I’m pleased to present our first Impact analysis, and on such an important wrestling topic: shoot trauma invading kayfabe. Thanks to Rory Garon for their shrewd insight into the perilous Eddie Edwards storyline! –Andrea
You’ve probably heard about how Sami Callihan broke Eddie Edwards’s face with a baseball bat. Even people who haven’t watched a second of Impact wrestling have heard about that incident. News of injury spreads like wildfire through the world of online wrestling fandom— especially if the injury occurred in risky or reckless circumstances. What is less usual is the way this incident has impacted Eddie’s character from that point forward. While it’s not unusual for wrestlers’ real injuries to form the focus of their return, the standard model is for the injured party to get justice and move on. Eddie, on the other hand, has spent over a year exploring the isolation, anger, and loss of identity that can take over a person’s life when neither of those things is possible.
Eddie wrestles like a man with a giant hole in his life that he doesn’t really understand and can’t even fully acknowledge, but he is still incredibly sympathetic. He walks the balancing act now where he is divorced from traditional morality—his actions aren’t clearly “in the right,” but he’s clearly not the villain—dragging the audience along as his companion into darker and darker depths. We’re there with him: we understand his anger even as it rips his old life apart. He’s right on the crossroads of who we want to be and who we’re afraid we already are. It’s uncomfortable at times, but it means exploring the actual negative effects of experiencing violence, without jumping to the cheap conclusion that trauma makes people evil.
It might seem odd to find such weighty meaning in a story that is full of melodrama and even cheesy moments, but in some ways the melodrama is what allows for the exploration of such dark subjects without contact becoming overwhelming. Furthermore, most people who struggle with mental health and recovering from physical and psychological trauma are aware that their responses seem disproportionate and lunatic to others. By turning up the dial on that feeling, what we see is not the reality of how traumatized people behave but the phenomenological experience of how trauma isolates you from your support system by making you incomprehensible to the people you want desperately to turn to for support and understanding.
It all began with an accident.
On a taping that would air in the spring of 2018, Eddie Edwards’s eye was legitimately smashed by a baseball bat in a post-match beatdown from Sami Callihan on Impact. Because this is professional wrestling, Eddie was already on camera as he walked to the ambulance, promising to return—promising to get revenge. Obviously, Eddie isn’t the first person to be injured in wrestling, but the viscerality of being hit with a baseball bat and nearly losing an eye really hits home for people. It’s uncomfortably close to the kind of violence us non-wrestlers might have to deal with: I’m not particularly worried about being suplexed in a dark alley, but being caught unarmed and beaten bloody by someone with a weapon is well within the realm of possibility. While Eddie was away, the man who injured him, Sami Callihan, displayed all manner of baseness: he started selling a shirt referencing the event, he went on TMZ so he could refuse to apologize, he soaked up the hate of at least half the wrestling world on Twitter. Meanwhile, Eddie spent his time quietly recovering at home, gathering his strength to fulfill his promise.
However, when Eddie made his triumphant return, things didn’t exactly go according to plan. See Sami Callihan was no ordinary bat-wielding lunatic—he was halfway between gang and cult leader and never went anywhere without two of his goons to back him up. Eddie is always outnumbered. If he wins a match, it’s by disqualification because one of Callihan’s goons gets the jump on him. So Eddie tries to take it up a notch—he demands an “I Quit” match, a match with no rules that goes on until one of the people quits. However, Eddie was still outnumbered. He refused to quit but was beaten down so severely that the owner of the company threw in the towel for him. Eddie tried to even the odds by getting a three on three match with his friends, hardcore legend Tommy Dreamer and Moose, against Callihan and his Ohio goons, but Tommy Dreamer ended up losing the match for them.
This is when things really started to go wrong for Eddie. See, the problem with trial by combat is that sometimes the wrong person wins. Sometimes, through no fault of your own, your chance at conventional and socially-acceptable justice slips away. But Eddie couldn’t let go. This is, in fact, a common response to traumas, both large and small. The experience of not feeling that you’ve received justice for the wrongs you have done, that your suffering is not recognized or understood, actually compounds the hurt done by the original incident and makes it harder for people to move forward with their lives. Eddie lost out on getting justice the old-fashioned way, in a match, so he tried to make his own. He taped Callihan to the ropes and beat him bloody with a kendo stick. It was only when his wife, Alisha, tried to intervene and Eddie inadvertently knocks her out that the shock of accidentally harming someone he cared about turned him from his violent revenge, at least temporarily.
