By Justin Muchnick.
No amount of movie magic, it seems, can fully replace Robles’ own unparalleled plasmaticness. I only wish Sergei Eisenstein could have seen this film, too….”
The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of film theory and lover of Disney cartoons, coined the term plasmatic to describe the ecstatic and uniquely liberatory qualities of animated movies. For Eisenstein, the plasmatic is “a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form.” Think of Mickey Mouse pulled taut like a rubber band, or Tom from Tom and Jerry smashed paper-thin by an anvil, or Wile E. Coyote and the topsy-turvy laws of cartoon physics that govern his madcap pursuit of the slippery Road Runner. The feverish and fantastic boundlessness that animates the animated world, that makes it an impossible refraction of our own limited reality—such is the stuff of the plasmatic.
Though the plasmatic is a distinctly animated attribute, it sometimes seeps into live-action films as well. You see it, for instance, in hybridized comedies such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or The Mask. And if you look hard enough, you can even find it in more unlikely places. Unstoppable—a new sports drama that Entertainment Weekly is calling “this year’s most inspirational story”—might seem a far cry from Steamboat Willie, but it’s nonetheless a surprisingly plasmatic movie. Directed by Oscar-winning film editor William Goldenberg and starring Hollywood heavyweights Jharrel Jarome, Jennifer Lopez, and Don Cheadle, Unstoppable follows the odds-defying athletic journey of Anthony Robles, the real-life Arizona State wrestler who won the 2011 NCAA national championship—despite having been born with only one leg. Such a mind-boggling feat required equal parts determination and ingenuity: Robles invented a completely original, unorthodox, irreplicable style of power-packed, slithering, low-to-the ground, one-legged wrestling. Not only did Robles become the best wrestler in the country, but he did it by turning what should have been an insurmountable obstacle into what some have gone so far as to label an “unfair advantage.”
But what makes any of this plasmatic? First and foremost, Robles was a singularly plasmatic athlete. Shaped like an exaggerated V, Robles’ frame tapered down from his bodybuilder-broad shoulders to his lone Nike-clad shoe, the superfluous spandex of his singlet’s right-leg sleeve flopping limply at his side. In action on the mat, he alternately compressed himself into a tight-packed ball and lengthened himself into a sharp-pointed spear—a living embodiment of animation’s squash-and-stretch principle. And Robles’ signature move, a roll-through tilt he developed to leverage his inordinate upper-body strength, was a somersaulting, limb-tangling tornado worthy of the great and unruly Taz.
In the best way possible, Robles wrestled like a cartoon character. But the fact of the matter is, every wrestler is a cartoon character. If you want to see the plasmatic in person, go to the NCAA tournament. Gape at the 175-pound men stuffed into 141-pound bodies, who balloon back up to at least 150 in their two hours of down-time between weigh-ins and their first match. Be amazed by the gymnastic absurdities of their inhumanly flexible scrambles, the Rube Goldbergian gambits they spontaneously contrive in order to score or avoid being scored on. Heck, even just listen to the names of the moves: spladles, cradles, mule kicks, gator rolls, cow-catchers, cement mixers, boot-scoots, whizzers, and so many more. Such shibboleths of the sport conjure up a Looney Tunes lexicon of bending, squeezing, and contorting another free-form body to your own dynamic ends—and that, after all, is the plasmatic essence of wrestling.
In his 2013 Deadspin profile of Robles, former high school wrestler David Merrill marvels that “a one-legged man would climb to the pinnacle of a sport that selects for such anatomical homogeneity that competitors of different weight classes frequently look like Russian nesting dolls of one another.” On a fundamental level, Merrill’s observation—couched, as it were, in amusingly plasmatic terms—is a perfectly accurate one. Robles’ highly visible and life-altering physical disability marked him as an immediate outsider in an arena populated by an otherwise-uniform mass of able bodies; his experience as a wrestler was an extreme but inherently familiar case of the quotidian challenges confronted by any disabled person navigating through life from a default position of difference. But in a more limited sense, wrestling is not so much Merrill’s quest for perfect “anatomical homogeneity” as it is a contest of anatomical trade-offs. While wrestlers do tend toward the compact and stocky end of the physical spectrum (and while vanishingly few are faced with a disability like Robles’), the sport knows no one ideal body type that provides unambiguous and uncounterable advantages. Elite rowers need to be lean, long-limbed, and—most importantly—tall; NFL linemen need to be over 300 pounds and built like engorged enlargements of the Uncrustables they consume by the boxful. But in wrestling, every benefit you derive from your natural physique also saddles you with a corresponding vulnerability—and, for the most part, vice versa. That’s why the sport’s storied rivalries frequently boil down to salient phenotypical contrasts: Cornell’s slab-like muscleman Gabe Dean vs. Penn State’s lankier, nimbler Ed Ruth, or Michigan’s walking mountain Adam Coon vs. Ohio State’s smaller, more agile Kyle Snyder.
Wrestling, then, is filled with its Toms and its Jerries, its Wile E. Coyotes and its Road Runners—but unlike in the preordained cartoons, the plasmatic match-ups on the mat often result in unpredictable outcomes that epitomize why people love sport. Sometimes the stronger guy wins; sometimes it’s the faster guy. Sometimes they scramble on a knife’s edge for three tension-drenched periods. Sometimes it comes down to a last-second, no-chance lateral drop. And in this most cartoonish and plasmatic of all athletic endeavors, sometimes the highest prize goes to the Sun Devil with a slithering stance and a Taz-worthy tilt and—lest you forget—an entire missing leg.
When Robles won his NCAA title in 2011, I was a twelve-year-old kid with two years of wrestling under my belt. I remember watching his championship match on TV, dumbstruck and inspired by his unfathomable heroics. All these years later, I’m no less inspired by Robles, but his heroics make so much more sense. It’s not that his one-leggedness was or was not an unfair advantage; it’s that the sport he devoted his life to was the only one governed by cartoon physics, the only one plasmatic enough to be squashed and stretched to his indomitable will.
Unstoppable gives you the chance to watch Robles’ extraordinary career all over again, this time on a cinematic scale. And when you watch it, you will in fact be watching him, at least in the most crucial moments: Robles himself served as the stunt double for his character’s actor during several key wrestling scenes. No amount of movie magic, it seems, can fully replace Robles’ own unparalleled plasmaticness. I only wish Sergei Eisenstein could have seen this film, too—I’d love to hear what he’d have had to say.
Justin Muchnick is a PhD student at the Institute of Classical Studies, as well as the head wrestling coach at Phillips Exeter Academy. His writing has appeared in LitHub, The Under Review, and Adaptation, among others. He is currently at work on his first novel, which ties together the worlds of college wrestling and classical archaeology.