PROMISES AND GUARANTEES: Jean-Claude Van Dam, Hulk Hogan, and what happens when winning no longer means the same thing as heroism.
28/09/09 19:46 Filed in: Essays
I suppose there’s been nostalgia for every decade or generation long past, but man, people really have it in for the 80s. Whether it be cultural oddities like Madonna or synth guitars or bandanas or glitter (all three of those also used liberally by Madonna), or the entire structure of unfettered corporate growth and greed and the idea of the excessive, wealthy nation, the 80s are remembered with some really rosy glasses. Professional wrestling is included with this, as it is considered “the golden age” by people who remember it. Wrestling made a lot of money in the 80s and was extremely popular, and there wasn’t (and, arguably, isn’t) a more popular wrestler than Hulk Hogan. This, by the way, isn’t even close to hyperbole. He was everywhere. He was a household name, an icon, a standard-bearer of kitsch and gimmick. Hulk Hogan was incredibly strange as an idea; he couldn’t have been constructed or written. Hogan was an organic cartoon born out of coincidence and savvy marketing. He was enormous, standing over six feet and weighing near three hundred pounds, but he was also in fantastic shape, ballooning like a caricature full of steroids and American swagger. He won nearly every match he was in, which made him a dominant hero, one who’s greatest enemy wasn’t a bad guy but waning fan interest. Depending on who you ask, they still haven’t really waned.
Hulk’s popularity was partially due to America’s 80s obsession with the action hero. Arnold Schwarzenneger, Sylvester Stallone, and Patrick Swayze all put out classic (and not so classic) serials where they kicked ass, took names, and on occasion chewed bubble-gum. These movies were largely formulaic, and included usually three parts: the part where the good guy gets trounced by the bad guy, the part where the good guy works on his weaknesses, and the part where the good guy defeats the bad guy. These stories were simple, but served a solid purpose: you’re looking for Stallone to shoot a guy, not act well. This is, by the way, the formula for every story involving Hulk Hogan from 1983 to 1996. This was also the formula for every movie starring Jean-Claude Van Dam.
Van Dam is an Austrian-born martial artist who just sort of happened to get into acting because the money was good, much in the same way Hogan was a bodybuilder who took paychecks for wearing tights and dropping his leg on foreigners. His movies were adrenaline-filled car wrecks; all the men bled or died, and all the women swooned (or died). Vam Dam was good at what he did, and much like Hogan, his greatest fictional villains were never really any great threat; we all knew he would eventually stand triumphant. What we also knew was that eventually we’d get sick of the schtick.
Both men built careers on the ideal that exacting revenge makes you a hero, and that brawn is the best weapon against the forces of straight-up evil. Hogan and Van Dam felt created specifically for the 80s, when everything seemed cut and dry and black and white. If you were good, you were good. If you were bad, you were bad. It was an easier time, if only because it was far easier to lie. The 90s brought a bevy of sobering cultural shifts: for example, it was no longer all that okay to have sex with a bath house full of strangers. More to the point with the action hero: we didn’t really need him anymore, since the new villains weren’t so easy to define. There were fewer bad guys maniacally laughing and more with a freedom-fighter mentality. If the 90s taught us anything, it’s that there is no such thing as evil; it was really our interpretation of evil all along. Bad people weren’t bad; they were just misunderstood. They wanted the same things we did (in fact, we often took it from them in the first place) and they just wanted their share of the pie. All of a sudden, it seemed just plain mean for Hulk Hogan and Van Dam to dispatch an entire series of enemies. Didn’t they know they had families, too? Sure, the world still needed heroes. But we wanted our heroes to look more like Mel Gibson (even though this turned out to be a mistake).
Van Dam’s career began to slide in the 90s, and by the end of the decade he was involved in cheaper and cheaper productions for less and less money. His typecasting had caught up to him in a bad way, and his career appeared to be over. Hogan, on the other hand, enjoyed a renaissance as a corporate villain, turning on his fans in 1996 and keeping that character until 1999. But Hogan returned to his hero character to little fanfare, and disappeared until 2002, when he enjoyed a short “homecoming” of sorts in the WWE.
Hogan went on to star in a reality TV show based on his family, which was terrible and did more to sully his image than any of his sub-par wrestling matches. Hogan was portrayed as a cultural simpleton, overbearing and unreliable, and a bit of a pervert. Oddly, none of this was actually considered that negative. People just sort of figured he was like that anyway, much in the same way we figure George Bush is actually a pretty good barbecue cook. Van Dam, on the other hand, starred in a somewhat autobiographical indie flick called JCVD that painted him as a sympathetic victim to our consumptive and forgettable culture. In it, he is literally trapped in a place by violence-obsessed criminals who happen to actually be his fans. The most poetic scene in the film comes early, when one of the bank robbers asks him to kick the cigarette out of the mouth of another hostage. Van Dam does so begrudgingly and without any breath of effort, and looks incredibly tired of being asked to do the same things over and over when there’s so much more he can give. You really do feel it.
Both Hogan and Van Dam are trapped by cultural expectations to a small degree, sure, but they are moreso trapped by their own ideas of themselves. This is apparent in their current endeavors. Van Dam is doing another Universal Soldier movie, and Hogan is heading a tour of over-the-hill wrestling “stars” in Australia. Both have either learned nothing, or find nothing else available for them to do. Either way, I don’t expect to see Van Dam actually lose in a movie, and I don’t expect to see Hogan lose in a match, even though doing so would make them both bigger heroes.
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