Stalker (1979)

This film, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, is apparently based on a novel called The Roadside Picnic (1971), by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. I have not read this novel but I just might, now that I’ve seen this adaptation. The film is classified as Science Fiction. And I would say this is correct insofar as 1984 (novel and film) is also considered SF. Meaning, of course, that neither films are SF. It appears as though the novel, The Roadside Picnic, is pure SF, however.

This is a pretty long film, at 2  1/2 hrs.  And, considering I’ve seen Tarkovsky’s Solyaris (1972), I considered myself in for a slow ride with Stalker. I’d like to note here that having read Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), and seen the Clooney/Soderbergh (2002) remake of the film, the 2002 film is more committed to the novel’s narrative, and Tarkovsky’s film is more abstract.  From this I can perhaps intuit something about the potential for Tarkovsky’s artistic license with his adaptation of The Roadside Picnic.

With that being said, the most prominent thing about this film is clearly the cinematography. There is a stark contrast between the Town and the Zone. The Town is filmed in sepia-tones (sometimes perhaps in B/W) and the Zone is filmed in color. In Town, the atmosphere is muddy, grey, povertified (seems like a good time to coin a new term). All of the floors have mud and water on them in Town. Everything glistens with mud. A complete look at the setting itself is obscured from the viewer, and even when the Stalker is driving the Writer and the Scientist around, avoiding the police, there is no real perception-of-space-or-place because of the way the scenes are shot. This gives way to a feeling of limited space; in other words, of a sense of living and existing in confined quarters, in a confined neighborhood, in a confined city, in a confined country; in a confined psyche perhaps?

The Zone, once they get there, is richly green. Trees and grasses everywhere. Then the viewer notices that all of the characters have blue eyes, characteristics otherwise obscured from the viewer in Town. There is clearly a difference between what goes on in Town and what goes on in the Zone. As the film progresses, it becomes perhaps a little more obvious as to why. Strewn throughout the Zone are downed power lines and rusted out tanks and automobiles. Apparently a meteor fell to create the Zone, and all of this devastation must have been the aftermath. However, there isn’t sufficient information provided to the viewer about the meteor, the fallout, why the Zone was created, other than civilization is sectioned off from the Zone, behind barricades, in order to keep people away from it (nature, the mysterious) out of fear of the place. Very much in a Brave New World sort of way in terms of the reservation; or in a 1984 sort of way with the Prole sectors. Or better yet, exactly like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel, We (1921), with its cordoned off sector for civilization hermetically sealed off from the wilderness (i.e. disorder and nature).

Something that becomes obvious in the Zone is that it is also a muddy, wet place, like in Town. Eventually the three men make their way to some buildings, where the elusive Wish Room is, and it is full of water and mud and discarded objects, and old sewer-looking tunnels, and ponds of chest-high stagnant water that must be trudged through. The entire environment is damp and muddy. A cesspool. A beautifully-lit cesspool, I might add.

The way the three men make their way through the Zone to the Wish Room is very interesting. The Stalker is the guide, but his process is very meticulous and rigid to the rules he has learned from his predecessor (the late Porcupine).  The Stalker has to first throw a bolt with a bandage attached to it, one of his companions must go first toward the bolt, then the rest of them follow. Then the Stalker picks up the bolt, throws it, and this is how they make their way. They do not go straight. In this way, they sort of “test” their path first before embarking. Almost in a way that they are notifying the Zone itself that they are going in that particular direction, along that particular path. The Zone is apparently an ever-changing place, full of tricks and traps and mystical happenings. They zig-zag up and down and all around. It is the process itself that is the most important part. It is the respecting of the sanctity of the Zone’s temperament that is the most important rule.

When the three men finally make it to the Wish Room, there is a peripatetic moment : The Scientist (a.k.a. the Professor) has been carrying a bomb, intending the entire time to blow up the Wish Room. The Writer seems to be in agreement with this action because he cannot yet bring himself to enter the room and be granted his innermost wish. The Wish Room grants you what you want deep inside of you, not what you think you want. This is something he is not ready to accept so he feels the Scientist’s decision to blow it up is better for everyone involved (so that maniacs and aristocrats can’t come to the Wish Room and get what their perverted hearts truly desire). But the Stalker cannot let this happen. Eventually, the Scientist is talked out of this drastic measure by means of the other two talking it out.

