AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

NST (Friday, Sept 28, 2007)
by Rehman Rashid

In the Eye of the Tiger: Survival Principles from Sylvester Stallone's Life & Films
Gerald Chuah
Gerald Chuah; Kuala
Lumpur, 2007; 226pp;

SYLVESTER Stallone and his mother were astounded by this book.
When the actor was in Singapore for the opening of Planet Hollywood in 1997, Gerald Chuah managed to pass him an early draft of his manuscript.

As Stallone returned to his seat next to Cindy Crawford, Chuah heard him mutter to her: "How do you respond to this?" Exactly the right response, no doubt.

It took another 10 years for Chuah to complete and publish his book. It's impossible to categorise. It could find a place in a bookstore's sections on movies, biography, popular culture, self-help, motivation, New Age esoterica and comparative mythology, for heaven's sake.

Back in 1986, a teenage Malaysian watched John Rambo in First Blood for the first time and experienced an epiphany worthy of the road to Arizona. Over the next 18 years, Gerald Chuah dulang-washed Stallone's life and work for nuggets of universal truth.

The result is a remarkable assemblage of reflections, aphorisms and homilies built around quotes and outtakes from Stallone's films. It is the uber-fanzine; the product of an obsession that might be certifiable were it not channelled and refined into this ageless document.

Chuah remains a reporter, however, and his frequent transitions from reflection to reportage in comprehensively cataloguing Sylvester Stallone's career add to the boundary-busting, genre-defying nature of this book.

Utterly innocent of cynicism, In the Eye of the Tiger stands unique among local publications. Heck, all publications. It can be confidently asserted that nothing remotely like this has ever been done before.

But in sifting these pearls of insight from the mountainous midden of American pop culture, Chuah somehow redeems it, turning it into the compost for a strange and wonderful blossoming.

To put it another way: He's penetrated the vacuity of Hollywood to tap the heart within. It's surely poetic that this should have happened with Stallone's work, for it was just such honest-to-goodness naivete that created John Rambo, Rocky Balboa, Marion Cobretti, Kit Latura, Lincoln Hawke and all his other superhumanunderdog anti-hero avatars.

With a limited print run, despite its startling originality, it's fingers-crossed on whether Chuah's book will get enough attention to merit a second edition in paperback (hopefully at a third of the cover price).

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