She shivered as the hot water ran through her hair and down her body, turning grey with soot and ash at her feet.
The smell was invasive, thick and choking. It stuck to her skin and scratched her throat, and she coughed with huge gasping sobs.
Did he?
Her hands shook as she tried to wash it away from her face, making her feel weaker still, and she steadied them against the tiles and let the shower hit her. There was enough water for now, but she would have to get out eventually. She knew it, but could not face it yet. The water could get her clean but it couldn’t make the truth go away.
She knew he had tried to kill her.
The room had filled with steam by the time she turned the shower off and clambered out of the bathtub. She sat on the edge, gripping the towel she had wrapped herself in like armour, and wished she didn’t know it. What came next? That depended on whether or not he knew that she knew what he’d done.
What would he do once she came out?
Where was he now?
It was late – definitely after midnight – but she couldn’t tell exactly what time it was. Where was he? She couldn’t call anyone or go anywhere without him knowing.
The police.
But there was only one phone downstairs, where he would probably be sitting. She would have to wait until he was asleep, but no-one would be sleeping in the bedroom tonight, so that meant he would be sleeping downstairs. If he did plan it, why would he let her live to tell anyone? For tonight, they would both pretend that it had been an accident.
The shaking had not stopped but she had to leave the bathroom before her absence started to appear suspicious.
Even so, she might have locked herself in for the night had it not been for the baby. When the door of her bedroom had finally been opened after what seemed like an eternity trapped in the smoke, she rushed out and down the stairs, letting her breath out and sucking in the clean air outside the door of her son’s bedroom.
Don’t wake him up.
When she opened the door, everything was exactly as before, the baby sleeping in his crib, the ceiling unmarked, the air unchanged. The fire hadn’t burnt through the floorboards above. He was safe. She wanted to hold him but she had to get clean first, or the smell and sight of her might scare him. It was over and they were safe, and mercifully none of the neighbours had been woken up. It was over… until she began to think about what had just happened as the water washed over her.
To Be Continued…
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Visual Research and Working Methodologies: An Essay
The following text has been adapted from my student essay for the “Visual Research and Working Methodologies” module of my BA (Hons) top-up course undertaken in 2011.
Looking back over student work is a curious exercise; it feels strange to have communicated so earnestly, and so formally at the same time. Here it goes…
Visual Research and Working Methodologies
The intention for the work this year is to investigate the depiction of the male figure in contemporary art through the creation of a larger body of work, to be realised in the form of paintings and carved wood sculpture.
Several artists whose practices have been referenced are Ricky Swallow, Ana Maria Pacheco, Clive Head, Ellen Altfest, Patrick Hughes, Tomoaki Suzuki, Gehard Demetz and Willy Verginer.
The depiction of the male figure in contemporary fine art arose as a theme in the middle of the previous academic year, after the completion of several paintings and drawings of the artistʼs male friends. The attention they attracted, particularly from female viewers, posed the question of why in the post-feminist age the nude was still almost exclusively female, and why both male and female artists and viewers expected or preferred to see females as objects of art.
The paintings completed at the end of the year were meant to explore the reaction of the viewer to male subjects, presented as objects of beauty, and to question the assumed gender of the gaze.
The combination of two and three dimensional mediums is an important part of the development of the practice. Spanish devotional sculpture from the middle ages has recently come to the fore in terms of an historical precedent in bridging the gap between painting and sculpture, and in researching contemporary polychromed wood sculpture, the work of Ana Maria Pacheco and Tomoaki Suzuki has been of particular interest.
