Remembering Chuck Norris via his memes

Chuck Norris isn't the type of person I usually memorialize on my blog.

Although he was certainly an action movie icon in the 1980s, the difference between him and guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis was that I didn't see almost any of his movies. Or rather, I probably saw lots of individual bits of them on cable in my friend's basement, but they were so interchangeable, with such forgettable plots, that I never bothered to make note of the names of the movies we were watching. 

In fact, the only movie I'm sure I watched from that period was Missing in Action, and this one sticks with me because of one particular scene. Norris' character is held captive by the Viet Cong, and at one point they hang him upside down and put an angry/hungry/rabid rat in a burlap bag that's just bigger than his head, then put it around his head and draw the strings tight. We hear lots of sounds of struggle and angry conflict and we can only imagine what this angry/hungry/rabid rat is doing to poor Chuck's face. But then the big reveal is that he managed to grab the rat in his teeth and crush it to death in his jaws.

That is sort of the perfect Chuck Norris moment, even though it does not involve any roundhouse kicks, and it leads perfectly into what I want to talk about today.

Although I did enjoy watching snippets of forbidden Norris on cable, I'd say the moment I dug Norris the most came some 15 years after that. (Missing in Action came out in 1985.) And in this case it doesn't have anything to do with any actual accomplishment by the actor, but only hypothetical, hyperbolic accomplishments that made him one of my very first experiences with the concept of the meme.

Sometime around 2002 or 2003 -- I remember it was around then because I remember the office I worked in at the time -- I became aware of a list of things Chuck Norris has supposedly done, which are so epic that they have to do with punching God in the fact and everything you can possible imagine at about that same level of impossible. You are probably also aware of this list, depending on what age person you are.

I really wish I could find the original list that was going around at the time. I can find a lot of the same jokes on the internet as part of other lists, but my list, the one I got in an email on my old AOL or Hotmail account, was definitely the best list. (I should pause to say that I can't be 100% sure that this was when I first encountered this list, or whether it might have been when the list came back on my radar for some reason. In any case, it was a good quarter century ago and possibly longer.)

Somewhere along the way it was decided that Chuck Norris was so badass that he could defy the laws of physics, travel through time, be recognized as himself during his own birth, punch God in the face, what have you.

So instead of trying to describe what these "Chuck Norris facts" were like, I've gone through what I can find online and included a dozen of my favorites from that time -- ones that I specifically remember as being part of my original list. Some of the other ones are good, but they aren't my Chuck Norris jokes. 

I think the old man, who died this weekend at age 86, would appreciate them:

1) Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. 

2) Time waits for no man. Unless that man is Chuck Norris.

3) Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked somebody so hard that his foot broke the speed of light. 

4) Since 1940, the year Chuck Norris was born, roundhouse kick related deaths have increased 13,000 percent.

5) Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits. 

6) There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist. 

7) Chuck Norris has never blinked in his entire life. Never. 

8) Chuck Norris counted to infinity ... twice.

9) Chuck Norris once punched a man in the soul. 

10) When Chuck Norris goes swimming, he doesn't get wet -- the water gets Chuck Norris.

11) Chuck Norris can divide by zero. 

12) There is no such thing as evolution, only a list of species Chuck Norris has allowed to live. 

There was another one I can't find though I can sort of remember, so hopefully I'll do it justice. It's sort of my favorite because of the notion that Chuck Norris was famous before he was even born:

"When Chuck Norris was born, the nurse said 'Holy shit, that's Chuck Norris!' And then he had sex with her."

Wikipedia suggests that Norris was bemused by these "Chuck Norris facts" but had weirdly earnest responses to some of them. Like apparently the one about evolution caused him to clarify that he's a creationist.

Norris was not simpatico to me politically, and he was not much of an actor. But we need our larger than life icons, and the phrase "larger than life" is the very sort of phrase that was designed for someone like Chuck Norris, that prompted him to be lovingly memed. You might say "Life is big, but Chuck Norris is even bigger."

Was. Rest in peace. 

Missing in action: Missing in Action

Remember how I knew I'd seen a Chuck Norris movie before, but if you asked me which one I would have had trouble telling you?

No? Is that because I've never actually articulated that thought before?

Well, to paraphrase the tagline on this poster, my movie list isn't over until the last movie comes home.

It's not all that often that I retroactively add a forgotten movie to my movie list. In fact, it happens less than once every two years. But it happened yesterday when I updated my movie list spreadsheet, my movie list Word document, my list of movies seen from 1984, Flickchart and Letterboxd.

That's right, I've actually seen Missing in Action -- as far as I can tell, my one and only Chuck Norris movie.

Scanning his filmography now on IMDB, I realize there's some chance that I've seen The Delta Force. But before considering adding that, I'll wait for the kind of inciting incident that led Missing in Action to finally be brought home to see its family and to eat a nice juicy hamburger and fries.

That incident was recently watching a movie called Chuck Norris vs. Communism, which I guess might be my second Chuck Norris movie, except that only footage of Norris in Missing in Action actually appears in it.

Chuck Norris vs. Communism is a documentary about Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, where black market video tapes helped Romanians connect with the west in a way that was not otherwise possible under Ceausescu's communist rule. Thanks in part to the heroic efforts of a translator named Ilina Nistor, who recorded translations for hundreds if not thousands of Hollywood films, people were able to engage in a kind of thought uprising against the prevailing rule of law. The doco contains interviews with Romanians today looking back on those times, as well as recreations from the time. It's done pretty well even if it actually drags in spots.

So one of these interviewees, who is probably about my age (as well as the same age I would have been when I saw Missing in Action), talks about a memorable scene from this one Norris movie involving POWs in Vietnam. It is, most definitely, the most memorable scene from the movie. "The gooks" (term always used for Vietnamese in these movies) still have Norris kept in some kind of pit in the ground, years after the end of the war, and seeking to torture him at one point, they hanging him upside down with a bag over his head. That might have been torture enough, but the bag also contains an angry, hungry, possibly rabid rat. The camera watches as all kinds of grunting, screaming and mayhem occurs inside the bag, and Norris' body thrashes back and forth. Finally he's still, and the assumption is that the rat has killed him. But when "the gooks" remove the bag, we see the dead rat clenched between Norris' teeth.

If not for this one scene having been described in detail in Chuck Norris vs. Communism -- the only scene so focused on, out of a bunch of different popular movies from the 1980s that get mentioned in one way or another -- who knows how much longer it would have been before I realized I'd seen Missing in Action.

My mission is not over, of course. Even though my list has stood the test of time and receives a retroactive addition only ever couple years -- but really, less often than even that -- I wouldn't be surprised if there were as many as 20 others out there, still missing in action, still waiting to be remembered by a grateful nation back home.

We'll just have to wait and see what the next inciting incident will be.