So what is this film about? The final scene in the Zone presents the viewer with an interesting position: while the three men (the Stalker can not enter the room anyway) sit outside the room, staring in, the camera brings the viewer inside the room, deep. What does the viewer see? Nothing; just the three men on the ground, in the water, crying, sulking. But then, as the viewer, you realize you’re in the Wish Room!  Tarkovsky is forcing the viewer to reflect on his/her innermost wish.   And as all of this is taking place, as the viewer is in the room, the room which the viewer technically cannot see all of, cannot see what the men are seeing, the Writer gives part of the mystery away: the Wish Room is essentially faith in God, and battling to destroy God from the outside is science and logic/reason, represented by the Scientist (he’s a physicist) and the Writer (he’s a novelist). It is the Writer who reveals this truth to the viewer in an abstract way. I can’t quote here because first of all, the subtitles were clearly off because of their poor grammar, and I didn’t write any of it down; you’ll have to trust me.  The Stalker, then, represents a conduit to God that is unable to attain, for whatever reason, that which is available to everyone else. He does not appear to represent the clergy, for instance. But the Stalker is the most faithful. He leads people there at his own peril. But he is sworn to not enter the Wish Room.  One thing is for certain: a theme of compassion is presented throughout the film in terms of the Stalker’s dialogue. A need to understand and practice compassion in the world. He is somehow a conduit to God via compassion. Perhaps the answer is this: he is compassion and compassion is a conduit to God.  Something like that maybe.

At the end of the film, the three men return to the Town, after none of them entered the Wish Room, the Stalker’s wife comes and gets him (and his newly acquired Zone dog–clearly a metaphor for something), and they return with their daughter (a.k.a. Monkey), past a smoking 3-4 stack nuclear plant, to their home where the wife proceeds to tell the viewer directly that her husband has always been touched by God, and therefore ridiculed for it, that he is a prisoner of the Zone in the sense that he is so faithful to leading people to it, that he can do nothing else. Then the film ends on Monkey (who has crippled legs) out on the porch moving drinking glasses using telekinesis while a train rumbles by (same train rumbling by that began the film).

I think the Dalai Lama would like this film for its message of compassion.  It really is beautifully filmed. The dialogue is such that it needs to be re-watched in order to really understand the ultimate goal of the film. The viewer can walk away at the end with an idea about compassion and God and science and logic trying to kill God, but there’s much more in there to find out by re-listening to the characters’ words.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

When one first considers the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch on the surface, one might expect to just watch a film about the extravagant lifestyle of a drag performer. But this film is about a lot more than that. It’s not just about wigs and makeup and some sort of Culture Industried presentation of homosexuality.  It’s about the process of living. It’s about making choices. It’s about being bullied into choices. It’s about reflecting on where you’ve come from, what’s gotten you to where you are right now, and where you’re going with what you’ve got at this exact moment. It’s about sadness, irony, and those ‘what-the-fuck’ moments we’ve all experienced in our lives. It’s about how people along the way have helped, hindered, or hurt you in the process. It’s a universal narrative. And it’s told smartly in this case.

This film depicts how one act of what I would consider violence and trauma, for the ultimate goal of freedom, can affect one’s perception and perpetuation of the Self.  Hedwig even says/sings that her one inch is angry.  The viewer must therefore consider that the act of the botched sex change was a regrettable moment for Hedwig, especially with the irony of the Wall coming down so soon after the deed-of-emancipation was done.

I think one of the most remarkable parts of this film was the way in which the director (John Cameron Mitchell, who plays the protagonist) presents Hedwig (formerly known as Hansel) as an individual with an amazing degree of self-awareness.  It is the lyrics of the songs, and the animations/dance numbers that accompany several of the musical scenes, that provide the best evidence of Hedwig’s intelligence and Self-awareness. And those scenes prove why this film is about life and living through disappointment and extreme trauma by pushing through and persevering despite the odds against you.

Hedwig is a very diverse character. She is clever. She is heartless. She is controlling. She is desperate for acceptance. She is tremendously creative.  She is traumatized. She is manipulative. She is more intelligent than anyone else. She is defeated. She is emotional. She is hardened. She is angry. She is capable of being ultimately happy.  She also looks really great as a woman!

This film reminds me that desperation leads people to do just about anything to be free and therefore happy. As humans, we go to great lengths to attain freedom and happiness, and in Hedwig’s case, she sacrificed five out of six of Hansel’s inches to get there! It’s a daunting reminder that there are individuals out in the world who struggle with issues many could not even fathom. Freedom comes at a great cost, sometimes costing freedom itself. Freedom to love, freedom to be loved, freedom to be happy in the way you had always envisioned it. Freedom to be free even.

This is a sad movie. But it’s also a happy movie. The viewer is escorted through Hansel’s and  Hedwig’s lives, and is treated to an insider’s look at the results of the traumas endured. Would Hansel’s or Hedwig’s life have been completely different had s/he been born in America instead of having to escape from East Germany by the (fore)skin of her/his teeth? Who knows. We are still facing a great deal of oppression in this country when it comes to gay rights. How is this happy, you say? Because, as a great man likes to say: “Happiness is being.”  And I think that’s what we, as viewers, are supposed to take away from this film.

Dark Star (1974)

This film, directed by John Carpenter, has all of the elements of an exquisitely-made, cheesy, outer space, science fiction film. It really reinforces the notion that just about ANYBODY can make a film, with pretty much any prop they have lying around the house, and have that film be distributed and cultified throughout the generations.

I’m a big fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the film and the series of books), and this parody of 2001 was a real treat. But the term parody is used quite loosely because the part of Dark Star that was trying to imitate 2001 was a very short segment that ended quite differently than the Kubrick/Clarke endeavor. 2001 had the super computer, Hal. Dark Star had, I guess we could call them, ’smart bombs.’  The crewmen would talk to the bombs (they were interstellar detonation devices), ask how they were doing, and ask them to arm themselves. Of course, one bomb developed a sort of self-awareness (due to none other than a human mistake) and ended up blasting the ship to bits along with one of the crewmen (oh, wait, two of the crewmen: one was in cryo-freeze).

Speaking of cryo-freeze, John Carpenter also capitalized on another theme from another SF great: Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Ubik, in which talking to individuals in cryo-freeze was part of the narrative.

The absolute best part of the entire film, besides Lt. Doolittle surfing into the atmosphere of the planet they were going to blow up ontop of a surfboard of spacecraft debris, was the gas-bag alien that Sgt. Pinback had an extended scene with.

This gas-bag alien was just an orange beach ball, probably 2 feet in diameter, that someone airbrushed a bunch of brown spots onto, and attached monster feet to. The gas-bag alien was unusually nimble and dextrous, able to move around quickly and in tight quarters. It also was quite smart and led Sgt. Pinback almost to his own death.

It is props like this that make the not-so-special effects in this film remarkable. It’s pure. It’s unadulterated. It’s silly. It’s brilliant. It’s simple.

There isn’t much to say analytically about this film other than to point out that Carpenter appropriated elements from other successful SF texts into this one. As far as the plot and dialogue goes, it was a relatively simple film. But it induced a lot of laughs and stupefied moments of perplexity.

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

It was a brilliant move for Spike Lee to make a half Italian-language WWII film. He sets the film in Italy; there are Italian Resistance fighters (i partizani) and Judases and Nazis and compassionate Nazis; he has Italian cast members who are speaking Italian (and there are Germans speaking German too); the cinematography is foggy in a daybreak-on-a-mountainside sort of way; and he blends it all in with the narrative of four disenfranchised African American soldiers who are able to be recognized, by the white Italians, as compassionate humans outside of their dis-comfort zone of a repressive America.

A brilliant decision, really, to do this film. All the elements of a good, Italian WWII film are there. Spike Lee gets a thumbs up.  Oh wait, did I forget to mention the scene in which the female Italian love-interest (Renata) takes off her shirt while doing the laundry on the hillside?  And that she takes off her shirt knowing the soldier (Stamps) is right there watching her?

