Kathy Acker & Sylvester Stallone
the bisexual punk and the sensitive meathead
The first frame in the movie Rocky is a painting of Jesus Christ.
Jubilant trumpets cross fade into the diegetic din of a jeering crowd as the camera zooms out from a closeup on Jesus and his halo.
Before panning down to two boxers in the ring, locked in an embrace that a ref is trying to break up,
the fight takes place in a former church converted into a shabby gym:
Philadelphia, 1975.
“Jesus is the inspiration for anyone to go the distance,” Stallone said in an interview explaining the motivation behind the shot. Stallone not only starred in Rocky, he wrote it, and Christ for him is a model for perseverance, determination, grit.
An alternate interpretation:
Jesus,
is the original hard body.
Stripped naked, and wounded on the cross
As juiced as Rambo, he may not be
but there are plenty of visions of the crucifixion including sculpted pecs and washboard abs
And like Christ
Stallone spends the majority of his screen time, for his most iconic roles, barely clothed and bloodied
Enduring suffering
***
Writer Kathy Acker started body building in 1983
When Hollywood’s roid rage was just taking off
Stallone was one of the world’s biggest movie stars
The first Rambo AND the third Rocky
premiering a year before
only five months a part.
That same year, Arnold had broke through with Conan the Barbarian
while Terminator was soon to come
And Acker, the postmodern poet with very gay short hair, was an unlikely gym rat
pumping iron with studded fetish armbands on
For years Acker tried and failed to write an essay about body building
She tried to journal after each workout, hoping these diary entries would give her some raw material, but she explains (in her essay which finally came out a decade after she’d started lifting)
she said the only way she can begin is by analyzing this rejection.
“What is the picture of the antagonism between bodybuilding and language?”
the sound of this negative space?
Sylvester Stallone’s characters are infamous for speaking in grunts
***
Brigitte Nielsen recently opened up to People Magazine
Saying she NEVER thinks about her ex-husband Sylvester Stallone
Sometimes
She said
About their marriage
“it feels like it never even happened”
The most enduring evidence that it did in fact happen is an infamous photo of the couple that Herb Ritts shot for a Vanity Fair cover story in 1985
classically black-and-white
The couple is at the beach
And Stallone is lifting Nielsen in the air like he’s doing an overhead barbell press
“For Sylvester Stallone is more than a superhero,”
the article reads,
“he is a superpower.
He is America armored and oiled, a human tank with rectangular pecs.
His body is a triumph of amplification.”
No wonder Stallone’s heroes, Rocky and Rambo, make minimum use of words: his physique is itself a shout.
The text makes no mention of the other way Stallone communicates without speaking
The droopy-eyed intensity of his gaze
Which is on full display in this image
While Nielsen is a prop, her face turned away from the camera and up to the sky, her neck arched, completing the arc that her body traces
achieving the inner movement curve of a baroque painting,
Stallone, however, looks right at the camera
You could describe his gaze here as disarming
Prideful but Melancholic
Dare I say vulnerable
A soft heart in a hard body
The photo on the cover of the magazine hid his eyes behind aviators
It was promo for the movie Cobra in which he wore these sunglasses in almost every scene
But it’s this image where Stallone locks eyes with the camera that’s the most lasting,
This single-mindedness in his droopy eyes that sometimes get mistaken for dopeyness
Is the quality that makes Stallone’s best performances.
We see it from the very beginning in the first scene of the first Rocky
He just won’t quit
The emotional intensity of his stare, however, is overlooked in this Vanity Fair article
that makes him a Captain America meme
Which is basically what he turned into throughout the eighties
When he became a human action figure
When he had this notorious rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger
But in the Herb Ritts photo you see the potential for Stallone to have been a tragic antihero from a movie like Mean Streets or Raging Bull
A Robert De Niro type
Stallone, instead, rode the wave of two mega franchises to become a superstar and then a punchline
Scorsese wouldn’t touch him
More than a bimbo, Stallone is a masochist
***
Kathy Acker writes
Simple sentences make the best catch phrases
I pity the fool
Rocky III, 1982
Your worst nightmare
Rambo III, 1988
I admit I’m self conscious using Kathy Acker as a lens to talk about Sylvester Stallone
I feel like I’m achieving peak parody of myself
Or trolling some sort of zeitgeist
The high brow critique of the low brow
“Media Personality”
But it’s too perfect not to put Kathy Acker and Sylvester Stallone in dialogue
Who has written better about body building and failure?
And who better embodies them?
The bisexual punk and the sensitive meathead, Two artists who mastered the art of controlling their image, only to be undone by it
Or at least frustrated by their success with it
Acker in her lifetime
had “the cachet of a fetish object”
(to quote Gary Indiana)
And now in her death
(to borrow from Drew Zeiba)
She’s “on literary life support as a saint”
I think either read could be applied to Stallone
maybe Minus the qualifier “literary”
Though I should mention: in 1979 Stallone wrote a never-made Edgar Allan Poe biopic
And in photos of Poe
Like Stallone
His eyes are downward slanted
And sad
***
Kathy Acker writes:
Bodybuilding can be seen to be about nothing but failure.
A body builder is always working around failure
***
By 1997
After sequel after sequel of dwindling returns
And some totals flops
Like a country musical co-starring Dolly Parton
And Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
(The mom: Golden Girls’s Estelle Getty)
Which Roger Ebert described as one of the worst movies he’s ever seen
Stallone was considered a failure.
