The main character in Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Wrestler is named Randy the Ram. He’s a former wrestling champion who’s gotten old, he wears a hearing aid and prescription glasses even as he tans and dyes his hair a startlingly neon grunge-blond. His voice is bumpy, sort of, and tired — it’s the gyrating growl of an old Chevy truck’s February exhaust pipe. His body and face are battered, pock-marked, scarred.
Aronofsky looks nothing like Randy the Ram, and he’s not really even a fan of professional wrestling. At the James Hotel in downtown Chicago, he’s talking on one of those headset phones that instantly and crudely invite associations with telemarketers and Justin Timberlake. He’s sporting designer jeans and brown leather shoes that look like they’re coated in wood lacquer. His gold-rimmed glasses are a philosopher’s, a prop in a detective’s study in a 19th century play.
His dissimilarities with Randy the Ram are only notable in light of his insistence, moments later, that directors should personally connect with their lead characters.
“You definitely have to identify with them on some level,” he says from behind a tissue, sneezing erratically the moment he sits down. “The reality is I could make a story about a five-year-old girl, and the only way I could make it good is by understanding what she’s going through. And the only way to do that is by putting my own experience there.”
With respect, and with an outward mask of maybe even something like dotage, we ask ourselves: What in God’s name has this man been through to come up with what he’s come up with? If personal experience is indeed what guides his film making, we can only assume that Aronofsky has led a life of maniacal drug addiction and interstellar exploration. But he hasn’t. What he has done is conceive and direct four wildly imaginative, wholly dissimilar films, and it’s because he’s able to use his experience as a launching point and project it onto his film worlds. Call him what you will — visionary, deranged mad man, amateur — Aronofsky demonstrates with every one of his new projects something Hollywood at large can’t quite get a handle on: evolution.
In 1998, Aronofsky’s visually arresting Pi made him a cult hero. Two years later, Requiem for a Dream and its whirlwind acclaim made his a household name (for those whose households endorse film making that abides enthusiastically beyond the Hollywood mainstream). The Fountain, in 2006, prompted some critics to herald the arrival of the next Stanley Kubrick. Now, The Wrestler has devotees pleading for his candidacy at the Academy Awards.
The idea of Aronofsky having devotees, though, seems far-fetched because of his oeuvre’s unabashed diversity. “The fans shift,” he says. “There are a lot of Pi fans out there, and there are a lot of Requiem fans who hated Pi. And there are a lot of Fountain fans who hated Requiem and Pi. The ones that stick with me—I’m psyched that they’re looking forward. But for me, I’m just trying to tell stories that haven’t been told before, trying to do something that’s original, trying to tell them in original ways.”
Originality is one trait Aronofsky’s films can hardly be accused of lacking. Pushing the envelope has become so definitively his stock in trade that to settle for something generic or something not uniquely of his voice and vision would be an egregious artistic offense: not against his fans, but against himself.
“I think it’s important,” he says, “as someone working in the arts, to keep challenging yourself, and keep trying new things—different things. At least that’s what Madonna tells us.” He adjusts his jeans and brushes them unconsciously as he crosses his legs. “Film making is a really really really tough job. The thing I always say is if you’re going to deal with all the pain of making a film and seeing it through, then it better be something you’re very passionate about. Don’t try to play to the middle. Play to what makes you special, tell the story that only you can tell. And then do the work.”
Northwestern assistant professor of English and Gender Studies Nick Davis is also, incidentally, a freelance film critic and an Aronofsky fan. He applauds him for being a true artist, for his finesse when dealing with heavy emotional themes, for making bold, unconventional decisions in his film making. “His films always ask the audience to think as well as to feel, and to accept levels of paranoia and anguish that most films would steer clear of.”
The Fountain even made Davis’s top films in 2006. In that film, Davis says, “the major burden on the audience was to accept and relate to a degree of romantic love, with no irony or sarcasm, that filmmakers almost never ask of us anymore, particularly in the genres that Aronofsky works in or near.” Davis even teaches The Fountain in one of his Gender Studies classes. “I’m doing my best to champion the film,” he said.
Slate’s Dana Stevens views Aronofsky as a director whose “intellectual reach tends to exceed his artistic grasp.” That’s why the “scruffy, accidental” beauty of The Wrestler (as opposed to the grand, ambitious scope of something like The Fountain) impressed her so much. It wasn’t the magnificent performance of Mickey Rourke. It was Aronofsky’s ability to evolve, to make her rethink him. “Aronofsky’s films have always struck me as adolescent fantasies,” she writes in her Dec. 17 review, “self-consciously big ideas wrapped in lurid, over-composed images…That Aronofsky had it in him is a rebuke to the complacency of viewers who, like me, thought they had his number.”