C’mon, Mr. Lee! Give us a break!  And by ‘us,’ I mean, those of us with a passion for non-gratuitous nudity in filmmaking, especially when you’re attempting to parallel a “real” Italian filmmaking syle.  You tried, okay. You tried. You did better than Clint Eastwood did with High Plains Drifter (1973), when he attempted to pilfer elements of Sergio Leone’s brilliant Dollars Trilogy; he pilfered poorly, very poorly. But, Mr. Lee, to just throw in a topless scene with one soldier, and then to have the same character actually have sex with another soldier (Bishop)???  Oh, it’s a blasphemy across the face of all that is decent! The inclusion of these elements dramatically cheapened the film.

The film has laudable qualities. I will admit that. But even a little piss in a 50-gallon tank of water will make the whole darn thing non-potable. Remember that.

Zabriskie Point (1970)

Well, I’m glad I didn’t watch the trailer before I watched the film. I love how trailers can be so misleading; how they present an idea about what the film is about, but in actuality, the film isn’t actually about whatever they present. The trailer is the ultimate public image, I suppose. Well, in this case, since there were no ’stars’ in the film, the trailer had to bring in the audience somehow.

The opening credits of the film really get you excited because the music is done by Pink Floyd, there’s some Grateful Dead apparently….  But in actuality, while the film does have moments of perfectly placed tunes, it’s also ironically devoid of a lot of extradiegetic music. A bit of a let down if you ask me.

The story itself is interesting enough. Boy struggles with revolutionary ideas. Girl’s just trying to make rent, ‘dig.’ Boy and girl meet in the weirdest way possible. Boy and girl bump-and-grind in the gypsum. Depart on their merry ways. Boy dies in a final act of repentant rebellion. Girl has a realization about consumption and ‘blows up’ (haha) her myths about wealth, etc.

The trailer says “Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point” about 10 times in a very serious tone. I actually like how Michelangelo Antonioni attempted to make an Italian film in America. But, to be honest, it just doesn’t pack the same punch as say L’Avventura, or even Blow Up.

I think this film was trying to convey a sense that people are generally in personal turmoil: vacillating back and forth in their decisions about the way(s) they should live their lives. I can relate. It’s not just an easy decision to do this or that; things are more complicated. You can have it in you to steal a plane and paint breasts and phalloi on it, but you can also have it in you to return the plane.  You can have it in you to work as a personal secretary to a C.E.O. to pay the rent, ‘dig,’ but you can also have it in you to choose to not buy into the conspicuous consumption of the rest of America with its manifest destiny and all that.  I get it.

You can and should be both, dig?!

9 (2009)

We live in a truly awful world. Not because we are headed for Armageddon but because the Culture Industry keeps feeding us the same plotlines and we keep gulping them down like starving pups suckling on the incontinent teets of the She Wolf.

I like that they put it into animation form, at least. Change the characters into non-humans, okay, but still give us Frodo, and the plotlines from LOTR and The Matrix and even WALL-E, and scores of other texts.  Still give us religous zealots who pervert ethics and morals. Still give us the dark, post-nuclear metaphor.  Is it even metaphor anymore? At some point this metaphor has transcended into something else because the C.I. has presented it to us so many times it has lost its original intent as metaphor or allegory. What is it? I don’t know. Falling on deaf ears, perhaps.  And by deaf I mean dumb.

It’s so sweet and romantic: the human soul that is the key to the survival of humanity. It’s also obvious.  But the world won’t remember us when we’re gone. It won’t care. And a memory of the fragments of the human soul can’t nourish the planet, like rain. Rain nourishes like rain.

Something that sticks out in this film, however, is that there is only ONE female character: #7 (Jennifer Connelly).  She’s the most agile one; the one who kicks the most butt. The one who comes in and saves the day in a narrative otherwise completely dominated by the male perspective.

