Years ago, during a college graduation commencement address, Sylvester Stallone instructed graduates to lie on their resumés.
To be fair, he probably made the suggestion half-jokingly, but also, perhaps, in an effort to level with them about how hard it can be to get your foot in the door. One of Stallone’s first pictures was a porno. Like most old hands in Hollywood, he knew you had to be ready to do whatever it took and, if necessary, cut corners. Needless to say, his advice wasn’t well-received.
I remembered this obscure trivia when I heard that Stallone had gotten busted for mistakenly smuggling human growth hormone into Australia earlier this month. He was apparently on his way to Southeast Asia to film the latest installment of Rambo.
Still cutting corners, I guess. But prepared to do whatever it takes.
As a fading, but still almost universally recognizable Hollywood icon, there is no doubt Stallone figured his baggage would receive less scrutiny than most travelers’ and this assumption got him into a bit of a pickle. But if Rambo IV is at least a moderate box office hit, the pickle will serve as little more than the relish that we put on our hot dogs when we cram into megaplex theatres to watch Stallone gratuitously beat the stuffing out of foreign evildoers in some quasi-noble cause Americana.
Rambo’s brand of justice will no doubt be the product of performance-enhancing human growth hormones, but we won’t give it a second thought because, like diehard baseball fans, we don’t care what our heroes are hopped up on as long as they are kicking ass.
Therein arguably lies the biggest downside of being a screen idol. No one wants to see you grow old and, when you do, you lose appeal, garner less attention and demand and, ultimately, become passé. The celebrity and adulation you enjoyed as a star begins to fade and soon you’re just a cinematic footnote.
Marilyn Monroe and James Dean got off easy. They died relatively young and before their appearance and screen appeal had begun to seriously deteriorate. Bogart had begun to fade, but passed away before a complete aesthetic collapse. Brando held up well through The Godfather, but started gaining weight by Apocalypse Now and never slimmed back down. He went the way of Orson Welles, but at least never had to resort to wine commercials.
The chief male Hollywood icon that comes to mind as having aged with style and grace is Paul Newman. He’s 82 this year. He never gained much weight, never pumped himself up to stave off wrinkles and never injected synthetic hormones to beef up his screen appeal. He seemed to take advancing years as they came, maturing, growing — allowing himself to age and act his age. Stallone obviously isn’t following in his footsteps.
A screen icon like Stallone — even with all his insanely popular hits in the 80s — is no heavyweight like Brando or Newman. Or even Dean. But his films did titillate the American psyche for a time. In the original Rocky, Stallone rewrote Brando’s “Terry Malloy,” from On the Waterfront, allowing him not to become just a contender, but a champion. And in the original Rambo, Stallone puts a twist on Robert DeNiro’s “Michael Vronsky,” from The Deer Hunter. In an exaggerated meditation on being a discarded vet of an unpopular war, Stallone’s “Rambo” externalizes his frustrations and indignation towards the society that under-appreciates him, and terrorizes a small town full of yokels.
The film was hokey, but still a huge success. And Rambo II succeeded even further, stoking patriotic disdain for the purported political bureaucracy that prevented us from “winning” the Vietnam War and, more importantly, giving Ronnie Reagan unlimited mileage in his Cold War meanderings by depicting Rambo as a righteous American warrior doing battle with evil cardboard cut-out Communist (Vietnamese, Russian, etc.) villains (Thank god George W. Bush didn’t have an ass-kicking, put-upon ideologue like John Rambo taking it to the Islamic Extremists on the silver screen during the first few years of our “war” in Iraq — his approval rating would still be over 50%!?!).
I’m sure Rambo IV will be at least mildly entertaining to the multitude, because Stallone is still clever enough to milk his most iconoclastic characters for likable, low-brow epilogues. But behind the nostalgic, feel-good revue is the ugly downside of life. We get old. We don’t look as good. We don’t get around as well. It’s unpleasant and frustrating, but also natural and authentic. The real deal.
Watching 60-year-olds like Stallone stomp around in artificially enhanced muscles isn’t terribly inspirational. It’s fake, it’s silly and it’s sad. I have no problem with raging against the dying of the light, but there’s a big difference between standing up and leaning into the wind with what’s left of your natural fortitude or dignity and injecting synthetic napalm into your bloodstream so you can storm the box office for one or two final, frenzied flame-outs before you collapse.
I’d rather remember Stallone the way he was depicted in the original Rocky or the recent Copland (in which he still looked like a normal human being), instead of Rocky VI or Rambo IV.
Did he need the money? Did he just want his two most successful silver screen characters to go out in a decent production rather than the drivel they had succumbed to in the late 80s? Neither reason makes shooting up with human growth hormone worth the price of admission.
In Cobra, “Marion Cobretti,” one of Stallone’s most forgettable characters, calls a dangerous thug a “disease” to which he — Cobra — is the “cure.” These days, respectable sequels, favorable reviews and/or box office successes or no, Stallone is part of the disease. The cure is box office absenteeism.