[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]
On what
differentiated the two 80s action superstars, and one important parallel.
I’ve written
about ‘80s
action movies a few times on this blog, most notably in response to
contemporary events like the invasion
of Granada or the war
in Afghanistan. But while the decade’s over-the-top cinematic action was
indeed often related to (I was going to say “in response to,” but that might be
pushing things a bit) real-world
events and issues, it was also, well, ridiculously over-the-top (emphasis on ridiculous).
I’m not suggesting that the prior decade’s action heroes like the subjects of
my last two posts, John Shaft and Paul Kersey, were purely grounded in realism;
but those characters and films were cinema verité compared to the ‘80s action oeuvre.
There were lots of action stars who contributed to that ‘80s craze and
craziness, from Chuck Norris to Dolph Lundgren to Jean-Claude Van Damme (and
with more unexpected examples like comedy legend Eddie
Murphy and TV star Bruce
Willis in the mix as well), but two icons really defined and in many ways
dominated the decade’s larger-than-life action explosion: Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
As that last
hyperlinked article indicates, Arnie and Sly really didn’t like each other
during the ‘80s. But my interest in this paragraph is not on such personal differences
(entertaining as the idea of a rumble between the two icons might be), but instead
on what differentiated their action movie characters and performances in the
decade (and beyond). Schwarzenegger came to action films from the literally
larger-than-life world of Mr.
Universe bodybuilding competitions, and his action heroes tended to be
similarly unrealistic, capable of feats and body counts as
extreme as his musculature. Stallone’s first major film performances were in Rocky
(which he also wrote) and First Blood (later
renamed Rambo: First Blood), both
featuring main characters who feel far more representative of everyday identities
and experiences (despite Stallone’s similarly extreme, if not quite
Schwarzeneggeresque, physique). I’ve written
before about how the character of John Rambo in particular evolved to
become more like an Arnie hero (with him shooting down Russian helicopters with
arrows in Rambo III, for example); but despite
that movement across Sly’s sequels, I would still argue that Stallone’s ‘80s
action characters retained a level of everyman believability, while the very
idea of Schwarzenegger in a
“normal” marriage and family (for example) was treated as intrinsically
comic.
Despite those
differences in their origins and tones, however, I would say that in a
significant number of their ‘80s action films, Arnie and Sly’s characters
embodied something fundamentally similar: a fantasy vision of America taking on
its adversaries. In Schwarzenegger’s case, those adversaries were as likely to
be literal aliens (1987’s Predator)
as foreign mercenaries (1985’s Commando);
while in Stallone’s films, they were often more directly Cold War enemies like
the Russians and the Vietnamese in his two 1985 movies, Rocky IV and Rambo: First
Blood Part II. But in any case, these supersoldiers, superboxers, supermen
were warding off enemies who seemed to draw on both longstanding Cold War narratives
and newer 1980s fears of invaders and threats to America’s hegemony. While 70s action
characters like John Shaft and Paul Kersey found themselves fighting against
fellow Americans in a troublingly dangerous and divided nation, that is, Arnie
and Sly and their ‘80s action counterparts took the fight to the rest of the
world.
Last action
figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?
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