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Copyright © 2010 by Benjamin Balthaser and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087
Re-Staging the Great Depression:
Genre as Social Memory in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler
Benjamin Balthaser
From NPR’s series on the Federal Writers’ Project to a spate of biographies on
FDR to the invocation of The Grapes of Wrath in a recent Washington Post editorial, it
seems the Great Depression is everywhere in public discourse.1 For students of 1930s
culture, the sudden public reconsideration of Steinbeck and the Federal Writers’ Project
is both a source of surprise and a cause for speculation. After all, the Great Depression
has long been politically and culturally a forgotten decade: Keynesianism was long
announced dead, labor unions dying, social realism held as a bad joke in English
departments. The welfare state that emerged with the New Deal is in tatters, and what
fragments of 1930s left culture remain in cultural memory, like Woody Guthrie’s “This
Land is Your Land,” survive often at the level of cultural cliche.
And yet it became increasingly clear that as all previously solid derivatives melted
into air, the “forgotten decade” was suddenly remembered everywhere: Time Magazine
issued a cover story entitled “Hard Times” with a 1931 black and white photo of a
Chicago bread-line.2 The same week, Time ran “Remembering the Depression” on its
website, comprised of a series of Walker Evans photographs and first-person testimony
of survivors, now in their 80s and 90s.3 Not to be outdone, Newsweek ran its February
1 According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, nearly a third of working class homes in the
United States cannot meet basic needs and live in a state of constant economic insecurity, and the effects of
poverty also include increased levels of failed marriages and even domestic violence, Shawn Fremstad,
Rebecca Ray, Hye Jin Rho, “Working Families and Economic Insecurity in the States: the Role of Job
Quality and Supports,” (Center for Economic Policy Research), , April 15, 2009.
2 “In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged
‘immaterial labor,’ that is labor that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, or an
emotional response. . . . Affective labor . . . is the labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a
feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. One can recognize affective labor in, for
example, in the work of legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile),”
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, The
Penguin Press, 2004), 107-8.
3 “A New Federal Writers Project,” Day to Day, National Public Radio, December 11 2008,
; “State by State,” Talk of the Nation,
November 27, 2008, ; Scott Simon,
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2009 cover story “Road to Recession” with Dorothea Lange’s 1938 “The Road West.”4
Even Pete Seeger had his moment in the rain during Presidential inauguration.
If Time got the genre right – the Federal Writers’ Project First Person America
did change the way history was recorded – the stories underneath the Evans photos were
mostly Reagan-era homilies of pluck and resilience. And like Time, Newsweek’s
embrace of Keynesianism lite – “running deficits and printing money” – is a far cry from
the government intervention and wholesale creation of new federal programs to create
jobs that seemed to many in the 1930s a taste of what might be a socialist future to
come. Few if any of these stories – from the Washington Post to Time Magazine –
seemed to think we are in a new Depression. From neo-conservative Niall Ferguson to
liberal Robert Samuelson, the system, they argue, is sound; all that may be necessary to
shore up what is presented as a temporary glitch is a little tinkering at the edge. While
there have been deeper concerns, including a Newsweek cover titled “Guide to Populist
Rage” featuring pitchforks and torches, only one of the six commentators suggested
anything about social movements. The Getty Archive photographs in Time’s memory
piece – including images of farm workers, bread lines and hitch hikers by Evans and
Dorothy Lange – stand in stark disjuncture to the stories of thrift and diligence they
accompany.
One has to then ask what this frequent – almost obsessive – citation of the Great
Depression should mean for those who write and work on the terrain of cultural
production, and on the 1930s in particular. As critic Marita Sturken points out, cultural
memory is “co-constitutive” with the process of forgetting: to “remember” the
Depression offers a new national narrative and potentially suppresses others.5 And as
Walter Benjamin writes in his seminal essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History, such
“Unchained Memories,” National Public Radio, February 8, 2009, ; Thomas Sugrue, “The Hundred Days War,” review of Traitor to his Class: the
Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands and “Nothing to
Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America” by Adam Cohen, The
Nation, April 27, 2009, 25-8; Rachel Dry “A Recession only Steinbeck Could Love,” The Washington
Post, magazine, Sunday, March 22, 2009.
4 “Hard Times,” Time Magazine, cover, October 13, 2008.
5 “Remembering the Great Depression,” Time Magazine, February 27, 2009, .
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Copyright © 2010 by Benjamin Balthaser and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087
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moments of crisis are precisely when the construction of new movements must ”retain
the image of the past” in order to “fan the spark of hope” for social change.6 Yet the
essay also carries with it a warning. Memory contains a “threat” precisely because it is
subject to and potentially agent of the same forces of power and hegemony as those that
rule the present. There is always a “conformism that will overpower [memory],” denude
its strangeness and power, and render history into merely a positive affirmation of the
status quo. To remember Depression-era social movements, even to remember them as
sources of positive change, is not necessarily the same as “fanning the spark of hope.”
Historical memory is double edged, and recollection is not the same as recovery.
