Essay: 'The Agony Of The Action Hero'

"Pain don't hurt" and other lessons

Photo: Orion Pictures

For most of my life, I have been proud of my ability to absorb pain. I liked to think of it as a superpower. I’m not suggesting I am impervious to feeling pain, just that I like to think I’m good at swallowing it—ignoring it and suffering in silence.

Stubbed toe? A grimace. Trip to the dentist? A wince. My sister’s funeral? I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled.

Once, a woman I was very much in love with dumped me suddenly. In retrospect, we were not a good match. She was a Capricorn and could express her feelings. I’m a Leo, and at that point in my life, I could express only two emotions: whatever and ugh. I just shrugged when my friends asked how I was doing after the breakup. Pain don’t hurt.

Whatever. Ugh.

I used to deal with emotional pain like any ordinary, red-blooded American man—with as few words as possible. If I could, I’d stick a grenade in the mouth of my heartbreak and pull the pin or lure my fears into the airlock of my heart, then eject into the cold nothingness of space and let it crawl around on the hull, looking for a way back in. These were my strategies. To pretend I was okay when I was not okay.

You see, I thought I was tough. A lone wolf. A one-man army. Never mind that one night, I stumbled home drunk and depressed to my empty apartment and screamed into a pillow with such force that I burst a blood vessel in my eye.

The next day, I wore an eyepatch to work. It made me feel like I was the commander of a team of international mercenaries. There is a part of me that will forever think that a man — a real man — doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t ask for help or open up. A real man is made of metal and rubber, like a pickup truck. I don’t know who wrote these rules. If I had to guess, I’d say John Wayne?

***

How many times have I seen an action movie character on a screen, big or small, take a bullet to the arm, bandage himself with a torn-off ribbon of his shirt, and then throw punches? It’s a pretty familiar trope.

There’s a famous scene in the classic 1987 action movie Roadhouse where the hero Dalton, a philosopher kung-fu bouncer, refuses anesthetic before getting stapled back together after a bar fight. He says: “Pain don’t hurt.” He is, in fact, flirting with the ER doctor, who will become his love interest later. Before patching him back up, she notices a freshly sutured wound on Dalton’s shoulder. “Nice work,” she says. “Good clean stitches.”

In the first few minutes of Roadhouse, we see Dalton casually stitch himself up in front of a mirror in the back room of a rowdy bar. I suppose I was impressionable when I first saw that movie—a teenager. I, too, would be like Dalton. Strong. Silent, with a well-conditioned mullet. I would smirk at agony. I would feel nothing. Say nothing.

Sadly, my stitches were always sloppy.

***

I love action movies. They’re like musicals; instead of characters breaking out into song, they break bones. I love old-school action movies where the hero spends five minutes racking shotguns, smacking mags into pistols, and sharpening knives with the intensity of a 7-year-old playing Legos. I love new action movies where the good guy spends half the movie hissing into cellphones and the other half hanging off helicopter skids.

But my favorite action movie cliche is when the main character has to perform surgery on himself. Or herself. Noomi Rapace’s gnarly robot cesarian in Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien, Prometheus, is the best scene in that surprisingly baroque cosmic sci-fi horror. Of course, she is appropriately freaked out in that movie, as anyone would be if they found themselves inside a robot surgery tube with a monster growing inside them. The traditional action movie self-surgery scene requires the hero to hurt, quietly.

I appreciated Ridley’s variation, but I prefer action heroes who do it old school (agonize quietly.)

A classic movie action hero celebrates a very specific old-school American virtue: not complaining when things suck. And getting knifed by a ninja, shot by a mob boss, or otherwise wounded by a villain sucks. To the action hero, this is business as usual, and there is nothing to be done except bite down on a stick when snapping a bone back into place. An action hero is allowed to sweat, maybe grunt.

This is not a healthy coping mechanism by any means. But it’s an idea that resonated with me as a young man and still does now that I’m not that young anymore. Although, these days, I look fondly at self-surgery scenes. I see them as the escapist fantasies they’ve always been. Only the dead are free from pain.

