”A merciless study of the lives of people who are living badly, [The Iron Claw] not only poses questions about free will, but portrays characters sunk so far in convention, fear, and unnaturalness that even the dawning of a more vital life must appear to them as something terrible and destructive.”¹xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

There’s a limit to how seriously a person can take professional wrestling. At least, that’s what you may have thought, to the extent that any clarity of thought with respect to the purpose or function of the film ever arises during its runtime. To the extent there isn’t though—and it will never be precisely clear throughout the duration whether there’s consciousness being applied to the manufacture of plot and dialogue in the perfection of a thoughtlessness that transcends the absolute limitation imposed by the performativity-demands of the contrived and invented contextual realities that define basically every natural world order in which a human being will ever find itself—you may find that there’s a good deal more to this movie than even the director may feel has resulted from his dutiful presentation of this cultural Americana.

Threading the fine-line between a kind of Dazed and Confused with respect to its overall form and intention and a comedy of ignorance of a Kingpin in the details and nuance of its execution, its forever impossible to determine whether or not what results should be considered as the perversion of an historical perspective arising from the application of the cynical irony of the latter film, or whether or not its the attention to detail in the assembled montage of authentic life oriented around an economic simulation with respect to the concern for evoking a past cultural milieu of the former film that prevails. In actuality, it not even possible to know whether or not there’s even any comedy intended or even if there’s any non-reflexive attention to authentic life that’s attempted. Nevertheless, both are there, to the extent one can free themselves to laugh at the deaths the brothers and take seriously the casual arbitrariness of the presentation of physique on screen as in any way conformant with the type of role each type is being applied to, for instance².

In its broad strokes the film deals with American economic reality: these are people engaged in essentially acting for a living, but whose acting applies to the serious necessity of making an income. Here, such conflicting demands requires a person to split themselves somehow into two halves of dedication to the hard work of strength and physical training that enables them to carry-out the performance-theatre expected to occur between such bodies and the flamboyage of the discursive mediation through which the assemblage as a whole is constituted as an endeavor that can be taken seriously by an audience as a result of the innate sense the ‘actors’ demonstrate in their knowledge of the expectations such an audience applies to such characters as social and cultural contrivances appropriate to their moment in time.

In its details, however, lies the presentation of the reconciliation of this split, to the extent such reconciliation can be demonstrated as possible with respect to the obvious absurdity of the involvement in life these people have with respect to their seriousness to survive. This is a split defined by the overarching historical determination of these lives according to the economic principles of self-sufficiency of the father and his anachronistic cultural sensibilities that splits the entire thing with respect to both the ongoing idiocy of the subsequent generation’s ignorant subsumption to them as a private matter as well as one that reflects the movement of the whole as an ongoing tragicomedy of insufficiency with regard to what is actually desirable in these kinds of characters that doesn’t actually seem appreciated by this family (since they are deluded by the details themselves).

The way this specifically looks with respect to the particularities at play in any given moment, however, describes a bizarre tapestry of interwoven stupidities at their meeting-points with certain unavoidable or inexorable authenticities that permeate such occurrences of encounters between human beings that no simulational reality can ever hope to entirely overcome. On the one hand, these are simple (such as the opening scene in which one is confronted with a body sculpted to presentational perfection meeting the ordinary act of removing bedsheets in the morning); on the other hand, more complex (such as the seemingly concussive dissociativity of minor-act famedom encountering the simplicity of inter-personal interest in a post-match signature request).

Doubled-over again, these specific instances describe the over-arching order of interaction in which they are implicated as cultural-historical emergences: waking-up in their parents home to start their day taking in the daily wisdom of the Father King at the head of the breakfast table as he lays out the cold, hard approbata necessary for his impoverishly-developed children to find their way in a world only he can presciently comprehend that determines the daily regimen to which his sons will need to unwaveringly submit themselves dutifully as expressive of their faith in ‘God’s will and the providence of faith-based adherence to His Law’; just as meeting outside the arena casually amidst a disinterested crowd calls into question the entire representational order in which such famedom self-persists as distinguishable-in-kind from the ordinary lives of those whose spectatorship forms the basis for their self-isolational non-logic. In the former, subsumption to an historical anachronism that plays itself out on the lives and bodies of the private; in the latter, of the private lives of this anachronism itself that plays out in the wider world in their confrontation with simple realities and necessities of existence.

The ‘curse’ of the movie³, thus, is simultaneously the curse of a culture over-defined by the iron-fisted belief in self-sufficiency and a make-your-own-luck type of thinking that inebriates one⁴ from the accidents of life that provide the chemistry of its molecular recombination; as well as the curse of the narrow-mindedness self-reflexive individualization betrays in those who, thusly, can no longer see the forest for the trees, so to speak, such that, even when implicated beyond their control in the arising of such recombinationalities, remain victims of forces conspiring together as a performative dimension of culture. Only in the simple act of recognizing a moment as simple affinity according to no terms but those that apply directly to it does the possibility for moving beyond the present present itself.

And so it is with the only of these brothers that is able to make for himself a private life that The Iron Claw of Life is seemingly overcome. Cast out by fortune from the decaying corpse of his family life so-called, he finds himself now honestly and truly implicated in the true nature of the economic reality of life in America; and having the misfortune to lose what was always construed as the most fundamentally redeeming aspect of life, he is now consigned to make a new history of such. But being now rendered ordinarily liberal by incoherences at the level of affect and sense, one does wonder, in the end, how it should ever be possible to consider a father’s children as his brothers, why it is possible to eulogize the eternality of the brotherhood depicted in the film, and whether such contrivances themselves don’t not portend anything but the continuation of an economic performativity now writ so large there’s not a soul capable of intuiting its limits any longer.

Final Score: an 'A' for making a simulated wrestling scene compellingly real; and an 'B' for working back only to what the present is already as totally incoherent assemblage with no grasp of reality. But fair enough, that's the story.

Footnotes