The Wrestler

We saw the Wrestler last night and it was pretty fantastic. Much like wrestling itself, every scene felt Important, like it Symbolized Something, but not anything in particular. Wrestling to me has always been about not so much good vs evil, but familiar vs. unfamiliar (Futurama: "I'm not from here! Look at my crazy passport!") This means that sometimes the good guy could be a big Mexican who drives a low-rider up to the ring and whose slogan was "Lie, cheat and steal!" (RIP Eddie Geurrero), and the villain is a smug rich white guy.
Everything, particularly the ending, felt appropriately ambiguous and unresolved. Randy fails at everything except wrestling because of his tragic flaw, which is itself not particularly tragic. It's not that he cares too much, or fears success--he's just, as his daughter admits in a brutal scene, a fuck-up. He just can't quite hack it in the "real world." He can't get used to his real name, Robin, so he insists on his assumed name.
Cassidy/Pam is his perfect mirror image. She's an aging stripper who hates being called by her real name. They have essentially the same job: they flaunt their athletic bodies on-stage so that the audience can fantasize about being or possessing them, but what they do seems to have much more to do with debasing the body, with shame and being pointed at rather than pride and being ideal/idol-ized. I did have trouble believing anyone, especially guys in this podunk town, would be disappointed at ogling Marisa Tomei, but other than their difference in beauty, I found it totally believable that she would find herself drawn to Randy. They have similar jobs they each have trouble leaving, each have a child they worry about suporting, they each prefer the bombastic, party-time fun of the 80's to the gloomy introspection of the 90's. And Randy is the only person who treats Cassidy and Pam the same way. He flirts with both of them unambiguously, with as much chivalry as he understands ("I guarantee she's hotter than any skank piece of pussy you'd wind up marrying," he jeers at a young guy who finds her too old). He barely sees the difference between her work persona and her everyday one.
Randy is a kind of poshlust-Christ, a camp martyr. He flaunts his wounds for the audience to gawk at; the camera, and a strategically placed mirror his "I'm the boss, I'm the boss I'm the boss," the scene reflect his muscular chest, emblazoned with the painful and vulerable looking bypass incision that I kept waiting to burst open into the flaming, chained sacred heart. And yet what does he sacrifice? Who does he redeem, and how? It makes perfect sense that Cassidy compares him to a Christ she knows not from the Bible but from the Passion of the Christ (this reminded me of the epigraph to Kill Bill that attributes "Revenge is a dish best served cold," to the Klingons). He's something larger than life, someone whose suffering redeems us, but their understanding and interest in how this works and what it means, goes no further than that.