As the mainstream media has engaged on its own memory project, it may seem
appropriate to ask what cultural memory means in this new context, and what it should
mean to “remember the Depression” as we are heading into what looks like a new one –
especially as the news media seems to recall that Depression only in order to insist that
we are not in one. Looking at two recent Hollywood films that reference the Depression
may help to shed light on what memory can – and should – mean for those invested in the
project of recovering (and re-activating) progressive and historically grounded culture.
Likewise, as film may be the medium that best captures immediate social change,
offering a rich textual and visual discourse, these films provide a more contradictory –
and productive – forum for exploring this problematic. Produced between the needs of its
investors and the demands of its creators for artistic content, film can show a more
nuanced view of the present than the news, which is often more ideologically
circumscribed.
Ron Howard’s 2005 Cinderella Man and more recently Darren Aronofsky’s 2008
The Wrestler are both films that are deeply invested in the memory of the Great
Depression, and that can tell us much about they way in which that historical memory is
constructed today. Of the two, Cinderella Man appears the most obvious fit for a “thirties
film.” Based on the real-life 1930s boxer James J. Braddock, it includes a host of
Depression-era tropes that attempt to add gritty historical context to what some critics
derided as an overly sentimental film. We see shots of Hoovervilles, hear references to
6 “The Road to Recession,” Newsweek, cover, February 4, 2009.
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Copyright © 2010 by Benjamin Balthaser and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087
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political organizing, see pre-union waterfront hiring lines, relief offices, and the gray and
ochre color scheme often associated with social realist art. More importantly, the film
evokes what critic Chris Vials, in his recent book, Realism for the Masses, argues was
one of the central mediums through which Popular Front politics were communicated: the
boxing narrative.7 Films like Kid Galahad, The Champ, The Killers, They Made Me a
Criminal, Body and Soul and Golden Boy (very closely modeled after the Clifford Odets
play by the same name) portrayed the boxer as often ethnically marked and working
class, exploited by a world of gangsters, consumerism, greedy promoters, and literally
cut-throat competition that threaten his morality and, often, his life. While Frank Capra’s
work presented a cinematic portrait of the New Deal as a benevolent paternalism
modeled on a small-town, the boxing narrative was, in fact, more emblematic of the
movement culture of the Popular Front: it featured an urban, multi-ethnic, anti-fascist,
and frequently anti-capitalist “structure of feeling” that fused pulp mass culture with a
hard-edged working-class politics.
Unlike Golden Boy, which was produced as a play by Group Theater before it was
a Warner Brothers film, 1937 Kid Galahad was emblematic precisely because of its
relative insulation from left political movements. Nonetheless, the film represents what
Michael Denning refers to as “the laboring of American culture” that began in the 1930s,
articulating a working-class sensibility not necessarily associated with the Communist
Party nor “political” in the narrow sense of party politics, but belonging to a generational
re-alignment of culture that integrated a working-class constituency, thematic content,
and sensibility.8 Ward Guisenberry, bellhop turned prize fighter, is re-christened “Kid
Galahad” by his promoter to a roomful of photo-snapping reporters. Repeatedly,
Guisenberry/Galahad’s promoter, Nicky Donati, refers to the boxer as a “machine, not a
violin player” and to his strong round-house punch as “money in the bank.” In doing so,
Guisenberry/Galahad becomes a kind of gilded proletarian whose body is merely an
extension of the businessman’s capital. The film proceeds with a number of formal
7 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 2.
8 Walter Benjamin, “Theses of the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York, Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
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contrasts between the commodified world of boxing and the anti- or pre-capitalist forms
of labor. Guisenberry’s dream to “own his own farm” is contrasted to Donati’s urban and
bourgeois schemes to make money from the labor of others; mobster Turkey Morgan’s
profit from gambling and other forms of crude speculation are contrasted with the
generosity of the farm family and the frank honesty of Guisenberry.
In these films boxing is the performance of capitalism. In the broadest sense, the
emphasis on boxing as a metaphor for capitalism has it roots in what Warren Susman
notes as the importance of games and sportsmanship during the Depression.9 Not only
was there a “dramatic increase” in games of all kinds, board games, sports leagues, the
democratization of golf and tennis, the expansion of mass media in radio and film made
sports and sports heroes national figures in ways they hadn’t been before. As Susman
points out, the game was also a metaphor for rules and mores that needed to be reinforced
or, in the cases where the game wasn’t played fair, for a social order that seemed to
violate all of known boundaries. Even the New Deal borrowed its name from the
language of the poker game. “Yet the striking fact remains,” Susman writes, “that the
increase in the particular kind of games that did dominate . . . in the 1930s . . . marked a
return to an almost folk-style pattern of large-scale participation and engagement.”10
Boxing by its very staging lends itself to a representation of anti-social competition: it is
a game that unlike dance contests or baseball does not rely on a visible social
cooperation. In Robert Siodmak’s 1946 The Killers we see the body of a soon-to-be
washed-up fighter in exhausted agony, as we do also in Golden Boy. Boxing in these
films is presented as individualized, alienated labor. In the 1930s lexicon of games, it is
the anti-game as it were.
9 Chris Vials, “Taking Down the Great White Hope,” Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front
Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935-1947 (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 4.
