At a certain moment during Darren Aranofsky’s much-ballyhooed (but, in the end, not so much widely-distributed) The Wrestler, I discovered a tear rolling down my left cheek (the cheek, as luck would have it, that was facing away from my companion). It was a strange tear—one that seemed less a response to what I was watching than it did, like sweat to exercise, a mere byproduct of watching it—and yet there it was all the same, unmistakable in its identity: a tingle along the edge of my orbital bone, then a cool wetness cutting its gravity-driven path toward the jawbone. I did not wipe it away, at the time, for fear of being caught; now, having boldly acknowledged it in retrospect, I suppose the challenge is to somehow explain it away.

To a point—and perhaps this is what can make it difficult, at first blush, to account for its emotional ferocity—The Wrestler is pure formula. It is a story of redemption and resurrection, in the long tradition of stories of redemption and resurrection (see: Jesus¹). A story, figuratively but also literally, about somebody coming back from the dead, and whether or not he will be able to find a new way of living. When we first meet one-time professional wrestling superstar Randy “the Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), both his and his pseudo-sport’s best days are behind them. During the Eighties, when professional wrestling reached its zenith point, the Ram performed in front of sold-out arena crowds—and, we are led to imagine, drove fast cars, partied hard, and took his pick from a nightly litter of beautiful women in bellybutton shirts and jean shorts—but now, twenty years after the fact, he lives in a trailer park, tools around the tri-state area in a beat-up old conversion van, plays weekend shows before dozens of fans, rather than tens of thousands, supplements his meager wrestling income with hours working in the local grocery store’s stock room, and blows his rent money (within the film’s first ten minutes he finds himself locked out of his trailer for non-payment) on steroids and lap dances from an over-the-hill stripper by the name of Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). It’s a pretty miserable existence, all told—a reality whose wintertime harshness is reinforced by Aranofsky’s grainy images and unsteady, over-the-shoulder tracking shots—but a combination of sheer momentum and the slightly delusional dream of making it back to the top seems enough to keeps the Ram going.

^{1. Tomei’s character Cassidy references Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ when she sees Randy come to her club bleeding from the temple after a match. Is it a dis or an homage to Gibson’s similarly blood, sweat and tear soaked bio? (And yes Gibson could perhaps use some lessons in redemption, or at least a salve for the old foot in mouth disease, from Rourke).}