Why Does Mickey Rourke Give Pleasure?

Keri Walsh

You're going to do everything I say, you're going to do everything I tell you, and you're never going to disrespect me in front of the crew. And I can't pay you. 1 Pimp to ho? Frankenstein to monster? Or indie director to fallen bad-boy star? Mickey Rourke loved to tell the story of his degradation at the hands of Darren Aronofsky while making The Wrestler (2008). He left no doubt that he was the bottom, there to be beaten up, stapled, gigged, and sent to the hospital between takes. The dynamic was captured in Annie Leibovitz's portrait of the sadistic director and his battered muse, Aronofsky bursting from his cheap-looking suit, his close-cropped hair and mustache that screamed masculinity crisis, his confrontation with the camera, and Rourke crouching in the backgroundhalf-naked, long-haired, smoking, bruised, and tattooedas though there was nothing left to do to him. He looked like a boxer in his cornera pornographic, existential boxer wearing tight jeans and velvet shoes (fig. 1). The photograph appeared in the wake of Leibovitz's bare-backed portrait of Miley Cyrus, and satirists joked that she had taken advantage of Rourke, too, that there would be much hand-wringing and fiery debate concerning the appropriate way to depict a 56year-old former it-boy turned professional boxer turned down-and-out has-been turned comeback kid, followed by an official statement from Rourke himself explaining how he was so honored and thrilled to work with Annie and now, seeing the photographs I feel so embarrassed.2

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Figure 1. Darren Aronofsky and Mickey Rourke. Annie Leibovitz, 2009. Open New Window

This comment points to the paradox that is Rourke; this supposed man's man can still project an aura of exploitability that needs a father to protect it. Said Rourke of Aronofsky: When I met him, I knew this was a guy who would fight for me. And when he won the Independent Spirit Award, Rourke stood up, grabbed the face of his tormenter, and kissed him right on the lips. The attraction he generated with his love of degradation was mysterious. Was he inviting you to step up and abuse him, too? Trying to give abuse some shared expression? Letting you in on his seeming genius for making peace with pain, for surviving and occasionally thriving in a world that loved to kick him around? As he had been not-so-subtly hinting since 9 Weeks (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1986),

and in the publicity photos from Angel Heart (dir. Alan Parker, 1987) that showed him clutching at the heels of Charlotte Rampling, at least some of Rourke's charms were the charms of BDSM. He dressed like a leatherman, with keys dangling off his belt, and even his chihuahua was named for a Norse god of bondage. Although he was supposed to be a punching bag or, in the words of Kim Basinger, a human ashtray, Rourke was an insubordinate bottom.3 That was the pleasure of his comeback, first in Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, 2005) and then in The Wrestler, the unlikely return of what had seemed like a broken jack-in-the-box. He had learned some lessons since his softcore days, or perhaps his new agent had learned them. There was no critical cache in Hollywood erotica, so Rourke, abetted by his grizzled face, now framed his dramas of mastery and submission in tougher waysthe high tragic style of The Wrestler and the pulp thrills of the comic noir. The Wrestler, that spectacular performance of abasement, gave voice to all that Rourke had been and become. Twenty years earlier, he had thrown away what some thought was the greatest acting gift of his generation. But throwing himself away was what he did best. It was a lifestyle, a passion, an addiction, the source of his greatest effects as well as his discontents. Now, with a performance that recalled what he once had been, his career was definitively reframed, and, along with legwarmers, leather jackets, and all other things of the eighties, Mickey Rourke was back. The years of B movies and painful offscreen antics were forgotten as Diner (dir. Barry Levinson, 1982), Barfly (dir. Barbet Schroeder, 1987), and even 9 Weeks were nostalgically screened in Hollywood theatres in the weeks leading up to the 2009 academy awards. At his best, as these films revealed, Rourke had combined method intensity with a cluster of other theatrical pleasures. It is hard to think of another actor who seemed at once so raw and so over-the-top. Early reviewers noticed the forces he held in satisfying tension; some critics of his breakout film Body Heat (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) emphasized Rourke's verisimilitude, saying he seemed like a real criminal, but Pauline Kael picked up on the artifice: Mickey Rourke almost makes you feel that you're at a real movie.4 This sense of surplusreal criminal and real actorstemmed from what might be called Rourke's method camp: his combination of intense, psychologically complex, gut-fuelled performances with a variety of mannerisms, flourishes, and poses. If Brando was method's answer to Elvis Presley, then Rourke was its David Bowie. Just as his youthful idol Bowie had playfully undone the authenticity of rock with eye shadow and sequins, Rourke brought an under-the-radar glam edge to the raw performance style of the Actors' Studio. The genealogy always remained just below the surface, so rarely registered for what it was. Critics made fun of the heavy eyeliner Rourke wore in Diner, but assumed it was an error by the make-up department. They never dreamed he had insisted on doing his own make-up for the role.

His breakthrough performance was as a rocker, too. As Teddy Lewis, the rock 'n' roll arsonist in Body Heat, Rourke first nailed the fusion of grit and glitter, flesh and flash, that would become his trademark. His costume was the standard method uniform of Tshirt and jeans, but with the addition of a sparkling diamond earring, aerobic wristband, and red hair. He's introduced to the camera as a rock star, mid-musical number, absorbed, sweaty, and lip-syncing to Bob Seger's Feel Like a Number before a nervous audience of one, his lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt), who has come to his surly young client for some illicit advice on explosives. Teddy Lewis's shop is a windowless dungeon with a bunk bed, the ladder of which he ascends mid-meeting, crawling onto the mattress to lecture to his lawyer from on high, while Racine paces nervously below amidst ropes, protruding blades and darts, and tanks of explosives marked with skulls and crossbones. Teddy starts off as the master of the scene, heckling his lawyer for criminal incompetence in a manner both earnest and flamboyant, affecting a geographically anomalous Godfather accent (Body Heat is set in Florida) and relishing his lines full of curses and theatrical metaphors (You gotta be careful not to get famous while you're in the act). His musical number about feeling like a number ends as he reaches somewhere offscreen to crank the music back up, as though he were in charge of the film's soundtrack. The interest of the scene is Teddy's switch from lording it over Racine to putting himself on the line for him, volunteering to take on the crime gratis and setting himself up for a fall. This transfer of power, this unexpected submission, was key. There was a reason Rourke wasn't Rourke until Body Heat: if it gave him his rock persona, it also crystallized his way of playing a scene. As an actor, his strongest fascination was the capital he made out of his seemingly bottomless bottomhood. He had a way of reading and responding to other actors, an openness, a curiosity, an empathy so extreme that he seemed to become the other. It overcame all self-protection or self-interest, leading him to acts of extraordinary renunciation. The compulsion to watch him, it seemed, came from this casual throwing away of the self. In A Prayer for the Dying (dir. Mike Hodges, 1987), his character, an ex-IRA agent, has been tracked down by his former partner (Liam Neeson), now commissioned to kill him. Rourke stands calmly, waiting to be shot: It's OK, he tells Neeson's character, with the gentlest consideration for his executioner. It was hard to tell on such occasions where empathy ended and a death wish began. His disappearances created moments of consummation with other actors and with the audience that seemed to know no bounds. This permeable selfhood suggested a resistance to identity that made everything he did intimate and generous. An actor of fluidity, an antifoundational actor, Rourke not only blurred the boundaries between male and female (which, as Joseph Roach argues in It, all great stars do)5 but also acting and pornography, inhibition and abandon, self and other. He transcended, combined, and lost identity profoundly, often

