Island
Living 36: Not a Pretty Picture
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
When I was growing
up small and skinny in New York City, prey to the
aggressive males of my species and an avid reader
of escapist fantasies, one location where these
aspects of my risky boyhood social situation coalesced
were the advertising back pages of comic books.
There -- amid the sales pitches for "X-ray
specs," sea monkeys, whoopee cushions, fake
blood and other gimmicks -- I could always find
two recurrent assurances that such imbalances of
power were rectifiable. One (these were the 1950s,
the early days of martial-arts activity in the States)
was instruction via pamphlet in the mysterious,
sly Oriental craft of jiu-jitsu. A mere decade after
the end of World War II, it carried the provocative
taint of its origin in a recent mortal enemy's camp;
nonetheless, its David-and-Goliath promise that
little guys could beat up big guys proved dependably
consoling.
The other, absolutely
all-American in its wholesome, outgoing flavor,
was the mail-order body-building course offered
by Charles Atlas. This enticement came complete
with a simple pictographic mythology. A young man
of average or under-developed physical size and
musculature lay under a beach umbrella at the shore
with his girlfriend. A hefty type came along, kicked
sand in his face, and then -- with our protagonist
humiliated, unable to retaliate -- stole the girl
away. Cut to months with the barbells. Then back
to the beach where, this time, the bully got his
comeuppance -- a punch in the mouth -- from the
former wimp, and his unfaithful girl's curvy replacement
expressed her adoration of this self-made Goliath’s
new dominance.
At the time,
I found nothing plausible about either of these
techniques of equalization. (Many years later, for
the purpose of spiritual self-development, I would
in fact study jiu-jitsu right here on Staten Island,
somewhat to my surprise.) So it was with bemusement
that I watched, over the next decades, as both martial
arts and body-building became interconnected and
evolved into major national pastimes and billion-dollar
businesses, their best-known practitioners -- Bruce
Lee, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarznegger,
Jean-Claude Van Damme -- turned into Hollywood superstars.
Yet I can identify
with this mythology, and easily empathize with its
believers. You can see how it takes some basic ideas
that we all find plausible, behaviors we consider
appropriate and desirable -- the capacity for adequate
self-defense, the health-maintaining regimen of
daily exercise -- and metastasizes them, the concept
tending to rage out of control even as the processes
involved demand utmost concentration. I find in
it a version of what anthropologist Robert Ardrey
called "the territorial imperative" writ
small: the expansion of one's physical self to its
available limits, a hyper-disciplined version of
the same symptomology that yields obesity. It's
a philosophy of the body that involves a peculiar
combination of awarenesses of one's physiology:
maximum coordination of all body parts and, at the
same time, the autonomous articulation and extreme
"definition" of its separate components
-- a physiological anarcho-syndicalism.
Watching trained
performers of either of these forms makes one immediately
aware that they are much involved with the striking
and holding of a repertoire of poses. Originally,
these poses resulted from art imitating life, and
sometimes legend; in European culture, we see them
first in Greco-Roman statuary based on stylized
postures, representing athletes, warriors, and mythological
heroes. Entering in this fashion the lexicon of
Western art, they then replicated themselves self-referentially
through centuries' worth of subsequent pictures
and sculptures: art imitating art.
However, somewhere
along the line -- beginning with the tableaux
vivants of the eighteenth century, perhaps --
living people began actively to take and sustain
these positions, as a form of theater: Life imitating
art. And nowadays, at beaches, in gymnasiums, on
stages around the world, these iconic poses are
struck, maintained, practiced, refined -- as if
the body were both a proscenium and an archive of
received expressions, and these archetypal postures
needed to be stored, preserved therein, salvaged
from the ravages of time, and played as repertoire.
Does this mean that we have finally come full circle,
to life imitating life?
Until recently,
this pursuit of personal infrastructure was an almost
exclusively male fetish; but, in the past decade
or so, an increasing number of women have been drawn
to to it -- perhaps most famously, Lisa Lyon, the
female bodybuilder photographed at length by the
late Robert Mapplethorpe. In the States, we call
images of this exaggeration of the male physique
beefcake, to compare it with and at the same
time distinguish it from cheesecake, the
now-dated term used here to denote displays of conventional
female pulchritude. (For some reason, that nomenclature
always brings to mind for me the brilliant surgeon
and writer Richard Selzer's description of the interiors
of men's bodies as "beefy" and women's
as "yolky.")
We see few images
of such bodies in a deteriorated state, wasted by
disease or age. Aside from the inevitable bathos,
such pictures would have little value. This process
is about abnormality: not the ills that flesh is
heir to, but what it can become in itself when pushed
to extremes. A formalism of the flesh, a modernism
of the physical self, if you will -- an investigation
of the inherent possibilities of the body, in and
of itself, as a plastic medium of expression and
communication.
It also addresses
the body as a costume: a deliberate construct, somewhere
between the naturally given and the artifactual.
If a consciously stylized, custom-tailored body
functions as costume and/or mask, what is covered
up, what lies beneath, what is inside? There’s
a wide range of unsettling answers, from which,
it seems, we're free to pick. After all, culture
imposes itself on the body -- male no less than
female -- immediately after birth, in rituals as
different as circumcision and baptism. Between the
infants in football helmets used nowadays to sell
disposable diapers on U.S. television and the iconography
of "Muscle Beach" there lies a continuum
of social imprinting of concepts of masculinity
that stretches back into prehistory. Those crude
Charles Atlas cartoons functioned as equivalents
of tutorial cave drawings, archetypal images made
to inculcate and perpetuate ancient ideas of "the
masculine" -- a veritable latter-day Lascaux
of testosterone.
If our relationship
to the body reveals, metaphorically, anything about
our culture, then it cannot be coincidental that,
with western civilization in a state of convulsive
crisis, the political rise of the so-called "strongman"
as a type of nationalist leader and the increasing
pervasiveness of "strongman" (and, now,
"strongwoman") mythologies are occurring
in tandem. The desire to "fulfill our potentials"
must be held in check by the recognition that our
potentials are on display not only at the Mr. Universe
contest and on the TV, movie, and video-game screen
but also in Cambodia, Rwanda, Chile, Bosnia -- and
that these are not disconnected.
We all want
and seek protection and protectors; we all must
find ways to defend ourselves. The enduring problem
is that the most fearsome enemy of all lurks, as
always, within.
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©
Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
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