I’ve occasionally alluded to the fact that I watched a great deal of professional wrestling growing up. What I haven’t yet done is confess to the world that, in the last couple of years, I’ve become re-acquainted with the WWE on a pretty regular basis. I don’t mind characterizing it as a blend of soap opera with ritualized violence, and I’ve seen enough of it to admire when someone’s doing it really well. I have one of those brains that needs to carry around big, complicated data sets that are constantly fed and updated – some people do baseball statistics or train schedules, I apparently do Academy Awards, Pi to 50 decimal places, and wrestling history/storylines.
You don’t have to be a fan of something to respect it, but wrestling has a difficult time with that – non-fans tend to either disdain it, or simply pretend it doesn’t exist. And even a lot of fans choose to stay closeted in polite society. But it’s a billion-dollar business now: “Sports Entertainment”. They are no longer called “wrestlers”, they are called “Superstars”. The old code of secrecy known as “kayfabe”, that drew a clear line between what the audience saw and what happened behind the curtain, has been openly blurred. This was kind of the only option once the show became a national TV event and the Internet came along. I think it is as legitimate an entertainment option as “reality” television, just as “real”, and in many ways more honest, since it at least has the decency to admit that its outcomes are pre-determined and that it intends to appeal to our basest instinctual desire to get swept up in muscle and explosions and mob mania.
I also respect its traditions as the old traveling carnival that could pull into any little town and rile the locals up with a few out-sized personalities. I, along with thousands of other well-educated and “sophisticated” coastal types, spend a great deal of my time trying very hard to produce something creative that has polish and a voice and entertainment value that someone would actually be willing to spend some money to appreciate, and then these yahoos roar in with their trampoline ring and some folding chairs and people shower them with ducats. I decided, long ago, that it would be healthier to admire that and learn from it rather than resent it, because they clearly understand something about crowds that is hard to intellectualize. But they didn’t sit and think about it, they went out, put on a show, and then kept noticing what people liked and what people didn’t, and refined the product one show after another over the course of decades. That’s wisdom.
My long-time familiarity with wrestling also makes it much easier to fall back into it – even after years away it doesn’t take me long to pick up the thread and tie it into the tapestry of what I already know. So over the last year or two I’ve started paying pretty regular attention, to the degree that with the annual Wrestlemania pay-per-view event just a month away, I’m pretty well-read into all the major names and storylines that are going to feature there.
Re-sparking that interest has led to a lot of reading of major fan sites, and one thing that’s struck me is that – no offense intended – there aren’t a lot of people out there writing really well about wrestling. I think the closest parallel is to the way video game criticism worked a few years ago; a lot of under- (or non-) paid, inarticulate young people trying their best, but with more enthusiasm than craft or perspective. It’s mostly insular and insubstantial – a lot of ranking lists and over-reactions and fantasies about what THEY’d do if THEY were in charge. That’s great for message boards but a conversation needs more. The most noteworthy and glowing exception has been the anonymous “Masked Man” who writes Deadspin’s irregular Dead Wrestler of the Week feature. These thoughtful essays try to take the measure of a late wrestler’s entire career, watching the evolution of their persona and their role within various promotions as a lens into what was going on in wrestling as a whole – and daring to use serious cultural metaphor to describe it.
So, without claiming I’m better or anything like that, I think I am going to try contributing to the conversation – I don’t know how often, but at least it will be open. I am closeted no more. A few ground rules:
1) My grounding in WWF/E comes from the late 80’s/early 90’s – late period Hulkamania and the early WCW days where WWF/E was in search of new stars and a new identity. Since I only started paying real attention again over the last couple of years, that means that I basically missed the “Attitude Era” and many of its legends. So I am under-exposed to the likes of Kurt Angle, Stone Cold, The Rock, Brock Lesnar, HHH – even the real heyday of Shawn Michaels as a main-event name – and the matches that made them famous.
2) I do not carve out five hours from each week to watch all the WWE shows, so when push comes to shove I’m much more likely to be current about what’s happening on Monday Night Raw than anything else. That also means I am not watching TNA – again, my fandom has its limits.