As both Alisha and Callihan recuperated in the hospital, Eddie continued to spiral out of control. His rage was now directed both outward and inward and he was afraid of becoming more and more like Callihan, but he couldn’t let go of his anger either—especially when everything else in his life was falling apart. Eddie was sent to prison for attacking Callihan. Alisha moved out. Eddie tries to murder Callihan in the woods. In some ways, it’s pure melodrama, but the emotional core is a very real and very visceral thing. People who are handling their mental health poorly are often deeply and painfully aware of that fact. It’s a really scary thing to no longer see yourself in the person you were before whatever traumatic incident took hold—and to not particularly like who you’ve become in the process of surviving it. You might not be running around the woods at night trying to stab people with cow skulls—but you’re aware of seeming almost as crazy to an outside observer.
In the midst of all this chaos, Eddie’s mentor Tommy Dreamer tried to get Eddie to lay aside his quest for revenge—one that at this point seemed to be driven as much by Eddie’s hatred and fear of who he was becoming as it was by his desire to settle the score with Callihan. Tommy said that he knew what it was like to be consumed by rage and a desire for revenge, referencing his past rivalry with Raven. What we know now, but did not know then, is that apparently Tommy Dreamer’s experience with rage and violence is even more personal than that. Dreamer has since gone public saying that he contemplated committing murder-suicide live on pay-per-view because of the betrayal and hopelessness he felt from his treatment in ECW. It was thanks to a call from JR reminding Dreamer that people cared about him that he was able to stop himself. Speaking through the double filter of his ECW feud with Raven and Eddie’s continuing feud with Callihan, Dreamer was perhaps drawing on that experience when he told Eddie that there was no good outcome on the path he was going down and asked him to move on. As the live audience took up the chant of “move on, move on, move on,” Eddie fell to his knees sobbing in the middle of the ring.
This moment is at the heart of what Eddie has been doing for the past year. His quest for revenge and redemption has been a failure at every turn. Eddie doesn’t get to have his hand held high & vanquish his foe—Callihan is moving on because he knows that Eddie will destroy himself. Eddie’s friends and family also care about him enough to prevent him from committing murder—and he can see how his inability to get past this is hurting them. But he still can’t just move on from it.
This is the sad fact of trauma: it might make you stronger in some ways, but surviving violence—especially when you’re denied systematic justice in the aftermath—can change you permanently, and not for the better. There is something particularly maddening about watching people’s sympathy for the horrible and life-altering event you have been through rot away into frustration and confusion when you aren’t getting better fast enough. There is also something particularly horrifying about realizing that you keep being terrible to the people you care about—lashing out or neglecting them—and you don’t even really know why. There is the temptation, once you’ve already done something you hate yourself for, to go ahead and just do something even worse—to accept that you’re a bad person and ride that out.
Miraculously, Eddie seemed to come through this and start putting his life back together. He couldn’t go back to who he was before—“Mr. Anything is Possible”—he was weird and crazy, he named his kendo stick and started talking to it, but he was able to reconcile with his wife and mentor, and re-focus on his career. Things were looking up! For a moment it looked like we’re going to get an odd little morality play on how Yes, You Too can come out the other side of trauma, odd but intact, with the help of your family and friends. As with Tommy Dreamer’s ECW experience, perhaps the timely intervention of trusted friends was going to help Eddie to get his life back on track and avoid making a horrible and irreversible choice.
But this is pro-wrestling. There is no happy ending because there is no ending. When Eddie went out and wrestled for the Impact World Championship, a sign he was finally starting to rebuild his life and move toward healthier goals, his best friend Moose betrayed him and cost him the match. The reason? According to Moose, Eddie was too busy being crazy and in jail to even bother to check on him when he was hospitalized with a concussion. Now, Moose has since revealed himself to be a self-centered cad, so we should probably assume that this isn’t the whole truth. Nonetheless, it is once again Eddie’s inability to move on that has come back to haunt him and it’s telling that Moose’s justification for his behavior is so similar to Eddie’s own experience. Once again, Eddie realizes that his focus on anger and revenge has made him act like a terrible person and a bad friend. This time, Eddie actually tries to apologize but it turns out to be too little, too late.
Moose, it turns out, was not just mad at Eddie’s callousness. He decided that he had toiled in obscurity for too long and that if no one else would sing his praises, he’d do it himself. Moose’s new persona was characterized by a self-aggrandizing demeanor, frequent womanizing, and an ostentatiously flashy wardrobe. In short, he became a douche. Not content with mere douchebaggery, he kidnapped Eddie’s wife, coerced her into committing Eddie to a mental institution and, perhaps most disastrously, he introduced Eddie into the orbit of Killer Kross. Kross, who made his debut in Impact by secretly attacking members of the roster one by one, is a man who lives in his own dystopia and is determined to drag everyone else down there with him, and soon his sights would be set on Eddie. In the short term, Moose’s betrayal brought Eddie and Alisha closer together: having been through a traumatic experience of her own, she had first-hand knowledge of Eddie’s anger and desire for revenge. However, it also set off a chain of events that destabilized Eddie even further.