disappearing just at the moment of appearance. Sometimes he literally offered up his body, in the manner of a tragic sacrifice, but more often it was a psychic gift of self, an utter deference, a lavishing of attention. Unlike Brando, who could seem hermetically sealed in his psychic processes, Rourke always oriented himself towards others women, men, children, or animals (in Barfly, he approaches a dog as though it holds the secrets of the universe). He could even bring objects to life; getting dressed to the strains of Frank Sinatra in the opening credits of The Pope of Greenwich Village (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1984), he calls to mind Fred Astaire's engaging way with shoes and hat racks. Within this intersubjective realm, Rourke specialized in moments when a totally submissive character suddenly lashes out or a dominant one suddenly buckles. And those exchanges, always held in reserve beyond the point when you might expect them, were his dramatic thrills, the electrical jolts his performances always gave. He had no middle register, no small talk, but vacillated between scenes of extreme intimacy and sudden, violent retreats, always pulling away just when he got closest. Rourke's imitators never got it right. Some mimicked the explosive moments but forgot about the tender ones that threw them into relief (Vincent Gallo in Buffalo '66, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Killshot). Others played self-effacement without the ego bursts (Michael Madsen in Thelma and Louise). Rourke played both sides each against the other. His fluctuations were perfectly timed, slow to emerge and quick to dissolve. Each switch was enacted with lunatic brilliance, the result of the improvisatory practice through which he seemed able to generate an infinite number of objective correlatives for the moment of exchange. In Diner, it was throwing back his head to drink like a junkie from a canister of sugar; in Year of the Dragon (1985), leaping fully clothed into the bathtub with his lover; and in The Wrestler, slamming his hand into a running meat slicer. Through Rourke, submission was not just a dramatic device but a pleasurable principle of giving over totally to the other, then asserting selfhood just when it seemed that selfhood was lost. Where did this dialectical, Dionysian performer come from? I see you had a misspent youth, Elizabeth Taylor tells pool shark Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. Watching the film in his high school English class, Rourke fell hard for the sad young manhood of Clift, which he would go on to reinvent in Dinerand Rumble Fish (1983). His own youth was misspent trying to survive the alcoholism of his father, the divorce of his parents, the struggle for resources in a family overrun by stepbrothers, and, most traumatically, years of physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather. As a teenager, he boxed and coached baseball while flirting with a life of crime and getting strung out on the beaches of Miami. Sports, not acting, obsessed him in those days, but his taste in movies hinted at things to come; he learned from the virile swashbuckling of Terence Stamp and never recovered from Rita Hayworth's turn in Gilda as a vixen with a genius for arousing and rebuffing desire.6 By the mid-1970s,

after a transformative experience playing Green Eyes in an amateur production of Jean Genet'sDeathwatch, he joined the ranks of New York's aspiring actors, working an ambiguous job in what he described as massage parlors, whorehouse jobs, frequenting gay bars when they had the food with happy hour, and attracting the mentorship of older thespian types around the Marlton Hotel where he lived.7 An eccentric and mischievous introvert, always drifting around, keeping a vampire's hours, Rourke seemed to make his way on gas fumes and cigarettes. When he got into the Actors' Studio after several years of studying with Sandra Seacat, he was too shy to participate in scenes, though Elia Kazan called Rourke's the best audition he'd seen in thirty years. Rourke's role models were Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel, colleagues who blossomed in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, and who led with Italian ethnicity, street smarts, masculinity. Like them, he knew how to handle borough accents, hand gestures, and scenes played over plates of spaghetti. But by the time he was nearing thirty and got his first big break, a preppier generation was emerging. Although Rourke may have pioneered the flippant smile that came to define the eighties leading man, he was never in tune with the Brat Pack, for his angst went far beyond the suburban kind. He was an antiyuppie because amidst all the prosperity he relished the opposite trajectory: downhill all the way. Tom Cruise built a career out of the roles Rourke turned down (hotshot parts in Top Gun and Rain Man), while Rourke preferred to play the beautiful loseraddict, masochist, extremist. In an age of accumulation, all of his roles documented loss: of parents, lovers, bets, fights, and finally, in Angel Heart, his immortal soul. The persona was an effeminized channeling of the rebels of the fifties, and it was particularly appealing to women, for whom it seemed to offer a bridge to the modes of freedom and rebellion he embodied. I like his insolence, said French actress Fanny Ardant, he throws himself in all directions, he reminds me of Brando when he was young.8 Like the lesbian icon James DeanJames Dean with his arrogant hair, James Dean with his tight black denims, James Dean with the bitter brat look9the young Rourke fused recklessness and tenderness, extending the promise of some intangibly subversive and lyrical coolness. He played with whatever accoutrements of masculinity he could find, appropriating the aesthetics of Marielitos, cowboys, boxers, hip-hop artists, rock stars, Hells Angels, organized crime, Wall Street, and the IRA. In his first major roles he played the hoodlum as rent boy, always making himself sexually available to the camera. Although he worked in a post-Midnight Cowboy world, Rourke always closeted his hustlers, displacing the signifiers of gay male sexuality onto a series of other risky businesses. Like Brando and Dean before him, he turned the figure of the hustler toward women. He became known for his seductive whispering. His throwback lost boys like

Boogie Sheftell in Diner and Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish were underresourced and unhinged, but disarmingly sweet and insightful. As the eighties progressed, his persona turned nihilist, decadent, existential. French audiences fell in love with Rourke in films like 9 Weeks, Angel Heart, and Barfly. He revealed himself as an athlete of the heart with a compulsion for underworlds and depths of experience. As though the blood of Charles Baudelaire and Antonin Artaud coursed through his veins, he drank out of fire hydrants and wallowed in pools of filth and bloody rain. He gained a cult following; a tour through the archives turns up admiring writing about Rourke in every genre. In the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley wrote a loving tribute through the eyes of Rourke's rabid French fan base, explaining how in Paris, his name is pronounced reverently and women go mad for Le Look Rourke, a state of fashionable abandonfaded jeans, dirty hair, two-day stubble.10 From the smitten reminiscences of Charles Bukowski11to a prize-winning poem called After an Evening with Mickey Rourke I Pick Up Petrarch (about a narrator left so feverish by Year of the Dragon that she has to read sonnets to distract me / from my tetched romantic bent; an overdose of romance / usually cures it),12 Rourke has inspired a torrent of passionate adulation when he hasn't been a laughingstock. From 1981 to 1987 he was a kind of erotic hypnotist. Yet if you cast a cold eye on Body Heat, you can see that Rourke was too skinny, with acne scars, one slightly lazy eye, and jeans that fit funny. What made you need to keep looking at him was a face that didn't add upcharm and despair, insouciance and submission, incomprehension and insight. His eyes spoke plainly of knowing something awful, and he assumed protectiveness over others while having no idea how to protect himself. The appeal was born of mixed signals, a sense of both hiding and showing something. In a recent interview, Rourke explained that boxers, unlike wrestlers, always have to hide their next move. Victory depends on surprising an opponent with the angle, strength, or timing of a hit. In the ring, he wasn't much to write home about, but in front of the camera he was one hell of a boxer. Because he was so good at paying attention, hiding his cards, and coming out of nowhere, he could unexpectedly flip the meaning of scenes. His art was one of attunement, obliquity, and reflexes. He thrived on redirecting energy, never approaching any line or character straight on. In dramatic conflicts, he never yelled in that tiresome way some actors do. Instead, he withdrew, lay in wait; he knew the power of the counterpunch. He could change in a flash. In 9 Weeks, one minute he's a psychological terrorist, and in the next he's playfully convincing his partner, you love this game, Elizabeth. Not everyone liked to work with Rourke, perhaps because when he wasn't being intimate and generous he seemed capable of breaking the spirits of other actors with his quick changes of mood and unpredictable improvisations. He wasn't particularly interesting in group scenes. He shone in one-on-one matches,

especially when he had chemistry with his opponent. Barry Levinson noted Rourke's curveball quality: There was something about him where you couldn't take your eyes off of him. He was this flashy guy, tough, but audiences responded to the sensitivity beneath it all. I think that's the side Mickey would like to hide. And his trying to hide it makes it even more fascinating.13 But he wasn't just trying to hide; he was trying to flaunt, while trying to look like he was hiding. I don't like to look like I'm hustling, he bashfully tells his date in Diner. Who said he was? He had a particular genius for pleasures of the closet, for epistemological sleight of hand, being half-in and half-out, and coming on to women as though they were men. In all he did, he let it be known that he was blue-collar to the core, but Rourke never made activist films like Susan Sarandon or Sean Penn. As though he couldn't stand to be liked, as though being misunderstood created more chance for effect, he consciously offended liberal sensibilities, exploding comfort and consensus. Like Genet's criminals, he inhabited the position that was assigned him: white trash. Perhaps because of his unusual empathy, his need to comprehend the abuser, his temptation to become the abuser, Rourke played violent men and social write-offsterrorists, racist cops, alcoholic bums, child kidnappers, rapists, and hit men. Whatever the term of derision was, he wanted to inhabit it. As an actor he developed in range, resourcefulness, and mastery, but as he got better, his films got worse. The problem was that he had no taste; in fact, he was antitaste, and he seemed to purposely take on wayward projects. He resisted the roles he was expected to take in films like Platoon that carried on the work of the seventies directors he had admiredrealist films about American masculinity. This was partly a bad-boy pose, partly his sense of acting as risk and, mostly it seemed, that he wanted to make films of arousal and effecthe was attracted to the jerker genrestears, screams, orgasms. The jerking worked best through the establishment of contrasts: in 9 Weeks, Adrian Lyne understood the value of playing up Rourke's surface straightness, a kind of choirboy quality, to cash in on his subterranean kinkiness. The film, though disapproved of by American critics, made him a global star and became a pop-cultural touchstone. Next he made artsier porn with Angel Heart. He was on a soft-core roll, and if he had kept making films like Parker's and Lyne'serotic but with legitimate directors and costarshe might have been able to pull off something like the career of Michael Douglas between Fatal Attraction and Disclosure (seedy, but recoverable). But Rourke went too far with Wild Orchid (1989), casting the Guess model Carr Otis as his costar and debuting a new look featuring conspicuous plastic surgery, steroid enhancement, and an artificial tan. If, as Susan Sontag suggested with an allusion to Genet, there's a good taste of bad taste, then Wild Orchid wasn't it.14 The film seemed to glory in its cheapness, was overflowing with laughable lines and outrageous exoticizations. Suddenly

a perception of Rourke's tawdriness overtook his hard-earned method credibility. As the sensational scene-stealer of Body Heat and Diner became the sensationalist of Wild Orchid, the acting genius from the Miami gutter was tarred with a new brush: dumb sleazy prick. Those three words were thrown at him so often beginning around 1989 that they came to comprise a new version of his image, an impression compounded by a domestic abuse charge, an arrest, and his retirement from acting to pursue a career as a professional boxer. Offscreen there seemed to be mounting evidence for Rourke's dumb, sleazy prickhoodor his serious mental illnessbut on film the case was more complicated. There the slurs needed to be understood from the perspective of Rourke's strategy of inversion, descended from Wilde and Genet, with which he challenged the rubrics of class as well as gender. This famous career flame-out, which was undeniably accompanied by a personal breakdown, was not just a personal breakdown; it was also an aesthetic one, the result of his attempt to fuse several traditions or perhaps to expose the extent to which they were already fused: method acting, pornography, and theatre of cruelty (traditions that consciously used the actor and related to the audience in a particular way). These traditions were not necessarily incompatible. The method had long been tangled up with issues of male sexuality in crisis. As Brando and Paul Newman's method performances in works by Tennessee Williams indicated, homosexuality, sexual secrets, and the objectification of men were an important part of the dramatic canon that existed in symbiotic relation with the method's development. Rourke brought these themes to new and uncomfortable levels of visibility. His subject matter was not the violation of women by men but, rather, the less broachable topic of the sexual abuse of men, the paralyzing effects of class and commodification, and the quest for transcendence of traumatic memory through extreme moments of physicality, exhibitionism, athletic or sexual performance. I can't get excited, the supposed lothario John confesses to Elizabeth in 9 Weeks as he pushes her to further extremes of experience. What does it feel like to be out of control? he calls out after her as he chases her from a room in the Chelsea Hotel through the crowded streets of the city. Bizarre as Rourke's role choices in the late eighties seemed, they were all united by this sense of crisis, this tortured inability to connect to sensation firsthand. From Liliana Cavani's Francesco (1989) to Lyne's 9 Weeks, Rourke expressed the melancholy of the unexcitable man, the one whose sexuality had a painful, unspeakable kink, who retreated from women, from society, and from life itself. He sought to work with directors who allowed him to improvise and gave him a hand in the development of characters. More than most actors, he insisted on the right to compose his own monologues and shape his own scenes. At the lowest point of his Hollywood career, when he was making films like Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (dir. Simon Wincer, 1991) for the money, the general consensus was that this fi ne

young actor was re-creating himself as a stumbling hack, without range, without craft, without even giving a damn.15 But it was during this period that Rourke wrote and starred in three films of his ownHomeboy (dir. Michael Seresin, 1988), F.T.W. (dir. Michael Karbelnikoff, 1994), and Bullet (dir. Julien Temple, 1996). In these independent projects, he began to search for a visual language for the constellation of themes that obsessed him. Removing dialogue, relying increasingly on gesture and music, Rourke excessively foregrounded his objectification in an effort to exceed it, to make silence speak, and to finally come out on the other side of fetish and clich. These films made no critical or commercial impact and are notable chiefly for the quality of his acting. But looking back at them now we can see what Rourke was trying to do and what, with Aronofsky's help, he was finally able to do in a critically legible way in The Wrestler: to perform his theatrical switch on the figure of the dumb sleazy prick.

Dumb Jump To Section... No one believed in Mickey Rourke He has no value as a commodity. Well, I sat with him and looked into his eyes. His eyes aren't dead. They're alive, yearning, thinking.
Darren Aronofsky16 To inhabit characters of dubious artistic value, wrote Cintra Wilson of Rourke's success, it is helpful if actors aren't terribly smart (MR). Though Wilson's piece is otherwise insightful, here she plays into the hands of Rourke's in-your-face performance of primitivism. Though on film his voice is interesting and variable, for years Rourke spoke offscreen in the vernacular of the dumbass. His interviews abroad tell a different story, though, the story of a literate artist and filmmaker with connections to the European avant-garde and its aesthetic and erotic transgressions. He once informed unfazed British reporters who asked him about his plans to adapt Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: for Dorian you need a beautiful 20-year old boy. I'd be playing Lord Henry Wotton. Such instances reveal that Rourke's dumbness at home is a defensive posture, a rebuff to American standards of what it means to be educated, and a refusal to become part of the cultural establishment. But onscreen, through some cinematic alchemy, his offensive and reactionary dumbness becomes heartbreaking and expressivea poetics of the dumb. He plays dumb in three related ways. First, he expresses the experience of dumb guys, the undereducated, misinformed, or slow on the draw. Second, his characters are literally dumb, sometimes to the point of muteness. Third, as the energies of speech are drawn inward and dispersed throughout the body, Rourke becomes an actor of gesture who transmits emotion kinesthetically, like a dancer or athlete. Rourke's dumb guys are usually dreamers who have a hard time making their dreams come true. Though they often have some compensating qualitycharm, wisdom,

