In spite of the promise that comes with the inauguration of our nation’s first African-American President this coming Tuesday, I can’t shake the feeling that we are all experiencing the twilight of American empire and the death rattle of that manufactured fallacy known as the American dream. I say this not in any way to demean the accomplishments of President-Elect Obama, but instead to keep folks wise to the reality of the American condition amidst the pomp and jubilation of Tuesday night. I’ve always believed that art, that reflection of life, is always a better barometer of a time and a place than any historical work or piece of journalism. With that being said, two of the year’s best films, The Wrestler and Gran Torino, offer a sobering picture of our nation as a washed-up nobody, frantically grasping for the pedestal on which it once stood and now merely gazing up at in freefall.
The struggles of the Big Three U.S. automakers are common knowledge to anyone who has turned on CNN or picked up a copy of The New York Times over the past two months. It was a decline decades in the making, the result of a lethargy, stasis, ignorance and the idea that people would buy American even if the product made the Edsel look like a Mercedes. Now, what better symbol of this relic of an industry is there than Clint Eastwood, at 78 years young, sitting on a rocking chair with a decimated 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon lying next to him and a glob of Red Man seeping through his cheek?
Eastwood’s portrayal of the curmudgeonly old bigot and ex-Ford assembly line worker Walt Kowalski is beautiful for it’s encapsulation of a greatest generation long gone and now unwanted. He practically growls his way through the entire film, not lamenting, but plain pissed off that his country has gone down the shitter. His once middle-class Detroit neighborhood is now a glorified slum, its all-white population scared off to Grosse Point and replaced by a polyglot hodgepodge of immigrants. While the film is ultimately about the transcendence of the human condition over racism and the quelling of one’s inner demons through good works, it is not lost on the audience that Walt Kowalski is a 21st century Custer. He and the generation he represents are dwindling and aging, succumbing to the rule of a soft-paunched baby boomer class that eschews their hard-nosed work ethic for a crass materialism that contradicts the counter-culture that first disgusted the Walt’s of the world. Walt Kowalski’s end is a noble one, but it is all for naught, as his children would never have followed his example.
Randy, “The Ram,” Robinson could’ve been one of Walt Kowalski’s kids, but by the time we see him in The Wrestler he looks even more beat-up than the man thirty years his senior. Randy, expertly played by Mickey Rourke, has been through the meat-grinder that is the world of professional wrestling and comes out looking like he had been run through a leather-tanning factory. Rourke’s superb acting is aided by the fact that his face, decimated from years of boxing, plastic surgery and drug use, looks like pockmarked piece of burnt meat. Randy was once a star who filled up 100,000 seat arenas, a man on par with Hulk Hogan or Andre the Giant, but now that his fame has passed him by he’s forced to wrestle at community centers and American Legion buildings while keeping a part time job at a supermarket.
Some falls are harder than the one from the top rope.
Rourke represents the decadence and excess of the eighties, which history might mark as the tipping point for our nation, when we let our bread and circuses drive us towards oblivion. Rourke’s portrayal of “The Ram” presents a tragically myopic figure who can live only in the present and knows nothing of foresight. His fame gone and his bridges with family and friends scorched, he is left to sleep in the back of his van surrounded by posters exhibiting his former glory. But, in spite of all of his character flaws, you can’t help but love the guy for all his charisma and resiliency. Despite his heart attack and the pleas of an over-the-hill stripper (Marissa Tomei) to come back to the real world, he can’t because wrestling is all he knows and he’ll do it even if he dies mid-suplex.
Both of these men are dinosaurs. They were built to live in a world that no longer exists and they would rather get shot in the heart than change who they are. They represent America, a land that is so used to being a superpower that the idea of just being another world power is unthinkable. We won’t adapt to the new paradigm of the 21st century, but will stubbornly linger in the 20th, reminiscing about The Battle of the Bulge and Apollo 11. There’s a telling scene in The Wrestler where Randy invites a neighborhood kid into his trailer to play a Nintendo wrestling game that has Randy “The Ram” as a character in all of his 8-bit glory. While they’re playing the kid is pissing and moaning about how boring these old games are and about how cool the new Call of Duty IV game is for the XBOX 360. “The Ram” can’t understand why the kid would want to play anything other than this Nintendo wrestling game and the kid can’t understand how Randy can play this ancient video game. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which one is America and which is the rest of the world.
