What has he
got that it makes him all hot? ? ?
Written by Mihaela Varzari
It was
the autumn of 1989, I was 11 and found myself stuck in a bedroom with some
older high school kids who were watching the film 9 ½ Weeks. Just to set the
record straight, before December 1989 in Romania you’d have to kill someone to
watch a film outside the TV schedule, as hardly anyone had video players and
films were not allowed to circulate. Years of confusing cultural signals
followed - a combination of overly Romanian national pride provided through
folk and the handful of Romanian intellectuals, who had active roles in the
West - highlighted by shops selling made in Turkey products, where occasionally
sexy films would run on a VCR player in a corner. Everything was permitted, we
were free to feel sexy and encouraged to only think of the future or the past, with
the period between the two world wars promoted as the pinnacle of cultural
development.
Full on, ongoing processes of
self-colonialisation and self-imposed amnesia have started. By killing the
Father we happily took on board another model which at the time was dominant in
the West, namely the enigmatic male figure, the bursary speculator, the rich
and busy, attractive and ruthless penetrator.
I saw
the Wild Orchid later in the 90’s and
9½ weeks again and again. The
magnetism emanated by the character played by Mickey Rourke combined with his
personal vulnerability, smartly cultivated in both leading roles, ensured him a
status of cultural symbol for the ’89 generation, at least in Romania, even
though I cannot support my hypothesis empirically, as this is my very personal
observation.
This is not to say that he is not part
of a wider gallery of cinema icons but on this occasion I allow myself to
single Mickey Rourke out as an exception and treat him accordingly. He is as
fascinating on, as well as off camera. The film released later in 1989, titled Johnny Handsome, echoes aspects of
Rourke’s personal autobiography. Mickey Rourke plays the role of the main
protagonist, called Johnny Handsome, a disfigured burglar, who through out the
film, due to plastic surgery has his appearance transformed into the well known,
handsome Mickey Rourke. There is a strange analogy here, as in the mid 90’s,
when he was young and very attractive, a sex symbol in his own right, he
disappeared from the film industry for 15 years only to appear again as a
deformed version of himself, this time because of the extensive reconstruction
surgery on his face as a result of his boxing career. As in the only Oscar
Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,
published in 1890 where the painted portrait is getting old while Dorian Gray
stays young, the same is happening to the actual Mickey Rourke, who manages to
stay young in my memory because his current presence seems so alien to me. It may
well be that the motif of Dorian Gray is consciously used in the film scrip for
9 1/2 Weeks, by employing the same
surname, John Gray being the film protagonist. Both characters embody qualities
of magnified beauty and vanity and intensified power given by the glorification
of money.
With the
counter revolution of the 80’s and the rise of neoliberalism, the marketing of
the personal computer, and the dismantling of systems of social protections,
the assault on personal style assumed a new ferocity. Time itself became
monetized, and the individual redefined as a full time economic agent. Freed
from the communist dictatorship, we found ourselves enslaved once again by the
economic one, more resilient and difficult to fight. It came under the attractive
figure of the adrenaline driven money maker, possessor of ‘the capitalist’s
smirk’, as it was famously described by Marx, who appeared relaxed, calm,
ambivalent to any other order but that imposed by money. I am referring to the
en-masse seduction through the rise of the loner, the soulless investor, driven
by speculative instincts. It reminds me of the way Freud described narcissism,
by way of comparing it to the unique cellular organism amoeba whose self-sufficient
status is combined with a constant try to interact with the exterior,
exemplified through extending its protrusions. The characters played by Mickey
Rourke in both films act as a symptom for repression, which being previously
structured patriarchically, along the lines of Oedipal Complex, it is organized
today around the complex of narcissism. This shift in repression is analogous
to marking of the transition from a collective based society to one shaped
around individual goals of competitiveness, personal security and comfort at the
expense of others.
The
inclusion of the screening of these two films is aimed at complicating the art project
1:1, which may be suffering from the
illness of the concept or the thematic
approach. It analyzes different ways of artistic representation during after EU
integration, which determined a restructuring of global relations. Strange isn’t
that the Hollywood films we, in Romania saw before and after 89, dubbed by
Irina Nistor[1],
represented a way of resistance. Now we loot at them under different auspices,
and we came to realize the way they impacted a generation modeled according to
the figure of the financial speculator, adding thus a new layer to the
collective consciousness.
2008,
the year of the financial crisis, should mark even more the unrevealing of such
myths. We hear so much talk about the incredible profits made by banks while
the existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same,
structured according to a different dictatorship, this time an economical one.
[1] Irina Nistor is a
voice-over artist, who dubbed American films illegally distributed in VCR in
Romania before and after 89. It could be said that her voice was the second
most known after Ceausescu’s.
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