So forgive me for cheering on Jason Bourne when he has to triage himself while gritting his teeth, or poor beat-up John Wick, reduced to using veterinarian surgical equipment.

I have considered writing a Netflix pilot titled “Action Hero Hospital” about a hospital for action heroes but no doctors or nurses. Just scenes of muscle-bound vigilantes and vengeance-fueled former special forces shouting ‘clear’ to no one before defibrillating themselves.

***

And then there’s Sly Stallone’s Rambo, a pioneering self-surgery character. In his first movie, Rambo: First Blood, Rambo uses a needle and fishing line hidden inside the handle of his knife. Rambo is resourceful and disciplined and offers up a grunt to show he’s human.

My absolute favorite self-surgery scene is in 1989’s Rambo III. This is the hilariously problematic sequel about soulful one-man-army John Rambo teaming up with heroic Mujahideen in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviets. In a few years, those freedom fighters would become terrorists. But that’s beside the point. During one scene, Rambo pushes a shard of shrapnel through his side, pours gunpowder into the wound, and lights it up.

There are three primary rules to action movie self-surgery. Rule one is you can scream once, and even then, it should be more of a bellow than a shriek. Rule two: cauterize that wound with fire, or at the very least, pour liquor over the wound right after taking a slug. Rule three? Forget the trauma by the next scene. Never let on that you’re hurting.

***

Every week, I go to men’s only group therapy. I’ve been doing it for years. I didn’t want to go at first, but my therapist suggested I try it. I was tired of feeling angry and scared all the time. Alone. No man is an island. Or a Skull Island. Any island metaphor works. I needed to learn to connect with friends and family, and sharing couches with strangers was a good start.

I know therapy is a luxury for many. I can barely afford it. I’m sure my health insurance company would be fine with me pouring gunpowder in my wounds, physical or emotional.

I go because I am learning to open my mouth and tell other humans how I feel. It takes practice. Because I am too used to standing in a pool of my gore and feigning surprise when a friend or loved one asks me if I’m bleeding.

The group is run by a shrink who likes to box. He’s particularly good at calling me on my bullshit. The group itself sounds like the setup to a corny joke: a teacher, a butcher, a banker, and me, a writer, sit in a room together, sometimes in awkward silence. We’re all different ages and probably wouldn’t have met each other out in the world. We sometimes talk like overgrown toddlers: “Me angry. Me depressed. Me scared.” I usually crack jokes, except when I suddenly realized my cheeks were painted in tears. I had been talking about how I thought I was happy. If you are inclined to ignore pain, you will also ignore pleasure. I was happy because I loved my wife, and I still struggle to tell her. You know, with words and acts of service.

I struggle to say things. Out loud. To tell those I love them that I love them.

But don’t get me wrong. I still zone out when I’m in the group. I’m not always honest or present. Recently, the teacher asked me how my job hunt was going, and I replied, “Great,” like a broken android. The truth was, I was scared and scared that I was scared. Admitting to myself and others that I am scared is not a weakness. That’s a difficult concept for me to grasp. Asking for help is what the commander of a team of international mercenaries would do.

I like to imagine sitting in group therapy with Jason Bourne, and Dalton, and Rambo, and we’re talking about all the times we had to stuff our guts back inside ourselves and how much that hurt, and then I’d suggest an alternative.

There’s another way. You don’t have to bleed alone. Are you listening, Rambo?

There is another kind of action-movie self-surgery scene that I haven’t mentioned. It’s a subset of the lone action hero twisting his tourniquet. I call it Surgery with Friends. An example: In the ’90s action-thriller Ronin, gun-for-hire Robert De Niro instructs his friend and fellow rogue operative Jeno Reno on removing a bullet from his gut. In the underrated 19th-century British naval flick Master and Commander, sensitive doctor Paul Bettany has to direct Captain Russell Crowe into yanking a bullet out of him. In fact, in the recent John Wick 3, our world-weary hero quickly gets surgical help from a sympathetic doctor.

“Next time,” I’d say, locking eyes with Rambo, “ask me for help?”

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