wrestling

April 03, 2006

Wrestlemania XXII

I held my second annual Wrestlemania party tonight, and it was again a blast. As was the case last year, the real highlights happened well before the two anticlimactic main events.

For those of you who don't follow wrestling, here's what you need to know: wrestling is scripted entertainment, not a real competition. The winners and losers have all been predetermined by WWE writers - everybody watching knows that - but that takes nothing away from the athleticism and showmanship of a great wrestler's performance. Pro wrestlers are more like stuntmen - or even dancers - than they are like boxers or football players. They're performers, not competitors.

The star of the evening was the great Mick Foley, coming out of retirement to face Edge for twenty crowd-pleasing minutes of barbed wire, baseball bats, barbed-wire-covered baseball bats, a bag of thumbtacks that ended up in Edge's back, and a finale that involved both wrestlers slamming into a flame-covered folding table. There was lots of blood, but as always with Foley (formerly known as Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love), it was all in good fun. If you read only one book about wrestling, check out Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, his hugely entertaining memoir. (If you read only two books about wrestling, follow it up with Thomas Hackett's smart, engaging Slaphappy: Pride Prejudice,and Professional Wrestling. Conflict alert: Hackett is a friend of a friend, interviewed me for the book, and thanked me in the acknowledgements. But I'd like the book anyway.)

Shawn Michaels vs. Vince McMahon was also a lot of fun. For those of you who haven't followed the recent career of McMahon, who has run World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation) for decades, in the last few years he's bulked up and taken to the ring himself, despite pushing 60. Sometimes the results are just testament to McMahon's vanity. But the Michaels match worked up some pretty crazy stuff. First a five-man "cheerleading squad" ambushes Michaels, and he has to take them all down, kung-fu-movie style. Then McMahon's adult son Shaun shows up and tried to force Michaels to literally kiss his boss's ass. But Michaels breaks free, turns the tables, and plants the son's lips on the dad's bare behind. As I told KT, the whole night was homoerotic - that's a given in wrestling - but this was the one moment that got clinically Freudian. KT agreed, but was disappointed that the moment wasn't followed by the son screaming, "my eyes, my eyes," then surreptitiously cutting his forehead (a standard wrestling practice) to bloody his face and make it look like he's been blinded by the horror he's just seen. Maybe the Sophocles reference wouldn't have played with the core WWE teen male demographic, but classics majors everywhere would've been tickled.

In any case, the capper for that match worked fine - Michaels sets up a faux-unconscious McMahon on a folding table, his head and upper body covered by metal garbage can. Michaels climbs up an extra-tall ladder, jumps off, and lands on the can, breaking the table and pinning McMahon. It was a showstopping move from Michaels, one of wrestling's greats.

The rest of the matches were mixed affairs. The women's match, featuring an ongoing lesbian-stalker storyline, was surprisingly fun - it looks like Trish Stratus, a real pro, finally has a worthy opponent in Mickie James. We'll pass over the "pillow fight" between Playboy models without comment, although I was amused to see a mattress (though not the boxspring) used as a weapon.

At least the matchup with The Boogeyman, who eats worms, was good for a laugh. The ladder match was OK, but a disappointment compared to last year's barn-burner. The Undertaker's yearly win (the announcers make a big deal out of him being undefeated on Wrestlemania) was plodding and predictable. And both of the main events were busts.

In the first, a three-way battle, Rey Mysterio, a former Mexican wrestler who still wears his mask, won the belt and dedicated his victory to Ed Guerrero, the WWE star who passed away last year. But the tribute to Guerrero, a victim of steroid abuse, was in extremely poor taste coming on the same card with McMahon, Booker T, Mr. Olympia, and other wrestlers with the telltale body shapes of heavy users. Even Mysterio himself, a lithe guy whose scintillating signature move is to acrobatically swing through the ropes, seemed oddly bulked up. Allegely, the WWE has instituted a new steroid policy following Guerrero's death, but I'm dubious. And it's a big shame, because 'roided-up wresters aren't even fun to watch. They lose the flexibility that makes greats like Michaels so quick and fluid. All they can do is stand in the ring and pretend to slug each other.

