[Content warning for discussions of suicidal ideation.]
In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker arrives on Dagobah to begin his Jedi training. We see him meet Yoda, see him lifting objects and being lectured by his teacher, see him confront the apparition of Darth Vader. It’s implied that he’s on the planet for a month, maybe two. All this goes by in about 30 minutes on the screen; two months of Luke’s life compressed into a half hour of the viewer’s.
Now imagine that instead of a thirty-minute sequence, Star Wars fans were required to come back to the theater every week to find that exactly one week had passed on Dagobah, the same as on Earth. Each week you’d get a peek into a few hours of Luke’s training, then be sent home to wait until another week had passed in Luke’s life. Imagine taking two real-time months to watch Luke grow in the Force, having to wait two full months to find out if he passes his trials and becomes a Jedi Knight. It would be infuriating and yet oddly involving. It would make the world of Star Wars feel incredibly real, as though once a week a window opened up to give a glimpse of a second reality, running parallel to ours, then closed again.
Welcome to professional wrestling narrative.
Wrestling so closely mimics and intersects with reality that it can be easy to overlook just how bizarre the flow of time in wrestling storytelling is, compared to other narrative genres. There are no time skips, no compressions. The ratio is exactly one hour to one hour. Time unfolds within the stories of wrestling at exactly the same rate it does in the non-fictional world. It’s part of what gives wrestling that weird magical-realism vibe: it’s all the organic progression of non-fictional sport or other reality-based programming, but overlaid with the high-excitement gloss of deliberately crafted and acted fiction. Titanic betrayals, breathtaking victories, harrowing challenges–all of it unabashed fiction nowadays, but still unfolding with no jumps in time, no “five years later…” appearing on the screen. If it takes five years to accomplish something in wrestling, you see each and every one of those five years.
When a movie does something like this–show the exact same span of time for the characters as for the audience–it’s considered a bit avant-garde and experimental. Professional wrestling does that for literal generations, and it’s just… business as usual.
Case in point: Rey Mysterio’s son Dominick. Dominick, as a young boy, was a pivotal character in the feud between Rey and Eddie Guerrero, in which Eddie claimed Dominick was his biological son and tried to take him from Rey.
The two wrestlers ended up having a ladder match with (and I am not making this up) Dominick’s custody papers as the prize.
Now it’s 2019, 14 years later, and here’s Dominick once more, all grown up and ready to be part of his father’s story again.
Imagine if you watched the beginning of Black Panther to see the boy who would become Erik Killmonger witness his father’s death, then the screen lit up with “Please come back in twenty-five years while we wait for the actor to grow up. Thank you.” Fade to black, please go watch whatever Marvel superheroes are running around in 1992. Carol Danvers is off having adventures with the Kree. Tony Stark has just become CEO of Stark Industries, maybe he’s doing something interesting. You’ve got a while to kill.
That’s wrestling.
Or another recent example: Kofi Kingston’s climb to WrestleMania, one of the most powerful stories in modern wrestling. It’s definitely fiction, a story carefully paced and structured to achieve maximum emotional impact. But in a movie or a book about a brave wrestler who suffered and overcame the odds, you can create 2019’s Kofi Kingston in a few concise sentences, you can start the story with a fully-formed character. The very first sentence of a book can be: “As Kofi Kingston prepared for his gauntlet match, he thought back on the last eleven years of hard work and sacrifice, eleven years of reaching for the stars and never quite catching them,” and there he is, the beloved underdog veteran summoned from nowhere with a few keystrokes. There are no shortcuts like that in wrestling: no, we have to actually wait eleven years for Kofi Kingston to become the character he needs to be for this story; we have to witness each and every accomplishment and every single setback as they happen.
There’s no other storytelling medium like it: exasperating and tedious, breathtaking and totally absorbing.
It can break your heart.
It can save your life.
On June 17, 2018, Sami Zayn wrestled Bobby Lashley at the Money in the Bank show, a match in which, we later learned, Sami could barely lift his arms above his head due to his nagging shoulder injuries. It went for six minutes and then Sami vanished from WWE television, to have double shoulder surgery, rehab, travel the world and do some stand-up comedy. His hiatus lasted nearly ten months; 292 days. That’s 7,008 hours, and the fans who love him lived every single one of them. We didn’t skip over them with a rehab montage set to inspirational music, there was no new chapter cutting from Sami’s Money in the Bank loss to “It had been a long ten months, but as he heard his music hit Sami finally felt everything start to click back into place.” Everyone else’s stories moved forward: in the WWE, Becky Lynch became the Man and Daniel Bryan plunged into darkness. In New Japan, Kenny Omega reigned and fell; Kazuchika Okada struggled with despair and betrayal. A thousand amazing stories unfolding around the world, and if sometimes those of us who missed Sami would have given them all up for one fast-forward button, it made no difference. No way forward but step by step by step, minute by minute for ten months.