10 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, (New York, Verso, 1998), xvi-xvii. Denning outlines several
interrelated arguments about the changing U.S. culture of the 1930s: the growth of the labor movement,
increased influence and participation of working class Americans in the arts, and the dramatic expansion of
mass culture and education for working class adolescents and adults. While the Popular Front was a
political movement, dominated by the Communist Party and left-lead unions of the CIO, and much of the
culture produced by and around the movement was broadly working class, anti-fascist, and anti-racist in
outlook, to suggest that it carried a CP or CIO “line” would drastically simplify the way culture works.
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Copyright © 2010 by Benjamin Balthaser and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087
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While Kid Galahad remains distinctly apolitical and conservative in its solution to
the values of capitalism – one can either fall in love with a farm-girl or return to the
countryside as a peasant producer – the binary between the commodified and capitalistic
world of boxing and the social world of human values is a constant in boxing films, and
often is deployed in more politically radical ways. In Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, for
instance, boxer Joe Bonaparte’s desire to “be better than you are” is contrasted with his
father’s wish that he fulfill his promise as a violinist or his brother’s role as a organizer
for the CIO who fights “for what he believes in.”11 In The Killers, a used-up fighter with
a broken hand turns down the offer to be a neighborhood cop for “six times the money”
as a small-time gangster. And while love is offered as a substitute for class competition,
it is often the women involved in the world of boxing – cutting news-clippings of the
boxer’s prize-fights as in Kid Galahad or seducing the boxer to keep him in the game as
in Golden Boy – that threaten to further ensnare the boxer within the world of
commodities and consumerism. Ultimately, the boxing narratives of the 1930s portray the
sport as a kind of unregulated, brutal competition that preys on the dreams of second
generation immigrants to improve their lot and enter the mainstream of society.
Given the context of the 1930s in which it is just those second-generation children
of immigrants who made the “backbone of the CIO,” boxing films’ implied rejection of
self-serving competition and their implicit if not always explicit endorsement of an
alternate value system based on intrinsic worth and mutuality undoubtedly resonated. As
Lizabeth Cohen writes in Making a New Deal, by 1940, one in three factory workers in
Chicago belonged to unions, compared with nearly none a decade earlier.12 Mostly
second-generation immigrants and blacks from the South, these new proletarians, while
diverse and divided in many ways, shared English as a common language and often
shared common mass cultural references to films and music. Together, Cohen argues,
these new institutions like the CIO, federal programs delivered through the Democratic
Party, and common cultural references fostered what she refers to as a “culture of unity,”
11 Warren Susman, “The Culture of the Thirties,” Culture as History: Transformation of American Society
in the Twentieth Century (New York, Pantheon Books, 1984), 162.
12 Ibid., 162.
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a political and cultural common sense based in mutuality and solidarity.13 This
generational mood is dramatized by Clifford Odets in Golden Boy, in which Joe’s father’s
wish that his sons live “the good life” by playing classical music is translated by Joe’s
brother Frankie into becoming a labor organizer for the CIO.
Viewed against the field, Cinderella Man violates nearly every premise of the
1930s boxing film narrative. The washed up boxer James J. Braddock returns to the ring
from the relief rolls to win the heavy-weight championship from Max Baer. Considered
an “underdog,” Braddock is depicted as an “everyman” who represents the struggles of
ordinary people against the well-heeled Baer. Despite the populism implicit in the
depiction of Braddock’s poverty, the film never problematizes the sport itself. Indeed, the
match seems to pit the “good” boxer, James J. Braddock, who fights “for my family,”
against the “bad” boxer, Baer, who is seen as an arrogant playboy. Indeed, Braddock is
not only shown to be a family man, but a constant dispenser of cracker-jack moral
wisdom: he lectures his kids on the evils of stealing, explains to his wife the virtues of
keeping his word, and returns his relief money to the welfare agency after he is self-
sufficient again. Rather than represent the boxing ring as a microcosm of working-class
capitalist competition, Braddock frames it as the only legitimate avenue to assert one’s
independence and manhood against those who would look down on working men. In the
ring he tells his wife, “at least I know who’s hitting me.”
Braddock as a muscle-bound Horatio Alger is dramatically underscored by
Braddock’s co-worker, Wilson, who advocates for unionization at the docks. Shown as
an alcoholic who flees after hitting his wife, he is eventually trampled by police horses
after trying to organize members of a Hooverville in the city. Advocating that “working
people have to fight,” Wilson is also portrayed as emotionally unbalanced, appearing
drunk during a community birthday party before assaulting his wife and insulting
Braddock only to flee running down the street. While it’s clear that Braddock pities his
co-worker, it’s also clear that Wilson’s radicalism is tied to his emotional instability. As
Baer is Braddock’s foil in the ring, so Wilson becomes Braddock’s foil in the public and
13 Clifford Odets, Golden Boy, Six Plays of Clifford Odets (New York, Grove Press, 1979), Act 3, Scene 1,
p. 2; Act 3, Scene 3, p. 3.
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domestic spheres. Braddock’s loyalty to his family is tied thus to his work ethic and
professionalism; his “goodness” at home becomes a sign that he knows to limit his
“fighting” to the ring. Structurally, Wilson’s death is contrasted to the deadly power of
Baer’s punches. While Wilson abandons his family to organize, Braddock fights only “to
buy milk” for his kids. Indeed, it is continually suggested that Braddock’s need to put
food on the table is what makes him nearly invincible in the ring; the sanctity of the
nuclear family gives him what appears to be superhuman power. Compared to Golden
Boy in which union organizing is seen as an antidote for the competition of the ring,
Cinderella Man suggests boxing as a safer and more certain alternative to political
advocacy, with self-reliance as its core virtue and the capitalist family structure as its
constituency.
There is a telling moment when Braddock’s wife attempts to convince her
husband’s fight promoter to cancel Braddock’s fight with Baer. The promoter, who has
sold his own furniture to promote the fight, reveals that he believes in Braddock “as a
cause” rather than just a fighter, let alone a mere business investment. Pitted against
blacks, rural hicks, Jews and a very swarthy half-Jewish Max Baer in a series of dramatic
wins, one has to wonder what “cause” the crowds at Madison Square Garden and those
praying for Braddock in Catholic churches are cheering for. Along with Braddock’s
feelings of shame around receiving welfare (and his much publicized return of his relief
money), his humiliation at unemployment is resolved less through an ultimate rejection
of capitalism than through a symbolic victory over ethnic outsiders who are perceived to
be its beneficiaries. In contrast to the coalition of minority organizations and union
members formed the political backbone of the Popular Front, the image of a lone white
hero battling Jewish and black boxers against the shame of federal relief transforms the
New Deal “cultures of unity,” into a story of racial backlash. As his identification with
the Catholic Church may suggest, Braddock’s status as a “common man” thus may have
more to do with the racial populism of Father Coughlin than with anti-racist social
democracy of the Popular Front. Transforming the “culture of unity” to a populism of
white unity, so the film also completes the transformation of the Popular Front from a
movement that challenged racial capitalism in the U.S. and imperialism abroad to a
movement that prefigures a white post-war middle class.
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As Vials argues, boxing narratives of the 1930s often provided opportunities to
link class consciousness to a critique of whiteness.14 For Richard Wright, the boxing ring
was a mass-cultural arena in which black Americans could feel racial pride. Joe Louis’
victory over Max Baer was written about enthusiastically by Wright in the New Masses’
piece “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite” that “Joe Louis was a consciously felt symbol. Joe
was the concentrated essence of black over white.”15 Max Baer himself took to wearing a
Star of David on his boxing shorts after he defeated Germany’s Max Schmelling, as a
conscious repudiation of Nazi racial ideology. In Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, his
ultimate self-destruction comes after he kills the black boxer the Baltimore Chocolate
Drop in the ring. Even Kid Galahad suggests that the price of boxing is the adoption a
deracinated “white” identity, as we follow Guisenberry from his idyllic Scandinavian
farm village to an urban consumerscape in which his name provokes laughter from
crowds of partiers and is seen as merely one more hardship to conquer. In contrast, the
film seems to celebrate the ethnic background of fight promoter Nicky Donati, by
showing an extended scene of untranslated dialogue between him and his Italian-born
mother at her rural farm in upstate New York. As a negligent son who rarely visits his
home, it’s implied that Nicky’s downfall and ultimate death is related to his rejection of
his cultural and ethnic roots. Perhaps the most telling anti-racist moment in 1930s boxing
comes from an anecdote related in Cohen’s history of working class Chicago: during a
CIO organizing drive, she reports how both white and black boxers in the union
supported Louis and even listened to the Baer-Louis fight during a membership
meeting.16 Cohen suggests that for the multi-ethnic CIO, working-class support for Louis
helped bridge racial divides facing industrial workers in Chicago.
14 Chris Vials, “Taking Down the Great White Hope,” Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front
Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935-1947 (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 4.
15 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2. 333.
16 Vials, Realism for the Masses, 21-31. Chris Vials gives an excellent reading of Clifford Odets’ Golden
Boy and Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning as Popular Front works in which white-ethnic boxers
embrace the promise of white upward mobility offered by the sport, at the expense of boxers of color. As
both Odets and Algren were committed anti-racists, the boxers’ failure can persuasively be read as a
warning against the culture of whiteness.
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As Vials argues in Realism for the Masses, films like Rocky, Cinderella Man and
Million Dollar Baby “bear witness to the decline” of the Popular Front incarnation of the
boxing narrative.17 I would argue however, that what is happening is more complicated.
Popular Front era politics have not merely “declined;” rather the working class
iconography has been subsumed within an implicitly racialized – often racist – populism.
As a restaging of the Great Depression, Cinderella Man fits uncomfortably well with
post-60s formations of a white working class pitted against minorities who depend on
welfare from the state and political largesse from well-heeled liberals. Like Allan Bakke,
the medical school applicant who famously sued the University of California to overturn
affirmative action, a working-class white person is framed in contrast to ethnic outsiders
who use their connections to get ahead. Hillary Clinton’s appeals to “hard-working
Americans, white Americans” who supposedly preferred her to Barack Obama in the
Democratic primary are little different from Braddock’s insistence that he fights for the
“common man” by knocking down uppity Jews and blacks in the ring. Given the racial
politics of the boxing narrative, Braddock’s whiteness stands in sharp contrast to his
opponents’ ethnic and racial otherness. In this sense, films like Cinderella Man or even
Walker Evans’ photos in Time Magazine should be considered less as reconstructions of
the Depression than as arguments about its historical legacy. Far from the actual social
movements in the 1930s that challenged racism and demanded a more democratic
economy, these narratives reproduce a narrative of whiteness, in which social welfare
was a temporary, unfortunate necessity that white people were able to overcome (unlike
certain implied “others”) through hard work and resilience. Thus the contradictions of the
news media depictions of the 1930s bear with them implicit arguments about the
Depression that go beyond their mere citation. Remembering the Depression through
hard-working white boxers or as a moment when white, working-class Americans
struggled to maintain their racialized and individualized identity suggests a response to
today’s financial crisis that may include temporary relief but cannot challenge any of the
systemic inequalities of the system.
17 Richard Wright, “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Territories
ed. by Wright and Joseph Norton (New York, International Publishers, 1969), 66-8.
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“Remembering” a social movement is different from citing it. Indeed, as
Cinderella Man suggests, citing a social movement can be a way of forgetting it. The
film The Wrestler, I argue, recalls the classic 1930s Depression-era boxing films, and yet
does so through modalities of the present. What it shares with the boxing films is less the
focus on a particular sport but rather a genre of filmmaking in which class, consumerism,
ethnic identity, alienation, and sexism form crucial intersections in the representation of
late capitalism. In a sense, one could say the boxing films of the 1930s are precise
examples of what Georg Lukacs refers to as “historical fiction,” fiction that does not
simply “reproduce” a historical time period, but rather attempts to understand the class
formations of a given point in history.18 Thus the Popular Front boxing films hinge almost
obsessively on the choice of the boxer to accept his class identity and renounce his own
commodification. That these concerns are also intersected with questions of ethnic
identity and cross-racial alliances forms a structural homology to the worker’s choice to
join the swelling labor movement. Boxing films became allegories of commitment during
a time when joining such a movement presented a real choice for the urban, ethnic
workers these films portray. As Joe Bonaparte’s death on the Long Island Expressway
while speeding in his brand new car suggests, they are also warnings against the failure to
commit to something other than individual success.
The Wrestler inherits these categories of concern – the body as commodity,
solidarity in the face of racial difference, the lure of consumerism, Americanization
versus ethnic belonging – and moves them into post-modern and post-industrial New
Jersey. In one sense, Robin/Randy “The Ram” Randzinski/Robinson seems the obvious
inheritor of Ward Guisenberry or Joe Bonaparte’s legacy. A white-ethnic with working-
class roots, his role as a wrestler is inextricably tied to his new “American” identity, apart
from ethnic identification. In the same way Joe Bonaparte leaves his Italian-American
roots, Ward Guisenberry’s “funny name” becomes “Kid Galahad” or Nelson Algren’s
Bruno Bicek is rechristened “Lefty Biceps,” so Robin Randzinski becomes Randy “The
Ram” Robinson, with bottle-blond hair and an oversized American flag. Literally, the
name is an inversion of his identity: Randzinski is transformed into “Randy” and the
18 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 330.
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gender-ambiguous “Robin” becomes the Anglicized “Robinson,” thus transforming the
Slavic ethnic-American into an American icon. Cast as the White Hero against politically
and racially identified enemies inside the ring – a flag-waving black man in Palestinian
national colors named “the Ayatollah” and an anarchist with a red and black mohican –
Randzinski/Robinson outside of the ring leads a life of working-class economic and
social hardship. Frequently late on the rent, without medical insurance or a pension, his
family an apparent victim to the requirements of his employment, Randzinski/Robinson
leads a life not so different from the lives of many working-class Americans.19
What is absent from the film, of course, is the social movement politics of the
1930s. While it’s clear that Randzinski/Robinson is exploited, with the exception of a
reference to “guys with Cadillacs” and his disappointment over low pay, the 1930s
obsession with boxing “management” is absent. Likewise, the choice that Ward
Guisenberry makes to return to farming or the choice Joe Bonaparte’s brother makes to
organize for the CIO are not available to Randzinski/Robinson. Rather, his alternative is
to work in the deli counter of the local supermarket, which as Randzinski/Robinson
shows, is merely another form of performance. The distinction between two forms of
what Hardt and Negri refer to as “affective labor,” one that is potentially highly paid but
unsteady and other which is low-paid and humiliating must suffice for choices in
Randzinski/Robinson’s blue-collar stretch of New Jersey.20 Lacking an external
movement alternative to which to turn, the immediate struggle for Randzinski/Robinson
is to form connections with other “affective” workers, whether strippers or other former
wrestlers, to recognize their conditions within a class framework.
