Last week I saw the movie "The Wrestler."   I liked it – not a great film but good (and I can see how, even though Mickey Rourke was quite good in the lead role, Sean Penn was deserving of this year's best Oscar for a leading man).  It serves, however, as an illustration of what I have trying to get at in recent posts when discussing "bad" Integrity (de).   To make this point I will have to outline the plot of the movie, so if you haven't seen it and want to avoid spoilers stop reading now….

The central character, the wrestler himself, is a wreck of a man.  He had a career as a professional wrestler, with all of the depravities that accompany that line of work (drugs, conceit, violence, etc.).  When we see him, he is washed up, a broken and pathetic man, who just can't give up the ring.  He tries to find a meaningful relationship with a stripper (he has to pay to be with her at the strip club), and that kind of works out, but not enough to transform him from his debauched ways.  He tries to patch up his relationship with his estranged daughter and that really fails.  His body is giving out – he has a heart attack and the doctor tells him he must give up wrestling – but there is nothing else he can do.  Ultimately, against doctor's orders he goes back to the fighting and it kills him.

On one level, this is a story about losing Way.  The wrestler, just as the Daodejing warns, seems to "adore twisty paths."  He gets caught up in the steroid-enhanced adrenaline high of the violence; he seeks out random sex; he struggles for money, essentially selling himself and his body; and he denies the physical limitations of his heart and muscles.  In the end, he is not able to live out the life he is given.  He is the epitome of "not the Way, not the Way at all" (DDJ 53). 

But, as this passage from the NYT review suggests, something else is apparent here:

Randy (the Ram) Robinson, played with sly, hulking grace by Mickey Rourke,
is anything but a phony, in spite of the fact that nothing about him is
quite genuine. His real name, which he can’t stand to hear, is Robin
Ramsinski; his muscles are puffed up with steroids, and it’s highly
doubtful that his flowing mane is naturally blond. But this careful
fakery is, to some extent, what certifies Randy as the real thing, an
authentic, passionate, natural performer. The description fits Mr.
Rourke as well.

He is, at once, both fake and genuine.   Or, to put it in Taoist terms, he seems to have lost the Way, or to not be following Way, but there is in him a certain integrity (de).  He is what he is: a wrestler.  His character, his particularity, causes him to act in ways that contradict Way (perhaps the drug use is the best illustration of that), but he can't really help it.  His actions, his life, are simply the result of the unfolding of his particularity in Way.  (The notion that un-Way-like actions or beings exist within Way is not a problem for Taoists.  Way is everything, including contradiction).

We see the wrestler's integrity at the end of the movie.  He knows that if he goes back into the ring he may die.  He cannot be dissuaded even by the promise of a genuinely loving relationship with the stripper, who comes to find him and take him away.  He knows he cannot salvage his tie to his daughter.  All he can do is climb in the ring and reach for the glory he had twenty years before.  He is a wrestler.  His integrity (de) is to wrestle.  And that is what he does and he willingly accepts the consequences of his actions.   It is that willingness that is the fullest expression of his integrity (de).

By just about any understanding of the term "virtue," the wrestler would be found lacking.  But his existence is not simply one of vice.  He certainly revels in vice but there is something more there.  There is a kind of integrity.  Perhaps we shouldn't call it a "bad" integrity.   Yet there needs to be some sort of qualification or elaboration because there is also a way in which the character seems to be lacking integrity (with his daughter, for instance). 

In the end, though, I think "integrity" gets at that authenticity of the wrestler.  He knows that he is lousy in certain ways, but he is a wrestler, and he will fulfill the integrity of the wrestler until it kills him.  He is true to himself, true to his integrity (de).