“Rowdy” Roddy Piper

Nakedness is presented as metaphor rather than truth, and it implies that even this monolithic image can be subliminally transformed and acquire new and contradictory meanings. Here it suggests that there is no privileged truth to be found in the pose—the “gesture”—of the body builder played by Schwarzenegger. The matter is open and ironic, as art ought to be.

—Mark LeFanu, on Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry, in American Directors, Vol II

 

Roddy Piper (a stage name for Roderick George Toombs) will remind nobody of Humphrey Bogart, really, despite all my insinuations. Or even Clint Eastwood. He’s a professional wrestler, representing a minor stop on Hollywood’s journey from Johnny Weissmuller to The Rock. (Ours was, of course, the movie era where Schwarzenegger and Stallone proved how decisively a weightlifter turned actor trumps an actor turned weightlifter: the former goes from laughingstock to box-office-champ to Governor of California, the latter from Oscar-winning character actor to washed-up oil painter.) Under Carpenter’s hand, Piper wears his aspirations lightly, seeming barely to have shrugged off his other career for these duties. That said, he isn’t bad. As you’d expect from someone with hundreds of hours’ experience playing opposite other professional wrestlers in what is essentially live, semi-improvised theater, Piper’s best in scenes opposite Keith David or some other strong male presence, worst in his scenes with Meg Foster or other women. Piper is the blunt tool this job requires: conveying fear and rage is in his wheelhouse.

“Unlike most Hollywood actors, Roddy has life written all over him.” This, John Carpenter’s explanation of his casting choice, expresses a typically masculine discomfort with the fakery and costumes of acting. Like much to do with They Live, the remark embeds a matter-of-fact dichotomy—us against them, “life” versus acting—while begging us to tease out the buried ironies: the “life” Piper has written all over him is his life as a famous, straight-faced fake. Anyone wearing the glasses of good sense knows that pro wrestling is acting. Yet unlike “real” actors, who willingly take off their disguises and discuss the secrets of their craft, professional wrestlers—like They Live’s ghouls—will never admit their deception except amongst themselves, unless forced at gunpoint, or perhaps under sworn testimony.

Piper, with his slight acne scarring and not-intolerably-leaden vocal delivery (including occasional slips into a Canadian accent) makes a fair token of the real. If he knows how funny it is that he should be asked to act shocked at finding himself in the unmasking business—since pro wrestling involves both frequent unmasking at one level, and the persistent refusal to be unmasked at another—he keeps it mostly to himself. The exception will be the alleyway fight scene, where, allowed to unveil his “real” life expertise in “fake” hand-to-hand combat, a teasing irony plays over Piper’s expressions. More on this later.