The radical potential in the film, like Golden Boy’s recognition of the work as
organizer Frankie does, is to see the class nature of non-productive labor and
performance. The recognition Randzinski/Robinson and Pam/Cassidy have for one other
is romantic, but it is also a fundamental recognition of a particular kind of class
solidarity. As Hardt and Negri write in Multitude, the era of post-modern production is as
much about the extension of capitalist relations around the globe as it is about its
19 Vials, Realism, 36.
20 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London, Merlin Press),
1962.
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incursion into modes of existence previous imagined sealed off or immune. Whereas Kid
Galahad imagines love as an antidote to exploitation, romantic and familial love in The
Wrestler is very much within and part of capitalist biopolitics. Rather than attempt to
construct binaries of performance and reality – or productive as against “performative”
labor as Golden Boy does – the film de-fetishizes the labor process of “affective” work.
When Robsinson/Randzinski interrupts a verbally abusive lap dance Pam/Cassidy is
soliciting from four young men, charging that “they don’t know how to treat a lady,”
Pam/Cassidy angrily complains that his chivalry cost her two-hundred dollars, suggesting
that gender humiliation is precisely part of the “emotional” labor she performs. Likewise,
we see many scenes that feature Robsinson/Randzinski negotiating with other wrestlers
about routines pre-match (“I hope staples are OK”), and that introduce viewers to
wrestling stagecraft (a small razor used to draw one’s own blood, for instance).
Furthermore, shots of wrestling are juxtaposed with shots of stripping, and for a moment,
Robsinson/Randzinski imagines himself entering the ring to the sound of 80s music when
he enters the deli-counter, encouraging viewers to see the connections between these
apparently disparate sites of performative labor. The deli counter itself appears as a kind
of performance, as Robinson/Randzinki’s skills as a showman makes him initially
popular with the customers. Indeed, it’s suggested that it is because Robinson/Randzinski
sees the value in performative or “emotive” labor, that he doesn’t see anything strange
about Pam/Cassidy’s “other” life as a mother. The Wrestler does not retreat from post-
modern capitalism into a nostalgia for the past so much as it dialectically goes through
the contradictions of Randzinski/Robinson’s love for Pam/Cassidy and attempts to come
through the other side. Indeed, the closest to a “pastoral” contrast or fantasy of “escape”
we get here is merely an image on Pam’s cell-phone, an image of a condo that has yet to
be constructed.
This is not to suggest that The Wrestler offers no critique of class. In addition to
the poverty Randzinski/Robinson faces, it is made obvious that his body is a commodity.
He refers to it as a “broken down piece of meat” and, as such, his body – injected with
steroids, colored, tanned, and shaved – is likened visually to the shaped and dyed
packages pieces of meat that he sells as a deli counter clerk in the Acme Supermarket.
And giving a twist to the usual boxing tale, in which women are generally presented as
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either temptresses or saviors, Randzinksi/Robinson is attracted to and courts
Pam/Cassidy, a stripper whose body, like his, is an aging commodity (mis)used by her
profession.
Randzinski/Robinson’s tragedy is not Joe Bonaparte’s or “Lefty” Bicek’s – that
the world of cut-throat competition prevents his return to a life of pre-capitalist idyll – but
rather that he cannot differentiate the commodified image of himself as a “wrestler” from
his material condition. He is angry that he has to wear a name-tag with “Robin” instead
of his stage name “Randy” on it, and he seems to be equally mystified by Pam/Cassidy’s
insistence upon the distinction between real relationships and the client/stripper relations
he has with her as a paying customer to her club. While in some ways this tragic mis-
recognition is also his saving grace (Pam/Cassidy eventually falls for
Randzinski/Robinson), the structure of alienation is quite different from earlier boxing
narratives. Rather than suggest he join a social movement and reconstruct class as a
marker of liberation, Randzinsk/Robinson’s struggle is to differentiate the relations
between commodities from the relations between people.
As much as Randzinski/Robinson insists on the value of affective labor – unlike
Ward Guisenberry, who understands his role as a “machine,” and unlike Joe Bonaparte,
who rails against the managers that “own” him and “use him like a gun” –
Randzinski/Robinson identifies with the consumer image of himself as a “hero” and
“face.”21 In the opening scenes of The Wrestler we follow the back of Robin/Randy “The
Ram” Randzinski/Robinson for what seems like an uncomfortable amount of time. We
see him coughing and exhausted after the fight; we see his back as he questions his
promoter about “the gate” money; we see him autograph a fan’s program; and we see him
locked out of his trailer for late rent. The first time we are granted a long view at
Randzinski/Robinson’s face he is gazing at the inside of his van, at an impressive collage
of his own commercialized images: newspaper clippings, promotions, posters, even an
action figure of himself on the dashboard, all taking place of course, inside “the Ram’s”
Dodge Ram. The “face” among villains, the wrestler’s face only emerges when gazing at
his consumer identity.