That was the final match in a nutshell - the hulking, clumsy Jon Cena fake-boxing the hulking, slightly-less-clumsy Triple H. At least HHH came out in a hilarious Conan-meets-Jesus getup, claiming he was now "The King of Kings." Compared to that, Cena's Eminem-of-wrestling shtick, tired a year ago, hardly registered. In the end, Cena won with a completely unconvincing submission hold. Apparently he sells a lot of t-shirts.

If you haven't had your fill of wrestling commentary, check out this exploration of the hermeneutics of wrestling fandom, along with this classic post by guest-blogger BMN, "Wrestling Lingo Applied to Life and Academia".

Posted by tedf at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2005

Guest Entry: BMN on Wrestling Lingo Applied to Life and Academia

BMN's response to my post on wrestling lingo really deserved to be an entry to itself, so here it is:

Me and my brother basically popularized using wrestling terminology to describe our entire lives amongst our group of friends. To the point now that many non-wrestling fan friends of his use the terms all the time having no idea where they came from. Other helpful terms in wrestling that can be applied to real life,

"shoot" and "work" - "shoot" refers to a series of actual events that "aren't part of the storyline." (e.g. Bruiser Brody "shot" on Lex Luger by not letting any of his moves hurt and thus Luger got the hell out of there and the match didn't end as planned). "Work" refers to the storyline sometimes (as in, "it's all part of the work") but also as a verb to describe people who are TRYING to convince you that something is "not part of the script" even though it really is (e.g., Dallas Page and Buff Bagwell tried to work the wrestlers backstage into thinking they hated each other in real life but it was all to strengthen their onscreen feud).

(as used in real life) - "That couple's argument might seem like a shoot but they were just working the hosts because they wanted a reason to leave early."

(as used in academia) - "They aren't shooting with the job interviews, it's all just a work to legitimize the hiring of the inside candidate."

***

"Mark out" or "pop" - read above term about "Mark." Describes a specific event in a match that gets a major reaction (e.g's "the crowd marked out for Steve Austin's return" or "the three tables fall got the crowd to pop big time")

(as used in real life) - "Steve showed up at my party unexpected. I popped!"

(as used in academia) - "I marked out for Rob Drew's paper on Starbucks mix CDs."

***

"Booker": person in charge of storylines (i.e. head writer)

(as used in real life) - "Pat is booking the road hockey tournament"

(as used in academia) - "Maryann Meyers is booking proseminar this year."

***

"On the fly booking" - meaning to not plan too far ahead of time in order to keep the audience on its toes (usually to fool the "smarts"). Eric Bischoff used it to put WCW on top, booking entire shows only ten minutes ahead of time (but it ulimately led to disorganized chaos that helped bring WCW down).

(as used in real life) - "Hey Pat, don't leave the house yet, the road hockey tournament has just been moved to Ranni St." "On the fly booking!!"

(as used in academia) - not assigning readings until the very end of each class in order to remain "topical" and/or "au courant" would be a case of "on the fly booking."

***

"Getting over" - means that you are getting the reaction that you want from the audience in spades (the Rock really wasn't getting over initially but then got over so huge, he became one of the biggest stars in the business)

(as used in real life) - Brent's karaoke routine really got over with the crowd

(as used in academia) - if my paper is the best received on the panel, then I "got over" the best with the audience

***

"Heat" - Can be used in two fashions, "babyface heat" (strong crowd reaction for a good guy) or "heel heat" (strong crowd reaction for a bad guy).

(as used in real life) - Mick's got real heel heat on him right now for not showing up to the party.

(as used in academia) - if someone writes a book that seems more self-serving than theoretically promising, then they could receive major heel heat from the academic community

***

"Angle" - An event or series of events that is usually a confrontation between two or more wrestlers that intensifies a feud.

(as used in real life) - if someone makes a change in their life that's radical and gets a reaction (e.g. "Bryce just got accepted by Georgia State and is going to Atlanta in two months" :-p) then someone may react by saying "what an angle!"

(as used in academia) - an intense confrontation at a panel might be seen to further a "feud" between two discourses and thus is a good "angle." E.g. "That Appadurai-Harvey debate was a great angle! I'm really interested in where the flows vs. structure storyline is going."

