Category: Audience Theory

November 15, 2018 /

Creating a sudden heel turn is easy: all you need is a steel chair. Or a kendo stick. Or a window. In a pinch, in fact, you need nothing but two treacherous hands and a darkened heart. Admittedly, for a heel turn based on betrayal it helps to have a friendship to betray, and those are harder to come by. Those take time to build: months or years of effort, dozens or hundreds of happy…

October 8, 2018 /

I’m in the front row. I’m also in the back row. I’m in The Row. DDT Pro shows in my town are held in municipal sports centers, in rooms small enough that along one side of the ring there’s only space for a single row of chairs, and that’s where Dan and I are sitting. The Row is my favorite place to sit at DDT Pro shows, because my view of the ring is completely…

October 1, 2018 /

I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down in the movie theater to watch “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” the new movie starring Hiroshi Tanahashi and a host of other NJPW wrestlers. Considering it had NJPW’s official stamp of approval, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be pulling the curtain aside to show wrestlers calling their matches and bookers deciding who was going over whom. And it was a children’s movie,…

September 10, 2018 /

I reach out and rest my hands on the barricade in front of me. Dan and I are in Brooklyn for SummerSlam 2018, and we’re in the very front row, on the end, right at the stairs to the ring. The crowd roars and rustles around me, and I cheer with delight as Seth Rollins wins the Intercontinental championship, groan with disappointment as the Bludgeon Brothers retain their titles. There’s a lot on the card…

June 26, 2018 /

(Note: You click on any of the art to see a full-size version, and you can click on the link in the caption to go to the artist’s page!) He grew up an orphan on the mean streets of Tijuana. He learned his fighting skills protecting other children from bullies and thugs. He fled Mexico after he injured a man with a brainbuster gone wrong. We don’t know these facts about El Generico’s life from…

May 14, 2018 /

There’s a notorious moment in wrestling history called the “Finger Poke of Doom.” It’s the culmination of months’ worth of feud between two warring factions of the WCW, led by Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan respectively. At the climax of the conflict, Nash and Hogan finally face each other, glowering, in the ring. There’s a long, tense moment. And then Hogan reaches out and pokes Nash in the chest with one finger, lightly, and Nash…

March 12, 2018 /

“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure.” So J.R.R. Tolkien opened his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” and calling wrestling a kind of fairy-story may be the very rashest of adventures, but I live for danger, so here we go. I could probably write more at length about the world of wrestling as a strange kind of secondary fantasy world, with its own rules of physics and morality,…

February 12, 2018 /
February 8, 2018 /

Brooklyn in August is a seething cauldron of sounds and sights and smells, hordes of people gathering in the miserable summer heat, hoping to receive their handful of moments from the SummerSlam weekend. It’s August 20, 2016, the night of TakeOver: Brooklyn II, and Dan and I are carefully making our way down the stairs in the Barclay Arena, looking around in astonishment. Back in February, we took a long, hard look at our budget…

December 18, 2017 /

[Warning for intense bloody imagery in this essay.] Final Battle 2010, the climax of Kevin and Generico’s bloody feud, takes place in the dead of winter, but I watch it many years later in the early spring, when the leaves are that particular luminous green that’s almost golden. (The leaves are important. We’ll get back to the leaves.) The year-long arc, from 2009 to 2010, from Final Battle to Final Battle, is Kevin’s story. I…