A couple of months ago I watched the movie The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke. The movie is the story of an aging professional wrestler who, knowing nothing else, pushes his body to the breaking point for the entertainment of others. Along the way he befriends Marisa Tomei who is an exotic dancer. In what I saw as a kind of parallelism, the wrestler is the Freudian twin of the exotic dancer. Where one body is used for a sexual outlet the other body is used for an aggressive outlet. Two bodies--wrestler and dancer--used up and consumed for our entertainment and gratification.
I was reminded of that movie today reading Greg Easterbrook's weekly Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN. Easterbrook opens this week's column will a disturbing analysis of how the long term neurological health of American football players--high school, college, and NFL--is being jeopardized by the quest for the win. From Easterbrook's article:
The core problem is that football coaches at the high school, college and professional levels are rewarded for winning games but not penalized for allowing their players to be harmed. A coach who sits a player down out of concern for the player's health may pay a price, if a game is lost. A coach who sends a concussed player onto the field may never be penalized in any way if that player suffers another concussion. Human beings respond to incentives, and right now the coaches' incentive is to be irresponsible with players' health.So kudos to the Cowboys this week for keeping Jason Witten on the sidelines this Sunday. It was a rare display of courage, keeping a star player on the sideline, over that player's protests, to protect his long term health.
Yes, the culture of football macho contributes to the problem: Many players ask to return to action when battling injury, including neurological harm. But coaches are the ones who make the decisions. They're the adults in charge. And their incentive structure is all wrong.
Coaches receive money and accolades if they mistreat players and win; they are not disciplined, or seemingly even criticized, if players are harmed. Same for the front office in the NFL, the athletic department in college and the athletic director in high school. If the team loses, the fans and boosters are furious. If players suffer harm, there are no consequences whatsoever for the people making the decisions. And at the high school level, legally they are caring for children!
But what is driving all this? Us! As in the movie The Wrestler, the voracious appetite of fans, represented in the billion dollar sports and entertainment complex, is the gas for this fire. The thirst for wins--at the high school, college and professional levels--is the force driving this phenomenon. Bodies are being sacrificed for our entertainment and titillation.
In this, the bodies of NFL players are like the bodies of porn stars. Used and misused for our entertainment and gratification. Easterbrook's article made me think of this interview with porn researcher Gail Dines:[Interviewer:] You describe Gonzo porn as “body-punishing sex.” Why is it body-punishing, why is it prevalent today, and what do people need to know about it?Aren't the bodies of porn stars similar to the bodies of NFL players, and even the bodies of high school football players?
[Dines:] It’s body-punishing because the male performers pound away at a woman’s body...A woman’s body has limits.
That might sound extreme, but I'm throwing it out there for reflection. How are bodies sacrificed for our entertainment? And do we even care as long as we get our orgasm or that state championship?
Two thousand years ago humans brutalized the body of God. And one wonders, has anything changed?
I strongly feel 666 the Number of the Beast refers to John 6:66, the one single Bible verse thus numbered. Why so scary? Because it refers to the literally morbid quality of the Communion as seen from a purely human viewpoint; so, when people find out what God really IS, they back out. And indeed the Christians, seem, by habit numbed and blinded, unaware of this dark aspect; how would they react, just opening their eyes to the entirely obvious? In addition, the number suits excellently to a mighty cascade of interpretations based on operations on the first three positive integers, being of paramount importance for Christian doctrine, like Monotheism, the binary nature of Christ and the Trinity. Now, if this is the optimal solution or indeed the Solution, then I, Peter Ingestad aka Kraxpelax from Sweden, I am really Something, n'est-ce pas, being object of allusion by the verse, and consequently by the very Number itself. And, curiously, the word for 6, the so-called "Perfect Number" as both the sum and product of its terms /factors 1, 2, 3, thus well fit for symbolizing God, in Swedish is Sex, reminding of my theory about the Big Duality (see below). And yes, the Swedish word for Sex is Sex as well. All this rather striking, don't you think? coincidental? who can tell? Think it over.
Windor Mirrow
The Moon
shines
on a cat
Meow
Single Swingle
- Peter Ingestad, Sweden
The Wrestler. This is a great movie, one of the best ever, based on profound truth. What makes him fail? Sexuality: when he is taken off balance by his attractive stripper friend. From then on it all crumbles and goes downhill. But heroically. The tragic final: a grand manifestation of god-like Human Dignity.
Really? I saw it quite as the opposite; she was his chance at redemption, but he ultimately chose the damnation of the familiar.
Richard, maybe there's a transference of sorts involved here (since you're invoking Freud). If there's one thing that I've seen change since Reagan and onward, it's that we have created a work life that "brutalizes" the human soul.
Maybe there's something profoundly--though unwittingly--happening as fans exorcise burdens which lack a social language: our language for productivity and efficiency are well honed in our culture; our language concerning the experience of soul is considered at the least, "soft minded" in contrast.