Ana Maria Pacheco is an artist who moves fluidly between various mediums, finding solutions to problems in one medium through working in another. (MacGregor, 1999. p.5) Pachecoʼs painted wooden figures are relevant to this research, as her aesthetic philosophy is found to be very appealing and sympathetic. She reflects that her colonial background may be the cause of her preference for her work to be well finished; she says,
“there is this thing about spontaneity, very closely connected with modernism, I find it impossible.” (Wiggins, 1999. p. 47)
Patrick Hughesʼs work as viewed in his retrospective exhibitions at the Flowers galleries in London was provocative, not in the direct way of manipulating perspective, but in his combination of highly realistic painting and 3-dimensional support. Reflecting on Hughesʼs work in the light of the recent interest in combining sculpture and painting, the synthesis seems entirely natural and very exciting. One method of working towards this combination is to utilise supports in circular and oval shapes instead of the traditional rectangular format, as have artists such as Frank Stella. Exploiting the cultural references of the circular and oval format will be a key aspect of the work within painting.
The work of Northern Renaissance artists including Holbein the younger has long provided an inspiration to attempt a similar effect of smoothness of surface, with the removal of the evidence of the artist.
The latest oil paintings, [redact]Tobi[/redact] (fig. 1) and [redact]Phil[/redact] (fig. 2) have shown an inclination towards this surface quality, but there is some way left to go in deciding how much of the brushstroke should remain, and how much mimetic illusion is aspired to. The effect of the artistʼs touch, the sensual effects of the paint surface and how much this affects the reception of the image in the mind of the viewer, is of great importance. On reflection, these last paintings produced have appeared static and overly slick in comparison to previous work, in particular [redact]Cill[/redact] (fig. 3)
A consolidation of style is therefore a key aim in production of this new work.
Since seeing the work of Clive Head at the National Gallery in London, the ambition has been to move the work towards a more detailed, photorealistic style. Some progress towards this was made in the last paintings, but there is much more progress to be made in terms of technique.
The hyperrealist work of Ellen Altfest at her exhibition “The Bent Leg” at White Cube, Hoxton, was a later discovery, and thematically is closely aligned to the current investigation of masculinity. Altfest similarly cites Sylvia Sleigh as an influence, and although in terms of painterly technique, her works are more thickly layered and heavily encrusted, the focus on detail is an essential link. (Storr, 2011)
Referring to Ricky Swallowʼs hyperrealistic sculpture Paton writes:
“we tend to associate detail with clarity, and conversely to think of blur and vagueness as the outward signs of mystery. In Swallowʼs art, however, detail is not an antidote to mystery but a form of it – a way to delay recognition, to make strange, to enlarge an object in a viewerʼs mind.” (Paton, 2004. p.10)
This view of detail as a form of mystery is a striking concept which encourages an interest in smaller sized, more detailed objects –
“Swallow is less interested in how loud an artwork can speak than how closely it can make you listen.” (Paton, 2004. p.64)
The intention is to expand further into a wider range of sizes, and produce a greater number of smaller paintings as a way of pushing the working methods. Since starting to exhibit and to enter work into competitions and open calls, the presentation of this current work has become a prime concern.
The impact that something as simple as framing has on the perception of a piece is a key area of interest and influences the choices made for the presentation of the work. Its usefulness as a method of contextualising images of men lies in how framing creates importance around an artwork, and how framing could create an artwork in itself. The frames will be used to present the images of men as works of art, to validate them as art by placing them in a very traditional sphere by presenting them as women traditionally have been.
The treatment of the frame as an integral part of the artwork incorporates the element of form within the 2-dimensional discipline, once more providing a link between the pictorial and sculptural.
Suzukiʼs use of scale, presenting his sculptures 1/3 life size, is something that sets him apart from other artists working in wood, and confers a very engaging quality to the pieces. Gehardt Demetz and Willy Verginer are both Italian artists carving naturalistic figures in limewood, and like Suzuki and Swallow they utilize virtuoso carving techniques which inspire emulation.
