The Face Hasn't Lost Any of Its Expressiveness





The announcer's voice echoes over the rowdy crowd in the arena, proclaiming, "...from Elizabeth, New Jersey, Randy 'the Ram' Robinson!"  Portrayed by Mickey Rourke with a deeply personal and visible commitment to a character that resembles the media caricatures of his own career, Randy achieved fleeting fame and receding fortune in the 1980s.  Now he drives a beat-up van, lives in an out-of-the-way trailer park, and spends his days working odd shifts at a grocery store and trekking to high-school gymnasiums, where he joins with other washed-up, almost-celebrities to wait for fans to show up and ask for autographs.  And of course he still dives into the ring for the magical and musical violence that made The Ram famous.

The fact that The Ram comes from Elizabeth doesn't seem to mean much in this movie, Darren Aronovsky's The Wrestler (2008).  Even so, for the sense of place for the city, perhaps there are a few lessons.  This is not Tom Wolfe's (1963) adrenaline-infused vignette of Muhammad Ali in Midtown Manhattan, and it's not Loic Wacquant's (2004, p. vii) experience of Marx's "suffering being," the man "who partakes of the universe that makes him, and that he in turn contributes to making, with every fiber of his body and his heart," at a boxing gym on the South Side of Chicago.  But when he slides into the ring in his satin tights and his long, flowing, bleach-blond hair, and when his wounds are patched up at the end of the night, The Ram's face seems to tell us all we need to know about a city like Elizabeth.  His "meaty mug - beaten down more by life than by anything that has happened in the ring - tells us more about his character than a dozen lines of dialogue might.  It's impossible to pin down what makes that beat-up face so beautiful."  (Zacharech, 2008, p. 1). 

So also with the city, named after "Lady Elizabeth Carteret, wife of one of the two First Lord Proprietors of New Jersey".  (New York Times, 1925, p. 16).  One of the oldest industrial areas in one of the areas with the longest history of European settlement in North America, Elizabeth flourished until the first decades of the twentieth century.  Growth and development shifted elsewhere, leaving Elizabeth with an infrastructure too old to claim the optimal efficiencies of the Fordist era.  But thanks to a modernized container-port facility carved out of the swampy meadowlands in the early 1960s, Elizabeth suffered more moderate job and population losses compared to nearby Newark.  Even after the devastation visited upon so many American cities during the 1970s, The New York Times could offer a light, cheeky portrait of a rough-edged but charming place:

"Known more for its brawl than its beauty, Elizabeth is a bustling seaport and a city of 106,000 people - the fourth-largest in heavily urbanized New Jersey - yet it has a small-town feeling. … Residents here call themselves Elizabethans, which sounds a trifle haughty considering the industrialized blocks spread throughout the city."  (DePalma, 1983).

Perhaps it is possible to pin down what makes Elizabeth's beat-up face so beautiful.  The rhythms of development and destruction have moved more slowly here.  Nestled between the "inner city" poster children of urban decline and the vibrant corridors of suburban growth, Elizabeth and similar old cities are easily ignored and overlooked - not just in the national or international urban imagination, but also in statewide and regional discussions.  As a result, the place has been spared from the most forceful waves of creative destruction.  Urban decline has not been so severe to invite the wholesale demolition of the urban environment motivated by the utopian 'clean slate' impulse of high-modernist urban planning.  But new growth and investment has also been insufficient to require clearing away many of the older structures.  The city has more of its history intact than one would expect in places with either more optimism or pessimism. 

The mixture of structures and land uses from pre-colonial times, the industrialization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and from more recent post-industrial, post-urban eras has left the city a face with character.  Anyone who remembers The Pope of Greenwich Village or 9-1/2 Weeks knows that the face can still tell stories.  Just like Elizabeth, "Rourke's face looks a little strange:  He appears to have had some plastic surgery, which has made his features look both a little too fine and a little too blurred, compared with the Rourke we used to know.  But that face hasn't lost any of its expressiveness."  (Zacharech, 2008, p. 2).


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"It's impossible to pin down what makes that beat-up face so beautiful." Stephanie Zacharech (2008).  "The Wrestler."  Salon, October 10.
References

Anthony DePalma (1983).  "If You're Thinking of Living In:  Elizabeth."  New York Times, August 28.

Loic Wacquant (2004).  Body and Soul:  Notes of an Apprentice Boxer.  Oxford and New York:  Oxford University Press.

New York Times (1925).  "Receives a Portrait of Lady Carteret; Gets $50,000 Painting of English Noblewoman after Whom City Was Named." New York Times, June 21, p. 16.

Stephanie Zacharech (2008).  "The Wrestler."  Salon, October 10.

Tom Wolfe (1965).  The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.  New York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Elizabeth, New Jersey, June 2009
For high-resolution versions of these images, look for filenames eliz01.jpg to eliz35.jpg, in the cityimage directory.