. It's entertaining. It's good for the ego as long as you can keep it going.
And it's the very end of the American Century.
1 comment:
Two words: Staple Gun.
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