Before I get accused of asking the dumbest question since WWE catering enquired if Mark Henry wanted seconds, this is not going to be a column about the structured nature of pro-wrestling. Now more than ever, 'reality' is such a mistreated concept around the WWE that the most popular question in the minds of fans thesedays appears to be whether something was a work or a shoot and I'm wondering if this cheap distraction isn't doing the product more harm than good. More than just trying to palm off an angle as genuine to increase its impact, the WWE is increasingly guilty of playing the 'real' card in an attempt to pre-empt independent reporting in the hope of making it redundant. It's happening on many levels and any suggestion that it is being done for the benefit of WWE fans is optimistic at best.
I've written a few scattered paragraphs on this subject before but after this week's episode of Raw it seemed more pertinent than usual. The very real injury to Ashley during the women's battle royal was preceded several weeks ago by a 'health incident' relating to Shelton's Momma. In previous years there was a very obvious crossed arms 'X' sign given by the referee which served as an indication to those in the back that whatever had gone wrong was unscripted but even that has become part of the charade, being used several times to throw off the 'smart' fans. Try as they might, it is virtually impossible to make an injury/stretcher spot believable. The WWE has even gone so far in the past as to adopt certain unprofessional attributes that would give the angle some perceived credibility like commentary silence or people blocking the view of the camera as would happen at a real accident scene. However, the performance element of pro-wrestling means that emotional portrayal will always be added to the drama creating the sort of melodrama that wouldn't seem out of place in a sickly American soap opera. I remember when Trish Stratus got put through a table by the Dudley's at a PPV and a good nine or ten minutes of tv time was devoted to repeats of the bump and her being carefully loaded onto the stretcher and carried out to the ambulance. Whilst I'm sure most men and a few women were ecstatic at the extended horizontal views of Trish's pink outfit and balloon-tight cleavage, the spot is dead and has been since general audiences stopped thinking that wrestling is anything other than entertainment back in the early 90's. As was shown with Ashley's injury this week, if the WWE want to present a stretcher spot as real, they should keep the show ticking and move on to another segment. If nothing else, it would sure beat watching those EMT amateurs fumble with something as simple as a neck brace for five minutes.
Correct me if I'm wrong but only one WWE personality has ever died in a storyline sense and that was Al Wilson. If we're talking value of life and acting talent then I'd probably put Al Snow's dog Pepper above Torrie's Dad but the non-human aspect does detract from the importance sufficiently. Death has been used before with such welcome angles as Katie Vick, Big Show's father dying of cancer and several pregnancy miscarriages (depending on your religious beliefs I guess) so the depths to which Vince is willing to lower his product should be no surprise to anyone. But Al's on-screen passing was more significant than that. Up until recently, no WWE superstar had been authorised to claim in promo that they were going to 'kill' their opponent and this alone suggests that Vince acknowledged the taboo of death whilst allowing the product the inference to highlight the gravity of a given situation. Of course, quite how we get from those instances to the current Eddie Guerrero storyline is a different matter. I'm not going to discuss the rights and wrongs of the idea here because that's up to us as individuals to decide but it does beg the question, when is something too real? Whatever happened to simple morality tales of good versus bad? Enjoyable escapism from the worries of daily life. A chance to shout sarcastically at the referee because he was distracted and didn't spot the face tag. Just because Orton says that Eddie is in hell, does that mean we hate him any more than when he spat in Mick Foley's face? Although I will defend Vince's right to explore all manner of edgy narrative consequence, I sometimes despair at the sheer volume of emotional baggage we are expected to carry to each event when many would rather just cheer or boo at the appropriate moments.
The WWE's record with more frivolous but no less controversial real life bastardisations is equally dubious. Last year's Edge/Matt/Lita situation is about as good an example of turning a negative into a storyline as you can get, though it wasn't a great surprise that the feud improved when they stopped trying to pretend that Matt was an out of contract 'avenging angel' and averred that he was just a character trying to kick some ass because he was bitter and jilted. The Montreal screw job is the other instance of note that seems to keep cropping up in storylines, including the current war between HBK Shawn Michaels and Vince McMahon. The mutated reality surrounding this incident has grown to such proportions that feeble recreations of it have appeared at a WCW PPV (when it was in strong competition with WWE and involving Bret Hart himself) and as recently as a few weeks ago at the TNA Against All Odds PPV. But there was one tiny aspect of it that caught my eye more than any other and that was during Vince's big speech to Shawn backstage about four weeks ago. In it, whilst trying to stir up Shawn's possible return to his 'old ways', Vince used the expression 'pill-popping'. Apart from RVD's '4:20' stoner mentality (which is thankfully consigned to the garbage albeit three years too late) and Eddie Guerrero's problems (which did earn him his release at the time) I had always assumed that there was a limit to how much exposure he was willing to give to the recreational habits of his employees. Well if it's open season on reality then I guess we can all look forward to such colourful storylines, which have as yet remained unused, as Eugene's drug rehabilitation, Vince's numerous sexual assault accusations, the steroid scandal, Lawler's deviancy court case and the many wonderful Diva related subpoenas for various bullying and sexual intimidation issues. Or would they only seem funny if Edge dressed up in a silly wig and a robe and parodied them on Raw?