Suzukiʼs method of carving and painting is very interesting; he works towards a high level of detail, using photographs taken from 360º and carves very close likenesses. Yet his figures are not smoothed to the extent that Swallowʼs are; there remain traces of the tools, slight angular planes on the surfaces. He uses acrylic paint on limewood, but does not seem to use gesso to prime the wood. Perhaps because of this the skin colours can appear to be flat – especially when the subject is black. The paint appears chalky, and some of the wood grain remains visible through the paint, which hints to the process in the same way that the carving does. In contrast, the highly refined process of gesso application in traditional Spanish devotional sculpture lends a more naturalistic ground, and produces effects which are closer to the desired result for the artwork.
Whether the painting or sculpture is concerned with image or form, a predominant theme is that of “re-skilling”, connecting to traditional aspects of production and increasing technical fluency. The aspiration towards technical mastery that wood carving as a craft instills is obvious at amateur levels, as contemporary carversʼ societies show; this is a legacy of artists such as Grinling Gibbons.
The V&Aʼs Power of Making exhibition highlighted the debt that oneʼs attitude to working owes to oneʼs experience in design and craft. The exhibition focused on craft, on “objects that relate not to the quick invention of conceptual art, but to the slow perfection of skill”. (Miller, 2011. p.20) The line at which craft meets fine art is perennially an interesting one to define, especially within the discipline of wood carving.
“ʻCraftʼ is still a charged, even scandalous, term in the end of the professional art world that Swallow inhabits… There arose “a view of craft-skill as a kind of excess in artʼs economy of ideas – something ʻgratuitousʼ.” (Paton, 2004. p.95).
One of the ideas behind a traditional, skill-centric approach is an attempt to elicit a feeling of trust from the viewer.
“The care that we take in making something properly is cousin to the care that we retain for other people and their labour…selecting depth at the expense of breadth” (Miller, 2001. p.22)
It is important that the viewer feels able to trust the artist and thereafter become immersed in the discourse started by the artwork. In addressing the gender of the gaze, the viewer-subject connection and relationship becomes an essential aspect of the work, and this is established by the formal methods of production.
Figures 1, 2 & 3 are studen works, all now destroyed.
Recording for history, creating diagrams of the day to day. In recording animate objects, there inevitably comes the knowledge that they will eventually become inanimate… I enjoy the idea of representing life to celebrate life.
This is my visual recording.
I am highly aware of working within a European tradition, but I believe tradition is pointless if it exists for its own sake. It amounts to no more than the misplaced reverence of the dead. However, traditional craft is an invaluable tool for the visual storyteller, whether satirist or celebrant.
The history of Western figuration represents a visual lingua franca, invaluable for manipulation in storytelling. Working within and right up to the bounds of history and tradition can serve to point to its omissions and failures. One merit of figuration is its accessibility. Humans naturally relate to representations of themselves and their created environment, and thus they can be a vehicle for conveying empathy and comparison because of self-recognition.
Portraiture and the figure
Drawing and painting are central to my practice, but my love of creating and learning leads me to embrace many different media. What remains consistent is my interest in portraiture and the human figure. It may be akin to the Renaissance ideal of placing man at the centre of the universe; in any case, it serves to communicate shared experience.
My focus on the male figure may invert centuries of art history, but is a purely instinctive response in choice of subject. Some of the themes I naturally explore are relationships, love and day to day life, situations (or the pursuit of such situations) which are common to us all, and which have untold power over our lives.
Conceptualism and craft
Personal involvement, labour and precision are very important to me. I try to incorporate my experience in varied fine and applied art media to my work, blurring the lines between them to point to their equality in the hands of the artist, and to my personal vision through the control I exert over them.
I could never be a purely conceptual artist; Victorian concepts of value and virtue having been ingrained in me by my upbringing preclude such a line, in my case.
Personally, I have an irresistible need to create.
For me, the value of art is bound in its craft. Value, being subjective, is at once a risible concept, yet of the highest importance to humankind. The exploration of worth and perceived value is an ongoing part of my wider artistic practice.
