Spending and Saving

Mickey Rourke, Avatar of Excess. Or Angel of Redemption?

Through the extraordinary arc of his career, Mickey Rourke has personified our obsessions, our excesses, and now, finally, the possibility of our redemption.

Way back in the mid-eighties, in 91/2 Weeks, he cast his knowing gaze on Kim Basinger, playing an arty type who works for peanuts in a SoHo gallery. New York City is grey and gritty, filled with predatory squeegee men and homeless bodies that the resigned masses hopscotch over on their morning commute.

Kim’s character is that type we perhaps wanted to be in that moment just before the Reagan era took hold of us. She lives in a small downtown flat – modest but charming—decorated not with expensive furniture but meaningful mementos. She throws dinner parties where intellectuals and artists exchange wit and wisdom. Her world is not wealthy, but warm and full of a certain hopeful sparkle.

Then He comes into the picture. He of the Expensive Suit and Mysterious Smile. His first grand gesture is to wrap her in an pricey shawl that she can’t afford. Boom! She’s hooked. And so are we. Mickey Rourke has officially entered our collective fantasies as the man who will offer us a wild ride without payment or consequences.

After their first encounter, John (Mickey) lures  Elizabeth (Kim) to a friend’s pad. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” plays eerily in the background as she looks at him with a mixture of fear and fascination.

“What do you do?”

“I buy and sell money. Some people call it arbitrage.”

“But your business is very risky, isn’t it?”

“No riskier than you coming here.”

The game is on. And it’s called Risky Business. The cold, vaguely sadistic businessman whose dealings are as abstract as they are attractive has lured us into a game we can’t afford to play. But we are hungry to taste the Strange Fruit. We are John’s victims, but we also become complicit in his mission to punish the Innocent Elizabeth and make mincemeat of her naivete. We get a kick out of being voyeurs in the Businesman’s sleek loft apartment, filled with television screens that allow him to scan stock reports while he is, um, otherwise engaged.

During the course of the film, Elizabeth gets screwed, literally and figuratively. She buys the fantasy of easy money and easy sex. Mickey’s character ups the ante until the edifice of his House of Excess, built without moral foundation, comes crashing down.

In the end, we, like Elizabeth, feel dirty. Used up. But we have a secret. We know we liked it. And we know that we’ll be coming back for more.

In the decades that follow, our culture indulges in an orgy of materialism not seen since the 1920s that leaves us morally bankrupt. Like the addicts we are, we keep wrapping ourselves in shawls we can’t afford, enjoying the rush of our spendy ways and denying the hangover that gets worse with each splurge.

As we party on, Mickey’s stock character pops up in movies of decreasing artistic merit. In Wild Orchid, the Strange Fruit appears as an Exotic Flower; an indeterminately pervy business man living in Brazil who once again attracts beautiful women like bees to honey. When his love interest (played by his soon-to-be-wife, Carre Oits) gets wind of his predatory ways, she asks him why he uses people. His Sphinx-like reply: “That’s what I do.”

“What? Use people to make a buck? Don’t you have enough?”

“No one ever has enough, Emily.”

And that remained our cultural mantra: No on ever has enough.

Fast forward to 2008. For a long, long time, Slick Mick has been exiled from Hollywood. He has been moving somewhere in the shadows, and we haven’t really cared to know where. We’ve used him as he used us. We moved on to Bigger Better Things. It was as if Mickey Rourke no longer existed for us in real life. He was simply lodged in our fantasies as the avatar of our excess. We didn’t want to look too closely at his failings and addictions, for fear that we might see ourselves. So we looked away. Until our own house of cards came crashing down in the Autumn of Our Rude Awakening.

At first, it was a shock to our system to see him again. In The Wrestler we find our Mythic Businessman locked out of his trailer, broke and nearly broken. His battered face wears our exhaustion. The pain in his eyes captures the heartache we all feel at the mess we’ve made of ourselves. No longer does Mickey buy and sell money. He carries boxes and performs his wrestling tricks in school gyms. He doesn’t tempt women with expensive baubles. He watches them wistfully at a local strip club.

Mickey has moved from Mythic Businessman to a kind of Chalie Chaplin figure – a bum we can’t hate because he represents our own struggles. Every time the camera zooms in on his beaten, swollen face, we become Wrestlers, too, struggling with the demons of our regret and our refusal to face reality.

Mickey Rourke’s rise and fall mirrors the rise and fall of a delusion we may be ready, finally, to move past. You don’t get something for nothing, and if you try, you’re going to get screwed. Humbled and scarred, the mumbling Mickey Rourke now embodies our desire to move past our shallow, vain history and emerge as something more real, if a hell of a lot less pretty. He’s our hangover. And it’s time to accept him.

But he’s more than that, too. If Mickey wins the Oscar on Sunday, he wins something for all of us. A chance at redemption. A recognition that there might just be something worthwhile and wonderful lurking just underneath the wreckage of a culture of greed that has caved in on itself. His enormous talent, which shines never so brightly as when he has been kicked from his pedestal of perverted power, and then run over a few times, suggests a hope that we might just emerge better off after our struggles, too.

And we desperately need that hope right about now.

Tags: Mickey Rourke, the eighties