Through the Looking Glass
The events following the feud with Moose crossed another threshold in Eddie’s evolution as a character from unhinged hero to full-on, ultraviolent wolf-man. Once Moose was defeated by the joint effort of Eddie and Alisha, it seemed like things were settling into a more comfortable pattern again, where Eddie was the affable weirdo of Impact Wrestling. But if there’s one thing we learn again and again from Eddie’s story it’s that there is no going back. And, unfortunately, there was no staying put either. Just when it seemed like Eddie was getting his life back on track, making new friends, and maybe getting back to doing that whole tag team thing he used to love so much, it all fell apart again. Eddie kept getting drawn into manipulative relationships and ultimately abandoned by people he trusted. After Moose turned on him, he befriended Eli Drake. Drake turned on him and vanished. Then, worst of all, Killer Kross started drawing him in.
Again, this is a moment of painful truth that shines through the work Eddie has been doing: all of the manipulators on the Impact roster set their sights on Eddie, sensing his psychological instability and tried to turn him to their advantage. This is when you remember that Eddie was predominantly known for years and years as a tag team wrestler. Even after that, he always had his friends and family around him. As he lost those, either through betrayal or because they are no longer able to understand him, Eddie invested himself more and more in his relationship with his inanimate kendo stick, Kenny. What was initially a way out of his obsession with Sami Callihan became an obsession in turn, and a kind of escape from the demands and risks that a friendship with a real human being would make on him. As is so often the case in the wider world, people with ill-intent picked up on Eddie’s vulnerability and targeted him because of it.
Killer Kross was determined to remove this escape and see what Eddie would become without it. After breaking Kenny, Kross attacked Eddie and tried, in the words of JG Ballard, to ‘rub the human face in its own vomit and then force it to look in the mirror.’ Kross was convinced that Eddie’s truest self was a violent maniac.
Impact has been using mirror imagery a lot over the past year to show us the “dark sides” of characters. The mirror gave us the first glimpse of a demonic Allie—presaging the soulless entity she would become; it also showed us Eddie’s fear of becoming Sami Callihan. So Kross brandishing the mirror at Eddie not only hinted at Kross’s underlying worldview—he sees the darkest possible reflection of a person as the “truth” they keep buried—it held the possibility for Eddie, who had spent the previous several months being constantly swept up in the wake of other people’s visions of him, who in fact, spent most of his career with his identity tied to someone else, to confront himself on his own terms and decide whether he liked what he saw. However, as Eddie attacked Kross, the mirror was thrown aside so we didn’t ever get a glimpse of how Eddie saw himself. He threw away any external reference point and instead ended up pulled between two people’s versions of himself: Kross’s and Alisha’s.
On the surface, it’s a pretty flat (not to mention troubling) dichotomy that they set up here: Eddie chooses between the physical fulfillment that comes in beating Kross to a bloody pulp and the emotional fulfillment that comes from his loving and stable relationship with his wife (up to this point, Alisha was the only person who has never betrayed or given up on Eddie—something that goes unacknowledged, as Eddie had already placed more trust in an inanimate object than her because what she asked of him—that he attempt to reign in his impulses—was difficult and inconvenient). The interesting thing is that, even after he decided to turn away from Alisha in order to sink his teeth into Kross, Eddie was still the beloved hero for the fans here—we WANTED him to keep going forward, no matter how dark it got. Turning back would be a betrayal of what Eddie took us through up to that point.
The next week, Eddie went to confession in a last-ditch effort to turn his life around. I was struck at this point by the fact that Eddie came from the dark wood where he tried to murder Sami Callihan and endured countless betrayals—the worst and lowest part of Hell. There is something Dantean about the journey Eddie is on and, for Catholics, the sacrament of confession is what would allow him to set foot on the shores of Purgatory and begin climbing back up. Dante, though, knows what makes Hell, Hell. In Dante’s Hell, even the devil himself could have an end to torment if he would just accept his lot—stop flapping his wings and freezing the floor and gnashing at the other traitors, if he would just stop rebelling—but he can’t and he never will. For Dante, hell is made by people continuing to choose, for eternity, the actions that bring harm and misery to themselves and others. Like Eddie, none of them can move on and so they continue “choosing” their torment for eternity.