My version of realism
I am a realist. This is accurate, not only in referring to my traditionally naturalistic depiction of figures and objects, but in that I depict people, situations and conversations that have existed and that may be recognizable to many.
As the reality of life in the western world now means the pervasion of digital technology, its depiction within my artwork is unavoidable, perhaps necessary.
The co-existence of the highly polished, intangible, artificial world with the frail, fleshy, inescapable humanity is something that I find extremely interesting.
The souvenirs of choice for lovers may no longer be painted portraits or even printed photographs but digital images; but as long as we are human, their conversion into tangible objects, with physical presences, will be irresistible.
In the evening I walked through the subway towards the station.
I saw the writing on the wall, and realised I had walked into a poem. One that was meant to be commenced at my destination. For those going towards the city.
Pointless to read, but I glanced nonetheless. I would not have stopped, but that one line not hit me like a cold slap across the cheek. It may have been written for all travellers, but today it was only for me.
I read it again.
I knew, I remembered, because of that very day. A day of watching lovers in Westminster, lovers in Jubilee Gardens, lovers in Waterloo.
I remembered without jealousy when we were them, or they were us. I was as happy for them as I was happy for us. I remembered that day when we rolled on the grass in that public private garden, putting on a show of the most exquisite happiness for all the people having their lunches, reading their books and waiting for their buses.
We strolled from park to place to point, never needing to be anywhere but the place we were. Up there on the cool grass, I laughed so hard, kicking my legs in the air, holding his face over mine, pulling his arm around me, pulling my dress down around my knees for the sake of the strangers. But now, under pavements, I am sucked through a concrete straw, into the mouth of Waterloo station.
The words on the rounded wall pointed to me alone and my dream of a garden, faded and foxed like a watercolour left in the sun.
I remembered another summer in another garden in London, sunlight on my face and hands in my hair. Then flashes of trains, airplane windows and cars, always moving and waving goodbye. A Venn diagram of our worlds merging in the thinnest secondary-coloured sliver. But then how I suddenly thrashed and reveled in wonderful grief, doubled over clutching at my stomach, gasping, barking, rasping.
I remembered how I grieved then for the grief itself, quietly and exquisitely, drawing out its every breath and measuring its feebling pulse. Then how I suddenly wished it dead. I folded it neatly and put it into a box of favourite mistakes, there to gather dust and eventually, hopefully, innocence.
Cold uneasiness came over me, faced with the fading stain of the kiss that was once so eager, then became so weak. Not just the draft through the tunnel.
It was the guilt. Of not wanting to live in the dark any more.
Guilt. The guilt of letting it go and it letting go of me.
Guilt. Of cruelly prising apart the grip of my right hand with my left.
Guilt. Of wanting to see the surface again.
But how long could I stand motionless in front of these words? There could no longer be any place left for it, not by my invitation. Neither here in this close tunnel nor above ground. Up there, my green garden belongs to lovers; down here, it cannot exist. The expectation and the memory fought. Green and grey, they collided and kicked at each other until I tore them apart. Crumpled and flung into the corner like read letters. So it had to be. I knew it wasn’t a promise; it was only a plan.
I had a train to catch.
Originally published in 2011, this was inspired by my first encounter with Sue Hubbard’s poem “Eurydice” on the walls of the Waterloo underpass.
Can the Rocky film franchise be read as a feminist text?
Lover Or Fighter is an essay I wrote in 2012 about the Rocky movies and a potential link between them and feminist theory.
Far-fetched? A strange combination? Read and decide for yourself.
Lover Or Fighter:
The Performance Of Masculinity In The Rocky Series
Looking at The Male Body
Although the male body has long ceded its position as a comfortable resting place of the desirous gaze in the fine arts, that is not to say that it has been removed from public view; there is one location where it has hollowed out a secret niche – the popular cinema.
In the split between elite and popular culture, the male body has been firmly grasped by the latter and held aloft for public consumption by movie-goers and subsequently, by advertisers capitalising on the imagery spawned by the cinema.
