The revolution is upon us, and I am so grateful for the first submission of AEW analysis to the Spectacle of Excess! Guest contributor Denali W. has taken a deep dive into the layers of story in the Double or Nothing Rhodes Brothers match. Take a look:
All it took to sell this match to me was exactly four sentences from a four minute promo that I saw in gif form at the beginning of May:
When that animal can’t go anymore, and it falls out on the trail, and you can feel the tension in its eyes, in its fluttered breaths of panic. And it knows it’s going to die, and it wants to die.
You don’t just leave it, because you love it. You pull from the hip, you roll your fingers on the steel of the chamber, and you pull the hammer back, and you don’t anticipate the recoil, and you blow it away.
I’m a new wrestling fan. Cody and Dustin were two of the very few wrestlers that I actually had some passing familiarity with before the build-up to Double or Nothing, though I knew about them completely independently of each other. I was familiar with Cody from the excellent heel work that he did as part of the Golden Lovers story, and I was familiar with Dustin through hearing about his time as Goldust while I was researching other examples of LGBTQ representation in wrestling.
Honestly, that alone is illustrative of a crucial aspect of this match: Cody and Dustin are from very different eras of professional wrestling.
Cody’s era is modern and progressive, defined by innovative use of social media and youtube videos to heighten the in-ring drama. He plays a crucial role in helping Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi tell their big epic positive gay love story.
Meanwhile, Dustin is from the wrestling era that’s frequently cited as the best era in wrestling history: the attitude era. It was a more adult-oriented era of wrestling that was defined by blood, sexuality, and shock value. Dustin’s character, Goldust, was essentially an evil queer character played by a straight man. Was the character a groundbreaking moment for LGBTQ representation in wrestling? Well, considering how paltry the offerings were and are, yeah, it was.
As Dustin himself put it in this promo:
I left the Dustin Rhodes name to do something that was way before it’s time, that shocked the world. And pulled it off, and did a great job at it. And here we are, 30 years later, Cody is doing the same thing.
I’m not trying to say that the LGBTQ representation angle is a big aspect of this match, because it’s super not, but it is certainly something that was at the forefront of my mind nonetheless, because that was the context in which I was originally introduced to both Cody and Dustin individually as wrestlers.
But the generation difference is absolutely a big part of the match. In fact, that’s exactly how Cody framed the fight. He claims to hate the attitude era and everything that it stands for, and sees his brother as a symbol of that.
So, there are really three layers of story happening here: there is the basic story of brother vs brother for their father’s legacy, then there is the bigger story of generation vs generation, and finally there is the deeply meta story of two performers finally winning back creative control over their own narrative after years of having that denied to them.
Out of the three layers of storytelling, that last one is simultaneously the most subtle and the most blatantly overt. It’s also by far the most divisive.
At the heart of it, the Cody vs Dustin match is brother vs brother, generation vs generation, and AEW vs WWE.
Everyone who works for AEW has said, again and again, that they aren’t trying to compete with WWE—they just want to provide an alternative.
But at the same time, AEW just can’t seem to resist taking cheap shots at WWE. I’ve seen a lot of people criticizing these moments of the Cody vs Dustin match, finding them unnecessary or extremely corny.
Personally, I loved it. Not because I loathe WWE as a company (though I do), but because it simply had to be this way.
Like it or not, WWE is an essential character in Cody and Dustin’s story. The company’s role in their narrative is impossible to ignore.
I’ve never actually seen any of Cody’s or Dustin’s WWE matches. I’ve only read about them secondhand. But I’m less interested in the narratives of the individual matches as I am in the metanarrative of the matches as a whole.
One thing that immediately struck me while watching The Road to Double or Nothing is that Cody and Dustin couldn’t even say the Stardust character’s name. They had to bleep it out. When I first realized what was happening, it floored me. Cody has this entire major part of his history when hewasthis character, and he can’t even publicly talk about it by name.
Stardust was also Cody’s last gimmick at WWE. Apparently he’d pleaded with writers to end the gimmick for over six months before he requested his release from the company.
Ultimately, Cody’s career with WWE had gone nowhere. WWE had used him poorly, and had allowed him no creative control over his character. And worse than that, Cody and Dustin had been denied their chance for narrative closure. WWE hadn’t thought that they were capable of main eventing a show.
And Stardust wasn’t the only name that WWE took away from Cody: after he left the company, he was unable to use his own last name—the Rhodes name, his family’s wrestling name—as his ring name.
So, this is where we begin on May 25, 2019:
Cody is here to kill his brother. He’s the heel in the match, a king dressed in gold and white and blue, heir to his father’s dynasty, ready to finally take the throne. He wants to end his brother’s career, and end the era that defined it, as well as destroy the company that stripped away his freedom and ownership of his name.
Dustin is here for one last ride. It’s his retirement match. He’s the face, the underdog, the prodigal son who loved and supported his brother even while Cody was their father’s favorite child. He’s wearing all red and black: “the red stands for life; the black stands for death.” His face is half-exposed, as it never was when he was Goldust. He isn’t playing a character anymore—this is real.
Cody makes his entrance. His theme, “Kingdom,” plays. The line about Dusty immediately stands out:
And my father said, when I was younger
Hard times breed better men
Cody walks past a throne that is a clear homage to Triple H (and thus attitude-era WWE). Brandi retrieves a mallet from beneath the ring and hands it to him. Cody takes the mallet, then walks over to the throne and smashes it.
