With a name like Stroker Ace, you don’t have many choices in life. You can be a porn star, racecar driver, or gay night club. Luckily, Stroker only turns left, a vagina-fucking, jaw-punching Nascar icon with the chest hair of an Italian butcher and a mustache so epic that it would make a hipster abandon his loft and head west. Stroker grew up a world shaker, dropped out in the 10th grade, and became a man of action. He’s the kind of guy who acts first and thinks never. You could say he makes Ricky Bobby look like Christopher Hitchens.
Stroker operates with the impulsiveness of a hedonistic goldfish wearing a giant belt buckle. He walks into rooms, oblivious to everything but tits, ass, and beer. He can charm a woman like Jams Bond at a cocktail party but remembers her name like my mom remembers her email password. And you just know he’s naked under his racing jumpsuit, which he leaves unzipped almost to his belly button. He talks like he’ always got gum in his mouth, and only wrecks two things: cars and pussy.
I hope I’ve painted an accurate picture of our hero, and every hero needs a villain. Stroker’s joker goes by the name of Aubrey James. He’s the young up and coming star, and he’s completely obsessed with and envious of Stroker. Aubrey, being nothing more than a pink-cheeked douche bag of Shooter McGavin proportions, only cares about supplanting Stroker as the fan favorite and alpha dog on the block. He’s just so damn contemptible. To really explain his spirit would be to say he’s like the Get him a body bag Jonny! guy mixed with a jar of farts. But this is a story of more than two men; it is a story of the exploitation and blatant consumerism that is permeating its way through the pure American spirit of victory and freedom. Stroker, blindly signs a contract the size of the 2004 budget, and through his own desperation and stupidity becomes a corporate slave.
Anyway, he’s forced to do ribbon cuttings, photo shoots, and radio ads. He signs himself into marketing whoredom, showing that the puppet masters will always own the proles, no matter how many races they win or women they fuck. But the masters will never truly know what it means to shit in a jumpsuit at 200MPH while banking left or have a threesome without paying for it. This movie seems to suggest that the universe does have a balance. There could be a God. Maybe even heaven. Then, we get the gentlest rape scene in movie history, where the clouds of existentialism and hedonism reappear. This film truly is a spiritual roller coaster ride. Let’s discuss our rapee: Loni Anderson plays a dim witted, innocent Sunday school teacher who is also a virgin. That’s an acting stretch somewhere above Sean Penn playing a retard in I am Sam and below Gary Busey playing an MIT grad in Predator II.
Loni is charged with making sure Stroker adheres to his contract and becomes the marketing whore demanded of him. She looks like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a Biloxi real estate agent. And her face was so caked up if my 80’s VHS of Dungeon Dikes IV ever masturbated, it would think of Loni. She doesn’t drink, so Stroker gives her some champagne but lies to her, saying it’s alcohol free. After she’s drunk and passes out, he rapes her, but with a touch of love. He carefully removes each article of clothing from her lifeless body like an 8-year-old left alone with his sister’s Barbies. Then, rape! No big deal. There is also a prior scene where her fat, sweaty boss is chasing her around a hotel room. You get the feeling that if he catches her, it’s rape city, and there will be no cops, no court, just an inconvenient night of being thrust on by some guy who looks like a young Boss Hog.
Back then, if you could catch or trick a woman, you got to fuck her. That was your prize as a man, and you earned it. No questions asked. The word “consent” in the 80’s meant what “separate but equal” meant in the 50’s. But we don’t hold this against Stroker; he’s a man of his time. Sure he drugs and pops the cherry of an innocent Sunday school teacher and lies to her about it, but it doesn’t make him a bad man. He’s just having a little fun. And just when you start to think this is merely a fun filled, morality-free tale of exhaust, tits, and speed, a message emerges: Rednecks are people too, fucked up shitty, weird people. These are pics of real NASCAR fans from the movie. Behold, America’s best:
Take a good look at those people up there; their existence has helped fuel everything from fast food to the Iraq war. Anyway, one of the best gems of the movie was when these extras were told to get angar and show displeasure for Aubry James (Strokers nemesis). Some held their noses, others threw up the finger, but one did something so shocking I actually had to rewind and pause.
Yup, you’re seeing that correctly, Bob Ross’s mongoloid twin in the blue Hooters shorts is trying to stick his entire fist up his asshole. He ends up getting his index, middle, and ring fingers to go two-knuckles deep. Then, he proceeds to do a little corkscrew twirl with his wrist, hollowing out his homosexually-repressed Redneck cave of shame and stank. So many questions arise:
How is that not different from a girl fingering her vagina through her underwear?
How could that be allowed in a movie?
Did he think that up all by himself?
Did someone tell him he’d be in a movie if he stuck his fist up his ass?
Was this his crude expression of his repressed sexuality?
Maybe his asshole itched and he just needed an excuse to scratch it?
Is this actually a hillbilly gesture of contempt and not gay at all?
Did he smell his hand after?
Did he give himself a boner?
Did the stretched fabric from his shorts stop his whole hand from going in, or was his butthole just too tight to absorb to another knuckle?
We’ll never know the answers to these questions, nor should we.
So back to these weirdoes. I’m from Cajun country, born and raised, so what I’m about to say isn’t just coming from some abstract, vague notion of the former Confederacy. We are largely an unintelligent, lazy ethos. That is not a deep-fried assumption; It’s a fact. All scientific, sociological studies confirm it. Our pride stems from a glamorization of self-reliance, as if self-reliance in 2011 is buying an assault rifle instead of graduating high school. Our rage stems from paranoid, unfounded fears about science, politics, and melanin. We use a collection of fabricated excuses to justify and condone our sins and atrocities, and it’s all masked in hospitality and great food. We praise the conservative ability to fillet a fish down to the bare, dry bones, yet celebrate the excess of 12 miles per gallon. We talk of small business, but a Wal-Mart thrives every 15 miles. Ours is an embarrassingly parasitic existence of hypocrisy, waste, and ignorance. Yee Fucking Haw.
But every culture needs their distractions, their therapeutic past times. Down here, it’s football, but for the dumber-er half that’s too stupid to understand the complex 4-downs concept, they resort to watching cars go in a circle. That’s why NASCAR exploded in the South. Every Sunday, millions of mouth-breathing booger-eaters watch stock cars drive in a giant oval, and they do it with the intensity of a cat watching a goldfish. To call car racing a sport is to call soy a meat. I guess drivers have it hard, but if sitting down and sweating is considered athletic, then I’m very athletic every morning I wake up from a whisky and Wendy’s binge.
But back to the movie, NASCAR fans are well, just fickle masses addicted to speed, carnage, and Budweiser. The men line the bleachers as belligerent balls of muscles, fat, and hair. The women resemble hardened lunch ladies who could finally slit their wrists if cigs go up another dollar a pack. The children are nothing more than the accidental seeds of cosmic stupidity. You can almost smell the stench of room temperature hot dogs and soggy bathmats. Grease from food and automobiles mingles together in an oil painting of poverty across the canvasses of cheap, sleeveless T-shirts. And through the din of profanity and applause, the explosions of the four stroke engine are heard in the spirits of the meaninglessly malignant.
So yeah, pretty strange but good movie.