Aronofsky’s is a number hard to come by. Yet for all his talk of telling stories only he can tell, of imbuing every film with life experience, of “connecting,” before The Wrestler, all of Aronofsky’s films seemed a far cry from truth, his characters nearly impossible to understand as human beings. The issue, perhaps, is that his film making style is so present and so powerful in all his movies that it effectively commandeers the characters in them.
It’s impossible to watch his films without constantly acknowledging that you are doing so. It’s impossible to finish one without feeling like you’ve survived something. There’s a visceral quality to them, an in-your-face bleakness which at times concentrates and snowballs into moments of extreme, graphic violence.
“I just like when things freak out. I don’t know what it is. I’m a roller coaster fan, so the more you can scare the shit out of me, the better. One way you can scare people is by doing stuff that’s very disturbing, but I try to do it so that it has a reason. I don’t want to be one of those horror directors that’s disgusting just to be disgusting.” He speaks with his hands, and he pronounces it “hawrer.”
He’s talking about the scene in The Wrestler where Randy the Ram and a sadist opponent do battle in a ring ornamented in shards of glass, barbed wire and thumb tacks. The scene starts with the two wrestlers slapping each other in the face, back and forth, as hard as they can. Then it gets grisly: staple guns, hammers, tables and chairs, ladders and lots and lots of blood.
But Aronofsky could have been talking about the unsettling scene in Pi when a man becomes so fed up with his mental breakdowns that he applies an electric screwdriver to his scalp, spraying his brains all over the bathroom. Or he could have been referencing the harrowing montage in Requiem for a Dream, culminating in a blood-splattering amputation.
Aronofsky raises his hands in surrender — don’t sue me — and confesses that he never has an audience in mind when conceiving his projects, or even while directing them, attributing his ideas instead to the vagaries of inspiration. “I have no idea why I’m attracted to these stories, these images. It’s just what comes out. I’m not conscious of it.”
It’s Davis’s hope that whatever images and stories do come out from Aronofsky are able to “connect with the Hollywood community and the ticket-buying public, so that he wins access to studio budgets that would help him realize his visions even more fully.” Davis says that people need to see these films “in the theater” to send studios the right message about supporting real artists. He adds that though many people consider Requiem a huge hit, he can’t think of anyone other than himself who saw it before it came to DVD.
There’s a great deal of financial strife associated with making films Hollywood hasn’t fully embraced. Aronofsky even had to put a portion of his union salary into production costs for The Wrestler. “Every single financier in the world, except for the one who financed it, said no. And the one who did finance it didn’t give me enough money to make it.” Back at the James Hotel, Aronofsky inhales through his teeth and shakes his head. “That’s the life if you want to tell stories.”
From a critical perspective, the stories Aronofsky chooses to tell–and the way the he chooses to tell them — are unfortunately realities that are almost too real to be appreciated, conflicts that are either too ultra-niche or so impossibly abstruse that they’re nearly inaccessible. In Pi, an introverted mathematical virtuoso is flung about a black-and-white New York City guided by his black-and-white mind, trying to uncover a pattern in the stock market by “solving” pi. Requiem for a Dream pits a whole ensemble of downward spiraling addict/lunatics against themselves and the world. An immortal man, or the trapped, intractable mind of a mortal one, is the protagonist in The Fountain, a film where enormously complex themes like “love” and “death” are made small by its multidimensional scope.
But in The Wrestler, what comes out of the story is a miraculously, dauntingly perfect Mickey Rourke. As Randy the Ram, Rourke complements Aronofsky’s directorial style, and enhances it by trimming the flourish. He becomes not an object in an otherwise doomed Aronofsky landscape, but its quiet centerpiece, a one-trick pony whose tragic, heroic life becomes what viewers latch onto.
On the whole, it’s the way the stories are revealed that make them Aronofsky’s. It’s the razor-sharp cuts that make the pills in Requiem for a Dream villains. It’s the tumult of a mind projected onto a city in Pi that makes the narrative so compelling, the searing score which tears each image from the screen even as the brain itself is torn from its captor. It’s the colors and the textures of The Fountain and the film’s slow, constant ascent which eclipses the narrative and eventually absorbs it. It is Aronofsky’s bold, boundary-less film making that gives his pursuits a nobility beyond their adherence to reality. It is his imagination that merits him pardon and acclaim. Not his story-telling, to be frank, but his story-showing: the gift of a Visitor’s Pass into that mind of his, that crazy, candid, tireless, pumping genius.