There’s a rule in contemporary historiography that says you can’t use modern mental health diagnostics on historical figures. The same is true in regards to celebrities – we aren’t psychiatrists, we don’t know their lives, we aren’t qualified or entitled to label them.
There’s no consensus on fictional characters. There’s also no particular consensus on what, exactly, a wrestler’s performed persona counts as – not entirely fictional character or celebrity, they exist in a blurry, liminal state: at best an exaggeration of a real, regular person who happens to do sports entertainment as a profession?
There are few who better embody the ambiguity of wrestling than Best Friends. The Best Friends are the duo of Trent Beretta, born Greg Marasciulo and Chuck Taylor, aka Chuckie T, aka DUSTIN, born Dustin Lee Howard.
Greg was briefly known as PlaZma in his youth, but has been pretty consistently Trent Beretta, sometimes styled as Trent? – with a question mark.
Dustin, who briefly lost his handle in a match against another Chuck Taylor, has had many names. Bugg Nevans. Mr. Azerbaijan. “Raw Dog” Rick Beanbag. Rich “Hardwood” Mahogany. Scoot Tatum. Stewie Scrivens. Touch Phillips. Howie Dewitt. Karate Durling. Slim Perkins.
Let me discuss Greg and Dustin. Not, for clarity’s sake, Greg Marascuiulo and Dustin Lee Howard. I don’t know those men. They seem nice. I’m not diagnosing them with anything. I want to talk about the characters they perform, which may or may not reflect anything about their actual life. I’m talking about the Greg and Dustin who do wrestling, promos, commentary, an internirant and scatological talk show called Poppin’ Dogs and Talkin’ Hogs.
The Greg who was uncertain of his own name change so wrote it frequently on his belongings as Trent? The Dustin who is mostly, but not solely, known as Chuck Taylor. They both use their shoot and ring names fairly interchangeably in content and merchandise, and for clarity, I’m sticking with the names I’m most used to hearing them call each other.
Side bar: why did a man who comes up with wrestler names for fun go with the name of a famous basketballer and even more famous shoe, making himself nigh on ungooglable?
Partly because he started wrestling at fifteen, before he could legally perform in his home state of Kentucky, and fifteen year old Dustin, who trained in Converse Chuck Taylors, thought it sounded cool.
Partly for the same reason Greg named himself for an arms manufacturer: capitalism consumes every aspect of their existence. They did not name themselves for past wrestlers or fictional characters, as many others do, but for brands. They did this independently, before they had met.
The hundred year old Converse signature shoes have been quietly produced by Nike since 2003, not long after Chuck Taylor debuted. They keep the swoosh off – why mess with such excellent branding. Beretta have provided gun barrels to every European war for centuries. Both men chose ring names that evoke a specifically nostalgic coolness – a sense of style haunted by a past they weren’t alive for. This is a manifestation of Derrida’s punning concept of hauntology: the idea that every contemporary construct contains its own losses and absences.
Mark Fisher’s writing introduced me to hauntology through the framework of pop culture – how Inception references Goldeneye and Adele could have come from any of the last four decades. He links this anachronology with Francis Fukuyama’s idea that history ended in 1989 and we have nothing now to look forward to but a settling of the whole world into capitalism. Fisher calls this belief – that there is no alternative to individualistic capitalism and its destructive forces – capitalist realism. He hates capitalism and all those who claim it is not only the best but only system, and links it with Western societies’ mounting diagnoses of depression and anxiety. “Capitalist realism,” Fisher writes, “insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect).”
I don’t have to dance around a definition of performed vs actual personality with Mark Fisher – he built his writing career around a discussion of his own depression, and how he related to art through the filter of it. I also have depression and anxiety, as has a fair percentage of my family. I’m not trained as any kind of mental health professional, but growing up with it, you recognise certain things that aren’t as stereotypically obvious as self harm, executive dysfunction, disordered eating, alcoholism, or staring out a window into the rain listening to piano music in a grey jumper (though I have done all of those).
Depression and anxiety can be argued to be reasonable, even necessary responses to our cultural context of desolation. It is currently easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – climate crisis and its effects are already here – see our mega storms and hyper heat waves, unseasonably early floods and strangely long droughts. The apocalypse has already arrived, it’s just unevenly distributed. How could this not be a cause for fear and sadness?
This is reflected in our media – there are no new films or music, only echoes of the past made more marketable with a fresh lick of paint – they all look backwards, instead of forward. They all represent the world as essentially unchanging. Best-selling book lists have been reduced to increasingly facistic life advice or treatments for new films (re-hashes of old tropes). The prestige TV that so excites streaming services is mostly the same grim morality plays of straight white men justifying their terrible actions. None of these forms offer positive visions of the future, only affirming the false, fatalistic idea that everything is fucked and it always has been.
Wrestling has, for me and many others, become one of the most interesting and optimistic forms of entertainment. It gives us victories – being able to kick your boss in the face, get revenge on a bully who mocked your idealism, hold the hand of your best friend high as an audience applauds. These stories can only convincingly exist in the strange, theatrical bloodsport of professional wrestling. Wrestling allows the collectively experienced affect of the 90’s rave or Elizabethan theatre – the outsourcing of joy, that we so rarely get in the world of personalised channels and private screens.
