Hit me baby one more time

Rating: Null/10 (30 March 2011)

"To know a social class or even a portion of a social class is not simply a matter of rubbing shoulders with its members, or getting down pat all their mannerisms and language. It has something to do also with understanding the class as an objective historical factor, a phenomenon that goes beyond the level of individual consciousness and self-awareness." - Joanne Laurier
David O. Russell's "The Fighter" takes all the boxing tropes from 1950s ring flicks and pushes them to more frenetic extremes, the family drama harsher, the grit grittier, the swearing louder and so forth. But it's all canned conflict, Russell, like Darren Aronofsky did recently with "The Wrestler", looking to get his career back on track with some audience/critic/studio pandering. See, "The Fighter" says, I can make crowd pleasing adult movies. But in Hollywood, "adult" is often code for fairy tales with R ratings.
Like "The Wrestler", "The Fighter" strives for a certain 1970's grittiness. But it's a overly manicured form of neo-realism, plastic and self-conscious. Russell's white trash characters are less "real people" than knowing copies. Though virtually his entire cast rings false, actor Christian Bale is the worst culprit. Yes he's playing a brain damaged crack addict, but Bale's manic look-at-me performance is nevertheless all surfaces and too little depth. When De Niro parroted La Motta parroting Brando in "Raging Bull", he still came across as a character. Here, Bale's parroting De Niro parroting La Motta parroting Brando parroting Terry Malloy. The result is less a character than a self-reflexive Polaroid, flapping in the wind.
The film's boxing sequences are themselves shot on video, epitomising the film's strange relationship with documentary realism. When Scorsese inserted faux family videos into "Raging Bull" you believed it. Three decades later, similar tactics have an odd awkwardness. Cinema verite once attempted to simulate reality. Now directors attempt to simulate cinema verite. The world too mediated, ground zero "realism" seems almost impossible to convincingly convey. Or maybe it no longer exists. Strangely, actor Mark Wahlberg, a born again Christian with newfound humility/devotion (he was once a street thug), is the only actor who comes across as a real person rather than a replicated image. The film's best moments involve him.
The "boxing genre" is largely a blue-collar world, so most of these films unconsciously say something about the American working class. Here the film aligns media domination and early 1990s techno-capitalism with both a culture of addiction and the corpse-like decomposition of the American Dream. For all its sexy style and Method pyrotechnics, something like "Raging Bull" was all hot air, masochism collapsing into a kind of Catholic guilt, each fight a station of the cross, each blow a desire for penance. But Russell's film, like Aronofsky's, is about a much larger assault on the body. Here, each of its two brothers (Mickey and Dicky) embodies a different fighting style. Dicky is feral, fast moving, flexible, whilst an unsuccessful Mickey is firmly planted, rooted, always entrenched. Now anachronistic, Mickey's a post industrial man being down sized and replaced by foreign strangers with small fingers and faster hands. In a way, he embodies what Gilles Deleuze calls the "disciplinary society", a cultural model which, like Mickey's dilapidating home town (Lowell, the birthplace of industrial America), can't seem to cope with the 21st century. The boxing ring is itself nothing but a curriculum vitae, an arena to showcase your skill sets.
The film ends with Mickey "retraining" for this new world, his manhood/masculinity reprogrammed and reconstituted. After cutting ties with his brother and his selfish, wholly dysfunctional extended family, he eventually becomes a freak like them. Final image: a VHS shot (and then a VHS shot of the VHS shot) of Mickey and Dicky side by side, equally flat, one brother a nut case, the other now on his way to becoming one.
Eventually Bale's super self-conscious performance unintentionally begins to work as subtext. Bale's identity is unstable, depth-less and thoroughly postmodern. Whalberg, meanwhile, is a devout Christian and supremely (and naively) self assured in what and who he is. What this new wave of modern "boxing films" seems to unconsciously stress is not the physical damage induced by fists on flesh, the seeping of blood or the swelling of faces, but a kind of cruel alienation which the boxer must adopt if he is to triumph; to win you must sell yourself, stop being yourself, change who you are and acknowledge, indeed, that there is no self; you do not belong to "you". And this triumph is always hollow. Rocky was reborn a man, a hero, when he took down Apollo Creed, but Mickey and Randy the Ram become flat images, selling their new bodies to the media-space and then discarded.
Incidentally, this was a work for hire for director David O. Russell. The project's real auteur is Mark Wahlberg. Aronofsky himself rejected the script in favour for directing "The Wrestler".
7/10 – Like watching every boxing cliché spat out of a blender and then steamrolled flat.