The Wrestler

Once upon a time there was a country known as America. On the strength of its noble ideals, and its diverse people, it rose to greatness and became the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.

But powerful forces, jealous forces, both inside and outside of it, sought to bring it down, to dismantle and plunder it. The country found itself faltering, and losing faith in itself.

By the middle 1970s, this dismantling was in full swing. It seemed the best days of the country were behind it. All its greatness was in the past. American movies reflected this downbeat message, and the uncertainty over this frightening future.

But the reservoir of strength within the people and their ideals was too strong. Out of this wreckage, America would rebound and stand up again as a beacon of hope to humanity.

A movie came along in 1976 that perfectly captured this lurking strength, and the rebound that was just around the corner. Fittingly it was made by an unknown actor who had peddled his screenplay unsuccessfully to dozens of producers, all of whom turned him down.

Finally he got a movie deal, but hardly any money to make it. Many on the cast and crew barely took the project seriously.

It was about a down-and-out boxer in Philadelphia. The protagonist is not only washed up, but is reduced to working for the mob, reluctantly breaking thumbs to collect petty debts. He doesn't believe in himself anymore. But through fate, he gets a second chance---and he takes it.

In the spring of 1977, the movie won the Best Picture Oscar. The unknown star who had written the screenplay went on to become one of the best known actors in the history of cinema.

In the years after that, America too seemed to come back, and surge to even greater heights of prestige, wealth and power, just as the down-and-out boxer in the movie went on to win the championship.

But something went wrong. The dismantlers of America were themselves not down and out. They were always very clever, and most of all, they knew how to harness the energy of the people back towards their own purposes.

And thus the rise of America in the 1980s, with all its flag-waving, was co-opted right from the beginning. The energy of the people was not used to build real value, but phoniness, a chimera of lewdness that served the hidden masters while handing out flagpin trinkets and toys to the people.

By 2008, it had all collapsed again. It was like the early 1970s again, but drained of that reservoir of strength of the people. The ideals of America are all gone. In 1971, a young energetic Clint Eastwood had fought to turn back the tide of filth in Dirty Harry. In 2008, he is an old man brandishing a pistol to keep neighbor kids off his lawn in Gran Torino.

And Rocky has become The Wrestler, a movie that blew me away so much that I can barely begin to write about, even four days after seeing it, as the second of two movies I saw in Waltham, right after Revolutionary Road.

Near the beginning of the movie, we learn that the title character, Randy the Ram, real name Robin (Mickey Rourke), once wrestled at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the very arena where the climax of Rocky takes place, and which has fittingly since been renamed after one of the tribe of looters once known as "banks". The venues in the movie are largely in New Jersey, literally on the other side of the river. It is a perfect metaphor for everything that has happened since 1976.

It is not 1975 anymore. We are not a down-and-out people of repressed energy, ready to spring back. We are a tired out people, played like slaves for our last ounces of energy. Rocky punched out sides of beef. Randy the Ram is literally, in his own words, "a broken down piece of meat." He is no longer the puncher, but the punchee.

Rocky's girlfriend was Adrian, quiet and full of virtue. Her own brother all but tries to pimp her out, but Rocky will have none of it. The world may be upside down, but he will restore order to it, one person at a time. The most spectacular part of the movie is how in his rise, he brings all the other characters with him, turns them from darkness to light one at a time, not by force, but by his example.

Randy the Ram is on the way down. There is no one he can bring up. He can only take them down with him. There is a beautiful and perfect anti-symmetry of the meat packing scene in Rocky when Randy, now reduced to working in a deli counter, punches out a meat-slicing machine and bloodies up his hand.

He attempts to woo a woman---an aging stripper, the quintessential female occupation of 2008. She is no Adrian, and she will prove it in the climax of the movie. Rocky is fallen Christ who will rise. Randy is Christ on the cross, ready to breathe his last breath.

Rocky fights a black man with American-flag trunks. Randy stage-fights a brown-skinned man waving an Iraqi flag. He is America pantomiming its death throes as a caricature of the nation it once was, having used up all of its options, snorted up its last hopes like cocaine, and with nowhere left to go.

At the climax, Randy makes his grand soliloquy to the crowd, proclaiming that only they, the People, can tell him when he is done. But it is a beautiful lie. In 2008 the people have no such power of resurrection anymore.

Last night, at a different movie, I saw the trailer to The Wrestler again, and I am still finding significance in lines I have heard several times. "This could be my ticket back on top," says Randy, before his big match. How true.

I'm going to be thinking about this movie a long time. There is so much more to say about the story, things I will think of after posting this. As a statement of where this nation is in 2008, this is definitely the powerful movie I have seen this year, surpassing even its magnificent rivals in that category: Gran Torino, Frozen River, and Stop-Loss.

I will be seeing this movie again---at least once, perhaps many times like Rocky, each time seeing new things. I will also be pointing it out in years to come if anyone wants to see what America had become at the end of the Bush era, at the threshold of the Great Dismantling of 2009. The Spectrum, as it happens, is being demolished in September.

Cut to black.