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April 04, 2005

Wrestlemania 21

This weekend I enjoyed two spectacles of hypermasculinity: Sin City and Wrestlemania 21. I'll get to Sin City in a later post. Tonight, let's talk about the just finished Wrestlemania.

Wrestlemania is like the Super Bowl of pro wrestling. I'd never actually watched it before this year, but I'd long been curious. Making things more difficult has always been the extensive backstory knowledge necessary to understand what's going on (wrestling has a lot in common with soap opera that way). This year, I finally had some expert help: Bryce and Shane, two long-time wrestling fans who are now both advisees.Tonight, the advisees became the advisors.

Much has changed since the last time I paid much attention to wrestling. The WWE (formerly WWF - they lost a delicious trademark battle to the World Wildlife Federation) is in a fallow period between breakout stars. The Rock, wrestler turned movie star, has only made cameo appearances at the last few Wrestlemanias, and didn't even do that this year. Stone Cold Steve Austin, the breakout star of the 1990s, is hobbled by injuries and could only do a mock-interview segment this year. Goldberg, another '90s star, dropped out of the league for a part in The Last Yard.

The current low period for wrestling really started in 2001, when AOL/Time Warner bowed out of the business by closing down the WCW, which ran on TBS and was the primary competition left to the WWE. Fans thought this would usher in a golden age, when all of the wrestling world could be united. Instead, the WWE by itself has become a stale monopoly, the Microsoft of sports. Without any competitors, they haven't been pushed to experiment and take chances to build new stars and develop new concepts. They used to poach the other leagues for the best on-air and creative talent. Now they have nowhere fresh to turn. And so by all accounts, the product has grown flat, out of tune with contemporary youth culture. Their biggest new idea is John Cena, a painfully awful white rapper who wants to be the Eminem of wrestling. Where is the 50 Cent of wrestling? The wrestling version of Grand Theft Auto? Of anime? Of Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Wrestling at its best should bounce off of the rest of youth culture, creating a deliciously cartoon version of the universe.

(I have encounted one little subculture Vince McMahon and the rest of his WWE employees should be looking to rip off: the world of Kaiju Big Battel. Kaiju is halfway between wrestling and a Ed Wood version of a Godzilla movie - the characters all wear gigantic styrofoam costumes, and the biggest hero is a giant potato named, of course, Silver Potato. If the WWE doesn't get the idea, I'm betting MTV will pick them up at some point and make them the next big thing.)

But if mainstream wrestling today is behind the times, it also has its charms. One of the things that's changed about wrestling, compared to the days of my youth, is that they make no bones about being fake any more. The announcers don't come out and say it in the middle of matches, but it's pretty much taken for granted in the behind-the-scenes WWE-produced documentary "The Mania of Wrestlemania," which I watched to bone up before the main event, and which is sculpted just like an episode of "Behind the Music." This candor about their pretense is really refreshing. It makes the whole thing feel much more playful, less self-important. It's a real nice change of pace from "real" pro sports, in fact, where ESPN acts like every college basketball game is an event of world-historical imporance, and 18-year-old pampered jocks are blown up into preposterous paragons of heroism and virtue.

Another thing that's nice about wrestling is that despite all the overt aggression, it's the one sport that's not really about the competition. The competitors know who's going to win - beneath the pretense, they're really collaborating to produce the best match, not battling against each other. Each match is more a dance than a fight.

The pleasure created by this choreography was most apparent in the first fight of the night, between Ed Guerrerro and Rey Mysterio. Both are "cruiserweights" - lighter, more agile fighters. These guys tend to be appreciated by the cognezenti, but less so by the crowds. They don't have the cartoonish physiques of Hulk Hogan and his descendants. One shame about the state of wrestling, then, is that the fighters who put on the best shows don't tend to rise as high as the behemoths who aren't limber enough to do more than stomp around. As a result, the "undercards" - the early fights - are apparently often much more interesting than the headline bouts.

That was certainly the case tonight. The battle between Guerrerro and Mysterioso (who fights in a mask, in the classic style of Mexican wrestling) was eye-opening, thrilling the way a great fight scene in a Jackie Chan movie is. Guerrerro and Mysterioso are friends and tag team partners, so they were able to collaborate in lightning-fast, stunning maneuvers. Mysterioso has one move - where he grabs a corner pole and spins horizontally through the ropes - that just blows me away. It's as cool as the scene in The Two Towers where Legolas mounts the moving horse. And that was done digitally - this was all live. So what's more "fake"?

The second match was also a blast: a six-man "ladder match." That means, literally, six men go at each other with ladders, racing to be the one to set up a ladder in the center of the ring and climb to the top to reach a reward hanging from the rafters. In this case, the reward was a briefcase containing a contract giving the winner the right to a future title fight. According to Shane and Bryce, five of the six fighters here are real pros - second-stringers with less hype but more skills than the headliners. They performed a series of impressive falls, toppling from ladders into the ring and beyond out onto the floor. A guy named The Edge ultimately won, although he didn't impress me as much as Chris Jericho (whose nickname, Y2J, seems a little stale at this point) and Christian. Last year, those two put on a great soap opera at Wrestlemania 20 (which I caught this weekend on DVD), fighting over the affections of a female wrestler named Trish. She ultimately betrayed the innocent-looking Jericho in the ring, sandbagging him to give the title to the much sleazier Christian. Sadly, nothing as juicy as that happened this year.