3) I will not watch every pay-per-view. There are too many and I’ve got better things to do with my money.
That said, our subject for today: John Cena.
Cena is the Hulk Hogan for the “PG” era of WWE. He’s the kid-friendly role model, and has even appropriated Hogan’s match-climax gimmick of taking a long beat-down and then suddenly turning invincible, like he grabbed a star in Super Mario Brothers, and unleashing a programmed series of offensive moves that everyone in the house knows by heart. He has spent a long time wearing the WWE Championship belt, and is about 95% sure to win it again at Wrestlemania from current champion The Miz; and yet there are a lot of fans who just plain don’t like the guy. Some of it is your garden-variety adolescent resistance to whoever’s wearing the shining armor, and some of it is grounded in genuine criticism of his limited in-ring technique.
I don’t hate Cena, but I find him frustrating. And it’s not totally because of his matches – I see him trying to think of unpredictable finishes, trying to sell the suffering. His moves are limited, and that invincibility routine does age more quickly than in Hogan’s day because we see it every week, but Vince McMahon has always been smart enough to know that wrestling technique and star power aren’t always completely overlapping. He’s made an investment in Cena and I think it’s been a smart one, so I think it’s on Cena to fulfill that role as best he can.
And here, I think, is his major miscalculation – he doesn’t respect the build. The build is the accrual of tension and anticipation that’s meant to reach a frenzied peak right when it’s time for the big pay-per-view showdown. A match that’s only semi-competently executed can still be immortal if it’s built well-enough – see the slow and awkward confrontation between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania III. When Hogan slams Andre, the reason the crowd goes bananas – and the reason why it’s still remembered as one of the Hall of Fame moments in the whole history of wrestling – is not because the match itself was all that great, but because that moment was months, arguably years, in the making.
Most wrestling matches use the good vs. evil (or “face” vs. “heel”) dynamic, so for the biggest match at the biggest event of the year, you want to be swept up in the sense that this is the biggest such clash of that year. Say what you want about Hogan, but back during his peak, he could make you believe that whatever rivalry he was currently engaged in was an unprecedented challenge, and he was going to need all his skill and heart, and the support of his fans, to prevail. He could even sell a half-assed replacement rivalry like his Wrestlemania VIII program with Sid Justice, which culminated in a half-assed non-title match with a botched finish, as if it was something he’d never faced before. Credit Hogan this – he understood that you build your own legend by building up your opponent.
Cena takes the opposite route. He’s juvenile – he belittles his opponents with taunts and pranks. I hear him make poop jokes and gay slurs and I’m immediately repulsed – this guy wants to be a role model? This is schoolyard stuff. And by diminishing the challenge he faces, he diminishes the build. He has, at this point, so derided and disrespected The Miz as a champion that he’s taken to spending more energy on a battle of words with The Rock, who will be at Wrestlemania as host, not a competitor. There’s still time to swerve this all into a worthy main event, but is it ever going to feel epic? Not the way Cena’s dancing and fooling.
The one time I thought he had an opportunity recently to really show something different was during his feud with The Nexus last year. When he had to do their bidding or be fired, there was real conflict there, because someone had power over him and he couldn’t make with the yuks about it. And then he actually went and got fired, and I thought that this could carry on for months. But the very next week he was doing backstage assaults and jumping out of the crowd in order to build to the inevitable reinstatement. How can we miss you if you won’t leave, John? Once again, the build was diminished, and the whole feud got rushed to completion with a nonsensical Chairs match against Wade Barrett.
I know that swagger is part of Cena’s persona, and the kids do seem to like the poop jokes, but it just doesn’t seem to have a lot of class to it; and I think that is the essence of the problem. Even when he’s not wearing the belt, by virtue of being the top face in the WWE, he is The Champion. And when he acts childish, when he doesn’t grant enough awe or fear about the challenges he faces – he just doesn’t seem like a Champion. Beowulf needs dragons to fight.