The XX Factor: What women really think.

Meat the Press

I came away from The Wrestler feeling exactly as you did, Hanna. This was a movie for women. The common denominator here isn’t just that Rourke and Tomei have allowed themselves to be exploited and objectified. It’s that screaming, frothing men are the reason each has become a busted shell. This is a movie about fantasies. But the female characters long for connection while the males long for action figures. Even the men Rourke serves at the supermarket meat counter (yes MEAT COUNTER  ... well, nobody said it was a subtle film, as my friend Liz observed last night) are aggressive and brutal.

I don’t know that the whole men-as-animals subtext turns this into a chick flick. I found the violent bits so unbearable that I spent a lot of the movie deeply involved with my Milk Duds. And as Jessica notes, even if she were played by Dame Judi Dench, that whole stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold character can never be anything but a dreary cliché. Still, The Wrestler lodged itself someplace in my chest after I saw it lost weekend and it’s still sitting there. There was one moment when Rourke looked straight into the camera when he was begging his daughter’s forgiveness, and I’d swear that whatever he let loose in that instant caused me brain damage at the other end. Yes, he deserves the Oscar, and, yes, he’s crazier than a moonbat. But what this movie says about men and their dreams is probably less chick flick that horror movie.