Seeing as it’s a fairly quiet week in the world of pro-wrestling and not one story stands out above any other, I thought I’d look at a few minor issues and make some subtle but poignant observations about them. You know, delve a little deeper than the usual superficial, one-dimensional ranting of people too emotionally or creatively unequipped to deal with anything more challenging than ‘wrestler A’ versus ‘wrestler B’. Hang on, I’m getting an email from a reader now, let me check it out first ... blah blah blah ... Vince dead? ... limo explosion? ... Paul London’s madly grinning face??? ... why did no one tell me about this before?!? Right then, time to get angry. The WWE presenting another ‘death’ storyline complete with a faux ten bell salute and tributes paid to Vince like the ones for Eddie Guerrero and Owen Hart ... this is outrageous! Get Bob, call the WWE’s advertisers and tell them to pull their commercials from the show. Call Fox, call the FBI and for God’s sake someone call Ernest Miller’s momma in the hope she’ll tell him his dinner’s ready and he’ll piss off. Mobilise the troops ... put the coastguard on standby ... where’s Mike Nifong when you need him? ... it’s all too much...
STOPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Ooh, great drama this week)
Good grief, I have never heard such a bunch of whiny bitches as I have in the wake of Vince McMahon’s barbecue last week on Raw. All I have read over the last few years are opinions like “ECW isn’t violent enough”, “the WWE is too predictable thesedays”, “there aren’t enough storylines on WWE television anymore” or “Vince needs to remove himself from the product”. So what now? You’re not happy with Vince’s violent, unpredictable exit from WWE television that has added meaning to an otherwise disconnected series of matches? God you people are hard to please. And easily offended.
I might as well break this down into paragraphs, gives me a chance to breathe in between rants...
As a concept, this is good, solid pro-wrestling. Too many times thesedays we are presented with a stale, obviously worked rehashing of the classic wrestling storyline of good overcoming evil with a moralistic tone and people need to be challenged every now and then. Even if that challenge is just a cheap, repeated slap in the face to see if you’re awake and willing to get annoyed. The best storylines are the ones that mess with the public’s comforts, taking them out of that zone where they understand all the rules and take security from the limitations of the process. A feud in 1990 involving Jerry Lawler and ‘Hot Stuff’ Eddie Gilbert that culminated with Eddie and his brother Doug getting fired and subsequently running Lawler over with their car as they left the arena led to the Memphis Police Department receiving numerous calls relating to the incident. In the original ECW, the angle where The Sandman became blinded by a cigarette when Tommy Dreamer hit him with a Singapore cane to the face was considered a groundbreaking storyline for a company that relied on edgy, contemporary impact to grab a new audience where it could. Oh right, so that level of artistic allowance isn’t afforded to something as corporate and polished as WWE? Just the ones kicking and scratching to make a buck where it can? You don’t need to convince me that the WWE isn’t ‘art’ (I’ve studied the beautiful and diverse works of Manet and Modigliani too long to stoop that low) but it is protected by the right to creative freedom of expression that has been enjoyed by painters, poets, actors and musicians since the inception of democracy, regardless of how many ‘pudding’ matches it stages. Any conclusion that the WWE has a moral obligation to be tasteful, reasonable or sensible is just WRONG, no matter how well intentioned the sentiment.
On the issue of taste (or lack of it), I am surprisingly not in favour of the WWE’s actions of late. Reassuringly, this is because I don’t think the WWE has gone far enough to upset the more sensitive viewers out there. I was hoping that, when they opened the limo doors, the burnt out vehicle would be apparently empty, until the camera panned upward to see a Billionaire shaped splat on the roof headliner. Come to think of it, it’s a brilliant piece of manipulative writing. Despite the ten-bell salute, the testimonials on Smackdown and the numerous references to it on television, the WWE has in no way suggested that Vince IS dead. Just PRESUMED dead. In a similar way to when they ran the necrophilia storyline (when there was none), the HLA angle (where there was very little on one occasion) and the time HHH told Booker T “his kind of people” didn’t become champion. It’s cowardly, but exonerative for sure. Unlike the WWE’s previous pseudo (Terri) and genuine (Lita) miscarriage storylines (which were primarily distasteful because they offered no emotional highs and lows, just a flatline of revulsion), I feel there has been a zeal, a vicarious joy, about the McMahon decent into madness that has meant it has come across as entertaining and substantial. But the inherent black humour required to find comedy out of tragedy is now wasted on a world numbed into introspection by national disasters and acts of atrocity. Several years ago, in the wake of a British comedy show satirising the way the media sensationalises news stories (specifically paedophilia) a spokesman for the Prime Minister said “Satire is very important ... but there must be limits to satire and boundaries of decency”. Who the f*** has the right to tell me what’s ‘decent’? I’ll tell you what I find unacceptable on tv; obvious phone-in quiz shows aimed at taking your money, politically