21 Odets, Golden Boy, Act 2, Scene 1, pg. 291; Act 3, Scene 1, p. 309.
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This split between what the audience sees and what Randzinski/Robinson sees
suggests the alienation faced by the wrestler is as much a question of identity as it is of
exploitation. Unlike Golden Boy in which Bonapart’s role as a performer in the ring is
contrasted to the “real” labor of artistic production, or Guisenberry, who dreams of the
productive labor of farm work as opposite to the performative labor of boxing, there is no
such opposition in The Wrestler. In Kid Galahad, the phoniness of the boxing spectacle
and its performative aspect is seen as degrading, and it is a sign of Guisenberry’s integrity
that he refuses to “bicycle” or “play” an opponent, rather than knock him out directly. In
distinction, Randzinski/Robinson both produces and consumes the commodity of himself,
surrounding himself with reminders of his status as an consumer object, from wrestling
video games in which he is the hero, to oversized American flags that serve as necessary
props for his part. When he panics inside the deli at the meat cutting station, it is because
a customer recognizes him as the wrestler he used to be, thus highlighting the gap
between Randzinski/Robinson as a “piece of meat” and “the Ram” as a hero. As Slavoj
Zizek writes in The Parallax View, there is no opposition between the role of worker and
consumer here, since it is only as a consumer that the commodity is realized as value.22
Value created by labor is “performatively enacted” not at the site of production, but
rather at the site of consumption, where the worker-consumer completes the cycle of
exploitation by realizing the value of the commodity that labor has produced. If the
wrestler is both the producer and consumer of his own commodity, then in many ways his
situation is not all that different from the U.S. working class. He “closes the gap” as
Zizek would say only by staging and consuming wrestling matches as much to keep the
self-referential system going as to accomplish anything per se.
If there is a resistance to this confounding capitalist gaze, it has its source in the
body. Bodies are everywhere in this film – breaking down, sweating, wearing hearing
aids, exposing their flesh, being punctured and pierced. Thus it’s not incidental that the
material limits of the wrestler’s commodity status – the split between Randzinski,
working class failed father/husband, and “The Ram” Robinson hero – are most starkly
confronted after his heart attack. The body is what links him not only to his daughter, but
22 Slavoj Zizek, “The Parallax View,” The New Left Review, 25(2) January-February 2004, 121-34.
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also to his common condition with Pam/Cassidy. Like Pam/Cassidy, his fans “don’t like
to hear about a family” and, yet, unlike her, he abandons them entirely. The commodity,
according to Marx, appears free of its past, as if it came from nowhere. And thus it is at
the level of irony that what he gives to Pam/Cassidy is a representation of exactly that
life: an individually packaged action figure. Framed by his hearing aid,
Randzinski/Robsinson’s confession that he’s a “broken down piece of meat” occurs in
front of his daughter reinforces not only his own awareness of his status, but the film’s
awareness that above all it is the suffering flesh and blood that, in breaking down, can
force the recognition of the social cost of the circuit of production and consumption.
If the film stages the body as a site of resistance to the commodity fetishism of
identity, this resistance is certainly precarious. Randzinski/Robinson’s pick-up of a
wrestling fan suggests the consumer fetish offers seductive pleasures, even as it produces
alienation within acts of intimacy, as an extension to the realm of the spectacle. While
Randsinski/Robinson lies about his status as a wrestler to the woman, it’s clear that her
invitation to “party like a fireman” is part of an active fetish supported by posters, action
figures, and even fireman boots she has him wear while having sex. As she tells him at
the bar when they first meet: “I know who you are.” Within the ring, audience
participation is equally totemistic. There is a disturbing scene in which Randzinski/
Robinson is handed an artificial leg with which to hit his opponent during a “hardcore
match.” The request that Randzinski/Robinson perform an act of violence with a disabled
man’s prosthesis suggests something of a faith healing: the association with the spectacle
of ableism will produce all it touches with the perfect life of the commodity. Even the
most fleeting contact with the commodity spectacle is thus pregnant with the promise of
“immortality.”
And again, unlike earlier boxing narratives, the non-commodified relationships
with either a woman or with family do not (and cannot) serve as a refuge or escape for
Randzinski/Robinson. His relationship with his daughter is broken past healing, and by
the time Pam/Cassidy accepts him, he’s already found the gap between production and
consumption, identity and image to be too painful to bear. Randzinski/Robinson
announces in his last fight that the crowds at the wrestling match “are my family,”
suggesting that the circuit of capital can produce a close-knit discursive unit: like the man
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with the artificial leg, within its bounds, the fiction can be real. Similarly, that he gives
his speech to his daughter at the closed-down site of a beach-side amusement seems
significant. It suggests an older form of consumer culture in which human and collective
interaction was still the center of events. Randzinski/Robinson remembers his daughter
“clinging to his leg” as they descended on a ride, and they finish the day dancing in an
abandoned ballroom. Where consumer culture was once a collective focal point of
working class life and even facilitated organizing, The Wrester suggests that
contemporary mass culture is based on a spectacle in which one is a passive observer,
radically limiting its progressive potential.23 Indeed, as critic Joseph Ramsey has recently
noted: “Once upon a time, indulging in consumer culture meant giving oneself a ‘scare’ –
Stephanie’s favorite ride, as Randy recalls, was the ‘Hall of Monsters’ – that would make
you hold tight to the living leg of an actual family member beside you; nowadays, the
film suggests, it means seeking an artificial ‘family’ member who will hold your
prosthetic leg in the spectacular lights, wielding the symbol of your debility on stage as if
it were as a weapon.”24
Yet within the ring, wrestlers show a very material understanding of the codes of
sport – who is the “face” and who is the “heel,” e.g., the “white hero” as against a
kitchified Arab nationalism. Likewise, the class-conscious coaching Randy gives to
“Tommy Rotten” before the match, that “guys with Cadillacs do the promoting . . . it’s
not about ability” obviously contradicts with the triumph of Americanism over anarchism
that their fight narrative in the ring suggests. More importantly, they also find ways to
support each other during the match. Randzinski/Robinson tells “The Ayatollah” to “go
easy,” and when he sees that Randzinski/Robinson is gasping for breath, “The Ayatollah”
invites Randzinski/Robinson to “pin me” and end the fight. Replacing the racism of
fascism or the Ku Klux Klan of the 1930s that were central features of boxing stories like
Golden Boy and Wright’s reportage of Joe Louis, The Wrestler references the global
racial politics of the post-Cold War era through the characterization of “The Ayatollah.”
