Don’t Cry for Me, Steve Austin-ina: The Wrestler
By Christian De Matteo

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            Forgive me; watching The Wrestler has made me a tad philosophical.  Skip to the last three paragraphs for real “review”.

            I have long felt that performers, be they singers, dancers, actors, or athletes, are the sacrificial lambs of society. Clearly Darren Aronofsky and Robert Siegal feel the same way, going even so far at one point in The Wrestler to have a stripper quote The Passion of the Christ and then refer to Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson as the “sacrificial ram”.  Since before Roman times, when they truly figured out how to make entertainment fill the need of the people to have sacrifices made in their honor, we’ve demanded that our entertainers be entertaining all the time.  And not just when performing.   No, no, we demand that they give us their personal lives and private moments as well, that they be clowns, jesters, for our entertainment at every possible moment.  Reality TV and paparazzi-fueled rags have completed the job the Romans started with the Coliseum so many centuries ago, allowing us human debasement for our entertainment literally 24 hours a day. At the very moment we again begin to crave watching a fellow souls humiliate themselves to keep us feeling good, we can find it on just about any channel, or on amateur hour, the internet.

            Cassidy’s real name is Pam, and Randy The Ram’s real name is Robin.  Cassidy is a sexy stripper who makes sure everyone of her customers know how bad she wants them and only them when she’s dancing by night, but by day is a tattooed and pierced single mom trying to eke out a living without a man so as to never get burned again.  The Ram is a No Guts, No Glory, balls to the wall-er, ready to accept any punishment – staples to the chest and back, broken glass body slams, barbed wire entanglement, 2x4’s with nails sticking out to the bicep – to guarantee the audience the show of their lives on the weekends.  On the weekdays, he is a broken down father who abandoned his family, lives in a trailer he can’t even pay the rent on, who still self-promotes by trying to sell VHS tapes in 2008.  Both need to entertain, but one has lost everything to keep it central in his life, while the other is doing it mostly to protect what is really central in her life.  These two play opposites to each other in the way only those cut from the same cloth can.

            The Wrestler is like being in the ring with The Ram.  Please know, this is no easy watching.  The film is brutal.  Brutally honest and brutally violent.  After watching the film, please remember to pause and realize the subject of the film is far from fictional, but rather something people all over the country pay good money to watch.  Razor wire slices, blood spraying, and humans beating each other and themselves into bloody sacks of meat just to slate a very real public bloodlust.  Not at all a far cry from Roman bread and circus.  And as bad as that might make us, the audience and humanity, seem, we can never forget that these people who do this for us, who fill this violent void in our lives, do so willingly.  They are not poor Russian girls forced into prostitution to keep their families from being harmed.  They are people who always dreamt of being in the ring, hearing the roar of the crowd and doing things so unbelievable awful to themselves that they will be guaranteed the audience’s fickle love.

            And so we reach the point of the film.  Don’t cry for the Ram.  Cry for us.  The Wrestler is a powerful, moving, tragic, comic, brilliant experience.  A superb film.  I have some qualms with the dialogue in the “emotional” scenes, like between The Ram and a very angry Evan Rachael Wood, or a very clichéd conversation between The Ram and Cassidy, the reluctant love-interest.  The film is best in its quiet moments.  Even when in the midst of audacious violence, it’s best when the dialogue is at a minimum and Rourke’s tortured face is doing enough acting for everyone.  Rourke and Tomei are brilliant and their respective stages for performance tell us all we need to know about this particular brand of human that will willingly, and sometimes gleefully, demean, destroy and humiliate itself for our sakes.  The sacrificial rams, indeed.  The Wrestler is a triumph of human self-recognition that simultaneously accuses and forgives everyone equally.

            And now that you’ve finally recognized the brilliance of Darren Arnofsky, go rent The Fountain and Pi.

Interesting sidenote:  Continuing the questionable Christ-figure parallels, Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s real name is Robin Ramzinski.  Therefore, the alter-ego he created for himself is as his own son… Robin-son.  So he is at once Robin and Robin’s son, both Father and Son at once. And since “Ram” is not only in his stage name, but also in his real last name, it exists everywhere, not unlike a self-created Holy Spirit.  Toward the end, Randy also makes a ritualistic gesture of putting a Ram chain around his neck like one would a cross, before doing a sign of the cross that ends with his own signature wrestling move, the Ram’s elbow slam.  It is as though Randy has a made a religion out of himself.  All this begs the question, can one be Christ-like when, instead of accepting that you were created in God’s image, you imagine a god (an idol-esque Ram nonetheless) in your own image?  One may suggest that makes you not Christ-like, but instead You-like, and therefore doubly flawed.  And indeed, instead of dying for our sins, The Ram suffers to erase his own.