I think perhaps the message I can glean from this film is that a world full of men caused the problem(?). That comes with a lot of baggage. The film also presents us with no solution, really, but to wait for life to start itself over(?).  Perhaps it is trying to tell us not to do this to ourselves in the first place. This would be obvious. But then again, maybe I am expecting too much from filmmakers. Metaphor is perhaps cliche and outdated.  Allusion is more appropriate perhaps:  all I know is that Frodo went into the fiery forge, Neo and the Architect were there in spirit, and WALL-E was left to pick up the pieces.  Oh yeah, and the flying, scouting machine had Edward’s Scissors-hands for a mouth. Thanks, Mr. Burton.

American Gigolo (1980)

This is a hard one. I debated whether to even post on it, actually, because it’s not that great of a film. But I suppose I can still glean a little something from it. If not, what am I doing here?

I’d like to start out with the absurdities of the characterization of Julian (Richard Gere). Julian is presented as a high-rolling gigolo, able to speak “five or six” languages (though he doesn’t even affect an accent when he’s speaking French), able to spend three hours bringing the aging Mrs. Represseds out of their sexual shells. He is someone who has all the right connections at all the classy L.A. restaurants and bars, and he is the “only one” who can get into the most exclusive country clubs in L.A.  That’s wonderful. Truly wonderful. But as I’m sitting there watching it unfold, I’m wondering to myself about a few things: why is prostitution being glamourized, why does Julian have so much credibility, and with so many “return-tricks” in high society, how is Julian not caught/ how are all the women he is hired by not shamed by their associations with him (they all seem to know who else he hooks up with)? He’s just that cool, I guess.

He’s also cool enough to school Detective Sunday (Hector Elizondo) in the art of dressing up for the ladies, and the Detective even listens to his advice. I’m just wondering about the reality of a high-class hooker maintaining his ethos with so many people in this way. My point is that it’s just not that believable. He’s a “whore,” as the Senator points out.

Speaking of the Senator, one of the scenes that really bothered me was the scene at the country club when Julian confronts the Senator (or vice versa). If you notice, it is the Senator who goes after Julian; it is the Senator who follows Julian around, not vice versa. One would think that a Senator wouldn’t be the one to go following a gigolo around like a puppy dog whining about his wife. I suppose this scene both disappointed me and reinforced the message being conveyed about Julian: that he has something about him that sets him “above” the norm. He even says to Detective Sunday at one point that there are some people who are “above the law.” I suppose he was referencing himself. But, as the narrative progressed to the climax of the story (I would categorize this as the scenes dealing with his realization that the jewels were planted in his car, leading up to the confrontation with Leon), the viewer is treated to a classic peripatetic moment.

Julian’s true reversal of fortune was when he actually kills someone. Up until that point, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was being set up, and then it went terribly wrong.  Poor Julian.

I suppose the biggest let-down of this film was that in the final scene, when he is across the jailhouse glass from Michelle (Lauren Hutton), and she says she told the truth so she could be his alibi for the night of the murder, the film ends awkwardly with Julian’s sappy comment about not believing he had to come this far to get to her. Gag me with a spoon. Not only is there no resolution to the case itself, nor the general problems associated with a Senator’s wife dating a gigolo, but the viewer is left with the message that ‘love conquers all’ or something like that.

I’m too smart for that.

Rather than ‘love conquers all,’ this film says to me: it’s okay to be a whore if you’re public image portrays an air of higher class.  I mean, Julian technically ‘tricked’ in not only the “clean” environs of the country club ladies and the Senator’s wife, but also in the very bizarro worlds of Leon and Mr./Mrs. Rheiman (she did not look truly conscious to me when he had that encounter), and yet he did it anyway.  So, all the glamour of the suits and the stereos and the Mercedez Benz can’t possibly balance out against the sometimes gruesome service he is performing for money.

I guess I’m failing to see the overall point of this film. I think they were trying to say it’s hip to be a gigolo. But then I also think they were saying even gigolos get the blues. When all is said and done, I think Paul Schrader and Jerry Bruckheimer could’ve made a better film with what they had.

Though it does remind me of that old jazz standard, “Just a Gigolo”:  ”when the end comes I know they’ll say I’m just a gigolo…life goes on without me….” (I’m thinking of the Marty Grosz version).