kindness, toughnessRourke exposes how inevitably the lack of cleverness takes its toll. Boogie in Diner can't hack it in law school and ends up in construction; Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish seems to have some kind of cosmic knowledge but no way of articulating it; Charlie Moran in The Pope of Greenwich Village just can't figure out how to get his own restaurant; Jan the Actress in Animal Factory (dir. Steve Buscemi, 2000) uses words like disfunctionary; the brain-damaged boxer Johnny Walker in Homeboy doesn't recognize an apple. In the tradition of the Western and also of the mumbling of method acting, Rourke tends towards characters who either by circumstance or disposition are radically inarticulate, who sometimes have literal speech impediments. The first of these roles was as Motorcycle Boy, the color-blind, partially deaf, former gang leader and Tiresian seer who seemed, as the film unfolded, to be ferried further and further away from reality. In 9 Weeks, silence is spun into fantasy. Rourke has almost no lines as the sexually adventuresome stockbroker John, who withholds words to establish his dominance over the art dealer Elizabeth (Kim Basinger). A typical scene includes a babble of nervous small talk from her, which he meets with an enigmatic look, both indulgent and sociopathically glazed over. When John does speak, it's only to issue commands. He reveals nothing and seems involved in an increasingly elaborate performance of self-erasure. Though his extreme verbal withholding works to project mystery and cultivate desire, it becomes clear that he's paralyzed by linguistic impotence. In the final scenes of the film, as Elizabeth packs her bag to leave, John tries to come up with words that will meet her craving for intimacy, but he can't find them. In 9 Weeks, Rourke uses silence first to exert power and then to signal loss of power. More often, the first phasesilence as poweris absent, and silence is only the mark of unspeakable violation. His silent men bear all the marks of the survivor of childhood abuse: rage, fear, helplessness, isolation, alienation, and perpetual feelings of loss, shame, and guilt. InJohnny Handsome (dir. Walter Hill, 1989), Rourke plays a disfigured criminal whose mouth is so misshapen that his speech is incomprehensible. But even when a surgical intervention gives him a chance at speech and a rehabilitated life, he can't make himself heard. The silence is more than skin-deep, and he slides back into a life of crime that eventually kills him. The performance of voicelessness intensifies in Rourke's own films. In each he plays a character who seems at first more like a patchwork of fetishes than a human being. In these roles Rourke takes on pornographic fantasies head-on: cowboy boots, cigarettes, boxing gloves, denim, and tattoos. In two cases he's a wrongfully convicted felon: an excon rodeo rider in F.T.W. and an ex-con Jewish gangster in Bullet. In all three of the films that he wrote, in a strategy that anticipates The Wrestler, Rourke inhabits the abject, commodified manthe most clich exteriorwith immensely individualized, verisimilistic performances, so that his characters are both fetish and human at the same

time. In this way, he brings together the reifying aesthetic of pornography with the personalizing, intensely emotional effects of method acting. Rourke signals from within. He does not flatten his characters into objects of sex or violence but dramatizes the psychic effects of such objectification. He plays types whom others see as clichs but who don't know that they're clichs and whose suffering for that reason is no less real. In these films Rourke gives the impression of being a man in an iron mask, his eyes and posture transmitting the messages that his words cannot. In The Wrestler, which continues the pattern, Rourke is not just dumb but is also going blind and deaf, with bifocals and hearing aid on display. In Homeboy Rourke gravitates toward a particular kind of concertedly inarticulate monologue, one that chiefly communicates the failure to communicate (he would compose similar monologues for Bullet, Animal Factory, and The Wrestler). The lonely protagonist Johnny Walker simply cannot muster the necessary words to get help or to make the human connections he so desperately craves. Exploited by managers and hangers-on, the awkward, alcoholic Johnny can only express himself through the violence of the boxing ring, a violence that becomes ecstatic in the film's final scene. This gap between the desire to make himself understood and the inability to marshal language is registered in his agonizingly trite, halting speech about his passion for Ruby (Debra Feuer), a carnival worker who is his love interest. Monosyllabic, trailing off in incomplete thoughts, Johnny's monologue contrasts sharply with the smooth way other men in the film talk about women. He is all seized up: That Ruby, she's a good one. She's so pretty. Man I'd just like to be able to look at her and just I could just look at her and just hold her and I'd like her to just touch me, just, you know, just touch me and have her like me, you know. Holding his jaw in a particular way, as though it's been broken too many times and is now permanently wired shut, Rourke dramatizes the problem of speaking for the Johnny Walkers. In each Rourke-helmed film there is an intensification, an increasing revelation of the unspoken fact at the heart of his character's silence: rape. In Homeboy, the possibility of sexual violation is raised only in the significant silence following Johnny's confession of the childhood that shaped him. Rourke uses the method's emotional memory exercise not only as a technique for connecting to the emotional truth of a scene but also as the template for the dramatic scene itself. Walker finds that a mechanical horse, the kind you feed coins to ride, triggers a memory of his loss of childhood security: Oh God Damn. Hey I ain't seen one of these in a long time. Well, I remember when I was a boy I used to always ask my granny for a nickel so I could ride on one of these. Can I sit on it? I used to ask her for some nickels, and she'd give me a whole bunch of nickels to ride on the horses, and get me candy. I really liked that. I spent a lot of time

with my old granny, 'cause my mother, she was fucking nuts. And my old man, he just drank himself to death. And then my old granny died. They sent me to this place where there was all these boys like me. I didn't like them, man, I didn't like none of them. I used to try to run back home, I just didn't know how to get there. Whatever happened to Johnny is left unstated. In his next film, F.T.W., Rourke's character Frank T. Wells falls in with a vigilante named Scarlett who slowly reveals that she was raped by her brother. As their biographies merge, Frank overcomes the impotence instilled by prison through hearing her story. But in Bullet the imagery suggests the source of shame. Rourke plays the title character, whose first act upon being released from prison is the attempted rape of two young men during a holdup. When he gets home to his family, he tries to tell his father what happened to him in prison, and then he tries again while in a hotel bedroom with an exotic dancer, confessing his impotence with honesty and self-loathing: it's no good, it's dead. When the dancer departs, the failed phallus is replaced by the penetration of a drug needle and Bullet passes out in a combined nightmare/fantasy montage of eroticized men's bodies recalled from prison. Bullet brings up the question of homosexuality with his best friend, explaining his theory that his friend is a repressed homosexual. You don't have to suck dick to be a queer, he tells him philosophically, followed by, You gonna tell me you never looked at another guy and thought about it? The question is constructed in such a way that it allows his friend to respond ambiguously: No. Nah. Rourke's films play on such misleadings, which are visually as well as verbally inscribed. In Homeboy, for instance, we are led to think at one point that Johnny is standing in a moment of consummated bliss at Ruby's window, but the camera's zoom out shows us Johnny standing alone, exiled back to his own room. In F.T.W., the pick-up lines we hear Frank utter as voice-over while we are shown footage of Scarlett in the bath actually turn out to be addressed to his horse. But what escapes this uncertain discourse and cinematic language, what makes Rourke's characterizations more than expressions of blank suffering and unspeakable violation, is his physical articulacy, his gift for expression through movement. He could break your heart with a look, wrote Bob Dylan of Rourke's performance in Homeboy. The movie traveled to the moon every time he came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him. He was just there, didn't have to say hello or good-bye.17 But more than being just there, in this film Rourke calls on a Chaplinesque archive of moments of pathos, from Johnny's hiking up of the collar of his jean jacket to deflect the rain, to his pathetic sharing of a sandwich with Ruby, to his careful recovery of a single coin from his bureau. Rourke's best moments on screen are often wordless affairs of significant gesture that punctuate and illuminate scenes of failed communication. He

mobilizes silence most frequently for two purposes: to express suffering or to hint at alternative sexualities. In Diner, Boogie sits at the counter gripping a sugar dispenser and talking to Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), his younger, impressionable friend who's about to be married. Eddie appeals to Boogie for sexual advice, but Boogie is bored and clams up, merely answering I can't tell you that. Suddenly, however, he realizes what Eddie is confessing to him: You son of a bitchyou're a virgin, aren't you? Now he changes gears, holding out on Eddie because it amuses him to watch his friend squirm. You've got a lot to learn, Boogie concludes, and then he makes his physical move; he throws back his head, holds the sugar dispenser aloft, drinks dramatically, and then places it down on the counter with a flourish, the sugar still falling out of his mouth. Now we know everything we need to know about Boogie: his impulsiveness, his need to protect his mystique, his lack of inhibition, his sweetness, and a relationship with Eddie that includes both rivalry and desire, showing up and showing off, not to mention the hint of vampirism in Rourke's junkielike orality (fig. 2).

