For our sins he was pinned: Salvation in The Wrestler

In Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, modern pop culture forms the stage of a very unusual Passion play. The film places Golgotha within the squared circle: it presents a wrestling match as a drama of violence that brings salvation. But who is the redeemer and who is the redeemed?

Mickey Rourke plays—though "embodies" might be a better word—Randy "the Ram" Robinson (born Robin Ramzinsky), a fifty-something professional wrestler quietly fading into oblivion in south Jersey. He still wrestles on weekends, but superstardom has long-since passed him by, and he struggles to make rent on his dreary mobile home. He is, like Travis Bickle, God's lonely man. His estranged daughter refuses to speak to him, and the closest he has to a friend is Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a stripper who thinks of him as a customer rather than a companion. After a particularly brutal match, the Ram's years of physical and chemical abuse overtake him: he suffers a heart attack, and he is told he'll likely die if he continues wrestling. Thus robbed of his identity, Randy struggles to find his way in the world. Ultimately, he realizes that he needs wrestling, and, throwing caution to the wind, he goes ahead with a 20th-anniversary rematch against his old rival, a faux-Libyan heel named the Ayatollah.* 

The Wrestler is a movie all about redemptive suffering, as we see the central role that dramatized violence plays in the Ram's life. At a couple points this is made perhaps too clear, as in an early scene where Randy shows Cassidy the scars his career has left him with. She responds by quoting Isaiah 53:5 by way of The Passion of the Christ's opening epigraph: "He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by His wounds we are healed." She makes the connection even more clear moments later, dubbing Randy "the sacrificial Ram," and later in the film we see a tattoo in the center of his back of Jesus crowned with thorns. Clearly, the film wants us to view wrestling as a spectacle of redemptive suffering.

And at times that suffering is extreme. In perhaps the most powerful sequence in the film, we see an ultraviolent match between the Ram and real-life hardcore wrestler Necro Butcher**. The two mangle one another with a variety of sharp implements scattered around the ring, and the action is intercut with scenes of backstage doctors patching the two up immediately after the match. The violence is intense: Necro takes a staplegun first to his own body, then to the Ram's; he stabs the Ram in the forehead with a fork; both crash through sheets of glass and tangles of barbed wire. (And, lest we forget what it all means, the Ram ends up with a sizable gash on the side of his torso.) It's a messy, bloody affair, and the audience loves it—but it's interesting to note that they express their enjoyment of the match by hurling abuse at the masochistic Necro (chanting, for instance, "You sick fuck" while he staples himself). Despite the extreme violence of the spectacle, the match still establishes a normative morality.

But what comes across most clearly is that this is a very, very different kind of wrestling than the Ram enacted twenty years ago. Wrestling in the '80s was simple, straightforward theater. In the final act of the film, the Ram tries to plan out his match with the Ayatollah, who responds: "You're the face, I'm the heel. Done." Compare this to a conversation Randy and Necro have before their match, in which Necro carefully explains what weapons he's going to use. In the Ram's day, wrestling was all good guys and bad guys, simplified stories of right and wrong. Necro Butcher's style of wrestling is still theater, but it's theater of a very different kind; it's something more akin to performance art. The stage is no longer the canvas, but the actual flesh of the wrestlers—flesh that is, by the end of the match, visibly torn and battered. Things have changed, and the Ram has a hard time staying current. In his day, wrestling was a drama of violence, but with a sturdy layer of make-believe on top. There's no faking being stabbed in the forehead with a fork. It's little surprise that, after a cursory patching-up in the aftermath of the match with Necro, the Ram ends up in the hospital anyway. 

It's not stated explicitly in the film, but the match against Necro Butcher is a "Bring Your Own Weapons" match, a staple of CZW (Combat Zone Wrestling) events in which fans provide the tools with which the wrestlers mangle one another. The barbed wire, forks, and thumbtacks that nearly kill the Ram are provided by the audience; this is participatory violence. In this context, the audience's chanting takes on the audience's role in a Passion play. "Crucify him!" is replaced by "Fuck you Necro," but the end result is the same: the audience makes the violence possible (and necessary).

So perhaps it is the audience that is redeemed: through participating in the violent spectacle, aspects of their worldview (America is better than not-America; reluctant masochism is better than enthusiastic masochism) are reinforced. But the real salvation here is for the Ram himself. The movie makes it clear that he finds a clarity inside the ring that he can't find in the ambiguities of his real life. (It's little surprise that a wrestler of the '80s who dramatizes suffering falls for a stripper who offers fake pleasure.) His attempts to find a new normalcy (a new job, a better relationship with his daughter) end in frustrated disaster. Ultimately, the Ram can't simply be a character that Randy plays. He is the Ram; his true identity can only become manifest in the simple drama of an old-school wrestling match. Without wrestling, he has no identity, so he sacrifices his reality for fiction, and finds redemption in the bargain. When he emerges from behind the curtain to fight his final match, he truly becomes the character he's been playing in Passion plays for his entire life. The Ram is the salvator salvandus, the redeemed redeemer. His final entry into the ring is a resurrection: Robin Ramzinski has died, but Randy the Ram, the legend, the "spiritual body" that transcends ordinary existence, will live forever. 

Many thanks to wrestling fans extraordinare Mark Hugo and Michael Benni Pierce for their assistance with this essay.

*The reference is to the mid-'80s rivalry between Sgt. Slaughter and the Iron Sheik.

**Who I suspect may have gotten his name from the bass player for Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. 

Comments

[Lokisbane]

Spot on, Gabe. One of my main worries going into this movie was that Aronofsky was going to preach against the fans. "Beyond the Mat", although a great wrestling documentary, is definitely guilty of this. To the contrary, the fans are depicted as Ram's true family. Although Cassidy tells Ram that she is really there for him before his last match, it's too little too late. By asking him to not walk through that curtain she's showing her ignorance of him as a person. The fans know that above all else Ram is a wrestler.

I've been going to CZW shows for the past six years and before our discussion I did not think about the matches in terms of a Passion play. As a person who had lost religion, wrestling had become my religion. I just didn't realize how stark the parallels were in the ritual. In a small but significant way this movie captured some of the feeling I found in the squared circle.