Tom Sutcliffe: Reality bites amid all the fakery

The Week In Culture

Let me make a public service announcement. The Wrestler is not about wrestling. Yes, there is wrestling in it. But don't be deterred if you think that's where Darren Aronofsky's film is content to rest. And I point this out only because I have a feeling that I wouldn't have got round to seeing The Wrestler unless I'd been professionally obliged to, precisely because of a prejudice about what you might call jockstrap movies. Looking at that title, and absorbing the diluted synopses of the pre-publicity and early reviews, I thought I knew what I'd be getting. We've all seen fight movies before, after all – and we know their favourite moves. I thought it would be all about pluck, about being beaten down and then doughtily rising to your feet again. I thought it would be about the triumphant second act which, pace Scott Fitzgerald, Hollywood appears to believe is an indispensable element of every American life.

In fact, it's about something far more rarefied. The Wrestler is about the gap between appearances and reality. It is, to borrow a phrase made famous by the American critic Lionel Trilling, about sincerity and authenticity. And it contains three scenes which explore the paradoxes of real feeling in fake situations so well that I still get a little aftershock of pleasure when I think about them.

The first is the most crudely crowd-pleasing. Mickey Rourke's character Randy is shown fairly early on fighting a low-paying bout in a high-school gym. Before the action, the paired wrestlers talk in the dressing room about the choreography of the fights to come; who's going to do what to whom, what moves are best to avoid because of old injuries, and, naturally, who's going to win. As Rourke's character prepares we see him breaking off a shard of a razor-blade and taping it carefully to his wrist. It looks like cheating, and it is, though not quite as you expect – because when he eventually unsheathes it, he furtively uses it on his own forehead, to release a curtain of blood. The fight and the aggression are fake, but the injury and the damage are real. And the crowd lap it up in a way that seems knowingly indifferent to which is which.

The second scene is the most unsettling. Randy has gone to a lap-dancing club; he has a kind of relationship with one of the dancers, ambiguously poised between client and friend. He pays for a private dance, and while Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) writhes semi-naked above him, they chat amiably. As with the wrestling match, you are watching a simulation of high arousal that is nothing of the sort. But here, a deeper attraction is flickering away behind the superficial one and the real intimacy of conversation has to be concealed beneath the ersatz intimacy of sexual seduction. When Randy tells Cassidy that she's hot, it isn't lust but kindness. He means to reassure her that she can still do her job, because he knows she's insecure about aging.

The third scene is the real kicker, though – the one that makes you realise how perfectly cast the film is. Randy, temporarily retired from wrestling by bad health, has to up his hours at the supermarket where he earns a little extra cash. Only a shift on the deli counter is available, which requires Randy to tuck his trademark blond locks beneath a hair net. It's a near-terminal humiliation for him, but as he works he thaws from awkward sullenness into lightness of touch, finding a pleasure in making his customers smile. And when you learn that Rourke the actor dreaded filming this scene – and then that he improvised much of its banter – you realise that the fake and the real, the pretended and the heartfelt, have become indistinguishable. Rourke, on screen, in front of your eyes, rediscovers the joy of performance precisely as his character realises that he still has a way of pleasing a crowd. And, OK, it is about wrestling. But it's the real thing, too.

Little rhyme, less reason

I felt for Elizabeth Alexander on Tuesday, having to advance to the microphone and face a two million-strong crowd, which is just a little larger than the average poetry-reading. Not only did she have to follow Barack Obama, when the crowd had had their fill of rhetoric, but she was taking on a thankless task anyway. She opted for a vaguely incantatory prose – occasionally sending up a promising thread of poetical smoke ("All about is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues") but never fully catching light. And, most fatally, her attempts at all-encompassing largeness ended up sounding merely indecisive, as if she was still trying to work out what the mot juste should be. "On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp – praise song for walking forward in that light," she concluded. Coleridge described poetry as "the best words in the best order", not "tick your preference from the following selection".

A sonnet would have been a far wiser choice – over in about a minute and packed so tight with implication that everybody would have had to spend at least three days unravelling it before they could moan.

As every schoolboy (or pub bore, possibly) knows, Alexander Graham Bell originally believed that the telephone would be mostly used for the live relay of concerts into wealthy subscribers' homes. It didn't quite work out that way, but the news that a company called Classical TV is planning to offer pay-per-view internet broadcasts of major productions at the Metropolitan Opera (right) suggests, intriguingly, that modern telecommunications have finally caught up with the concept.

Whether there's really enough bandwidth out there to cope with a big demand for high-quality sound and image I don't know, but with subscriptions at around £7.25 – a modest fraction of what it would cost you for a good seat in the stalls – you can see that it might appeal to culture vultures who don't have the financial wings to feed on the real thing. Indeed, it would seem to offer a mechanism by which the National Theatre could be genuinely national for the first time, in terms of accessibility. It would be rather exciting to think – as you sat down for a big first night – that the auditorium stretched out into virtual space, way back beyond rows X, Y and Z. And who knows, if the crowds in the ether got big enough, the crowd in the theatre might pay a premium for being on-site.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk