The Body Beautiful: Pumping Ironies

By LANCE MORROW

Americans like cartoons of transformation, fantasies of sudden empowerment. Popeye eats spinach. Clark Kent enters the phone booth. The 97-lb. weakling sends away for the Charles Atlas course. Shazam! The creature that a moment ago looked mortal and ordinary and vulnerable becomes a master of the universe. He can fly. Conquer evil. Get revenge. He is born again, this time as a kind of god.

Sylvester Stallone has a shrewd mythmaker's instinct for that kind of metamorphosis. Stallone's formative influence was the Hercules movies of Steve Reeves, whose physique he energetically and wistfully labored to replicate. Stallone eventually took his splendidly muscled creation over into fiction. He became Rocky, the Philadelphia loser who beats up the heavyweight champion of the world. Now Stallone's pectorals and deltoids are in service again as Rambo. The name sounds like a good ole boy's rendering of Rimbaud. Rambo is a veteran who single-handed accomplishes what the U.S. Army and Marines never could do. He defeats Viet Nam. Those bullies had better not kick sand in the American face again! The movie is a great hit.

Muscles seem to be oddly evident in the national fantasy now. Children play with "action figures" like He-Man, the great-muscled master of Castle Greyskull, who does battle with Skeletor, Beastman and the other forces of evil. Ronald Reagan pumps iron for half an hour every day -- and also thinks about "the evil empire." The workouts have, he reports, added 1 3/4 in. of muscle to his chest.

During the 1850s, a Congregational cleric named Horace Bushnell said that the distinction of sex puts men and women "in different classes of being. One is the force principle. The other is the beauty principle." Men had muscles. Women were soft, or at least they were very differently muscled. Bushnell's distinction survives, more or less, in a new movie called Perfect. The actress Jamie Lee Curtis plays a sleekly made aerobics instructor described by the movie's title. It is in another movie, Pumping Iron II: The Women, that Bushnell is definitively put in his place. In this semidocumentary about women body builders, one sees hormonal prodigies. The women are formidably developed. Their bikini bras look like preposterous Band-Aids attached to the nipples of a linebacker. An Australian woman in the movie, Bev Francis, has bulked herself up into a simulation of the Incredible Hulk. She clearly has the most daunting set of muscles in the Las Vegas body builders' competition that is the focus of the movie. But she loses because the judges think she looks too "masculine." Bev is not, that is to say, the Venus de Milo.

But dedicated body builders, male or female, tend to be zealots. So much self-torture in an essentially narcissistic cause demands, after a point, a kind of religious fanaticism. Body builders sometimes lose sight of the aesthetics of the project. In long agonies of sculpting the trapezius and the rhomboids, the body builder eventually risks crossing over into grotesquery. He (or she) will then swell like a rubber creature that is horribly, dangerously overinflated, and about to explode. Or the body seems a disturbing pile of fruits and vegetables: the biceps like cantaloupes, other bulges like plums and eggplants and grapes, all covered by the thinnest membrane of flesh. Veins like giant earthworms stand out alarmingly, sinuously coursing everywhere. The body becomes lurid. It is not a Grecian ideal being sculpted here, but Calaban. The head disappears into the shoulders, leaving visible mostly the teeth, a fixed grimace. Or else a strange detachment occurs. The face is not susceptible to the same "development" as the body muscles. Therefore, after a time, the head no longer appears to go with the body. Instead, the body builder looks as if he had had his picture taken on the boardwalk, where the customer sticks his head through a hole in the fence that is painted with a variety of comic bodies.

At least in creating his Rocky and Rambo stories, Stallone has found a use for his muscles. But great muscle bulk on other body builders usually seems nonutilitarian, somehow pointless. Beyond a certain point, being so densely muscled is a little like being enormously fat. It smacks a bit of the freak show. Working out and body building can be satisfying and good for the health. Women find muscles attractive on a man. (Many men, on the other hand, must be excused for thinking that some women body builders have, by steroids and long purgatories with the weights, performed a kind of sex change upon themselves.) Beyond a certain line, though, body building leaves eroticism far behind and passes into a realm of dreamy self-regard.

It is the sheer pointlessness of so much muscle that makes it odd. At one time, a set of muscles marked a man as a laborer, as lower class. In the late 19th century, a prosperous man was almost expected to be fat, and being so, was deemed "manly." In much the same way, a suntan at one time suggested that one was virtually a peasant who had to work in the fields. Later, when so much common labor moved indoors, a suntan came to suggest leisure, a house at the beach. Today it is usually not strenuous work that requires, or builds, a set of muscles. Rather, the muscles are developed in leisure time. The muscles become an end in themselves, not a means to an end. The architect Louis Sullivan's dictum stated that "form ever follows function." With body builders, form and function are united for the purpose of pumping iron.

Of course, by that logic, all sports are essentially pointless. Perhaps the single-minded and painful intensity of body building makes it seem different. Being a terrible strain, a captivity, it should somehow yield more than well-defined lats and pecs. Maybe every Nautilus machine in the nation should be wired up to a generator. The collective exertions of the huffers and groaners could light up the streets.

The muscles, then, are a form of decoration, and not always a very pretty one. The body is the raw material. The body builder labors to release the Platonic ideal of the hunk within. Most Westerners like motion and action in their athletics. Muscle building tends toward stasis, toward posing the body in tableaux, a series of Grecian urns.

In serious body building, a will to control the body becomes an ambition to transform it. The flesh, mastered, becomes art: hairless, oiled, gargantuan. In ironic alchemy, all the exertions and self-denials turn the body into a gleaming masterpiece of excess.