As you write, "Two thousand years ago humans brutalized the body of God. And one wonders, has anything changed?", I would point out this distinction:
The people who actually brutalized the Body of God, were the elite: the ones who were brutalizing the masses for their aggrandizement, and who justified such brutalization through the theology of Caesar. Jesus confronted that theology in a way that threatened a "good thing goin" for that group- which only made up roughly 10% of the population around Jesus.
Jesus was a way of hope to "His fans"- a way out of the desperate acts of transferring internal suffering to the outside through some sort of brutalization. In other words, Jesus was relevant to people yearning to get their experience of soul back.
I think the actual thing that hasn't changed since the Christ Event, is the propensity of some people being willing to imperialise others for personal aggrandizing.
And I question why and how the church isn't being nearly as relevant to human life as Jesus was....
Boo! There's a reactionary imperialist bogeyman around every corner and behind every door. "Since Reagan?" Please.
qb
Richard,
This post stirred up some nostalgia for those wonderful days gone by when Coach Bear Bryant took his boys to Junction. When I was a freshman in high school, I was on the golf team. It was coached by the ex-high school football coach who was legendary for his goofiness. He bore the burden of losing his position of AD and head football coach and of obtaining a nickname indicative of the casual attitude toward injury that characterized the 1950s and 60s and even today. He received his demotion to the golf team (he was a lousy golf coach and also a lousy history teacher) when he told the trainer to wipe the bloody scratch off a lineman who limped off the field, put mercurochrome on the small wound, slap on three band-aids and send the sissy back into the game. The big kid, likely in shock, nonetheless toughed it out and lined up for a couple of more plays--after which he collapsed on the field and was carried off on a stretcher. Turned out he had a compound fracture below the knee. After that, the coach was universally known as Coach Band-Aid. The kid's father was on the school board and saw to it that he was demoted. He likely might have been fired, but it was a small community and the coach was the cousin of another school board member.
Easy qb. Mike G may have a point about a work-ethic out of control. Regarding work as a commodity and treating workers as such is nothing new. But much of Mike G's brutalizing worklife began in the Johnson and Nixon years--the matter is complex but it has been encouraged by real bogeymen right and left: those demanding more productivity and those feminists insisting that women work outside the home in order to liberate themselves from men and the slavery of childrearing. As Juliet Schor has documented in her book "The Overworked American," from 1970-1990 the average American worker's hourly workload increased from about 40.5 to 50+. That's an additional day in the work week. And this too with more and more women entering the workforce over that period of time. Since the early 1990s things have not gotten better. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy--and if not dull, exhausted and/or emotionally strung out, or maybe even postal.
Blessings!
Can you expound on what you mean when you say we've "created a work life that brutalizes the human soul?" I understand what you mean by how much we prize efficiency, but it is possible to be efficient and still do fulfilling work. IMO, the institutions in our lives seem to perpetuate violence against the soul simply by virtue of their own soullessness.
Open question: is it wrong to equate soullessness with evil? This is a loaded question in current political climate, because I'm implicitly questioning capitalism. But, aesthetically, soullessness and evil feel very similar.
One step closer to becoming the Roman Empire. Sigh.
George- indeed, the history is complex. I think Reagen though, really shifted the game, by being the first to use propaganda to further his political agenda i.e., welfare queens driving Cadillacs. I'm all for serious discussion through different points of view- as long as we use language connected to reality and seeks to illuminate rather than obscure i.e., "Death Panels".
I think Reagan also began the shift to make the health of the market place take precedence over the health of society; a shift that continued through the Clinton years as well.
So I'm not singling out a party, as much as I'm singling out a way of thinking about things: the way people will expend incredible amounts of energy to impeach a president for crudely having sex in his office; certainly poisonous to his family, but to the world it was innocuous. However, when a President and his staff lie about WMD, and cause a war that kills nearly a million innocents, and puts our world in peril, these same people don't say a peep.
But they didn't stay quiet long, I hear these people crying out again in their brand of flurry that Obama is the Anti-Christ for trying to solve health care problems.... and qb calls me reactionary....
This made me laugh.
MG, the number of gross and gratuitous mischaracterizations in this follow-up post of yours is too great to fathom! LOL. qb
U missed qb's piont, which was that you seem to find a right-winger as the bete noir no matter which rock U Turn over.
qb
Matt,
I don't have the time now, but I would like to respond to your excellent questions tomorrow. In the meantime, I think you're on to something when you equate evil with soullessness.
Mike
"The Wrestler" is one of the most profound movies I've seen in 50 years. "Man as meat" and the objectification of the human being as a manifestation of the fallen order and the struggle to overcome our self and other objectification through love is the theme of the Gospel: the recovery of the image of God (who is Love) in ourselves. This is a catechetical movie.
Shameless self promotion:
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/man_as_meat_on_the_road_with_steve_the_builder
Self-promotion is strongly encouraged here. Thanks for the link.
Made me think of Michael Vick and his dog fights, and a news story I saw last night about pimps recruiting suburban 7th graders at a shopping mall.