It’s incredibly on the nose.
So much so that this moment really took a lot of people out of it, because it felt cheap. If it was a response firing back at Triple H after his “pissant company” comment, it was ridiculously over-the-top, and immensely corny.
But I argue that it was necessary. The throne-smashing is pivotal to the story being told here, to Cody’s entire character arc up until this point.
When Cody started using the “Kingdom” theme, AEW didn’t even exist as a concept, and yet, somehow, it feels like all of the lyrics to the song were foreshadowing this very moment:
You took it all away
I give it all away
Can't take my freedom
Here to change the game
A banner made of pain
I built my kingdom
Now you bow to me
You took my dreams but not my name
You'll follow me until the end
I am my kingdom
In this moment, this song isn’t about Cody vs Dustin, and it isn’t about generation vs generation. It’s about Cody vs WWE.
It’s about Cody’s anger at the company that denied him creative freedom, that tried to take away his history, his name. Cody took that anger, and he built his kingdom out of it, a kingdom that is here to change the entire industry.
You tried to tell me what to do
I stepped right over and through
Bow! Now!
Now watch me as I take my throne
And rule my kingdom
It always had to be a throne. There must be a symbol to destroy, and it had to be a throne.
blood, and agency, and blood
I’m not going to spend a lot of time dwelling on the actual match. People who are more capable writers than me have described it far better than I could.
They got in that ring and processed 30+ years of weird family stuff in front of thousands of people in an opera of blood and facepaint and sweat.
For all of Cody’s claiming to hate the attitude era, this match seems to come straight out of it. It’s a grisly, bloody fight. At one point, Dustin pulls down Cody’s pants and spanks him with his own belt, which says “attitude killer” on it.
There was a lot of blood. I still don’t know how I was able to watch it.
In fact, the reason I wrote this essay in the first place was to try and answer that question.
I can’t even watch some R-rated movies because they’re too gory for me to handle. How on earth, then, was I able to watch Cody vs Dustin? What about it was so compelling that I was able to suspend my visceral reaction to the blood, and watch it until the end?
It wasn’t because I wanted to see who’d win. I think we all knew, going into it, that Cody was always going to win this fight.
It wasn’t because I wanted to see the wrestling. As much as I like Cody, I don’t especially care for his actual wrestling.
I think the thing that drew me in, that kept me hooked even when I wanted nothing more than to be able to look away, was that regardless of how gory or awful this fight was, this was exactly how they wanted to tell this story.
For the first time in their careers, Cody and Dustin had absolute creative agency over their own characters, their own selves.
It was like everything that Cody had done with AEW, everything he’d done even before that, was leading up to this moment. It was like Cody had founded an entire new company just so that he could be standing in that ring with his brother.
And the least I could do was trust them to tell their story without wishing they were telling it differently.
The blood, as gruesome and as awful as it was to watch, was consensual. This story hurt because they wanted it to.
When the match ends, it’s a relief.
Cody pins Dustin. It’s a tragedy. I don’t think it would have been less of one had it gone the other way around.
Cody stands in the ring. He’s covered in his brother’s blood; his hair is stained pink from it. He faces Dustin, and he says:
You don’t get to retire here. Because I got to ask you a favor. Before AEW was a thing, before we filled this place up… I put my name on a piece of paper for Fight For the Fallen. It was for myself and a partner of my choosing against the best tag team in the world, The Young Bucks. But Dustin, I don’t need a partner. I don’t need a friend. I need my older brother.
Cody’s voice breaks part of the way through it. After he’s done speaking, Dustin walks forward. They throw their arms around each other. Both of them are crying.
And it becomes clear that what this fight was actually about all along was reconciliation.
a new chapter
I watch wrestling because I like stories about love.
Tag team wrestling is what initially got me invested in professional wrestling, and at the end of the day, it’s the only form of wrestling that I truly care about.
I’m glad that AEW seems to genuinely appreciate what tag team wrestling can do, what it can mean.
The exchange between Cody and Dustin after the match—Cody asking Dustin to be his tag partner in a match that they have the power to book themselves—this is the emotional payoff. It’s a triumph for both of them, the resolution that they both desperately wanted.
As Dustin said, in his promo:
This is a fight that needs to end. It should have ended years ago.
The match itself is also a reconciliation between the new era that AEW reflects and the old era that WWE reflects. It’s a blend of the two. It has the blood and the shock value that characterized the attitude era, and the story-driven focus and the creative control that is beginning to define AEW.
This isn’t a match about the symbolic destruction of WWE—though it certainly throws some punches. This is about showing what AEW can do.
Cody vs Dustin is saying: look what we can do when we have the freedom to tell the kinds of stories that mean the most to us.
Or, as Dustin put it in an interview after Double or Nothing:
Listen, man: I got out of Papillon. I made it out of prison. And it feels good to know there’s a life outside of WWE. It feels good, man! New life for everybody. [WWE] better be on its toes.
Cody vs Dustin isn’t an ending. It isn’t about a brother killing his brother, or about the new generation destroying the old generation, or even about the destruction of one company at the hands of another.
Instead, it’s a beginning. It’s about love, and revival, and the start of something exciting and new.
It’s about reclaiming your agency over your own story, your own name, your own self.
Denali W. is on Twitter @yarnbard, where she does not typically talk about wrestling, but she welcomes conversation about all forms of storytelling.
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