Elephant Man

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 2010)

"In the 'eroticised' body, it is the social function of exchange which predominates. The erotic is never in desire, but in signs." - Jean Baudrillard
"90s sucked." – The Ram
"The Wrestler" is a generic but somewhat affecting sports flick about a washed up wrestler who returns to the ring. What's most interesting about the film, though, are the parallels director Darren Aronofsky draws between wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson and Cassidy, the ageing stripper he's infatuated with.
Both Randy and Cassidy exploit flesh; he exploits his body and various violent impulses in order to make his living as a wrestler, she exploits her body and various sexual impulses in order to make her living as a stripper. Randy is glorified (or glorifies himself) as the masculine ideal in his profession and Cassidy is glorified (or glorifies herself) as the feminine ideal in her profession, both characters spending inordinate amounts of time "maintaining" their appearances (Randy is always shaving his chest and armpits, dying his hair etc).
Relics of the 1980s, both characters walk about today like left-over produce from the West's decade of decadence. Both are heavily reliant on superficial consumer ideas of gender, entertainment and fantasy, and both are caught in the trap of constantly maintaining what Baudrillard calls "flesh capital", in which everything from sexual performance to self-objectification is a form of work, duties that must be undertaken and perfected if one is to advance themselves. All social relations, in other words, all spheres of human life, become objectified under capitalism, the subject now "subject as sign", responsible for advertising and marketing his own body (see Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience").
Eventually Cassidy and Ram realise that they can no longer give their bodies over to the generation of affect. They're outdated commodities, Ram linked to cheap 99 cent store aluminium and tacky toys from the 80s (which fail to impress "modern" kids), whilst Cassidy discovers that she's not as desirous to her customers anymore. They want younger strippers, not a single mother well into her forties.
In a sense – and I seriously doubt Aronofsky intended this - Ram and Cassidy represent a very 21st century "reliance" on both planned obsolescence and creeping featurism. Philosopher Vance Packard divides planned obsolescence into two sub categories, obsolescence of desirability (or psychological obsolescence) and obsolescence of function, both of which are tactics used by marketers to either wear out a product in the mind of its owner or to construct a product with a short shelf life. Packard calls this "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals."
Having long been "phased out" by the market, Ram's body exhibits a sort of grotesque desperation. Always visiting tanning salons or getting his roots dyed, he is an odd combination of buffness and prettiness, the ghoulish result of a consumer society that valorizes only youth, usefulness and beauty.
Cassidy, who spends much of the film semi-nude, is also a gargoyle of sorts, clinging desperately to the signifiers of sex and worth. Of course there's also some self-reference in the film's casting: Marisa Tomei, who plays Cassidy, is herself an ageing actress who has to drop her clothes and drum up "naked publicity" in order to "further/promote her career", whilst actor Mickey Rourke, who like "The Elephant Man" navigates this film like a heart-string tugging special effect monster, is himself a Botox injected Hollywood freak with his own tinsel town come-back story. Would this film work if we didn't all know Mickey Rourke's personal history? I don't think so. One irony is that his character is only very thinly sketched in the film: it is the media and the Hollywood publicity machine which imbues his character with its "soul" and "history".
Midway in the film, following a heart attack, Ram stops wrestling and starts working in a meat deli. He moves from a piece of meat to a seller of meat, from a subject-as-object to a pusher of product. Significantly, it is now that he has to wear a name-tag with his real name, Robin Ramzinski. But he resents wearing this name and prefers to go by the title "Ram", a direct contrast to Cassidy, who prefers to be known as "Pam", a mother struggling to raise a boy alone. In other words, Robin embraces his identity as a performer whilst Cassidy rejects it.
The film ends with The Ram returning to the wrestling ring – against his doctor's orders – and "going out in a blaze of glory". Whether this is a melancholic or triumphant ending is left up to the audience. On one hand, one can view the film's climax as an admittance that unless The Ram is selling his body and soul to the ring, he has nothing. With this depressing reading, The Ram has no life outside the box, and so when the audience applause dies, when the money ceases to come in, he dies as well, spiritually if not physically.
On the other hand, one can look at The Ram's beaten body (the film's packed with hokey Christ metaphors) as the victorious body of labour. By making his body the very product of his labour (literally, a sacrificial ram), Randy liberates himself, he thinks, from the system in which he sells his body to others. Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs called this, somewhat romantically, the "artist" or "virtuoso" persona; even when you can't escape being defeated by your class, you can, in theory, take control by exploiting your labour by making your body your own product.
7.9/10 – Though marketed as an indie flick, "The Wrestler" is pure Hollywood. Despite its R-rating and grungy camera work, its as sugary as Ron Howard's "Cinderella Man", filled with the usual genre stereotypes, contrivances and "one last shot/blaze of glory" clichés. See: "Requiem for a Heavyweight", "Somebody Up There Likes Me", "Raging Bull", "The Hustler", "Body And Soul" and "This Sporting Life".