The more I consider the tragedy of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, the more I can’t help picturing Willy Loman and a scene from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In the scene, a flashback, Willy is lecturing his eldest son on how to handle himself and the crowds at what he considers an important football game in the boy’s career. “Hit low and hit hard, because it’s important,” he reminisces. “There’s all kinds of important people in the stands.” As Willy reaches further back in memory toward his own triumphs on the field, he has a sudden disconnect from the illusion of the story he is recounting and realizes that he is alone, and indeed he is, his son having left the stage. While the break between his present and past realities is shattering, the allure of returning to that bottled moment, the trimmed grass and swirling cheers of his youth, makes the rift more bearable, makes crossing it more essential. Because of this, Willy Loman, like Randy “The Ram” Ramsinski, the protagonist of The Wrestler, is a man trapped, willingly indulging the illusion of life as it was in the past, and dying slowly in a memory.

The memory to which Ramsinski recoils, top billing at a Wrestlemania-like event, April 6, 1989, burns with a more consistent intensity for all the ways he encounters that moment in his daily routine. News clippings collage the walls of his van. A twenty-year-old action figure of him rides on the dashboard. He dusts off an old Nintendo to virtually relive, again and again, the match that was his high-water mark. Even his hearing aide is anachronistic. His hair, a long, fleetingly Herculean mess of peroxide blonde, looks much as it did in the photographs we see of his rise to fame. And it is through this hair that we first encounter Randy. During the opening sequences we follow him at his back, the camera never moving from beyond his shoulders and up, and the darkness of the rooms and people he passes through makes his bright hair the dominant visual by contrast. In these early scenes, and throughout much of the movie, Randy is constantly stereotyped and self-stereotyped, reduced to this costumed exterior, and it becomes apparent that his self and his persona are hugely divided. When this persona is removed, and Randy is sidelined from the ring, a crisis of identity sets the drama of The Wrestler into motion.

Aronofsky’s three previous films have all considered obsession and addiction in one form or another: knowledge (Pi), drugs (Requiem for a Dream), and love (The Fountain). And whether it is an elusive formula or a tight red dress, Aronofsky has been ceaselessly bleak in his belief in the weakness of the human spirit to turn away from the golden carrot that it dangles just beyond its own reach. The Wrestler is no less concerned with addiction, Randy’s obsession with that moment in 1989, but the film does more than just present an image of self-destruction. When the object sought after is fame, the audience is necessarily drawn into the film as the antagonist to Randy’s desire. Contrary to our half-hearted investment in his life outside the ring, his stabs at romance and compassion, it is squarely within the cult of celebrity that we find ourselves on the screen while watching The Wrestler. We are the savages at the coliseum, the maddening crowd. We are the amputee who offers up his prosthetic leg as a weapon in one of Ramsinski’s bouts. We are the family that both embraces and cannibalizes Randy. Aronofsky implicates us in his destruction, and the confluence of emotions is fascinating. An opponent staples a five-dollar bill to his own forehead. We laugh out one side of our mouths because the act is absurd, but we cringe out the other side because the thought of rent flesh is disturbing, and at the same time we are struck with the realization that were we not here to witness it, this spectacle would not be taking place at all.

These contradictions make viewing The Wrestler a muddled affair for the heart. We empathize with Randy’s situation, his confusion and desperation, and yet we cheer him toward the edge knowing that it may well kill him. We push him to that place on the top rope twenty years ago where his heart is not yet broken, and his daughter is not yet abandoned, and his future lies somewhere beyond the mat. We see the scar on his chest and the joy in his face, and we smile because we share that too. “Ram Jam!” the crowd demands his signature move. “Ram Jam! Ram Jam!” We join in. “Ram Jam! Ram Jam!” At what cost, fame? The old warrior rises. The coliseum erupts.

And then he jumps. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

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