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Figure 2. You son of a bitchyou're a virgin, aren't you? Open New Window

But while he uses his mouth to be sexy, Rourke most often uses his body to express homelessness and to invoke painful family romances. In Rumble Fish he cradles the elbows of his threadbare leather jacket, a defensiveness and appeal for protection in a disturbed young man preoccupied with his abandonment by his mother. In 9 Weeks, John has an odd habit of burrowing into Elizabeth's stomach, as though trying to crawl back into the womb. In The Pope of Greenwich Village, Charlie rocks back and forth, whether while shaving or playing baseball, a kind of whimsical, nostalgically infantile rocking, expressing the lightness of being that characterizes his relationship with his cousin Paulie, one that contrasts with the stony, martyred faade he presents to his son, his ex-wife, and his girlfriend. In Homeboy, the way he hikes up his gym bag on his shoulder communicates a transcendental homelessness, like a hobo's sack on a stick; every time Johnny starts to feel out of place, he hikes up the sack on his back and departs like a wayfarer (in The Wrestler, a rolling suitcase is used to the same pathetic effect). From film to film, Rourke signals exile, parentlessness, the tramp's lack of affiliation and need to keep moving on. Starting from dumbness as rebellious resistance, as a pose designed to rebuff psychological probing, Rourke takes us on a journey into the violation of being gagged and the discovery that the body, the very site of violation, is also a site of

communication. He turns dumb from a casual slur into the source of an expressivity beyond words.

Sleazy Jump To Section...

If sleaze has a physical form, it must look like Mickey Rourke. Beginning with Kael's designation of Boogie Sheftell as the sleaziest and most charismatic of the bunch in Diner, it's a word that's never far from the lips of anyone responding to his persona.18 Rourke nearly stole Body Heat as a sleazy arsonist;19 9 Weeks was the film that pushed Rourke towards sleazy sex;20 in his resplendently sleazy performance as Charles Bukowski in Barfly,21 he was so sleazy you could almost smell him through the screen22; Wild Orchid is a miserably stupid and sleazy wank film (MR); and in a comeback cameo inThe Rainmaker, he was scene-stealing as sleazy lawyer Bruiser Stone.23 The least pejorative meaning of the word is shabbiness: sleaze as a condition of dilapidation or physical dirtiness. A Rourke character usually meets this basic standard. He lives in squalor for any number of reasons: poverty, alcoholism, selfloathing, bohemian spirit, or sheer lack of will to live. But without a failure of hygiene there would be no Mickey Rourke. His characters sleep in motels and boardinghouses, chain-smoke, drink straight from the bottle, and eat off other people's plates. They patch the rips in their clothes with duct tape. They also inhabit landscapes of sleaze, the places where people go to be thrilled and amused, to gamble, have sex, and get high. And he's not just passing through; he makes his life amidst the marginal, transient souls who inhabit such communities. He identifies more completely with the sleazy world than the respectable one. In Barfly he moves between a crummy rented room and a crummy bar. In A Prayer for the Dying he hides out in a brothel. In Rumble Fish he frequents dances and pool halls on the wrong side of the tracks. In The Wrestler he lives in a trailer park and hangs out in strip clubs and on the deserted boardwalks of the New Jersey shore. Rourke's commitment to the world of attractions is not just a romantic solidarity of outsiderdom; he lives among the attractions because he too is an attraction. The vulgar cultural products of sleazepornography, fighting, and gamblingrelate to the viewer in a particular way, angle at a kind of real satisfaction. They have a service function. And so does Rourke, whose acting continually inhabits the uncertain space between acting and the sex trade. But he's not the kind of sleaze you may typically think of. The classic male sleaze is a predator, acting narcissistically on his own desire, reducing other people to objects. On the surface, Rourke gives this impression. His characters sport the right knuckle jewelry and know the right lines. But he always plays against the grain of a sleazy scene, coming out as a misunderstood gentleman who finds himself in a sleazy situation for a sweet reason. As Boogie, Rourke perfected the technique. His smirk is always at the ready, and

he's a little too good at talking his way out of whatever hot water he's gotten into. I'll take all the action I can get, he says, but when push comes to shove he won't sell anyone out to make a buck. When it counts he turns from lover to protective friend. This is clearest in his half-seduction of Beth (Ellen Barkin). An old flame who reconnects with Boogie in a moment of weakness, Beth needs a self-esteem boost after a fight with her husband, while Boogie needs a girl he can pass off as his date to win a bet. Boogie's lines to his married ex-girlfriend are rarefied sleazeI often think of the nights we spent together, you're a very sexy lady, I think we should get togetherbut he plays against them to complicate the scene. By hitting on her with reluctance, kindness, and a worried gaze, we get the impression that he's chatting her up for her benefit, not his. Sleaze becomes a chivalrous white lie. This is confirmed later that night when Boogie gets her halfway up the stairs to the bedroom and then calls it off. Decency becomes his out: bet or no bet, it's not right, he mumbles. Now he shifts into his most comfortable role of relationship counselor. You and Shrevie should work your thing out, he tells her, I think it would be worth it. Seducing to the point where conquest is certain and then calling off the seduction is Boogie's signature move. The key to his charm is that he doesn't exploit even though he can. He combines intense emotional availability with absolute sexual unavailability. In The Wrestler, Rourke strikes again with his endearing way of getting caught up in sleazy situations for sentimental reasons; he just wants to have a heart-to-heart with the exotic dancer Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), but he ends up having to buy a lap dance to get one. They both ignore the fact that she's gyrating naked on his knees while they gossip about their lives. What distinguishes him from the real sleaze is his motivation. The question of his pleasure isn't even on the table. It's the kick Rourke's characters seem to get from taking someone for a ride, rather than the sleaziness of exploitation, that's most characteristic of his persona. There's nothing in it for him, except a kind of vicarious pleasure in the pleasure of the other. In a moment of kinesthetic catharsis in Rumble Fish, Motorcycle Boy takes his brother out for a high-risk ride through the deserted city streets. Color-blind and half-deaf, he sits unmoved like Charon ferrying his cargo into some other realm, and they miss getting in a few crashes by the skin of their teeth (fig. 3). From film to film, a stoic Rourke orchestrates the pleasure of the other, a pleasure that fascinates, baffles, enchants him. More like the gigolo than the sleazeball, he projects an aura of intimacy, availability, and exclusivity that Kael picked up on when she noted that Rourke in Diner is the most tender in his dealings with women, and the most gallant and that he found a way to extend that gallantry into the darkened cinema, with an edge and a magnetism, and a sweet, pure smile that surprises you. He seems to be acting to you, and to no one else (D, p. 931).

