Wrestling, the Male Soap Opera

I made fun of my wife for liking soap operas.  Mostly because they’re awful.  But there is a reason for them to be bad and there is, much to my chagrin, a real reason to like them.  Part of the reason they’re bad is that they have to make a couple hundred episodes a year and they are an hour long (around 44 minutes with commercials and intro) so that’s a lot of time to fill.  Even with the amount of characters they have to keep track of it isn’t easy.  That’s why there are so many Twilight like pauses of “intense” stares.  I put intense in quotes because I understand that’s what they are trying to convey intensity but most of the time I see bad acting or someone with bowel discomfort.  Kirsten Stewart didn’t invent bland bad acting with three possible emotional responses she just borrowed it from “The Bold and the Emotionally Vacant”… maybe not the name of the show but I actually prefer the honesty of it.  So some of the acting is bad on purpose to fill space, so we can forgive that.  The directing isn’t great because there a significant amount of crappy intertwining plot lines that they keep cutting between.   They do this to, again, fill time but also to slowly build the amount of tension.  But nothing fucking happens.    If you are familiar with Dragon Ball Z it’s kind of like that.  Ten episodes of buildup and one of actual culmination of action.  It’s like story foreplay.

Part of reason I can’t make fun of Adi is due to accidentally watching and following a soap opera.  At UPS I took my lunch around the time of a soap opera.  And it was always on in the background.  The silly inane prattling wormed its way in.  Bit by bit I caught myself paying attention.  Actually knowing who the character were.  All incidentally.  Incidentally is also how I ended up watching the stupidity that is professional wrestling.

Wrestling is not a product an intelligent adult admits to watching without a twinge of shame.  It has ridiculous story lines, an inherently flawed premise, twigs with engorged/enhanced front bits, needless (sometimes) violence, and generally very base subject matter.  Also its wonderfully contradictory.  There is such an air of hetero male superiority but at the same time we’re watching grown men who are shaved, oiled, in small amounts of spandex, aggressively grappling each other in attempts to force each other to the mat.  Another odd hypocrisy is the new bullying campaign the WWE is heading up.  While I commend them for helping kids by talking to them about the real dangers and effects of bullying I’m still confused.  I’m confused because it’s coming from pro wrestling.  This is the programming where two guys insult each other for twenty minutes before hitting each other.  And not like ‘you suck as a grappler,’ no, it’s ‘your momma’ jokes and worse.  So the guys who put on insult fest and smacking each other are standing against bullying.

But logic is not the strong suit of wrestling.  Remember this is a business where a guy who is 190 pounds can beat a behemoth of 350 pounds. That essentially doesn’t happen.  And yes you can make the argument that skill levels the playing field.  But both these men have presumably trained for a while.  You don’t pull people off the street and say get in the ring.  So giving up that much weight and winning is a wee bit beyond the whole willing suspension of disbelief.

The way I found wrestling was a friend of a friend was intensely passionate about it.  He would stop whatever he was doing and rush to the set to watch.  It was on in the background.  We made fun of him for it but we slowly gravitated to the couch and watched.  Week by week we started paying attention and stopped making snide comments.  Then it happened.  We were cheering, we cared about the fake wrestlers wins and losses.  The silly story lines and the sillier belts.  Then I realized ‘hey, this stupid wrestling thing is kind of fun.’  And it was.  And there have been gladiatorial references made and with good reason.  A crowd of spectators cheering around an arena with large sweaty men beating each other in combat.  And there is evidence that in many gladiator bouts they were entirely faked with false bloody ending.  Obviously it isn’t always a good a idea to kill half of your performers.  It might be more economic to simply stage the destruction and death.  Unlike gladiator bout anyone nowadays who argues that wrestling isn’t fake needs to grow up.  And yes I agree that you can’t fake falling off a ladder and you can’t fake it when you actually get hit.  But if wrestling was entirely real these men and women wouldn’t be one camera every week after the ‘beatings’ they take.  Unless of course you are talking about the indie wrestlers.

The independents are where most of the active wrestlers are.  You’ve got all the young talents looking for a break and the older ones who are winding down their careers.  The problem with the indy leagues is often times the wrestlers do silly dangerous things.  Like backyard wrestling jumping off house roofs though flaming tables kind of things.  There is reason why there is the airing of warning before pay per views.  But young men tend to ignore that warnings and severely hurt themselves.  In the indies they take is further.  I watched a documentary recently called Card Subject to Change about the independent wrestlers.  I was a little bit disgusted by the lifestyle and violence.  You had one young man living too hard and fast who hit rock bottom from drugs.  After close to a year of jail time he left with body near ruined, face bloated and muscles turned flabby.  A young man in his prime close to fame cut down.  Then you see him broken but optimistic on his reemergence and sincere hope to rise again.  But his second (or perhaps a number higher) overdose would not have him come back.  Then there was the dangerous Necro Butcher self proclaimed hick.  The name should warn you to his standards of safety.  I’ve seen horror movies without blinking but the human atrocities I saw this man inflict and go through made me a bit ill.  I won’t detail them here but that kind of mentality is what turns a fun possibly family friendly entertainment into something ugly.  Can I blame him for abusing his body to make money, not so much, but can I blame him for encouraging more dangerous stupidity into an already dangerous profession, yeah, yeah I can.

So why is wrestling the male soap opera?  Let’s compare the similarities first and then we’ll add the maleness.  Months long intertwining plot lines and many characters?  Check.   Silly storylines with not particularly good actors?  Check.  Lots of camera time for the attractive males and females and some camera time for the less attractive comedy characters?  Check.  Backstabbing, character revelations and surprise twists  – in wrestling it’s called turning as they go from face, good guy, to heel, bad guy, and vice versa – as well as the ultimate question who is sleeping with who.  Check.  The maleness in wrestling come s from well the overwhelming violence and the de-emphasis on story versus hitting.

So next time you see a wrestling fan before you make fun of them… nah, just make of them.  Wrestling is stupid and people who take it too seriously are most definitely in need of reminding.

Ben