Any wrestling fan who’s had a favorite go out with injury–and that’s everyone, surely–knows how painful those long blank times are. We’ve all been through it, so we all support each other. The hardcore Finn Balor fans give us their sympathy. We cheer when Dean Ambrose shows back up, overjoyed at the joy of our friends who love him most, swallowing that tiny bit of envy and waiting, week after week. After week.
Waiting to see the rest of the story.
In December 2009, a wrestling fan I’ll call Dawn made her decision. Personal tragedies and despair had left her with no hope for the future; at the close of the year, she resolved, she’d wrap things up and end her life.
And as she started to get ready for that ending, Dawn–a particular fan of Kevin Steen and El Generico–watched what she thought would be her last Ring of Honor show, Final Battle 2009, when her favorite tag team was taking on the Young Bucks.
If you know your Steen & Generico history, you know how that ended: El Generico betrayed, Kevin standing above his limp body, chair in hand.
Devastated for the luchador, Dawn resolved to keep going long enough to find out what happened to him. Just a delay–and it wouldn’t be that long of a delay, after all, because what wrestling feud runs more than a few months? Just three or four months, until she could see Generico beat Kevin and emerge triumphant. Then she’d be ready.
Except that wasn’t what happened. What happened was El Generico immediately sank into a terrible gulf of pain and anguish that left him a shell of his former self. For months he could barely function, unable to lift a hand against his former partner, unable even to lace his boots.
It took him until March–three months!–even to bring himself to spit in Kevin’s face. It was April until they were in the ring together, in a tag match involving Steve Corino and Colt Cabana. They didn’t have a singles match until June, and even then it become clear this feud was not over. The story ended up spanning an entire year, from December 2009 to December 2010. It was a long journey through despair and sorrow, and fans like Dawn watched El Generico go through the whole thing. His grief was a story, but his time was real: there was no “Colt cheers Generico up” montage to speed things up, there were no shortcuts. He lived every minute of that year, through mourning and doubt into resolve, until he could find the strength to pick himself up and stand up to his nemesis.
And Dawn lived them with him. Her heart ached for him, but because his pain was clearly fictional, it didn’t add to her own burdens. It was a story she could walk with, and she went through those same months of pain with Generico hour by hour, through the spring and summer and fall of 2010, and by the time that Generico finally triumphed, she also had found her footing and the strength to keep going.
Nine years later, Dawn is happily married. She writes about the paranormal in her free time. And she works at a hospice, where she walks with people through the end of their own journeys, by their side through the last weeks and days and hours.
The ten months that Sami is gone are agonizing. We who miss him track his Twitter and Instagram, talking about his posts, the glimpses of his life. At least he hasn’t vanished completely, thanks to social media. It’s a new addition to wrestling storytelling, where wrestlers can choose to show a character’s development on Twitter and Instagram even if they’re not actively wrestling. Stories and relationships with enough momentum can somehow get across those long silent times, with enough careful work and support. Tommaso Ciampa and Johnny Gargano manage to continue the arc of their story through injury and tragedy. Hiromu Takahashi, recovering from his own neck injury, posts videos of himself watching his Ingobernable friends on the screen, maintaining those connections. Kota Ibushi and Kenny Omega, ever the most reckless daredevils, keep their story going across entire promotions.
It’s a gift–and it’s a curse.
Because we don’t know, we can’t know, how much of what gets revealed on social media is fictional and how much is “legit.” Or both at once. In this weird awful space where Sami isn’t wrestling, isn’t on the screens and in the ring that make the fictional real for us, we can’t be sure how much of what we’re seeing is character work and how much are the non-fictional person’s thoughts. We’re getting worked all the time and it isn’t fun at all, because truly all we want is to know is what we can’t know: Is he happy?
He looked happy in that picture. Didn’t he? Don’t you think?
We want him to be happy. We hope he’s happy. But underneath that–here is the most awful and embarrassing confession–there’s a terrible fear as well.
Is he… happier without us?
Maybe he doesn’t miss us. Maybe he shouldn’t come back.
Wrestling fans are not blind or Pollyannas about “the business,” and while John Oliver’s scathing indictment was on point, it wasn’t news to us that wrestling in general, and WWE in particular, is a toxic, soul-crushing meatgrinder. When Sami tells Chris Jericho on Talk is Jericho that he doesn’t really miss wrestling at all and is in no hurry to come back, a friend writes me in a miserable panic: I knew it. He hates wrestling, it’s destroyed his soul. He doesn’t want to come back to us. I reassure her as well as I can, but I worry too.
We just want him to be happy.
