Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Wrestler!

Theme: The Crusher - Dee Dee King

RIP Hulk Hogan. While it's true my interest in professional wrestling extends about as far as Miss Hancock's legs, that's pretty far (42.5", or an entire Warwick Davies). But I laud the Hulkster for an unrelated reason: he one-shotted evil gossip rag Gawker in court after they illegally posted his sex tape and refused to take it down. If I were Pope, I'd offer absolution of sins for anyone who puts a j**rnalist out of w*rk, but I'm not sure Hogan ever did anything wrong to begin with (no, saying a popular hip hop word while of the wrong caste isn't doing anything wrong; grow up). Since I know nothing about wrestling, let's celebrate his legacy with this 2008 kino instead.

This movie taught me not to do coke with a mid or you'll wake up in her firemen-themed shrine.

Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish) stars as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, whose 80s heyday was as far behind him at the time of this movie as this movie is behind us now, but feels more ancient if not mythical, because not even I was alive for most of it. Still, Randy never traded in his ancient console for something as newfangled as a PS1 or Dream Cast, nor his Ratt and Cinderella records for Nevermind.

Uhhh based?

Sadly, Randy's career went off the rails and he's now stuck in a shit job with a snarky hairlet boss and working what looks like a dwindling indie circuit with much younger talent on the weekends, between drowning his sorrows at a strip club, showing off his pixelated likeness in an ancient vidya to half-bored kids, and trying awkwardly to reconcile with his amazingly obnoxious estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, as herself).

Evan, honey, I'm not the one who failed to convince the world that Marilyn Manson was a creepy pervert.

But could Randy make a comeback with a twenty-year-anniversary rematch against his most famous heel, The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller)? While they almost certainly just made the heel The Ayatollah as a pointed stab at the low-status jingoism of the downscale plebs who watch wrestling, it actually works on a few levels: just like the news, the audience are marks, the shoot is a work, and the real enemy isn't Iran, but your own regime of which the entertainment industry is a consensus-fabricating appendage. You can even get into a more esoteric neo-Platonic reading of the kayfabe as the cave, but all that would go over Randy's head. As the ties that bind him to the outside world fray and snap under the pressure, he's both lost and set free. For him, it's the ""real"" world that's fake and gay, and he's not altogether wrong.

Scenes wahmen will never understand, thy name is this one from The Wrestler.

The ubiquitous Bush-era shakycam may have aged like ass (inb4 >implying it was ever good), but it fits better here than in a lot of other movies from the 2000s, and there's a running motif of tracking shots following Rourke around like a third-person vidya that gives it a bit of a visual signature. It's a rough, gnarly little gem that's sometimes hard to watch, but I return to it at times and it holds up. Had I ever had a heyday of my own, he'd be a literally me up there with Vincent Gallo and Tom Noonan in Manhunter. Watch The Wrestler.