A third great match was between Kurt Angle and Shawn Michaels. Angle is a former Olympic gold medalist in amateur wrestling; apparently he's the first Oylmpian to successfully make the transition to pro stardom. Michaels is a longtime pro wrestling veteran whose receding hairline is making his "pretty boy" image a little hard to swallow. They put on an athletic, well-paced battle of about a half an hour, rising from early grappling to escallating throws, jumps, and scuffles outside the ring. Shane and Bryce confirmed my perception that this was the highlight of the evening. Angle eventually won on a hold that forced Michaels to quit ("tap out") but that really seemed beside the point. When the outcome is preordained, who wins or loses doesn't need to be the focus of the event.

One other highlight was a Wrestlemania first: a sumo match, pitting The Big Show, billed as 7 feet and 500 pounds, vs. a Japanese sumo wrestler who's apparently a big star back home. Wrestling pundits in previews were wincing about all the opportunities for painful xenophobic schtick, but the giants ended up playing it straight - as in real sumo wrestling, the whole thing just took a couple of minutes. And they allowed the expert to win, rather than showing him up by having the American who'd never been in a sumo match before win. It was a charming, fun change of pace.

So, that's quite a few highlights. Given that it was a four-hour show, though, that left plenty of time for filler and duds. One shtick involved an "Arab" wrestler who began torturing a "comic" mentally challenged character named Eugene. Hulk Hogan burst in to quickly save Eugene (he's really getting up there, so the "fight" only lasted about 30 seconds), then spent a good 10 minutes preening for the crowd in front of a giant American flag. That was depressing on numerous levels. There was also a womens' matchup that was designed as just a titillating catfight, although the winner, Trish (the one who betrayed Jericho last year), showed real charisma and decent moves. And there was an OK battle between longtime vet The Undertaker and ingenue Randy Orton, billed as The Legend vs. The Legend-Killer. Most of the fight was nothing special, but it had a nice twist at the end - Orton's dad, a wrestler just inducted into the Hall of Fame, jumped out of the stands to help out his son, but The Undertaker tossed him out of the ring and retained his perfect undefeated Wrestlemania record.

Finally, the event ended with the biggest duds: the two title matches. The lousy rapper, Jon Cena, took on a "heel" character named JBK whose schtick is that he acts like JR Ewing (again, Wrestlemania demonstrating it's 20 years behind the times). Cena won the belt after a surprisingly uneventful match. McMahon is producing a movie starring Ceda that comes out this summer, so the victory is part of the plan to build Cena into the next Rock, only this time, with McMahon retaining control of his star's Hollywood career. But is doesn't appear Cena actually has the wrestling, rapping, or acting skills to be the triple threat Vince imagines him to be.

In the other main event, a huge, clumsy challenger named Batista beat a huge, clumsy vet, Triple H. Shane and Bryce warn me that Triple H won't be on the outs for long - he's married to Vince's daughter, and helps run the company. As a result, apparently he's given a much more prominent role than would be best for the business. He certainly didn't show much tonight - the only big moment of the match was when he started bleeding profusely from his forehead, which Shane and Bryce concluded was the result not of contact, but of a hidden razor blade.

I don't know if I'll keep watching wrestling after this indoctrination, but I have had a lot more fun this weekend than I ever expected. When I was growing up, the fakeness of wrestling offended me. I also didn't enjoy the level of violence and aggression. I associated wrestling, along with The Three Stooges, with the bullies who beat me up in elementary school. This was the media that pumped them up, right before they'd go out and pound me. The Stooges, wrestling, the Mets and Woody Woodpecker were all on New York's WOR, channel 9. I watched channel 11 instead, the home of Abbott and Costello, the Yankees, and, if memory serves, the Superfriends. In my childhood imagination, Channel 9 was the indimidating world of brute aggression, hypermasculinity, and the drabness of Shea Stadium, where overhead airplanes landing at LaGuardia would drown out the sounds of the Mets losing again. Channel 11 was the refined universe of witty banter, selfless heroism, bloodless conflict, and the world champion Yankees in tidy pinstripes.

But I haven't been physically assaulted in well over twenty years. I can afford to take a walk on the wide side of channel 9 culture. The heroes of channel 11 were probably better role models. But I probably lost touch with a part of myself when I repressed the pleasures of channel 9. It's worth getting in touch with that shadow self once in a while - my inner bully, or maybe just my inner brawler. And in any case, at this point, the violence of pro wrestling seems charmingly playful in the context of 50 Cent, Grand Theft Auto, and the rest of today's humorlessly self-important "thug" culture. If I'm going explore the world of fantasy violence, I'd just as soon everybody involved not pretend they're "keepin' it real."

Update: for some smart commentary on Wrestlemania 21 from savvy wrestling fans, check out this thread on The Wrestling Blog.

Posted by tedf at April 4, 2005 02:06 AM

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Posted by: BMN at April 5, 2005 01:58 PM

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