***

"Comedy spot" - a series of events put in a match more for a laugh than to be taken seriously. Can be used in a flattering sense to describe a wrestler's humorous personality ("Eugene is effective in comedy spots") or a not-so-flattering sense to describe how a wrestler's style has gotten so corny and/or repetitive as to be laughable ("Ric Flair is a legend whose schtick been reduced to comedy spots")

(as used in real life) - "I put a comedy spot into my karaoke performance that got over huge."

(as used in academia) - "Arguments about false consciousness were once taken seriously but now run the risk of being reduced to comedy spots about what dupes we all are."

***

"put someone over" - Used commonly to refer to losing to someone but more subtly used to describe the act of making the other performer look good. E.g., HHH lost the match but didn't sell most of his opponents moves so he didn't really put him over. Also can describe a series of events (e.g. Goldberg's winning streak was designed to put him over as a monster).

(as used in real life) - "Hopefully you'll be able to go out with Suzie. I really put you over in the conversation I had with her."

(as used in academia) - "I used these three professors for my letters of recommendation because they're the best at putting me over" or "if you want to get in that journal, you really need to put over the editors in your paper."

***

"Turn" - to go from babyface to heel or vice-versa

(as used in real life) - "He turned heel on his girlfriend by cheating on her."

(as used in academia) - "She turned heel at the NCA convention by putting over the ICA instead."

***

"Workrate" - describes how well someone can make a match flow. E.g. Hulk Hogan was a popular character but his workrate sucked (i.e. he didn't do much to make a match look good).

(as used in real life) - I'm sorry......I'm not willing to post sex talk on a website :-P

(as used in academia) - Probably used to describe people who have become the "go to" people for quotes in the media but haven't really contributed any actual ideas to the discipline. "So and so is really over with the media but their workrate is terrible."

***

"Swerve" - to book an angle/storyline one way when it appears to be going another e.g., the fans in 1998 thought the Survivor Series would set up the Rock as the top good guy but the company swerved them and turned him heel

(as used in real life) - "We thought he was going to other bar but he showed up here instead, what a swerve!"

(as used in academia) - "Everyone thought the inside candidate was going to get the job but they hired outside the department. What a swerve!"

***

"Screwjob" - A finish with a controversial ending, often upsetting and/or disappointing the fans.

(as used in real life) - "The party turned out to be a real screwjob; they said there'd be an open bar but there was hardly any booze and they kicked everyone out before one."

(as used in academia) - "The conference was a screwjob; half of the promised presentations never happened."

***

"selling" - Making someone else's moves look good, writhing in agony when you are "hit" with something. The better the sell, the better the move looks.

(as used in real life) - "He's not selling the breakup in public because he doesn't want her to know how hurt he is."

(as used in academia) - "The chair of the department sold the challenge to his theory as the ultimate indignity."

There you have it, wrestling's "carny lingo" and how it make YOU articulate life and academics in an entirely different way. (Other examples are welcome!)

BMN

Posted by tedf at 11:03 PM | Comments (2)

Cool Wrestling Lingo Applied to Music and Critical Theory

From the wrestling blog:

[There are three kinds of wrestling fans:]

mark - someone who believes it’s all real

smart - someone who knows the inside information, or thinks they do, and is too smart for his own good

smark - a "smart mark” - someone who knows insider stuff, but is still a mark at heart

I really love these hermeneutic categories - they perfectly capture something about the experience of postmodern culture. Beck, for example, is great when he's a smark, but annoying when he's just a smart. Whether you enjoy the Pet Shop Boys or not depends on whether you consider them smarks or just smarts. And watching MTV loses is pleasure when it becomes impossible to remain smarky about it, and you end up just being a smart.

I remain a mark for Hall & Oates, Debbie Gibson, and Superman. I used to be a mark for the Yankees, but that's fading, and I'm not sure I'm even a smark for them anymore. And the world of academic critical theory is full of marks who think they're smarts (Foucault obsessives, Derrida fantatics), and would be better off embracing their smarkiness (like the publisher of Judy!, that great Judith Butler fanzine of the early 1990s).

Posted by tedf at 04:19 AM | Comments (3)

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 02:06 AM | Comments (1)