Despite this, we can’t forget that wrestling is, in many ways, appalling. Greg and Dustin work in the most brutally and directly capitalistic industry imaginable: they perform emotional catharsis and destroy their bodies for other people’s entertainment. And they don’t even get paid well for it.
There’s no health insurance in independent wrestling, no universal coverage in the USA. They’re hurt, physically, all the time. And, I will argue, mentally.
Dustin tweets about his numb arm, his ruined neck, how he’s been crying on planes at in flight movies and thinking about how many of his friends have become more successful than him. He’s working in lots of promotions and claims they only want him because WWE booked everyone else. In promos he’s either high on a win or certain he’ll never win again, certain that he’ll never be booked again.
Dustin is and always has been fatalistic. Greg, by comparison, refuses to dwell on much of anything. He famously rented a car for a year rather than deal with an insurance mess. He’s wrestled on injuries more times than could possibly be healthy because that’s better than cancelling.
He doesn’t like showing people his feet and is often concerned with accidentally giving offence. He likes his dog more than most people.
I’m not a medical professional, and the people I’m describing are at least partially fictional, so take what I’m saying with a big old grain of salt, but: Dustin has depression. Greg has anxiety.
Their friendship is real, and delightful. They hold hands during their entrance, hug mid-match, execute matching moves and high five about it. They announce that they love each other, wear matching shirts of them holding hands or hugging. They also bicker, shove each other around and sometimes come to blows – but they always make up in the end.
Greg and Dustin are comedy wrestlers, which means they’re exceptional athletes who are also excellent clowns with huge stage presence and a lot of weird millennial charisma. Part of their comedy comes from their dysfunction – they’re two weird and awkward kids who’ve come to care for each other despite everything. The cliche of a crying clown seems particularly apt to a profession where your clowning inherently involves self harm – but very few wrestlers really give into the perhaps obvious option of nihilism. My thesis is that Greg and Dustin perform, respectively, anxiety and depression, and one of the things that makes them appealing (but also means they’ll never be huge stars) is that a huge number of audience members can identify with this.
Their friendship is also, of course appealing. Against the backdrop of damage and competition, affection is a balm and joy. The momentary tenderness of Didi and Gogo makes Waiting for Godot bearable, the positive relationships between teammates are the only thing people remember from any number of blockbusters, over their showy setpieces. The childlike optimism of having a best friend, of making goofy jokes and silly projects with them is its own sweet nostalgia – in direct opposition to the haunted names they chose, the haunted product they ply.
There’s a longing when I watch the Best Friends – we all want a friend who will put up with all our shit, not because they’re related to or sexually involved with us, but because they chose to – because we’re friends!
Their responses to their environment – depression, anxiety and friendship – are more easily identifiable than some of their contemporary wrestlers. Many of the people Greg and Dustin teamed with, feuded with, have gone on to greater fame and financial success than them – but those people are the exception, not the rule, those people have less common responses to the crushing world of the capitalist workforce. Few people have the energy for Sami Zayn’s idealistic activism, or the Young Bucks’ business minded hucksterism. Few people have the focus of Kenny Omega’s utopianism or Zack Sabre Junior’s fury. As a group, millenials are more likely to trend towards knowingly irresponsible choice paralysis and self destructive behaviours caused by burn out and uncertainty than anything an outside observer might deem sensible – what choices should we make? What choices can we make? What can we trust in this increasingly precarious world?
To survive under capitalism, we must grow, as a cancer does: malignantly, competitively, at cost to our surroundings. This is at odds with anyone who just wants to find collective co-operation, who wants to get along: who wants to have friends.
This is where the tension of Best Friends builds.
Greg is dissatisfied with being a pre-show act, as they have been so many times. He’s been, by now, frustrated at many moments that could have been a breakthrough – by his own injuries or others, by bad timing or dumb accidents. It’s not enough to be the comedy partners, relegated to curtain jerkers. He’s getting angry, driven by capitalist realism’s construct that we must achieve to have worth, that there are no other alternatives. There’s the anxiety here that they’ll be forgotten if they aren’t main eventing soon.
Dustin’s response is to internalise this failure – he apologises, says, “I’ll change for you. I’ll change.” That he’s interpreted Greg’s complaint as evidence of personal deficiency is classic depression thinking. He understands everything that’s been happening through the lens of his own self-loathing.
He is, however, externalising some of this loathing.
Four matches into 2018’s World Tag League, Dustin got dark. After receiving a nasty headbutt from Toa Henare, Dustin stops doing any of the things we normally see Dustin do – none of his rubbery facial expressions, none of his flashy white trash lucha moves. He starts whaling on his opponents with a steel chair, in the ring, immediately disqualifying himself, and apparently not caring at all. Greg calls his name, and Dustin seems not to hear. He drags a table into the ring, puts Henare through it, breaks a chair over his other opponent, punches the Young Lions coming in to break it up. Dustin – goofy, big mouthed Dustin – takes his belt off and starts strangling Henare with it.