Why a ‘secret niche’?
This gazing at the male body is sanctioned by the spectacle of the action film, yet, is burdened by the audience’s complex relationship to the violence and eroticism inflicted on the male body in these films. Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s carried the extreme end of masculinity’s muscular mask from the relative obscurity of the bodybuilding subculture to international fame, so that the hero was “defined and determined by a focus on the body.” (Jeffords, 1994:53).
In examining popular culture’s representation of the muscular male body, it may be useful to consider a film series which has spanned a period of some thirty years, and the changing body of its hero, Rocky Balboa.
Rocky
The release of Rocky in 1976 met with critical acclaim, winning three Academy Awards, with nominations in seven other categories. The film was propelled into the popular imagination and the character of Rocky became one of the most heavily cited and enduring pop culture figures of the last century.
This essay will focus on the performance of the series’ complex masculine ideology, its use of the male body as a receptacle for the erotic gaze, and the meanings of the physical transformation of Rocky’s body over the series.
Much could be said about the phenomenon of seriality within the most popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, but that is more than may be allowed for at the present.
Masculinities
Just as this character’s performance of manliness has spawned countless copies and tributes, so was it formed as a copy of previous manifestations; boxers such as Chuck Wepner providing the inspiration, and Rocky Marciano the name.
Although a movie which uses boxing as its narrative vehicle may easily be misconstrued as being fixated on a single-sided masculinity, the first two films (separating these from the latter for reasons to be expanded upon) depend heavily upon conflicts within masculine ideologies for their success.
Let’s assume the traditional anthropological/cultural standpoint of women being associated with nature and men with culture. Rocky purposefully turns this around, giving us a character emblematic of natural masculinity.
His body is his means of providing materially, and is also his means of expression: through boxing alone he experiences success, proving to the world that he is more than ‘another bum from the neighbourhood’.
His speech is slow and slurred, although he speaks most when trying to seduce Adrian, the shy girl from the pet store; however, his words only go so far. In the romantic scenes within his apartment, it is his body to which she responds. He is thus portrayed as a natural man: genuine, without artifice and ultimately irresistible.
This focus on Rocky’s body introduces the contradictory qualities of the male bodybuilder hero. Tasker (1993: 78) describes the way in which the bodybuilder is an unnatural, manufactured product, existing precisely to be looked at.
The bodybuilder as a feminised man
Since ‘real men’ are not obsessed with their looks, this narcissistic element of performance marks the hyper-masculine bodybuilder as a feminised man.
“If, for some, the figure of the bodybuilder signals an assertion of male dominance, an eroticising of the powerful male body, for other critics it seems to signal an hysterical and unstable image of manhood… it is clear that both active and passive, both feminine and masculine terms, inform the imagery of the male body in the action cinema.” (Tasker, 1993: 80)
This leads us to the role of the feminine. Adrian is the voice of reason and intelligence – culture – in Rocky II – urging her newly bourgeois husband not to spend his money carelessly. Rocky ignores her advice, desiring to be seen as a financial success. As a result he finds himself eventually having to sell his ostentatious acquisitions to men who are, although physically and morally weaker, more powerful.
Feminine power and weakness
Each successive movie draws on the conflict of Adrian’s power and weakness. Adrian is never a figure of erotic interest within the films; she remains an unsullied figure of purity which Rocky must protect. Of course, this is a standard situation for women in action films:
“Intrinsically tied in with the necessity for fighting, and therefore for aggression, is the necessity to protect ‘a good woman’. The wife is both to be protected from other men… and to be protected from the ‘streets’…” (Burgin, 1986 :172)
Therefore Rocky expresses his rightful aggression by protecting her from her brother’s abuse, from poverty, and from Clubber Lang’s sexual advances in Rocky III.
