The Wrestler

I sat in the car and shut off the engine. As the car cooled and the windows began to mist, I found myself unable to move, still absorbed by the emotional impact of what I had just seen. The Wrestler had left me shaken. Mickey Rourke’s portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson was one of the most honest and heartbreaking performances I had seen from an actor in a very long time.

As painful as the wrestling matches are to watch—and as disturbing as the wrestlers’ willingness to inflict damage on their own bodies can be—I found myself wondering how different they really are from the rest of us. Self-destructive behavior takes many forms. We overwork, neglect our health, remain in relationships we know we should leave, deprive ourselves of sleep, and routinely sacrifice our own well-being for goals or forms of recognition that may ultimately give us very little in return.

Randy is an extreme example, but the underlying behavior is familiar. In many ways, both the film and its central character belong to the tradition of tragedy. Like Hamlet, Randy is a tragic figure whose downfall grows out of a flaw he cannot overcome. In Randy’s case, that flaw is a profound lack of self-love: he cannot separate his sense of worth from the recognition of others. The roar of an audience tells him who he is. Without it, he seems uncertain that he exists at all.

The Wrestler could just as easily have been about an artist in any field who allows his art to define both his identity and his self-worth at the expense of loving relationships with family and friends. The tragedy is that Randy is surrounded by people who offer him another way of living—his daughter, Cassidy, his friends, even his doctor—yet he remains unable to choose it. Like the protagonists of classical tragedy, he moves almost inexorably toward the very fate we desperately want him to escape. His tragedy is not that love is unavailable to him. It is that he repeatedly fails to recognize it when it appears.

Everything around him seems to be in a state of decay—his body, his career, his relationships, even the physical spaces he inhabits. And still, as beaten down and alone as he becomes, he never entirely loses his fighting spirit. There is something admirable in his refusal to retreat, even when courage and self-destruction have become almost impossible to distinguish.

Randy mistakenly believes that the audience is his family, while remaining largely blind to the far more difficult forms of love and intimacy offered by his daughter and Cassidy. An audience asks very little of him emotionally. Intimacy does.

Relationships require time, vulnerability, negotiation, and the willingness to remain present when things become uncomfortable. For Randy, physical pain is in some ways easier to endure than emotional vulnerability. He knows how to survive a wrestling match. He does not know how to sustain intimacy.

This is what makes Mickey Rourke’s performance so extraordinary. He never asks us simply to pity Randy. He allows us to see his vanity, tenderness, selfishness, humor, loneliness, courage, and capacity for self-deception simultaneously. The performance feels lived rather than performed. Rourke’s own history inevitably adds another layer to our experience of the character; the parallels between actor and role are difficult to ignore, and they give the performance an almost unsettling resonance.

In its portrait of people living at the margins, The Wrestler also recalls John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift—another film populated by damaged, lonely people struggling to find connection in a world in which they no longer quite belong. Alienation and loneliness are hardly new cinematic themes, but The Wrestler gives them a particularly contemporary form. Randy is a man whose body, profession, and identity have all become obsolete at roughly the same time, and he has no idea who he might become without them.

Weeks after seeing the film, I was still haunted by Rourke’s face and by the film’s final moments. That, perhaps, is the measure of what The Wrestler achieves. Randy’s world may be extreme, but the questions the film raises are not: What happens when the thing that gives our life meaning begins to destroy us? And what happens when we have spent so long performing for others that we no longer know who we are without an audience?

The final shot offers no easy answer. It simply leaves us with Randy—and with the terrible consequences of his choice.