Stay Hungry

Bob Rafelson’s 1976 Stay Hungry completes his great trilogy of Seventies’ movies. It is preceded by The King of Marvin Gardens and the most famous of the three, Five Easy Pieces, both of which star Jack Nicholson.

Stay Hungry and Five Easy Pieces sit on either side of the turbulent early 70s. In the latter Jack Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, the scion of a wealthy family, who has rejected his background for a life of drifting. As the film starts he is working on an oil rig and being routinely unfaithful to his unsophisticated, Country and Western loving waitress girlfriend, Rayette. Discovering that his father is dying, he returns home with Rayette in tow and finally rejects his membership of both classes, disappearing off over the horizon into an uncertain future. Nicholson is America itself, its restless energies, its desire for the new blocked, perhaps permanently, driven forward but with no real sense of a destination.

Stay Hungry also focuses on the heir to a wealthy family, this time played by Jeff Bridges, a clean cut, blandly handsome actor, more in keeping with the film’s gentle screwball comedy and optimism than the wild and 60s-related Nicholson. At the start of the film we see Bridges leading his horse through a sylvan glade that is later revealed to be his family estate, while a stern and fatherly voice-over informs him of his duty as a Blake. The opening scenes could be taken from Johnson’s Rasselas with the young prince in the happy valley or Candide, and the film is a bildungsroman of sorts; if Bobby cannot find a social world to live in then Bridges represents a new synthesis, in rejecting his background and embracing the counterculture he moves away from the old ways of doing things and into new markets, exploiting and embedding the hippy-Capitalist ethos, surrounded by his retinue of colourful characters, in order to set up a gym.

The term “Stay hungry” is now most closely associated with Steve Jobs for his speech “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. The phrase was lifted from the final edition of the bible of emerging “new-entrepreneurs”, the Whole Earth News, a magazine aimed at rescuing what was “best” of the hippy movement, largely under the sway of the Economist and environmental campaigner E.F Schumacher. There is an overlap between the ethos of the Whole Earth News and Stay Hungry’s vision of the future of capitalism, playful, dressed down, ludic, fraternal rather than paternal, tolerant of eccentricity. In this sense bodybuilding is still charged with something of the freak-power of the hippies. Schwarzenegger’s playful, emotionally wise and sympathetic bodybuilder offers a positive vision of a new masculinity, hyper-masculine on one level but also childlike.

Stay Hungry’s vision is one of a compact between old money and the less nihilistic, more disciplined elements of the hippie/freak revolution. What it also offers is the sobering truth that generational conflicts, rejection of authority and struggles for independence and “new spaces” are often merely cyclical conflicts within capitalism, moments of rupture when the struggle for succession takes on a de-territorializing or anti-oedipal aspect that doesn’t offer any kind of definitive break with the past, but simply seeks to reconstitute old practices on new ground and in new guises.

Stay Hungry tells you that the entrepreneur, this fabled figure, the apotheosis of mankind for the Austrians, the Atlas upon whose shoulders all lesser men stand for the Randians, is not a heroic or titanic figure, not a Nietzschean self-creator, but a slumming, peevish child of privilege whose revolt consists in rejecting the family business and instead using daddy’s money and influence to do some cool shit of his own.

You start off with the Flat Earth News, a whole new business model and a bunch of wacky friends, but all the same you end up with Foxxcon.