But–selfishly–we’d rather he were happy with us than despite us.
It’s a long, miserable, doubt-filled ten months. We get through it, step by step. Week after week. Because that’s the only way to get through it.
Unlike Dawn, Kitty wasn’t a wrestling fan when she decided she’d had enough. The survivor of years of abuse that left her with a shattered self-image and no faith in her ability to connect with others, Kitty reached a point where she didn’t see the meaning in going on.
So in late July 2017, she made her preparations, and she locked herself in her room, and she started dying.
As she waited, she turned on the tv and flipped at random through the channels. It was a Monday night, and as she went through the images, she suddenly found her attention caught by a tableau: two men in a ring, celebrating some kind of victory. But their celebration seemed fraught, and when one of the men put his fist out and waited, the whole audience seemed to catch its breath.
Kitty’s breath caught too, without even knowing why. She could feel the weight of the years of history there in the ring, in the eyes of the two men, in the hopeful cheers of the crowd. And when Dean Ambrose turned and walked away, leaving Seth Rollins in the ring alone, Kitty knew she had to find out what their story was. What had brought these two men to this point, to this moment? Why would someone be willing to hug a partner, but flinch away from a fist-bump? Why did he hesitate on the ramp, torn between leaving and staying? What could explain the mix of grief and resignation in the eyes of the man left the ring with his hand outstretched?
Even more, she had to find out what their story would be. She had to know if Dean could transcend his distrust, if Seth could make up for his betrayals, if they could make it right between them again. So she saved herself; she left her room; she committed to following them until they found resolution–week after week, show after show.
What will make it right? Seth Rollins’ eyes asked. And the answer is time, and time is what wrestling gives us.
By the time Dean and Seth won the tag team titles at SummerSlam, by the time they finally managed that awkward, over-eager fist-bump that they had earned through suffering, Kitty had tapped once more into that strength of will that had gotten her through so much. She was able to move forward into the future.
Kitty is in wrestling school now, learning to take bumps and do arm drags. Crafting, month after month, a self inside the ring that others might one day walk with. She still loves Seth and Dean, but her favorite wrestler today is Elias, and by now I think you can probably understand the intuitive appeal that Elias’s character has. Because week after week he stands before us and asks us explicitly to do what all wrestlers ask of us implicitly: walk with me.
Sami finally, finally comes back the Raw after WrestleMania. The Brooklyn crowd, overjoyed to see him, breaks into song, singing his theme song to him. But Sami doesn’t seem to be listening; he’s hanging on the rope waiting for them to finally stop so he can cut his promo.
Undaunted, they switch into singing Ole. Sami responds by getting some food out of his teeth while he waits for it to be over.
He wrestles Finn Balor for the Intercontinental title. The audience still sings to him, but he wrestles as if they’re silent, with a grim forced cheer that doesn’t touch his eyes. The crowd isn’t giving him strength, because he’s refusing to take it. He isn’t trying to connect to them, and all the singing and all the love in the world can’t force that connection into existing, in either direction.
After he loses, he picks up the mic and laughs a little, a bleak laugh with no music in it. Then he says with a terrible grief that breaks my heart beyond bearing, “I really thought coming out here tonight would cure what ails me.”
I had hoped it would too, hoped it with all my heart across the long months, but it never could. Because in wrestling a story can be put on hold, but it can’t advance off the screen, outside the ring. Narrative can skate across those long terrible blank spaces, can keep its momentum going across the void, but any true change and development has to take place in the ring, in the space set aside for closure and transcendence and catharsis. No feud worth having was ever resolved outside the ring, and no victory worth the story was ever achieved offscreen. Sami Zayn’s despair–in the world, in us, in himself–is not something that can be cured with some time off and a little sunset-watching. It has to be experienced, lived and gone through, as we would go through any loss of faith. There’s no skipping. There’s no way to leap forward. He will have to go through it–and us with him–step by step. Week after week. Through hopelessness and anger, with no guarantee that there will be any light on the other side. The same as in reality, in other words.
Some of the hardest times to be a fan are when the wrestlers we love insist they don’t want us there at all. It’s not always easy. It’s tempting to walk away and spare ourselves the heartbreak, however fictional it may be. But wrestling works best when we are moved by and move with with the story.
Walk with Elias on the streets of New York.
Walk with Allie into the Undead Realm to save a friend.
Walk with Kofi Kingston on the road to WrestleMania, through every obstacle thrown in his way.
Walk with Tetsuya Naito through the fires of doubt and rebirth.
Walk with Kenny Omega into the unknown, into the future.
I’m so grateful this weird, wonderful art was there for my friends when they needed the strength of a story. And whether you follow that strange parallel world for a few months or the rest of your life, I’m grateful you’re here too.
Keep walking.
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