Even in choosing certain filmic techniques, the WWE is tampering with the concept of reality. It is well established that the fourth wall has become part and parcel of WWE programming with the camera (and therefore us) present in seemingly private backstage segments, not just ones where an interview is being conducted. Let's just say that if Trish Stratus had any doubts that Mickie James was the victim in her altercation with Jack then surely a copy of the tape would answer her questions. More than this, the WWE recently employed the 'inner eye' concept during Randy Orton's feud with the Undertaker. While Randy was experiencing nightmarish visions, obviously induced by the dead man's supernatural powers (are we still doing that whole thing?), we were given the luxury of seeing what Orton was seeing purely for visual effect. Now this has been done once before, on the night where Kane lost his mask on Raw and we watched his memories in suitably Vaselined fade-outs, but it is dangerously close to turning pro-wrestling into a full-fledged television product reliant solely on camera tricks and dream sequences to put across the storytelling. Along these lines, if Vince feels that his product has become stale then why not have someone wake up on Raw and realise that the last four or five years of WWE programming has been just a dream? It was a stupid enough idea for Dallas and it can't be any dumber than 'The Truth Commission' or TL Hopper?
One of the more bizarre outcomes of the WWE's desire to 'out-scoop' the dirt-sheets is interviewing wrestlers after they have been released by the company. Although I don't think the WWE would be so dumb as to present such articles as freely written only to mould them into something more in-keeping with the corporate ethos, it is surely the case that they will protect themselves from what it considers to be unacceptably bad publicity at the expense of the truth and that is not true independent journalism. That said, with the vast majority of unrestricted reporting carrying some form of bias against the company as a whole or a particular performer, is the WWE doing anything other than offering a diametrically slanted view of itself to counter this imbalance? The admission that wrestlers exist outside of the confines of the WWE is made even more surprising since they have resorted to their old strategy of not acknowledging other wrestling companies on air. It was only during the 'Attitude' era and the McMahon-Austin feud that the WCW became anything other than a four-letter word on WWE television and the dealings that Vince was doing with ECW finally opened the eyes of WWE fans to the rest of the world. But once both companies were bought and placed under the broad umbrella of the McMahon Empire, Vince brought the curtains back down and to date has never mentioned either TNA or ROH on screen. Alternatively, TNA seems keen to associate itself with the WWE as often as possible in the hope of picking up any of its disenfranchised and disgruntled ex-followers. I'd go so far as to say that Vince would consider TNA a useful advertising vehicle if only more people watched it. In trying to be the hand that feeds and the one that bites, the WWE and especially wwe.com is offering us a corporate-friendly, smiley-faced version of reality and it is up to us to make sure that is has little control over the public forum. Not by being better at it than them, but by denying the rules of the game completely.
I am aware that most of the stuff I've talked about is theoretical and could be cured by unclenching and just enjoying the WWE for the entertainment it undoubtedly is. And I also know that most of the issues I've identified are hardly the sort of thing that would bring the WWE to its knees but it should be noted that the more time they waste constantly looking for the work/shoot angle or manipulating normality to suit their thinking is time that could be spent trying to establish the basics of a storyline or giving a character some much needed depth. I wonder if Vince would nix a fundamentally sound idea in favour of one that was less effective but contained that sense of maladjusted reality that he seems to like so much. I disagree with Bobby Heenan that the day the code was broken was a sad day for pro-wrestling because it created a second tier of interest for fans and a level of public interaction never before possible. But, just like all other aspects of the wrestling industry, it doesn't stand still for long and the worked lines between real and fake will be even more blurred in five years time if unchecked. I'd be interested to see how far Vince would take a 'wrestler's death' angle then. Doesn't really bear thinking about does it?
Lee
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