Movie Doubles - 'Monster' & 'The Wrestler'

The Depression Double

Why is it that worthy movies have to be so unrelentingly sad? 'Monster' delivered an Oscar to the beautiful Charlize Theron who made herself immensely unbeautiful with shaved eyebrows, extra weight, prosthetic teeth and monster make up. 'The Wrestler' also delivered a nomination - but not the prize - and a big come back for Mickey Rourke who already only uses a special effects makeup dude who specialises in monster makeup. I'm not complaining about the unbeautifulness of the stars, but merely setting the tone of what you can expect to see when you watch these films.  I'm teaming them up in this Movie Double entry because it occurred to me that they have something in common: unrelenting sadness that culminates in a depressing end and got resounding reviews. After considering the faux-profundity ascribed to 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Revolution Road', I thought that maybe it was worth trying to decode just what it is that critics get out of films like this.

Frankly, I found these films to be so distressing to watch, I got angry at the people who thought they were great and worthy of so much praise. I mean, really. I'd much rather watch 'Avatar'.

Working Against The Beauty Bias

Okay, I know I keep bringing up the beauty bias from time to time to explain how cinema works to convince us of something through our sensitivity to aesthetics. We're more likely to believe or be persuaded by somebody who is better looking. This is why models and actors are used in advertising. We're more likely to like somebody who is better looking. We're more likely to like watching Amy Adams playing Julie Powell than an actress who is a Julie Powell look-alike.

So it is of great interest when a star puts on uglification makeup to play somebody who is a repugnant main character. It underscores the production's desire for the audience not to be persuaded by the main character. That Charlize Theron worked incredibly hard to look as bad as she does in 'Monster' is all on record. Watching the film then is an interesting experience of partial disbelief and partial disgust at the character she plays, but always wondering how much of this is brought upon by just how ugly what we are watching happens to be. It is a tremendous performance. Doubtless she deserved her Oscar for this more than say, Nicole Kidman who won hers with a fake nose. In some ways this transformation is far more frightening and challenging.

Mickey Rourke too comes at his role of Randy with the ugly dial on full. He used to be a leading man, but years of abuse and bad care and plastic surgery has turned him into a very strange looking dude. In this film, he seems to be extending the freak show aspects of his looks to the max. In this case we're dragged through the journey of a man who is so alone an down and out, he almost has no choice but to die in the ring. The process of the film where we discover just how alone he is - his daughter hates him and renounces him and his best bet at a connection is a single mum who is a stripper - is just so awful you wonder if they come up with this stuff just to depress you. They probably do.

A Picture Of Unhappiness

This all got me to be thinking that perhaps this is a grand sort of flattery where the film makers say to the critics, "hey, you think your life is shit? Check this out. See? Your life is GREAT!" And the critics buy it and so they give it 5 stars for being so *worthy* but in the end these films just don't get much back at the box office. I mean, come on, I picked up these flicks on DVD for $10. There were boxes of them at J&B Hi-Fi, waiting to be sold off for a song.

But all this gos to an interesting question about tragedies. Let's say you're going to watch 'King Lear'; you know what's going to happen; you might even know the play intimately, line for line; all the same the process is pretty grueling and unforgiving and then thing s fall apart and King Lear dies. It's really one of the most pathetic story lines in Shakespeare's canon, but there you have it. Why do we put ourselves through this? The leading theory is that it's cathartic to do so. It's something that got taught to me back at High School (and I disagreed with it back then) and I'm not preaching that every film have a happy ending; but why do some of these tragedies have to be so darn miserable, and then they all die? Somebody argued that it as about the sublime, but I never saw what was so sublime about 'King Lear'. I can take 'Hamlet', or 'Othello' or 'Macbeth', but I just never got 'King Lear'.

And this is what these two films remind me of.

Is there anything one is to learn from all this? Is there anything to be learnt about life from a prostitute serial killer who went lesbian that applies to most people's lives? Is there anything that is applicable to your life in a story about a down and out and over the hill pro-wrestler? What I'm arguing I guess, is that if you take Andrei Tarkovsky's dictum that art is the eternal yearning for beauty, then why is it that we can be watching films that can only be described as the eternal yearning for unrelenting ugliness?

Voyeurism Of the Damned

The thing that hit me while watching both these films was the burning question, "Why the hell am I watching this?" I could only put it down to critical acclaim - and had it not been for the critical acclaim, I would have stopped watching in the first 20minutes. It's about as long as I lasted watching 'The Tooth Fairy', and that wasn't even unrelentingly tragic or anything - except for the fact that it got made.

So you watch, hoping to see something pleasurable but it never really materialises. Take Marisa Tomei's character in 'The Wrestler'. She's the stripper/single mom/love interest. She has 4-5 scenes where she is skimpily clad and is doing some pole dancing and what have you. When she was in her 20s, this might have been sexy. She's still good looking, but there's something tired about her character's 'act'. It's certainly not anything to make you think "wow, that's Marisa Tomei doing some pole-dancing". It's more like feeling incredibly sorry for somebody you might have gone through school with and you discover them doing this stuff for a living. You want to avert your gaze but if you did, you're not exactly watching the screen are you?

The whole thing with her character makes you feel like you're being pressed into watching something you don't really want to know about.

Brazen Homosexuality Bad, Repressed Homoerotica Good?

One of the negatives piled up against Charlize Theorn's character Aileen Wuornos apart from the trailer-trash background and the homeless vagabond life and the utter lack of education is her easily swayed course into a lesbian relationship with Selby Wall. The film is pretty judgmental in many ways but it is perhaps meanest on Aileen Wuornos on account of her being unable to keep her sexuality normative. But then her encounters with men as a prostitute are so bruising and painful and hateful that you are forced to understand why a lesbian relationship might offer Wuornos an 'out' from her hellish sexuality. Yet at the same time you get the feeling that she is equally guilty of her crimes as she is in her homosexual relationship with Selby.

In 'The Wrestler', there's something homoerotic going on with the naked men slamming into one another for the sake of spectacle. Of course this is so repressed that the audience is never made to feel uncomfortable about the homoeorticism inherent in the activity. The repression inherent in the ritualisation in pro wrestling allows the homoeroticism to sneak in, but it takes on the guise of something incredibly retarded. It is as if the sexuality is not allowed to grow into adulthood, it's forced to stay in a really stunted state.

In both cases, the gender politics that lurks in both films adds levels of discomfort to the viewing.

How Dramatic Is That Anyway?

I have one additional thing to write about on 'The Wrestler'.

One of the ironic things about 'The Wrestler' is that the actual conflict in wrestling is faked. The guys aren't really slamming the crap out of one another, they're mimicking the act. So is it actually competitive sport? Is it really an accomplishment to 'win' in wrestling? What do any of these things mean in a fake-sport that is actually all theatre?

Which gives rise to the question, where is the drama in all of this? If the film is about an aging boxer making a come back, then there's a drama of will he/won't he win? The conflict in the ring is real. yet, if the conflict in the ring is not real, and all the blood and sweat is for show, what exactly is the great accomplishment or great moment? How different is it from a choreographed piece of dancing?

It might actually be one of the biggest aesthetic ironies mounted in cinema. There's nothing actually at stake in the final ring action in 'The Wrestler'. He's meant to 'win'; they agreed to the result before going in, and nobody's changed the script. He may even die, but he's meant to 'win' no matter what. In that sense, it's not even 'Rocky IV' Why the hell are we watching this?