He had a bit of a comeback with the gritty police movie Cop Land
Leading an ensemble cast of heavy hitters
Including some of Scorsese’s favorite assholes, Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro
Stallone gained 40 pounds and played a big lug of a guy, deaf in one ear
The New York Times wrote:
“Watching Mr. Stallone quietly hold his ground with Robert De Niro in this film's best confrontation scenes, it’s not immediately apparent who was lauded as his generation’s greatest brooding film star and who was once the overmuscled joke.”
While Stallone’s performance was critically acclaimed
The movie Cop Land never quite resuscitated his career like maybe it should have
He was only able to reboot himself as a meme
13 years later
With The Expendables franchise
His own invention
When he couldn’t helm a blockbuster alone he was able to make a place for himself in Hollywood again
rounding together all the other aging action stars
And directing the high-octane high-body-count blizzard of violence
Playing up the nostalgia gamut
again
He soon after went head to head with De Niro in Grudge Match
Which also had something of a meta conceit
Two old men getting in the ring together again
The stars
of the
two
greatest boxing movies
Rocky and Raging Bull
***
There’s this interview Stallone and De Niro gave promoting the film
One of those cheap Entertainment Tonight-type clips
In a black room
With a nobody sitting across from the actors interviewing them
The only décor the movie poster
Everyone seated in cheesy folding, director chairs.
The way the two leading men behave in this interview
it really hit home why things played out how they did
Consider this
In 1977
Stallone’s Rocky and De Niro’s Taxi Driver went head to head at the Academy Awards
And it was Rocky that won
In 2023 Robert De Niro is helming the latest Scorsese flick
And Stallone seems relieved to have a family reality TV show
His netflix doc not quite achieving the saturation of the docs of other aging bimbos, Arnold and Pamela, A Love Story
In this interview for the old man boxing flick
Stallone does most of the talking
Eager to answer the banal questions lobbed his way
And De Niro sits there brooding and jaded
performing his disdain for the exercise
I don’t necessarily think DeNiro is a better actor
But he is more of a mother fucker
So is Al Pacino
So is Samuel L. Jackson
They can play characters that turn on a razor’s edge
while
Stallone is a blunt instrument
The other three
can play the devil
Stallone is better suited to Jesus Christ
***
I feel I am like Stallone in that I am too earnest
I have disdain for this earnestness
I wish I was more aloof
But here I am trying to conclude this monologue by wrapping it up
In a sentimental bow
Threading the eye of the needle
The brute has been misread, he is spiritual
***
Kathy Acker wrote
She connects this counting to a spiritual practice
And to Elias Canetti writing on the beggars of Marrakesh who repeat the name of God over and over again
“In ordinary language, meaning is contextual. Whereas the cry of the beggar means nothing other than what it is; in the cry of the beggar, the impossible occurs in that meaning and breath become one. Here is the language of the body; here, perhaps, is the reason why bodybuilders experience bodybuilding as a form of meditation.”
When a bodybuilder is counting, he or she is counting his or her own breath.
I feel something like this scrolling through IMDB
The Square Root
1969
The Party at Kitty and Stud’s
1970
The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker
1970
Rebel
1973
The Lord of Flatbush
1974
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
1975
Capone
1975
Death Race 2000
1975
Farewell, My Lovely
1975
Police Story
1 episode
1975
Kojak
1 episode
1975
Cannonball!
uncredited
1976
Rocky
1976
FIST
1978
Paradise Alley
1978
Rocky II
1979
Nighthawks
1981
Victory
1981
Rocky III
1982
Rambo: First Blood
1982
Rhinestone
1984
Rambo: First Blood Part II
1985
Rocky IV
1985
Cobra
1986
Over the Top
1987
Rambo III
1988
Lock Up
1989
Tango & Cash
1989
Rocky V
1990
Oscar
1991
Dream On
1 episode
1991
Cliffhanger
1991
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
1992
Demolition Man
1993
The Specialist
1994
Judge Dredd
1995
Assassins
1995
Daylight
1996
Cop Land
1997
The Good Life
1997
Antz
(voice)
1998
Get Carter
2000
Driven
2001
Eye See you
2002
Avenging Angelo
2002
Liberty’s Kids
Voice
1 episode
2002
Taxi 3
uncredited
2003
Shade
2003
Spy Kids 3: Game Over
2003
Las Vegas
2 episodes
2005
Rocky Balboa
2006
Rambo
2008
Kambakkht Ishq
2009
The Expendables
2010
Zookeeper
2011
The Expendables 2
2012
Bullet to the Head
2012
Escape Plan
2013
SNL
1 episode
2013
Grudge Match
2013
The Expendables 3
2014
Reach Me
2014
Creed
2015
Ratchet & Clank
voice
2016
Guardians of the Galaxy: vol 2
2017
Animal Crackers
Voice
2017
This is Us
1 episode
2017
Escape Plan 2: Hades
2018
Creed II
2018
Backtrace
2018
Mortal Kombat 11
2019
Escape Plan: The Extractors
2019
Rambo: Last Blood
2019
The Suicide Squad
King Shark voice
2021
Samaritan
2022
Guardians of the Galaxy: vol 3
2023
Expend4bles
2023
Tulsa King
9 episodes
2022 to 2023
I performed this text live at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Times Square December 1, 2023.
Really loved reading this