Commemorating a Year of Cinematophiliac

So, I guess I didn’t even notice that I’ve been writing on my blog for a year already! We’re a month past Cinematophiliac’s one-year anniversary but I’d like to share a few stats with you:

• # of views to-date: 1,353!
• Still the featured blog under the tag, “Herzog.”  This is awesome!
• Some faithful readers, the known ones being: Norse Penny Press, Ad Nihilum in Odio, and Foolscap topping the charts! Thanks!!!!!

I try to diversify my viewing habits and hope that my audience has gotten some pleasure from reading my analyses.

Here’s to an intellectually prosperous second year, dear Cinematophiliac!

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

I kid you not, dear readers-six, that I have been waiting to watch this film for two and a half years! It was recommended to me that long ago, and it sat on our Netflix queue’s ‘unknown availability’ list for two and a half years.  Also on our unknown availability list is Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu the Vampyre so we’ll have to wait and see how long that one takes (it’s already been on there probably a year at least). Hopefully that one will be worth the wait….

Back to the main event. So Last Year at Marienbad was recommended to me because it was supposed to be relevant to my studies of Muriel Spark’s novel, The Public Image (1968). Now, I’m not going to get into much detail about that but I would like to point out that waiting two and a half years to watch something (that was made in 1961) is a long time, and when the climactic moment arrives when the film shows up at my doorstep (albeit WAY late to include in my analysis of the novel…two and a half years ago….), it is reasonable to think that the film would be relevant. But it’s not. It’s not relevant in terms of direct narrative comparison, only tangentially based on certain theoretical principals…which may work for some people).  I’ve read and studied Muriel Spark’s The Public Image a lot.  I should know. Though I do not claim to be a Spark scholar or anything.

Last Year at Marienbad is a film about memory and perception of reality. It has elements of the postmodern because of its repetition and the way the repetition discombobulates the viewer’s understanding of the broken narrative. The Public Image has elements of the postmodern because of its exploitation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and because of Spark’s use of Baudrillard’s/Plato’s simulacrum. Now, I suppose, on a purely theoretical level, we could make the very long stretch that Last Year at Marienbad is capitalizing on the concept of the simulacrum in that memories are themselves simulacra of real events. This, I can buy. In that way, the two films are tangentially related. But in Last Year at Marienbad, the memories of the main characters are inexact and fluctuating; they are not exact copies.

One thing I’d like to point out is that as I was watching this film, I thought of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining (1980). The big hotel with all of the bourgeois guests, and the feeling that perhaps people are stuck in memories, or insanity, is something I felt was ever present in Last Year at Marienbad. At the very least, I assume Kubrick probably saw this film. There was also an ever-present theme of inadequate communication (because of the way the viewer was treated to only parts of conversations, picking up only random portions of what the other hotel guests were saying as if you were walking through the rooms too quickly to hear more than a sentence or two) and I couldn’t help but think of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series, especially with the White/Black Lodge sequences of bizarro communication. I will, however, admit that this idea of inadequate communication was part of my analysis of Spark’s novel, via Fellini’s La dolce vita, in terms of Marcello’s difficulties communicating with Paola in the end.  But I still stand true to my original assessment that this film would not be a text of primary comparison with the novel.

Aside from my general disappointment that this film was not, in fact, related directly to my prior studies, I found it to be one of the most cinematographically spectacular films I’ve seen in a long time. The framing of the shots was magnificent because of the interior and exterior architecture and design of the setting. For instance, one of the most visually appealing shots was out on the grounds, with shadows and shapes abounding, looking much like a painting (see this shot on The Criterion Collection’s page for the film) with its balance, and yet almost surreal structure. Also, one scene, when the man and woman are walking through the hallway, is framed perfectly with not only the design in the carpet but also with the walls and the corridor/hallway itself.

This is not a film to be watched when tired. It is slow, repetitive, and unresolved in the end. Perhaps this is another tangential correlation to Spark’s The Public Image, as the novel also ends ambiguously. But Last Year at Marienbad begins ambiguously, ends ambiguously, and everything in between is ambiguous because of the uncertainty of memory. I suppose the serious message we might be getting from Alain Resnais in this film is that memories, even if they are only 1 year old, can be treacherous and dependent on our perception of reality at the time of the making of the memory and at the time of our retrieving of the memory. That the man can’t recall if he raped the woman is disturbing. That the woman can’t recall the man at all is disturbing. That the viewer is left unsure of any of it is disturbing. Resnais is definitely wanting his viewers to think, and this is good.