Walkerdine ties the act of physical fighting to the struggle to provide for a family – “it validates trying and fighting and therefore the singular effectivity of bodily strength and the multiple significance of ‘fighting’.” This translates muscular masculinity to mastery of external oppression. (Burgin, 1986: 172)
Yet, returning to Rocky II, Rocky has not opted for this physical fight; he values middle class intellectualism more than working class physicality. He aspires to an office job but is without qualifications, cannot read well, and can only scrape together menial work in an abattoir.
When even this low position is denied him, his last recourse is fighting.
Although disapproving, Adrian becomes the catalyst for the fight by becoming pregnant, presenting Rocky with a new paternal masculinity to live up to. His parents are alluded to in the first film, but now Rocky is forced to become the father figure that he is never seen to have.
Furthermore, Adrian’s disastrous premature labour and resulting coma is brought on by her lifting heavy items at work, which creates severe guilt in Rocky – the very lives of his wife and child have been endangered because of his inability to perform as a natural man, yet his wish to perform this in the only way that is available to him is forbidden by his wife. He is to blame both for failing as well as for trying, as her labour comes on after he has defied her and commenced training for the rematch with Creed.
This crisis becomes crippling and Rocky refuses to train, sitting at his comatose wife’s bedside. As Rocky devotedly reads to her in hospital he continues in following in the way she has provided out of his corporeal trap – by improving his mind. In so doing he shows the dependence of his masculine identity on the woman, acknowledging her power.
At the last moment, Adrian regains consciousness, gives her approval for Rocky to train, fight and win. With the authority thus conferred upon him, Rocky trains harder than before, fights harder than before, and this time, wins in a greater way; not just for himself but for his wife, child, and the world.
This ideology of masculinity is built around the feminine; however, we shall return to review the effects of Rocky’s physical transformation on this feminine appendage.
The Spectator
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” (Mulvey, 2009: 19)
The popularity of the heavily-muscled, often near-naked cinematic stars of the 1980s signaled the arrival of an era of “overt and newly acceptable male-on-male looking” (Powrie, 2004: 179), when young men were presented not only with the opportunity to look upon and admire the bodies of other men, but the means to do so without the association with homosexuality.
The sports film delivers this opportunity, as do other popular film genres such as sci-fi/war/police narratives. These categories presuppose the presence of weapons and liberal violence along with the opposition of heroes to larger-than-life villains, dictating the very necessity for the action hero’s incredible physical display.
The muscular bodies of Rocky and his opponents appear, sweaty and stripped to the waist, pounding each other ferociously, after undergoing vicious training regimes seen through montages set to music.
Yet this sexual objectification is diffused by the rational framework of the sports narrative, even more so as the cinema audience becomes the spectator of a spectator sport, watching the audience in the boxing ring as they watch the final match.
Mulvey (2009: 21) explains how the male movie star becomes, not the object of the erotic gaze, but the ego of the spectator as the process of identification with the protagonist occurs. Tasker (1993: 77) acknowledges Richard Dyer’s analysis of the structures of activity that are placed around the male body to thwart the risk of that body becoming feminised through passivity.
Therefore, the possibility of the male body as a landing point for an erotic look from any sex is cloaked.
The female viewer
One says cloaked as opposed to denied because, whether these categories and their conventions exist for vicarious identification, or to ease the plight of the male spectator, one may yet dare to suggest that the spectator may be female.
Unfortunately, within contemporary film theory one often falls back on methods which restrict outcomes to those which have been handed down – that is – that men look and women are looked at.
Walkerdine uses psychoanalysis as the basis of her consideration of Rocky II but argues that “by using psychoanalysis to understand relations within a film and then using voyeurism to understand the viewer, we are left in a sterile situation which assumes that all viewers ‘take on’ the psycho-dynamic of the film as far as it relates to the Oedipal conflict. As Laura Mulvey and others have pointed out, this leaves women as viewers in a difficult position.” (Burgin, 1986: 189)
The intense physical suffering endured by the action hero can be understood as a specific kind of sexual display.
