The Wrestler
Wrestling's fake. Really, it is. Every move is choreographed by the guys in the ring and they do their best not to hurt each other. So, yeah, it's fake.
Fake.
Think about your job right now. Think about it while you sit in front of the computer. Think about your job. Think about working your job forty days in a row. No days off. Forty days in a row. Working three hundred days a year like that. Forty day stretches. And your job isn't like this. It isn't sitting in front of the computer reading some jerk's livejournal. No, your job is travelling from city to city, living off hotel food, paying your own transportation expenses, paying your own medical expenses, paying for everything. And your job is to get thrown around, punched in the face, kicked in the gut and falling from ten feet in the air down to a "mat" that's actually a bunch of plywood kept together with canvas. And when you get hurt, the company pays for nothing. Absolutely nothing. You don't work, you don't get paid. So, you know what you do? You work hurt. You work with a broken arm. You work with a broken foot. You work with a broken neck. (Think I'm exaggerating? Kurt Angle, Aron Copeland and Chris Benoit did that. Each for at least a year before they finally had to get surgery. Arn Anderson did it so long, he can't feel anything in his left arm. In fact, he can't lift anything with his left arm. And he's left handed.) Torn ligament in your knee? You work hurt. Busted sinus from all those "fake" punches to your face? You work hurt. And you take pills to make the hurt go away and you take pills so you can wake up and you take pills so you can go to sleep...
Wrestling's fake. Really, it is. Every move is choreographed by the guys in the ring and they do their damn best not to hurt each other. But that fake punch and those fake kicks add up. And nobody--and I mean nobody--can fake falling off a steel cage from twenty feet in the air. And nobody can fake getting hit in the face with razor wire. And nobody can fake being thrown into a plywood board with barbed wire. You can't fake it. It tears your skin, leaving scars that just don't go away.
Wrestling's fake. Really, it is. And The Wrestler shows the consequences of just how fake wrestling really is.
For me, watching The Wrestler, it's kind of like watching someone else's deja vu. I have heard a lot of hard rock bands themselves when they watch This is Spinal Tap. Ask Black Sabbath. Ask Blue Oyster Cult. Ask Deep Purple. They all point at Spinal Tap and say, "Yeah, they got that part from us." Everybody sees themselves when they watch Spinal Tap.
And when I watch The Wrestler, I see Mick Foley, I see Bruiser Brody, I see Terry Funk, and I definately see Jake Roberts. It's no secret these men inspired the character Mickey Rourke plays in Darren Aronofski's newest film. The high school locker rooms, the pain killers, the razor wire hardcore death matches... all of these things remind me of watching indie wrestling in the '90's.
Randy "The Ram" Robinson is one of those wrestlers you remember from the 1980's. Bigger than life. Long, blond hair, huge physique, hot on the mic, but cold on skills. He has limited talent but a great look and he shit it all away with the kind of lifestyle 1980's wrestling demanded: drugs, drugs, drugs, women, drugs, drugs, pain killers, drugs, women, drugs, women and pain killers. He was on the road for 300 days of the year, working a stretch of forty days at a time and while he got to party like it was 1999... until the '90's really caught up to him and the price was just too steep. But he didn't pay the price alone. His family paid the price as well. A wife we never see. A daughter who won't talk to him. Living alone in a trailer park, a man who used to be the childhood hero of millions is now living in the Hell where wrestlers go to die. A lonely place of dozens of screaming fans, short pay and pain. A perfect place for Aronofski--perhaps the most nihilistic director Hollywood has ever seen--to tell a story.
And despite his nihilism, The Wreslter, is in fact, his most hopeful work. That's not saying a lot coming from Aronofski, but... well, I really shouldn't say anything else. I like to think of this place as a spoiler free zone, so I won't talk about the plot, the characters or the ending. But I will say this...
Wrestling is fake. Remember that as you watch the movie. Keep saying it to yourself over and over and over again.
If you keep that up all the way through, maybe, just maybe, you'll walk out of the theater with your heart intact.