The Wrestler (2008)

What I like about this film are its moments of raw, human desperation. This is certainly something typical in Aronofsky’s other films, like Requiem for a Dream (2000), which I’ve mentioned in a previous post.  I think the strongest examples of this raw, human desperation in The Wrestler, have to be found in two scenes: first, the flashback to the 14-minutes-ago scene in the wrestling rink when The Ram was going up against the Hillbilly-looking wrestler with all of the ladders, staple guns, tacks, barbed wire, and glass; and second, when Randy-as-’Robin’ reaches his breaking point in the Deli.

In regards to the wrestling match, I will hand it to Aronofsky for ‘preparing’ the viewer for the brutality by showing a prior match where The Ram cuts himself on the head so he will bleed, and so the match will appear more real. Well, it was real blood, so it was real, but there was still an element of staged spectacle in that match. Nonetheless, it was real blood, and it was a precursor to the later, more brutal scene with the Hillbilly. Even before the actual scene comes, Aronofsky once again attempts to prepare the viewer for what’s to come by having the Hillbilly ask The Ram if  a staple gun is okay to use during the match. So the viewer is thinking it’ll just be a staple gun.  But, it isn’t. It’s much worse. And the lengths to which both wrestlers were willing to go for the spectacle (or in The Ram’s case, for the love of his audience) are truly pitiful. The viewer gets the same feeling about this scene, as he/she does with some of the terrible scenes in Requiem for a Dream when we get to witness the lengths to which Marion (Jennifer Connoly) will go for her heroine. Both scenes show the exploitation of the body for a gain in some way. Both scenes show moments of human desperation. Both scenes invoke, in the viewer, a sense of pity for the character(s) involved.  Marion exploited herself for heroine and The Ram exploited himself for audience admiration. I mean, that’s fine and all, if that’s your thing, but to watch it unfold should remind the viewer that life isn’t all peaches and cream for everyone.

The second scene, in the Deli when Randy-as-Robin is recognized by the customer and he is going back and forth getting the potato salad amount perfect for the old lady, is a reminder to the viewer that Randy is self-destructive by nature. His willingness to go to the extreme of slicing his own finger on the meat-cutting machine as a rebellion against his past submission to the ridiculous authority of the grocery store manager (thus, as a metaphor for trying to hold down any real job) is a reminder that Randy The Ram is pretty much cut out for the wrestling circuit and all its self-destructive demands. It was icing on the cake that in classic The Ram style, Randy smears his own blood all over his face as he’s tearing his way through the store, making himself fierce, a fighter.  This is reminiscent of something you might see in Homer’s The Iliad with Ajax/Aias or Sarpedon blazing their way through a jungle of bodies, mowing them down, and wearing their victims’ blood as trophies.  In Randy’s case, his own blood is his trophy. A striking image, actually.

But!  I think Randy submitting to the authority of the sleazy grocery store manager (who clearly has a Napoleonic complex of sorts) is ultimately the same as submitting to the nature of the audience’s authority that a wrestler must accept when his impetus for success is ‘win the audience at all self-inflicted costs.’ Both are humiliating in their own ways, and both remind the viewer that there’s maybe no escaping getting caught under this machine.

Ultimately, it’s sad that Randy tries to reconnect with his daughter and she severs their relationship. And it’s sad that despite all the work it took Randy to get closer to Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), he still felt abandoned by her at the end: he looks up to see her, to seek acknowledgment from her, but she’s ‘always already’ gone (in his mind). He had nothing to live for but his fans and if he goes out in a blaze of glory, then so be it.

Aronofsky has made a lot of films that make you feel sorry for people, for their lives, for their decisions in life, for the predicaments they’re in. He shows you moments of desperation that are believable. He shows you the struggles of real people. I have a hard time believing there are real Jason Bournes or Mr & Mrs Smiths out there, but I can surely see the Randy The Rams out there, struggling day by day, trying to be happy and good, but falling way short and failing miserably.