correct kid’s shows meant to convince children the world is a happy place, daytime television perpetuating the myth that women are vain and superficial, comforting and twee situation comedies, bland docu-soaps peddling manipulated reality, politically biased news reporting whoring for viewers, infomercials intended to make you feel fat and ugly (which they can ‘cure’ at a price) and a steady stream of alcohol related adverts that suggest you’ll be popular and vibrant if you drink this shit (when you’ll probably just piss yourself and drive into a tree). There are FAR worse things on your television to complain about than someone in an OBVIOUSLY WRITTEN AND ACTED performance show PRETENDING to be dead. The only solace is that it’s quite encouraging to see how easily offended some people are by something being too close to reality, looks like we haven’t progressed very far from Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
As for this belief that staging ‘fake’ tributes and memorials somehow detracts from the versions held for performers who die(d) in real life, are we now picking and choosing when we want to accept pro-wrestling as ridiculous escapism? So, if we’re saying that memorials and the like can’t be re-enacted as part of a dramatic representation, then no film or television show can ever show a tribute to a dead character? Or have a scene depicting the grieving relatives of the dead character because it would be too upsetting to people living that situation for real? It is a damning indictment of this overly sensitive, victim obsessed culture that the frailties of an individual can be intentionally amplified to national proportions just to bolster an already ‘anti’ stance. Put another way, if my parents died tomorrow, why on earth would I give a crap about some silly storyline run by the WWE, unless I wanted it to become the focal blame of my feelings of sadness and injustice? Take the recent passing of Sensational Sherri. Many writers will claim that it is a timely and real reminder of just how tasteless this angle is and why it should be dropped, because the story overshadows the real event. Nice to see that someone’s entire career and life can be so comfortably bastardised to prove a point, reduced to a smug ‘unanswerable’ question aimed at people engaged in fantasy. Personally, I admired Sherri as a performer. She offered something different at a time when the fragile prettiness of female wrestling stars made them sympathy magnets reduced to little more than running away and screaming. She came across as tough and single-minded in the pursuit of what her character wanted, even when playing a babyface. Those who knew her personally will presumably mourn her passing, but to the rest of us she is merely a name, out of thousands worldwide that died today, that we can put a face to. Don’t add it to your cause just because it fits your way of thinking.
Okay, say Vince has an epiphany overnight and undoes the storyline because it’s too raw and too close to the truth for some of his audience. Happy now? Or just until the next time? To date, no line has been drawn that determines what is acceptable and unacceptable with regard to pro-wrestling. The reason why a line hasn’t been drawn regarding taste and decency in the past is because it is an impossibility, a fictitious theory of pious conformity used by censorship watchdogs and religious puritans to stifle free thought (which it relies upon to subdue the masses). But let’s try anyway, might be a laugh. Okay so death is out? No storylines relating to death or the dying. Well if we’re including dying then ‘seriously ill’ should be out too, don’t want to offend those people who are suffering an illness in real life. I’ve got advanced Rheumatoid Arthritis, should I be protected? And disability, we wouldn’t want Zach Gowen’s appearances on Smackdown in 2003 to make the disabled feel awkward. No blading (because it offends the victims of knife crime), no violence against women (victims of domestic abuse), no miscarriages, rapes, elderly victims, children, accidents, aggression, swearing, obscenity, nudity, blasphemy, intolerance, stereotypes, fighting or chickens? (I hate chickens). So that leaves us with ‘everybody being friendly, getting along with eachother and having a lovely time’. You can’t structure a drama or a comedy so that it doesn’t refer to the nasty side of life, it just doesn’t work. There’d be no X-Files, no CSI, just Barney the friggin’ dinosaur and the God channel.
If you don’t like the McMahon death storyline then fine. We are lucky that we have a democratic society where we are free to complain and get outraged and I would never tell anyone to ‘shut up’ with regard to their right to be heard. I can’t even suggest that you turn off the television because you have the right to be critical about that which you see, if you so choose. But to moralise that events depicted in a performance environment that are coincidentally parallel to real life events are in some way the actions of a tasteless and depraved organisation is just crap. An actor can remember a dead colleague with warmth and affection, only to then play the part of zombie #6 in scene three of “Cannibal Chainsaw Stump-f***ers”, without feeling that they are being disrespectful to their fallen comrade. You just need to remember that one is real, the other is fake and no one in WWE circles is confusing the two. And neither should you.
Now, I had this other idea ... why don’t they do a scene where Vince’s charred, crispy corpse is lying in an open casket, HHH enters wearing a Kane mask and ... never mind.
Lee
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