4,000 Blows

What does an actor have to do to win the favor of the masses and become an overpaid movie star? It turns out that, as we've always suspected, the public demands payment in blood.

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When the fiercely handsome Ralph Fiennes appears on-screen at the beginning of The English Patient, his face is a hideous collage of burns and lesions, the result of a plane crash in the Sahara. Though the pre-transmogrified visage of this fine British actor is on display throughout most of the film (since the story is told in a series of flashbacks), there are nevertheless long stretches of the movie when Fiennes, approaching death, is seen sporting his hideous scars, rendered yet more stomach-turning by odious tufts of sheeny marsupial fur that seem to have sprung up around his face.

While studying Fiennes's appalling countenance, it occurred to me that the actor had made a very wise move in his career. Though no one likes to speak about it, there is literally nothing that the moviegoing public enjoys more than seeing a terrific-looking guy get completely jacked up. For reasons that are not entirely clear, but which probably have an awful lot to do with the fact that most male moviegoers don't look anywhere near as good as Ralph Fiennes, the moviegoing public seldom confers its full blessing on an actor until they have seen him get bludgeoned, lacerated, filleted with razors, burned, flogged, crucified or beheaded.

This is the main reason that male movie stars command higher salaries than their female counterparts: female stars get sexually molested all the time, but when was the last time you saw Goldie Hawn get her teeth kicked in?

I am certainly not arguing that the public only wants to see good-looking guys get their faces smashed in, or even that the public primarily wants to see gorgeous guys get gouged and garroted. The public does not demand that its idols get worked over in every one of their films, or even in most of their films. But if a star is not willing to get that perky puss pounded in at least one film, he can usually resign himself to loitering forever in the penumbra of superstardom. Ask Sir John Gielgud why he never became as big a star as John Wayne and he will almost certainly tell you, "Because I was never willing to get my face bashed in."

Anyone who doubts the logic of my argument should spend a bit more time at the video store. The record speaks for itself. Jack Nicholson came to the public's attention by getting smashed across his face in Easy Rider, then achieved megastardom by having had his nose sliced open in Chinatown. Al Pacino got his face hammered by Sterling Hayden in The Godfather. Harrison Ford got the shit beaten out of him in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Tom Cruise got that fantastic face brutalized during the improbable barroom brawl in Far and Away. Kevin Costner got his face and everything else kicked in during Revenge. Ditto Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona. Kurt Russell was beaten senseless, bound, suspended and electrocuted in Tango & Cash. Bruce Willis got thumped good in Pulp Fiction and all three Die Hard_s. In _Black Rain, one of cinema's most memorable two-fers, Michael Douglas had his face wrapped in a plastic bag by a Japanese thug who would later chop off Andy Garcia's head. Denzel Washington was horsewhipped in Glory, beaten senseless in Ricochet, and had his face totaled with his own trumpet in Mo' Better Blues.

Mel Gibson, brutalized in the Mad Max films and the Lethal Weapon series--for a total of six meatgrinding movies--then starred in the self-directed, self-explanatory The Man Without a Face, and later got the mother of all whompings in Braveheart, where even before he gets his innards ripped out he is subjected to a brutal clubbing by a horde of treacherous Brits. More on this later. Finally, in one of the most stomach-turning examples of facial brutality ever filmed, Jeff Bridges had to repeatedly kiss Barbra Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces.

As we have seen from a mere random sampling, almost any male star you can name has run the gauntlet of cinematic battering in at least one memorable instance. Then there is Sylvester Stallone. After rocketing to stardom by getting his head handed to him in Rocky, Stallone was then battered senseless in Rocky II, mercilessly thrashed in Rocky III, pummeled into a stupor in Rocky IV, and beaten to a pulp in Rocky V. And that's not even mentioning all the pulps he got beaten to in films as varied as the three Rambo movies, Tango & Cash and Cliffhanger. Since Stallone conspicuously failed to get his face bashed in during the filming of Rhinestone, Oscar or Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot and all of them tanked at the box office, it is probably safe to say that in Sylvester Stallone Hollywood has finally found a movie star that the public only wants to see getting his eyes gouged out and his teeth knocked loose. And, to his credit, writer/director/producer/star Stallone seems to understand this.

Though I have never seen Stallone or any other of these stars discuss this subject in print, all of them seem to intuitively understand that the public periodically demands the ritual desecration of its most treasured icons. The American public, in this context, is best looked upon as 250 million sick fucks.

Generally speaking, the public would really prefer to see a guy get his face kicked in and his teeth knocked out over and over. But if this is not a possibility, they will sometimes accept a flogging, a crucifixion or a ritual beheading as a substitute, provided the victim seems to be suffering a good deal. Yet, here it is important to draw the distinction between sadistic behavior that the public views as psychologically and even morally acceptable, and torture that is sullied by a disturbing, perhaps even gross, homoerotic undercurrent.

Consider, for example, the hideous torture sequence at the end of Braveheart. Just before he is ripped to pieces, Mel Gibson is asked by the royal magistrate if he would like to take this opportunity to confess to his treason and thus be granted a more merciful death. Gibson immediately makes eye contact with a tiny boy in the crowd. Even in his woozy condition, he can see that the wide-eyed boy, the symbolic stand-in for the moviegoing public, really doesn't want to get cheated out of a good show. So Gibson agrees to be hung, have his bones broken by being stretched on the rack, have his stomach torn open and his entrails ripped out, and then get beheaded. It's all very disgusting, but at least it's disgusting in a traditional, costume drama, boys-will-be-boys, macho way.

Because Gibson's dismemberment is handled in a fashion the public can view as somehow wholesome, no one has to feel guilty about enjoying it. An entirely different situation prevails in movies where the torture scenes contain a homoerotic subtext. Think back to Tyrone Power getting beaten by George Sanders in Son of Fury-Think of Peter O'Toole getting caned in Lawrence of Arabia while flirty Jose Ferrer gets his rocks off behind a partially closed door a few feet away. Most important of all, think of Brando's bizarre flogging at the hands of surrogate father Karl Maiden in One-Eyed Jacks. In each of these movies, there is a psychosexual subtext to the punishment because one or both of the participants seems to be enjoying things too much. This kind of stuff makes the public feel a bit creepy. Put it this way: the public knows that it is sick, but it would prefer to think that it is straight.

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