Starring in "Prayer for the Dying" (1987) gave Rourke a lifelong affection for the Irish Republican Army -- he bears a tattoo of the paramilitary organization's emblem.

"Homeboy" (1988), which Rourke helped write, lands the actor close to himself; he plays dumb-ass, luckless boxer Johnny Walker, a punchy, feral, kicked junkyard dog. One gets the feeling that this is a character Rourke really identifies with: turbulent, violent and rebellious in an ill-advised, quixotic way. He utilizes a "Caddyshack"-style Bill Murray dislocated jaw and a totally acceptable Southern accent. The scene with the most unctuous music involves Johnny having an argument and jumping out of a car on a bridge. He tries to beat up the car; he rails, he threatens traffic, and ends up walking home drunk through driving rain in the middle of a busy road. One feels these raging moments of worthless self-sabotage are familiar Rourke territory. His costar, flat-faced Deborah Feuer, became his wife for a little while -- their chemistry seems lopsided and doomed, even on-screen.

"Johnny Handsome" (1989), while a dumb movie, probably features Rourke's most moving performance. During a scene when the doctors take his bandages off, the man who was formerly a hydrocephalic monster with massive cranio-facial deformities is suddenly revealed in a post-surgery miracle as having Mickey Rourke's face. He cries with joy and gratitude. It is particularly moving when you consider that in Rourke's real life, shortly thereafter, he started out as a man with a beautiful face and ended up undergoing numerous surgeries and voluntary beatings to become unusually scary-looking. One imagines what he felt like when his real bandages came off, after having lived this moment on film.

"Francesco" (1989), wherein Rourke is cast in the unlikely role of St. Francis of Assisi, is notable only for a scene where the saint is rolling around naked in snow and his tattoo is visible.

"Wild Orchid" (1990) is a miserably stupid and sleazy wank film with the dubious distinction of being the place where the lives of Rourke and model Carré Otis collided head-on, as if in a big motorcycle accident.

Here, Rourke's outside began to match his tumultuous inside.

His face-lift looks too fresh -- he's having trouble moving his mouth, and his forehead, so expressive in "Diner" and "Rumble Fish," is way too smooth, motionless and shiny, like a balloon dipped in Clinique bronzer. He can't smirk anymore. His eyes seem pinched; his crow's feet are disturbingly gone. His eyebrows are too light, and they don't move. Eye jobs, for the first year at least, make the recipient's eyes appear smaller; they lose any roundness below during the surgical elimination of under-eye bags. Rourke's black eyes lost their ability to transmit emotion.

The movie is wretched in that it isn't even viable as smut; there's way too much abysmally stupid dialogue and plot. It boasts perhaps the worst script ever, not helped by the fact that Otis delivers lines the way a one-armed UPS guy delivers aquarium tanks. The entire movie is one long wait for the smutty finish.

There are a whole lot of panting Foley effects, particularly during the "controversial" final scene wherein Rourke's box-browned abdominal muscles gnash and dilate while grinding into Otis' pornographically rectangular strip of pubic hair.

The legend that was "leaked" from the "set" was that the two "actors" couldn't "control themselves" during this big sex scene, and despite the presence of the entire camera crew had "actual penetration." Yeah, right.

What did happen was that Rourke and Otis ended up together, sharing, by all reports, a bloody kind of soul connection. "We were both really wounded kids," a now sober and "deliberately celibate" Otis recently explained to Christopher Goodwin of the London Times.

This is the period of time when Rourke stopped having anything effeminate about him at all. One wonders whether the inevitable rumors that he was gay triggered some kind of barbaric, street-kid homophobia that made him kill off the sexily feminine, feline aspects of his persona.

Otis was a Calvin Klein model around this time, when the designer was going through his "biker" phase. Arguably this was inspired by the heavy Harley-Davidson-fetishizing scene that was happening in Hollywood at the time, spearheaded by Rourke and Otis. I was unable to find any information on Rourke's artistic-photography hobby, which flourished during this period and primarily featured nude black-and-white shots of Otis covered in motor oil.

In 1991, in addition to making the appalling (and double-appallingly popular) "Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man," the film where Rourke's abysmal tough-guy hubris came to roost and killed his artistic credibility, Rourke quit acting, which he derided for being "a womanly profession," and started boxing professionally again. Whatever his loutish comments, a closer investigation suggests that he was deeply hurt by the fact that Hollywood was not a meritocracy, and that the system, media and machine alike, never recognized that he really was a good actor.

Though he won several fights, he suffered a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs, a broken toe, four broken knuckles, a split tongue and a mashed nose. By the time he stopped boxing in 1995, he was broke and his Beverly Hills home had been repossessed. He had to go back to the movies.

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