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Figure 3. Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish. Open New Window

9 Weeks is most transparent in its handling of Rourke as male courtesan, a professional pleasure giver. Here he's not the Christopher Street hustler but his Wall Street counterpart, the arbitrageur who looks like a catalog model. He seduces the disaffected divorcee Elizabeth with steady eye contact in New York's Chinatown and an outdoor market full of antiques. He wraps her in a luxurious wished-for scarf, seemingly pulled from nowhere. Your business is very risky, isn't it? a tantalized Elizabeth asks, and he offers up the pleasure of danger in return: Well, it's not any riskier than you coming here I mean we hardly know each other, a threat that's belied by his almost teasing tone and the fact that he's batting his eyelashes. The pleasure is all hers, the expressions of danger part of the performance. He becomes her lover, father, and the child she never had. When they are alone together for the first time, she accidentally steps on a rubber duck, which squeaks as though to announce the deadline of her fertility. At the outdoor market she delights in a wind-up chicken that lays wooden eggs, bargaining it down to a price she can afford just as John appears on the scene, a mischievous man-child who gets caught up in silly bets with other kids on the boardwalk. But at home this child transforms into a father when he admires her drawings, brushes her hair, and airplanes spoonfuls of soup into her mouth. While Elizabeth is hypnotized and multiorgasmic, John remains vigilant. Giving her thrills is a full-time job; he wakes up before Elizabeth, lays out her clothes, feeds her breakfast in bed, puts in a grueling day on Wall Street, then comes home, showers her with lingerie, cooks dinner, and stage-manages erotic adventures. In the memorable scene that features a blindfolded Elizabeth in front of an open fridge being fed strawberries, chili peppers, olives, and cough syrup, to the wholesome music of the Newbeats' I Like Bread and Butter, she relaxes into abandon, kicking her honey-drenched legs with delight, while John approaches his role as an artist of sensation half scientifically, half in jest. To make sure he seduces the audience as thoroughly as he does Elizabeth, Rourke and Lyne recycle all the tricks from Rudolph Valentino's woman-pleaser The Sheik (dir. George Melford, 1921): the rebuff of covering up a naked woman after she has willingly derobed, the summoning claps and hand gestures, cigarettes louchely dangling from the mouth, rituals of dressing and undressing, breaks in the plot to focus on the erotic contemplation of his face and body, the creative use of perspective to subvert moments of supposed genital congress, the coy introduction of handcuffs and whips that never get used in the ways you expect.24 Lyne's film plays down the hardcore sadomasochism of the original 1978 memoir by Elizabeth McNeill,

producing something more like two masochists in search of a sadist.25 How did you know I'd respond to you the way I have? a mystified Elizabeth asks John at the film's midpoint. He answers, with no elaboration, Because I saw myself in you. As Rourke plays John, his inhabiting of the sadist's part is all a terrible misunderstanding or perhaps a temporary agreement. Longingly toying with Elizabeth's stockings, urging her into men's suits, John does everything in his power not to play the role while still superficially filling it. He only gets to have fun twice, first during the kitchen-floor food scene and then when Elizabeth is discovering the pleasures of striptease to Joe Cocker singing You Can Leave Your Hat On. These two musical moments allow Rourke to do what he does best: enjoy someone else's enjoyment. It's a tough acting assignment, to watch a woman strip in an interesting, uncreepy way. Basinger and Rourke play this scene masterfully. She fully emerges from her shell for the first time, and he, eyes alight with enchantment, sits barefoot on the floor with a bowl of popcorn and a cigarette, sliding ever downward until he's lying at her feet. In 9 Weeks John is endowed with the trappings of the pirate and the magician: planks, and white sheets he spreads out with dramatic flourish, strange chairs that seesaw, smooth fabrics, glass jars that refract, wristwatches that hypnotize. But the second half of the film encodes what lies beneath this enchanted surface. Lyne communicates the violent eroticism of John's character with a few visual reminders: mice dangling from the mouths of cats, fish flipping around on dry land, paintings of dog collars. But Rourke approaches John's menace through gesture, condensing it into brief, cryptic physical movements: the ripping off of a belt, the punching of a table, the testing of a whip against the air. Not chewing the scenery so much as doing gymnastics with it, Rourke brings to the role an art of leverage, pushing off against solid objects in a way that borrows their force and directs it against Elizabeth. As they make love in a clock tower, he braces his hands against a wall, as though it were a springboard. Then in a rain-filled gutter, he places his hands on top of her head and pulls down, as though trying to pull her further into him. In return for his attempts to incorporate Elizabeth, to take over her body, he offers her masculine privilege and hints at his own willingness to renounce it. A shared understanding of gender as performance informs the striptease and crossdressing scenes of 9 Weeks. Rather than upholding the distinction between male gaze and female body, John undermines it in the striptease scene by becoming the pedagogue, one who doesn't passively consume the spectacle but helps to create it, teaching Elizabeth with choreographic gestures how to strip and suggesting his own girlish embarrassment as he lowers his head and covers his eyes when she attains a professional's level of shamelessness. Earlier in the film, he buys her a man's suit, meets her at the bar of the Algonquin Hotel, hands her brandy and a cigar, and tells her all about life on the other side, ending the evening by asking, So what do you want to do? Pick up some chicks?

John relates to her as an honorary male subject and invites her to share the pleasures of sleaze. Rourke's defining eighties performances let women in on the moment of perversity. The popcorn scene in Diner is that kind of moment, too, when his postadolescent prankster pulls off the kind of stunt of which teen sex comedies are made, smirking at his friends while flashing a girl at the movies. If it ended there, it would just be annoying. What makes the scene interesting is that Boogie follows his date out of the darkened theater and into the women's bathroom, where he proceeds to explain the whole thing, transforming her from the butt of the joke into a coconspirator. In the sexually segregated world of fifties Baltimore, he becomes a native informant who explains to her the workings of the hard-on.

Prick Jump To Section... Your thing just got into a box of popcorn?
Carol Heathrow, in Diner Women loved him because he was better than anyone else at smirking in a way that made it look like his hard-on gave him terrible emotional pain. Cintra Wilson (MR) Wanna bet me Carol Heathrow goes for my pecker on the first date? Perhaps Boogie's makeshift solution to the problem of getting some actionmaneuvering himself into the popcorn while watching A Summer Placewas the template for Saturday Night Live's Dick in a Box skit. This defining moment of Rourke's early career was characteristically ambiguous. On the one hand: touch my pecker! On the other: take my pecker, please! Was he advertising his manhood or his castration envy? Soft beneath the manly chest and hard beneath the zipper was Scott Raab's description of the Rourke appeal,26 but Rourke's films always call such potency into question. After its memorable first outing, little Mickey comes and goes. Lyne keeps it coyly evasive in 9 Weeks.Barfly plays with the issue; chastised for his lackadaisical filling out of a survey, Chinaski's would-be discoverer says: Even where they asked you sex you put none. Well, he replies slyly, Hardly none. The audience's attention is consistently drawn to the problem of the Rourke phallus: Where is it? Who has it? And is Rourke a prick or a pussy? Both terms circulate throughout The Wrestler, turning up in the language of Randy and others. A prick is a contemptible manusually one with some worldly authority who has let that power get the better of him; he's imperial, self-aggrandizing, selfish, irresponsible. The Wrestler leaves us to arbitrate between two versions of Randy. Is he the prickish deadbeat dad who ruins the chance to reconcile with his daughter so he can get high and have sex with a stranger, or is he the sweetheart who gives her a touching set