When Greg grabs him, he punches Greg to the ground – Greg stares up at him, scared.
It’s scary. Everyone’s scared.
Dustin turns, once, looking at what he’s done, and slowly, shakily, leaves the ring.
He doesn’t look triumphant. He doesn’t look satisfied. He doesn’t look nervous or concerned. He shakes his head, a little, as he stares into the camera. He’s – shocked? No. Blank.
The crowd is quiet. This is unprecedented – they’ve never seen this from Dustin. He’s a heel, a little, but not like this. There’s no reason for him to act like this. This response makes no sense. The match is over. This is only violence, now, and unlike most of the violence that happens in the ring, there’s no obvious narrative to it. He’s not gaining anything, not victory, not even pleasure as we’ve seen other heels take in hurting other people. He’s just – gone.
He keeps doing this – not every match, but more than half. He brings in chairs, tables, weapons, beats the shit out of their opponents, makes them bleed. He gets them disqualified. He can’t explain himself. He seems barely aware that anything’s wrong. He claims they’re going to win the Tag League – which they can’t, because they’ve been disqualified so many times.
In Capitalist Realism, Fisher writes “there is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it… gradually falls apart.” Dustin, with his many small in ring snaps, repeated dead eyed staring, occasional beaming smile, social media broadcast complaints of his many many injuries, interspersed with pictures of his dog, is a perfect metaphor of our slowly decaying social and economic structures. The savage breakdown of Dustin has been coming for years. The signs were all there. But we changed nothing, because how could we? What impact could Dustin, Greg or the audience have on the system that made him mad?
In the New Year’s Dash match, with Greg’s mother in the audience, he does it again. He gets them both disqualified by smacking their their colleagues and friends, Finlay and Robinson, with chairs. After, he tells Greg, bleakly, “I just want your mom to be proud of us.”
Here we come to a kind of sense – he wants what Greg wants. He wants to achieve – he’s just going about it in a way that ignores the friendly face we put on capitalism, stripping the system back to its core – beating your opponents until they can’t get up. Dustin wanders away from the cameras, saying, to no one, “Death match legend. Death match Dustin.”
Death matches, no disqualification matches, are out of joint with the proscribed boundaries of the “sport” – wrestling is inherently violent, but weapons are not meant to be there – you should not look on your opponent as someone to kill, only someone to submit. But, the death match argues, some problems cannot be solved within limits – the violence must be escalated to the point of being frightening, disturbing – after all, what other options are there? Certainly not de-escalation! Whoever heard of a problem being solved outside capitalism, without violence?
“The depressives world is black and white” (pg 171) argues Fisher, and this tracks with the fact that there are no half measures with Dark Dustin – he does not go for the little cheat, the low blow or the jabbing pen – he goes directly from legitimate wrestling to steel chair blows and choking people out with his belt – he’s either a hard man or a man crying at Paddington 2. Dustin has fought plenty of death matches – but those had been agreed ahead of time. He wasn’t breaking the expectations of the audience, and he seemed to be having, at the time, some fun. That’s not what’s happening now.
Dustin has been left by many of his rivals and tag team partners – Drew Gulak and Johnny Gargano went to WWE, Ricochet and El Generico diversified, Kenny Omega to New Japan, as did Greg for nearly two years. Dustin’s won plenty of titles in a variety of companies – none of them seem important to him. Increasingly, nothing seems important to him. He hugs Greg, listens to him, sometimes. That’s it. It’s impossible to predict his behaviour.
Greg’s response to this, is, reasonably, panic. He’s been herding Dustin away from the press, tells him he’s worried, he loves him, he wants him to be OK – this has been rolling off Dustin’s back. So Greg talks, distractedly, about his own coming title shots, compares his opponent to Elton John – quickly states that there’s nothing wrong with that, but also, he is the better wrestler. “And whenever we have this match – I don’t know, I’m gonna win it? That’s it, that’s the end of my promo.”
Just as Dustin wandering away, mumbling about death matches, is a perfectly reasonable response to late capitalism, Greg’s mid-promo uncertainty about what he’s even doing, what he’s even meant to be saying, is an equally reasonable response.
What could anyone do, faced with their best friend falling apart? He’s not going to turn on him – that’s not how Greg works. He’s not going to abandon him, or hand him over to authorities. He can’t tell him anything, not really – they never could tell each other anything.
Greg and Dustin seem to think they have failed – they haven’t. Society failed them by not providing accessible healthcare, with good and fulfilling employment opportunities. Society failed all millenials, by promising we could have it all, by extracting the promise that we would work for it all – a job that’s cool and meaningful and gainful and allows a life without debt. Instead, here we are – some thirty years after the end of history, watching the world tear itself apart. What can we do but hug our friends? But swing a chair? But let our partner into the ring again and again, knowing that he’s a risk, following the fatal pattern, because what else is there?
Gifs by toosweetme.tumblr.com, image from NJPW.com.
Further reading on Capitalist Realism and Mark Fisher is available for free because capitalism can get rekt.
Direct and comments or complaints to me at twitter @weavegotknives
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