Movies of this period often revel in the portrayal of the hero’s undergoing physical wounding, pain, and vulnerability. Referring to such moments in the Rambo series, Jeffords(1) states:
“On the most straightforward filmic level, such moments rationalize sustained attention to the exposed male body, scenes that, as Steve Neale pointed out some time ago, are sources of anxiety in a Hollywood film tradition in which the female body is usually the exclusive object of erotic desire. Although all three films are devoted almost exclusively to the portrayal of Rambo’s body, these scenes are among the few in which that body is still… Consequently, audiences can examine Rambo here at some leisure and explain any anxieties aroused by that examination as anxieties of plot and not pleasure.” (Jeffords, 1994:50)
Yet this does not elide the fact that there is considerable eroticism lavished on the body on that ‘most straightforward level’, and that this eroticism is often experienced because of the hero’s endurance of pain and not simply coincidentally because the hero’s body is still; here, we are immediately reminded of the erotic iconography of Saint Sebastian.
Without this, how do we understand the abundance of scenes in which the hero’s desirable body is beaten, cut or tortured, yet manages to rise to the film’s triumphant climax? Surely relying on Freudian or Lacanian analysis is a fundamentally flawed approach, using one of the most important tools provided by patriarchy, but instead of making a break, buttressing the edifice of the system.(2)
A different system is needed to avoid returning to phallogocentric discourse, denying the female gaze.
Transformation
On their first date, Rocky shows Adrian his nose, stating that it has never been broken.
It stands as a symbol of pride in resilience, displaying how little he has to show for his efforts, but also his inner worth in the midst of his apparent shortcomings. When he loses his perfect nose to Creed in the climactic match the loss is justified – Creed is the greater boxer and in this instance there is no shame in having this virginity taken by a worthy opponent.
Thus Rocky exchanges this small symbol of personal pride for a far greater one, and the physical transformation describes a liminal transformation.
While this physical crossing of a threshold for the character is important for the first film, it is the transformation undergone by the character’s body over the gap between the second and third films which is of greater interest, precisely because it is an organic transformation, occurring externally to the movie series and being written in Stallone’s body, altering Rocky and the films’ masculine ideology.
From the domestic to the political
The domestic nature of the narrative in Rocky seems to preclude a link to Jeffords’ portrayal of the hard-bodied action hero functioning as a symbol or symptom of Reaganism.
Yet by 1985, Rocky is “pitted against an enemy whose identity and nature makes the hero into an emblem of the national body”, (Jeffords, 1994:53) when in Rocky IV he fights the robotic Soviet fighter Ivan Drago. This remarkable shift – the “bum” fighting for self-respect in 1977 becoming the very emblem of America itself fighting the USSR – was reached due to a sharp change of direction by the point of Rocky III.
The film opens with newspaper and magazine articles charting Rocky’s successes in the ring, and when we see the man himself, we see a new product of the 1980s. His expensive clothes, watch and haircut all mark him as a changed man, whom we learn has been weakened by his success.
It is, however, in his body that the change is quite stunning: Stallone/Rocky has become harder.
The fleshed-out face has given way to chiselled features and sunken cheeks, and his musculature is much more defined – to use the correct terminology – ripped. It appears that once the transition from underdog to champion was made, the external fat – that which was soft, more feminine – surrounding the body had to be expunged. What actually occurred was not, though, simply a concern of plot; what happened was Rambo.
The Rambo effect
Both Rocky III and First Blood were filmed in 1982. Whereas Rocky was an outsider brought inside by social relationships, John Rambo, the hero of First Blood, was an outsider left on the outside.
One operated on the domestic level, the other on the national, but both through Stallone’s body.