of secondhand clothes? This question is never settled. Though Randy is a nice guy, he's also a prick. But, as always, he inhabits the slur. A prick doesn't experience himself as a prick; he experiences the fact that it's hard out there for a prick. And because of Rourke's disturbingly luminous ability to suffer on screen, the audience experiences that, too. The Wrestler is a male melodrama, a narrative of tragic paternity that plays on an emotionality intensified by music (Clint Mansell's soundtrack played on guitar by Slash) and an unabashed foray into the pathetic. But, sap that he is, Randy rejects other emotional men, especially in his musical preference for metal. The eightiesbest shit ever, he says, Then that Cobain pussy had to come along and ruin it all. Randy the Ram has given himself a name that's synonymous with prickish aggression, lechery, and penetration. His signature move, the Ram Jam, involves thrusting his stiffened body into his opponent. But though his character's name parodies masculine sexual aggression, the off -kilter quality Kael sensed in Diner is still on display in the tensions between the Herculean beast Randy aspires to be, the frail, isolated man he is, and a third, even subtler figure the Randy who walks up to a pharmacy counter with aTown and Country magazine in his shopping basket.27 Randy's aspirations to phallic power are more touching than threatening. His boss at the grocery store taunts him for wearing tights and sitting on other guys' faces. The hero of The Wrestler is a man who lives on the margins of the heterosexual family. He sleeps not just in a trailer park but in a van parked inside a trailer park. He lingers by deserted phone booths, under train tracks, and near sewers, and he chooses to be received as a dumb, sleazy prick rather than suspected as a pussy. In The Wrestler, Rourke again uses his layering technique, veering between strength and vulnerability and masculinity and femininity. Aronofsky goes to great lengths to demonstrate the wrestler's achievement of his appearance through steroids, weightlifting, tanning, and hair dye. Rourke's Randy grooms like a woman. Keeping up his look for the ring means that he lives in a world of tanning beds and salons (he talks shop with his hairdresser, asking her not to leave the foils on too long because last time they damaged his hair). His platinum blond mane is his distinctive feature, and he often wears it pulled up in a grannylike bun. These vulnerable touches throw into poignant relief his bulging wrestler muscles, weathered sailor face, grungy jeans, and plaid shirts. Here we see the sad young man (Dean, Clift) transformed into the sad old man (Oedipus, Lear). What is faintly suggested as the source of his identity collapse, of his social estrangement, is a transgenderism that Aronofsky embeds in the film's imagery. When Randy pulls a towel from its bar in the bathroom to reveal the torso of a naked woman beneath (figs. 45), are we seeing the secret at the heart of Randy's masculinity?

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Figure 4. Randy emerging from the shower. From The Wrestler. Open New Window

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Figure 5. Two torsos. Open New Window

The suspense of The Wrestler revolves around Randy's wavering between prick and pussy. We are led through a series of incidents in which Randy is forced to reflect on whether he will be able to accept domesticity and heterosexuality as the price of human connection. We also see him wavering between moments of denial and self-harm and of awareness and authenticity. Ironically, Randy's prickishness stems from a failure of patriarchy rather than an excess of it. When he visits the home of his daughter to make peace, he finds he's been replaced by the lesbian phallus in the person of Stephanie's girlfriend. Though Randy ultimately can't get out of the cycle of prickishness and though Aronofsky makes it clear that a critical understanding of the system he inhabits is beyond Randy's power, the most memorable and moving moments of the film are those in which Randy almost achieves self-awareness, moments of quiet authenticity, fleeting but profound reckonings. In these instants Randy inhabits not a grandiose pose of martyrdom (which he's a bit too good at) but moments of simple clarity. His character is established early on: dumb, emotionally and physically exhausted, self-centered, and short-tempered. We know, in the words of the Springsteen theme, that no matter how hard Randy tries, he'll always leave with less than he had before. But for all of Randy's incomprehension of the world and his place in it, the drama still turns on moments of subtle recognition that briefly seduce us into thinking that the fatal ending might be averted. As is often the case, Rourke's most expressive moments are wordless. First, after the match Randy sits on a mattress in the back of his Dodge Ram. He's been locked out of his trailer for failing to come up with the rent. He opens a can of beer and gazes at the posters and clippings of himself that paper the back doors of his van. He nods his head slightly. What has he just seen? His mortality? His selfishness? We don't know, but we know he's acknowledged some important truth. Randy has another such moment while signing autographs at a fan event. He looks beneath the table at the legs and feet of his fellow wrestlers: wheelchairs, splints. He knows what awaits him. These flickering moments of acknowledgment, presence, accountability pave the way for the big one, Randy's confrontation with his daughter Stephanie. For this scene, the showpiece of The Wrestler, Aronofsky films the abandoned New Jersey boardwalk as though it were Greek tragedya desolate stage dotted with occasional ruins. For it is Greek tragedy, a Sophoclean family reckoning. After years in the prickish wilderness, the deadbeat dad takes responsibility, sort of:

I just want to tell you. I'm the one who was supposed to take care of everything. I'm the one who was supposed to make everything OK for everybody. But it just didn't work out like that. And I left. I left you. You never did anything wrong, you know. I used to try to forget about you, I used to try to pretend that you didn't exist. But I can't. You're my girl. And now, I'm an old broken-down piece of meat. And I'm alone. And I deserve to be all alone. I just don't want you to hate me. Kay? So compelling is Rourke's emotion in this scene that we don't at first notice Randy's narcissism, the prevalence of the word I, the lame excuse that it just didn't work out. Like Boogie, here again Rourke plays against unflattering lines, inhabiting them with such longing, honesty, and desperation that they begin to mean more than a string of lame excuses. This moment of intense connection is all the more valuable, all the more regrettable, for its unsustainability. It is the classic Rourke slide away from the woman, only this time the stakes are higher. The woman is his daughter. Outside of the scenes with his daughter, The Wrestler happens in three meat markets: the ring, the strip club, and the deli counter where Randy works. The most gruesome scene, and the one that drives home the theme of Randy's flesh as meat, is the last, as Randy nearly comes to terms with his new, mundane job. Though he faces his shift with dread, when he starts to serve up cold cuts he begins to enjoy himself and to charm his customers. But suddenly, in a horrifying recognition scene, someone in the deli line-up outs him as the professional wrestler Randy the Ram. Shamed and enraged by the collision of worlds, by the reminder of his fall from celebrity, Randy lashes out, violently mutilating himself on a meat slicer in front of the staff and customers. Like Boogie's pecker moment, the climax of this film becomes an ambiguous castration allegory as we see Randy's thumb approach the meat grinder and smash against the running blade. The gesture's meaning goes in two directions: symbolically, we see the destruction of the phallus, the ego, the flesh as signed by the thumb, but narratively we see the return of the phallus because this is the peripeteia (and The Wrestler is nothing if not Aristotelean drama), the moment when Randy has had it with his emasculating job and decides that he would rather die on his feet in the ring than live on his knees in the supermarket. He storms out of the store, primally smearing blood on his face. When his boss reminds him that there are customers witnessing this horrific display of self-butchery, he retorts, You little prick, you gonna talk to me the way you do? As usual, Rourke's moment of reversal is structured sadomasochistically. Just when he has lulled the audience into believing in his submission behind the deli counter, he reasserts control by acting out in a way that tosses the plot in the opposite direction. His act is masochistic, but it turns sadistic as he storms through the store, spraying blood across the cereal aisle (figs. 68).