It’s pretty rare in wrestling to see a story that has such a specific religious perspective, but it adds incredible specificity to Eddie’s moral struggle and is a moment of continuity in a sea of change: despite it all, Eddie is still at his core “Boston Man”. A confession scene also introduces one of the most challenging aspects of Catholic ethics: forgiveness. The idea that literally anyone can be absolved of their sins and genuinely, meaningfully change their life is an incredibly difficult and frightening one to grapple with for two reasons. The first and most obvious one is that we don’t want to forgive the people who have profoundly hurt us—and understandably so—or even imagine that they might be forgivable. The second is that, if forgiveness is possible, it places the burden on us to reckon with our actions and change them: no matter what, you’re never free from the burden of striving to be better. Eddie’s problem isn’t just that he doesn’t want to forgive the violence and betrayal he’s endured—it’s also that he doesn’t want to change his own life in order to bring it back in line with the moral expectations of others. In Catholic school, I was taught that medieval people believed that someone could become a werewolf if he didn’t go to confession for ten years. Eddie may or may not be a literal werewolf, but he is certainly a case study in how isolation and a lack of meaningful or helpful support from a person’s social and religious community can turn a person into a beast—or at least make them feel like they’ve become one.
So it came as no surprise when Killer Kross showed up in Eddie’s church, drove Eddie out, and perverted the sacrament of confession by using it as an opportunity to brag about his wrongdoing. This left Eddie without sanctuary—isolated from his family and friends, driven away from his religion, he found himself situated outside of both morality and good sense. He beat Kross, sacrificing Kenny the kendo stick in the process, not for a title or a pinfall, but for blood, and was cheered the entire way. Eddie is feral and, like the children rumored to be raised by wolves, some part of the audience cannot help but to romanticize and celebrate his freedom from social convention. Of course, with those children this “freedom” was, in fact, the only option available to them as they had been rendered illegible, unintelligible, and irreparably damaged not by the parenthood of animals but by the neglect and abuse done to them by humans.
From the outside, people often tend to view mental health and trauma through the lens of crisis management. This is understandable since an individual in crisis demands immediate attention. However, from the perspective of the person experiencing it, your problems are not a series of spontaneously occurring crises. Rather, they often seem the inevitable outcome of the situations you find yourself in. As bizarre and overblown as they seem to others, your actions make sense to you at the time.
This story is ongoing and is, at its core, a story about Eddie having lost his identity. How can you be “Mr. Anything Is Possible” when you know the one thing that is absolutely not possible is going back to who you were before? There’s a version of this story where Eddie learns to live with his anger and rebuild his life. However, for that version to play out, he would need stability and support in his life. Unfortunately, things seem to be sliding further into chaos. Just as Killer Kross smelled blood in the water (or rather… emotional and psychological vulnerability in Eddie Edwards), a new and equally alliterative villain has set his sights on Eddie. Ace Austin—a cross between Gambit from the X-Men and a Pick Up Artist—has decided that the best way to beat Eddie is to “bang his wife.” By gaslighting Eddie and deceiving Alisha, Austin has managed to strike at the core of the one stable relationship remaining in Eddie’s life, a relationship that was already vulnerable because of Eddie’s decision to isolate himself and choose the society of manipulators and friends of his own invention because it was easier. Ace Austin may have stirred the pot and produced a blowout worthy of any soap opera, but the heart of the problem remains what it has always been. Eddie, once a man who was part of an inseparable tag team (indeed, Davey Richards is something of an absent presence lurking beneath this whole story in ways I would get into, were not the thought of adding Ring of Honor continuity to the mix so incredibly daunting), has, through a mix of misfortune and his own actions, become completely isolated and incomprehensible to the people he previously relied on for support.
The truth of living with trauma is that you are living with it—it’s not something you get over in the final reel to send the audience home feeling safe, purged of uncomfortable emotions. It’s easy, and tempting, and sometimes unavoidable, to let it become a thing that (re)defines you—and part of what Eddie’s done is lead us headfirst into that temptation and show us what it looks like, the whole long and lonely road of it.
Bibliography
Working through the primary text of over a year of Impact footage proved to be a daunting enough task that there wasn’t as much space for engaging with the following texts as I would have liked, but here are some works that were on my mind as I was writing this. Since a major part of this essay is about how media literally “mediates” trauma and can help to work through it, I want to share some texts that were helpful to me in that regard.
Dante Alghieri. Divine Comedy
Jill Stauffer. Ethical Loneliness
Laura van Dernoot Lipsky & Connie Burk, Trauma Stewardship
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri. HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language
Ashley McKenzie (dir). Werewolf
Rory Garon recently finished an MA and is taking a break from being perceived. Topics of interest include: werewolves of wrestling, villainous women, Gothic and Romantic tropes, and the pleasures of continuity.
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