Chiming in on Best Actor. Also, Aging.

First, my apologies for the hiatus. Between the last post and this one, I've scrambled to put together a paper for presentation at The Louisville Conference [truncated version of the cumbersomely long conference title], and I've had little time and energy left over for the blog. The paper - "Autopoietic Meta-Et-Cetera" or "Too Much Information is Never Enough: How to Create and Erase Yourself Using Common Household Tools" - went over very well, thank you.

Second, I wasn't going to throw in my two cents on the Mickey Rourke debate, but I've been thinking about using the film as the focus of a future conference presentation, and so I thought I'd throw this out there and see what comes back.

What I found interesting was that the Best Actor category also pitted against each other two films that portrayed anxieties regarding aging: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Wrestler. Where the former, a film based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, presented a hopeful protagonist aging in reverse; the latter, written by The Onion's Robert D. Siegel, gave us a pathetic protagonist facing age, death, nostalgia, and loss. And where Benjamin Button offered a fantastical portrayal whose cinematic effects were matched in superficial beauty only by the good looks of lead man Brad Pitt, The Wrestler offered the stark realism of a washed-up wrestler whose life dovetails both wonderfully and tragically with lead actor Mickey Rourke’s. Ask a movie buff who should have won lead actor, and chances are they will concede that Sean Penn was very good in Milk and that the film deserves all the attention it can get for its sympathetic portrayal of the film's namesake, Harvey Milk; but between Pitt (who, in my opinion, is really a superb supporting actor trapped in a lead actor’s body) and Rourke, I think most of us will agree that Rourke’s “comeback” deserved the Oscar.

Rourke’s acting was certainly deserving of the award, and I think there are many who suspect that he deserves it as much for the way he allegorically acts out the narrative arc of his life prior to The Wrestler as he does for his acting; but I think this reaction also speaks to the poignancy of the film/Rourke’s life as a cautionary tale. In short, the moral of both: Don’t fuck up, and if you start fucking up, stop. We find Randy "The Ram" Robinson and Rourke both looking back over a life of fucking up and the ensuing loss that goes along with it. Robinson’s rampant path of self-destruction takes only the briefest pause in the face of a life-threatening heart attack, shortly after which, having failed to patch things up with his daughter (wonderfully played by Evan Rachel Wood), he recklessly abandons himself to complete self-annihilation.

So what is it about his recklessness and self-destruction that resonates so well with aging and failure (not that aging and failure are intrinsically linked)? Is the real moral of the film that, if you're a man, and you're alone (i.e. sans family), you're pretty much screwed? I'd like to think director Aronofsky is a little deeper than that. And I think he's deeper than to just be overtly setting Robinson up as the "sacrificial ram" and making our protagonist into someone who suffers so we don't have to. But, still, what IS going on here?