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Figure 6. The climax of The Wrestler. Open New Window

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Figure 7. Grist to the mill of tragedy. Open New Window

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Figure 8. I'm just a broken down piece of meat. Open New Window

The meat-grinder incident makes it clear that although Randy knows he has failed as a parent and a person, he will live out the phallic lie anyway. Against doctor's orders, he calls his manager and commits to a rematch with his old opponent. In the last wrestling scene, before he makes his ambiguous final leap (to either glory or cardiac arrest), we see Randy straining to get erect one more time as he prepares his body for the film's final Ram Jam. It's easier for Randy to kill himself than to stop being a prick. But this assertion is self-sacrifice, too, and the monologue that Rourke authored for his character is an offering up of himself to the wrestling/cinema audience in a moment that blurs the story of Randy the Ram with the story of Mickey Rourke: A lot of people told me that I'd never wrestle again, and that's all I do. You know if you live hard and you play hard and you burn the candle at both ends you pay the price for it. You know in this life you can lose everything that you love, everything that loves you. Now I don't hear as good as I used to, and I forget stuff, and I ain't as pretty as I used to be. But goddamn, I'm still standing here, and I'm the Ram. As time goes by as time goes by they say, he's washed up, he's finished, he's a loser, he's all through, but you know what? The only ones who are gonna tell me when I'm through doing my thing is you people here. You people here. You people here are the ones worth bringing it for because you're my family. I love all of you. Thank you so much. This scene, like Teddy Lewis's first appearance in Body Heat, is introduced with a rock anthem, Guns 'N' Roses's Sweet Child O' Mine (Rourke's own entrance song when he was a professional boxer). It is the first of the wrestling scenes to be shot in a theater rather than a gym. Bursting into the ring with heavy-metal hair, wristbands, and green sequin spandex tights, Rourke hits all the themes of his career: the rock 'n' roll theatricality, the embrace of victimization, the celebration of excess, the willingness to pay the price, the attempt to create an alternative family, the offering of pleasure to others

through the endurance of pain, and the most literal instance yet of Rourke's throwing himself away. Part of the pleasure of his performance in The Wrestler comes from watching him pull off the same dramatic hustle he did in Body Heat and realizing that it was never about good looks. Now that Randy/Rourke is stripped of all his resources face, money, stardom, youthit's clear that these weren't the sources of his attraction after all. All along he was giving pleasure with his mixed signals, his ways of paying attention, of revealing and hiding, of offering himself up for a beating, of expressing pain. By going backstage at the wrestling match, by showing the staples being removed from his flesh, Aronofsky advertises that it's a hustle but that hustles have a cost and reality of their own. The quarry of The Wrestler is the real suffering of those with fake tans, the real bruises gained in the fixed match, and the film exposes that all along Rourke's effects were born of solicitation, stoicism, and self-abuse (fig. 9).

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Figure 9. Randy's final Ram Jam. Open New Window

He ain't as pretty as he used to be. The early Rourke had a quivering, virtuosic expressiveness, every muscle in his face alive with emotion, but now, with his ravaged features, nerves deadened by boxing and surgeries, Rourke's acting has a compelling opacity. He has a new humility and subtlety, an ability to exist before the camera without bravado, not flirting, not hiding behind hats and sunglasses. His eyes are still mistrustful, and they still flinch and squint in a way that suggest he's expecting to be hit. But now he takes longer to strike back. In Randy there's a new patience, as though he's come to accept the limitations of his situation, his relationships, and himself. Young Rourke, confronted with hate, would hate right back. But when Randy's daughter screams at him, I hate you, he simply hugs her closer: I know. I know you hate me. But there is continuity in his acting, too, especially in Rourke's physical articulacy. When Randy's promoter approaches him to schedule a rematch with an old foe, the exhausted Randy hesitates for a moment. He is tired, sweaty, reluctant at first, but responds with sportsmanship. In a gesture that fills no more than two seconds of screen time, he dramatizes the cycle of addiction to pain and the community of the ring. Randy bumps fists with his manager, then winces, then smiles, then touches his other hand to his elbow, tenderly nursing the ache. The fact that Randy looks like hell changes the viewer's relationship to Rourke's objectification. His face is withheld for a long time at the beginning of the film, creating a combination of desire and dread. Nothing about 9 Weeks had suggested that viewers should be uncomfortable looking at the gorgeous young Rourke. But here, when we see

Randy being objectified or objectifying himself, we don't side with the gaze. When he goes for a beer with Cassidy and she won't dance with him, he says, fine then, I'll dance for you, and proceeds to mimic a lap dance. It's not sexyit's just comically sad. When he has a one-night stand with a woman who dresses him up as a fireman, he wakes up in her apartment still wearing parts of the uniform. We share his self-loathing as he shamefully sneaks out, and it feels gross. This loss of visual pleasure is not the only way in which the film, of necessity, revises the Rourke of the 1980s. The Wrestlerrepresents a significant new phase in Rourke's career because it's the first time he's been styled definitively as a star for men, and male responses to The Wrestler recalled women's to Diner and 9 Weeks. Perhaps it's not surprising, for The Wrestler inverts the dynamic of the films that let women backstage to masculinity. If early Rourke invited women to be male perverts, then late Rourke invites men to be old whores. Rourke's closeted transgenderism in The Wrestler can be usefully contrasted with the only out performance of his thirty-year career. In Animal Factory, Rourke plays Jan the Actress, the transgender bunk mate to Edward Furlong's posh young incarceree. The setting recalls Bullet, but with sexual alterity now foregrounded, not buried. We meet Jan as she lies on her bottom bunk filing her nails and fantasizing. She has fashioned her linens into a set reminiscent of Nadar's portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, with voluminous white drapery, and she has movie-star pinups tacked to the walls. Jan has a southern accent, a lisp, and no front teeth, making her mouth a gaping hole when she laughs. In a Rourke-authored monologue, she drawls while reclining like an odalisque: I'll tell you something, when God put me together he made it fucked up, he made a real bad mistake. I don't need this big old cock here, I'd just as soon cut it off. The next lifetime, I'm just gonna be the girl next door. Let me tell you something, if I had wings, I would be a butterfly and I would just fly out the motherfucking window, I would fly across the ocean. You know where I'd go? Where I've always wanted to go. I always wanted to go to Pawis, Fwance. I'd watch all the pretty French boys walk by, and I would say Hey you, you go get Mama a caf latte and a jelly donut, s'il vous plait. And they would wait on me and they would be polite to me and take me to pretty places. It's the familiar Rourkean expression of desire for transcendence of the body, for escape from the prison of the self, for multivalent and counterintuitive identifications. And here the emergence from the closet does nothing to diminish Rourke's effects. As usual, he discovers tensions and layers within Jan; he expresses sentimentality and toughness, domesticity and sexual aggression, visually in the contrast between her bulging muscular frame and her delicate attirered lace bra, false eyelashes, painted nails, belly button ring. Jan's effort to derealize the materiality of gender, her self-fashioning as the Actress, and her cultivation of an identity of surplus, doubleness, and paradox recall Rourke's first theater role. When Genet's Green Eyes opens his shirt for his cell mates to

reveal the tattoo of a woman's face beneath, he asks, I make a nice couple, eh?28 From Deathwatch to The Wrestler, this is the question that haunts all of Rourke's performances and defines his enigmatic merger of method and camp. He was never just Stanley Kowalski; he was also Blanche DuBois. Where will Rourke's career go from here? His role in Sin City was an anthology of favored outlaw motifs: the broken romanticism, the bond with women and animals against the cruelty of men, the feeling of being framed from the start, the noir glamour spiked with the realist edge of Marv's psychotropic medications, the outlandishly wounded masculinity. Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2 (2010) again takes Rourke into transgenderism and kink. As the villain Whiplash, Rourke's hands are transformed into whips, his body contained in painful-looking wire contraptions. The character originated as a woman, one of Marvel Comics' quartet of Femmes Fatales. With his roles in these two franchises, it would be easy for Rourke to disappear again into self-parody, to make a living doing cameos and playing charismatic villains. Since The Wrestler, nothing on the horizon seems quite worthy of his talent. Kael is no longer with us to comment on the winter of Rourke's career, but her remarks on the later roles of Brando ring in the ears when one watches Iron Man 2: when he appears on the screen, there is a special quality of recognition in the audience: we know he's too big for the role.29 Rourke has always needed the right director to get the best out of him. I opened with a command, now let me close with a plea: Liliana Cavani, please capture the late flowering of Rourke's talent. He'll do everything you say.