Mickey Rourke
Created on 02/14/2009Hello Everybody!
Thank you very much again for your attention, interest and participation! I especially thank you for your comments and letters that never seize to amaze me with the depth and sincerity that you bring to your work.
I keep working on "Transforming the Guilt", and by working I mean that I'm carrying it inside myself and processing and thinking about it, and feeling it out the way it needs to be so when it is complete it is posted under "Virtual Retreats" with the hope that it may help some of you to accelerate your processes.
Meanwhile, I feel compelled to share something else with you that kind of fits my idea of "Breaking the Walls".
It is a personal experience. I grew up in the Soviet Union with the collective repressions typical of a good, old totalitarian society; meaning that there were no public, cultural, open discussions about anything intimate. All romanticism was stored in “Russian Literature” from previous centuries, so in our time all of our creativity, romanticism and much sexuality were supposed to be transported into a collective pot cooking some happy future for all of us by rejecting individual awareness of our primal experiences. Something like that. Of course, in reality it never worked. We lived normal life, we had our friends, our relationships, we had feelings and thoughts and experiences as any living beings anywhere else on the planet. Still, openness in the culture was nonexistent. That’s when Mickey Rourke came along. In his long coat, with his soft, heartfelt voice, with his kind eyes and sexy little smile he swept away the entire generation of young Russian women who watched 9 ½ weeks as many times as those first weird videokiosks (the public places who managed to own the first VCR players) would allow.
He was the embodiment of everything sexual, emotional, romantic and desirable as many of us could ever imagine. Everybody wanted to fall in love with somebody like Mickey Rourke. And that’s why any movie with him was awaited with great anticipation to continue learning from him about pleasure we never thought existed. That’s why I couldn’t wait to see "Francesco", his other, now obscure, movie made somewhere in Italy. I don’t even remember the plot, the philosophy or any controversy from that movie (and I am sure there should be enough controversy considering it was a biography of a Saint shot in Italy itself by a female director). All I remember is a sense of epiphany as I was sitting in this dark strange room, watching the small TV screen with quite a poor quality tape and feeling how my soul was liberated exactly at the moment when this man was standing on his knees, in utmost desperation, taking upon himself the ultimate challenge of calling for God to talk to him because his life depended on it. It was a validation I never had from anybody else before. Struggles like this were allowed only as a part of the Great Russian Culture of the past and were never allowed in our present. It was the first modern human being who had submitting himself to the pain of searching for God because he refused to live his life without God’s presence. And Mickey Rourke was the one who made that experience so intimate and close and recognizable and so modern even when he played a Saint from the remote past. He made spiritual thirst as sexy, real, kinesthetical and human as any romantic images he presented before or after. I think he gave a new meaning to the world "Love" then. And I am sure a lot of people felt grateful to him for that.
No wonder, years later, I was really excited to see Mickey Rourke live when he was presented an award at the Santa Barbara film festival this year. He was off the radar for a long time and now suddenly everybody is learning his name again and he is on top of this “comeback” wave riding it straight to Oscars. I didn’t see his new movie ("Wrestler"), but I saw enough footage to be really puzzled by the transformation (including physical) that he underwent. This new Mickey Rourke seemed to be not just a different person, but a different species from the one we all fell in love with back in the Soviet Union. So, being always fascinated by human stories, I began to contemplate his possible story, guessing what might have happened to him in those years off the radar that transformed him so profoundly. On the day of his presentation, I went to my own kickboxing class in the morning trying to unlock the “mystery” of Mickey Rourke while punching the bag, questioning what would make somebody like him give up his success, his appearance, his established path in life by basically smashing it all with his boxing gloves. Sure enough, my smart-ass psychiatrist’s mind came up with an idea of some secret trauma that might have driven him to the path of self-destruction (as I pictured his life away from the public). And here is the main reason why I took that much of your time so far to share this personal experience. Because Mickey Rourke taught me another lesson and helped me again with one more liberation last month in Santa Barbara.
I was sitting very close to the stage so I could see and hear him in great detail. I could see his shiny white/red shoes, the chain hanging over his checkered glossy pants, him touching his long hair as he was answering the interviewer’s questions. It was a retrospective of his movie career, they showed footage from his past films, he talked about his experience of making them, about people he worked with, about him being grateful for the “second chance of a comeback” when asked about it. And as I sat and listened, I felt the old emotions coming up again. But this time, it was a gratitude towards a real person, not screen characters that he crafted so masterfully that they had lives of their own. It was an emotional gratitude to this person who has lived his life as he chose, who is who he was supposed to become, who has the same kind eyes and gentle spirit that didn’t go away, and whose life and story is nobody’s damn business. I realized so fully at that event how we tend to project, to make illusions, to live in each other’s mirrors and to use all the excuses to justify using other people to reflect our needs (being a smart-ass psychiatrist is just one of them). I just saw so clearly that this man doesn’t need any permission for a “comeback” from any of us, because he never went anywhere to come back from. It was only a monkey of public attention that jumped from him to other subjects who were ready to feed its hunger for fascination.
Enough said, if you were able to bare with my story that far, hopefully, it may give you some support in separating your own real valuable experiences and insights from publicly constructed suggestions. Because the epiphany of "Francesco" still stays with me today, and I know that I will continue to feel it years from now. While any of my assumptions about Mickey Rourke’s life and story are merely the wonders of my mind, not based on any reality and the lesson I learned from him will help me be more aware of my mirrors and not to forget to always respect other people’s privacy and choices, without judgement.
Thank you again,
Love,
Olga
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