Waving a red, green, and black flag, and attempting to sneak up on “the Ram” “the
23 See Cohen, Making a New Deal, and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in
Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1986).
24 Joseph Ramsey, from email correspondence, May 2009.
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Ayatollah,” in a parody of guerrilla warfare, suggests that the present moment has
resurrected Cold War racial politics of a previous era. Yet as much as Randzinski/
Robinson identifies with post-September 11th patriotism, his gestures of workplace
solidarity with “Ayatollah” in the ring suggest a radical view of class based on material
condition. Unlike Rocky IV in which the Soviet boxer Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa
inhabit their Cold War symbols totally, the film suggests wrestlers are “affective”
workers, whose alienation from their own symbolic logic allows for moments of
solidarity at their worksite.
Randzinski/Robinson’s whiteness, unlike Joe Bonaparte’s, does not rely on the
presence of people of color. Indeed, Randzinski/Ronbinson seems openly supportive of
the few black wrestlers in the sport. Rather it’s about the inheritance of an individualism
that in the film’s post-modern appreciation of class identity imagines itself outside of a
system of exploitation and state sanction that is reserved for “heels” and “ayatollahs.”
And likewise, Randzsinski/Robinson’s recognition of the class dynamics of the mat,
unlike the class dynamics of his own life, suggests that any form of commodification
cannot be total. In some ways, the film supports a traditional Marxist view of class
politics: that it is precisely the form of labor the proletariat engages in that creates the
potential for solidarity. That is, despite the wrestler’s alienation from his identity, he feels
solidarity for other affective laborers, wrestlers and strippers, in their place of work.
These multiple layers of solidarity and commodification are, I would argue, potentially
the grounds on which any new U.S. labor movement will be built.
Thus The Wrestler reproduces the class dynamics of 1930s boxing pictures not by
recreating the past “as it really was” to quote Benjamin, but by reinscribing a 1930s genre
within the material conditions of late capitalism.25 What makes films like Cinderella Man
and the slew of “New Hard Times” reproductions of 1930s iconography in the New York
Times and Time Magazine websites conservative is precisely their aura of “past-ness,”
their inability or refusal to meet capitalism and the state of working-class America in its
new conditions of production. This is not to say that The Wrestler is entirely new. Indeed,
in many ways it is a return to classic realism: the attention to the gritty details of work,
25 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.
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the machinery engaged in the labor process, the techniques of wrestling, the bare lighting,
the linear narrative construction. Yet it returns not as an archivist revealing the original,
but rather as reconstruction of a genre for a contemporary historical moment.26 In many
ways, I would argue, its lack of reference to the 1930s is its precise act of
memorialization. One cannot see the film without on some level appreciating its deep
referencing to social realism, yet it is not in the form of nostalgia or pastiche. One may be
hopeful for a new breed of more militant filmmaking, or a militant movement that may
inspire filmmakers to produce films in response. But if the first requirement of an artist is
“to tell the truth,” then I would offer that The Wrestler is perhaps one of the best
Hollywood films documenting working-class life in the U.S. in decades.
26 The recent David O. Russell film The Fighter proves this point in a moment of revealing and un-ironic
genre citation. A formulaic and conservative narrative much like Cinderella Man (if better made), The
Fighter’s plot hinges on a diagetic documentary made about a drug-addicted former boxing champion from
a down-and-out post-industrial New England town. Watching the documentary, the former boxer breaks
his addiction to cocaine. In addition, his younger brother’s estranged girlfriend returns and helps convince
him to become a boxer, who eventually outshines his washed-up older brother. As the role of the
documentary was originally to “show reality” and perform moral uplift, The Fighter’s genre citation reveals
its 19th/early 20th century debt to the equally 19th century idea of individual agency and self-help. While the
setting and social class of The Fighter and The Wrestler are highly similar, The Fighter’s political
conservativism runs far deeper than its Horatio Alger politics. Its thrust is basically nostalgic – not only
can one return as if by magic to an earlier time, so also can one return to a simpler idea of ocular truth. The
power of the film lay in the way it suggests that these are ultimately one and the same.