The violent sexuality of Rambo’s narrative caused a more overtly sexualised gaze to be exercised in Rocky III. During the scenes in which Rocky and Creed run along the beach in training, the camera glories in close-ups of their muscular thighs (in very short shorts). Finally, we are given the marvelously homoerotic slow-motion sequence of the men celebrating after their run on the beach, jumping in the surf, splashing and hugging one another.
Now Rocky is harder, faster and stronger than ever before, and has truly crossed from contender to champion.
The change in Rocky’s body reflects the change in the films’ female voice. Although still a passive character, when Adrian does speak, it is to shriek a melodramatic speech at Rocky wherein she persuades him to fight once again, but this time for himself alone.
“How’d you get so tough?” he asks, to which she replies, “I live with a fighter.”
Not only has the male hardened externally, but the female has hardened internally. The decade’s performance of hardness slices away the feminine appendage to create a singular, streamlined masculinity, all encased in an impregnable hard body with no added fat.
Yet, because Rocky does not fight in the way that Rambo does, this shared body must be displayed in a different way.
Heavy-duty signifiers
Hence, we are presented with ever larger and more outrageous opponents, all caricatures of hypermasculinity, which the hero must match and defeat. Rocky’s weakness now stems from his relationships to other men – the deaths of Mickey and then Creed, who each serves successively as his trainer/father figure/friend. He must first overcome his emotions and then avenge their deaths, achieving both of these through beating other men.
This reaches its peak in the figure of Drago, a giant man so stripped of any trace of weakness/femininity that he is effectively a machine.
The scenes which see Rocky preparing for this fight amazingly call on an array of signifiers to express his superior masculinity: not only does he grow an impressive full beard, but he trains outdoors in the Russian winter, using the most basic, makeshift equipment, whilst his foe trains under artificial conditions in a state-of-the-art gym. The hero then scales a snow-covered mountain in his pursuit of physical and mental preparation, demonstrating not only his natural masculinity, but that he has actually conquered the natural world.
Ultimately, this performance could not be maintained, and Rocky V was an unsuccessful attempt to return the character to its roots, wounding the now too-hard hero by stripping him of his money and health, returning him to his old neighbourhood and even to his old clothes, focusing on the father-son relationship.
Only with the final wound of aging does the focus on the feminine fully return – and this has to be achieved by the drastic step of cutting away the woman entirely. In Rocky Balboa, we learn that Adrian has died, and it is the internalisation of the pain/the woman, that rescues the character and returns it to critical acclaim.
Conclusion
Much more can be said about the series’ projection of its masculine ideology and its effects on culture; this essay serves merely as a brief introduction to some of the concepts which may be explored through the medium of the films and their place within the “innumerable copies of masculinities floating around in culture”. (Reeser, 2012: 18)
Just as this character’s performance of manliness rose from previous manifestations, it has spawned countless copies and tributes; so at the risk of enforcing what may be decried as an unnecessary intellectualisation (3), Rocky may be posited as a text worthy of in-depth critical analysis.
Notes
Jeffords’ aim is to draw parallels between the hero’s hard body and the ‘national body’. These examples are used within the ‘national body’ metaphor, to show that past wounds can be overcome and survived through self-repair – but that as this process is unimaginable and unbearable by the individual man in the cinema, the nation’s weakness is in fact weakness at an individual bodily level. (Jeffords, 1994:52)
Laura Mulvey describes this as “…the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy? There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one.” (Mulvey, 2009: 15) As for Walkerdine, her approach is “to analyse the constitution of subjectivity within a variety of cultural practices”… asking “how people make sense of what they watch and how this sense is incorporated into an existing fantasy-structure”, (Burgin, 1986: 192) the basis of which is to be found in Freud’s analysis of dreaming.
Both Tasker and Walkerdine are against “the ‘intellectualization of pleasures’ which seems to be the aim of much analysis of mass film and television.” (Burgin, 1986: 168)
My earlier work clearly dealt with issues surrounding the depiction of the male form in fine art, but this particular subject has directly informed my “muscle series”, including Fight, pictured below.
