One of the most exhilarating types in wrestling to watch is He Who Cannot Be Kept Down. The Comeback Kid, we might call him. We now have this in Roman Reigns. We’ve needed one of these for a long time. Not Daniel Bryan — he is the underdog. We need the persecuted hero who always prevails in the end. These are difficult times, aren’t they? We’re prone to following false prophets, like Bray Wyatt. We…
Category: Wrestling Theory & Criticism
I think many wrestling fans who were watching that night more than a decade ago remember when Brock Lesnar said “Where’s Funaki?” It became something of a cult meme, and that was back when only the most effete intellectuals I knew were calling things memes. Why was this tiny moment so memorable to us? Brock Lesnar was so scary when he debuted! He was a snarling, teeth-gnashing, bicep-flexing meat-headed monster, a goon who would beat…
The following notes I composed before having a chance to watch Payback. I just can’t keep up with all of this archetyp-y goodness. It will be interesting to see if my thoughts are still relevant after the big showdown. John Cena: man of the people, street poet, ever a baby face, literally and figuratively. Up until now, I’ve never had much to say about him. I don’t dislike the man; populist folk heroes just aren’t…
Oh, my dear blog. Life got away from me these past few weeks. I’ve been watching wrestling and taking notes, but the focused time to craft my posts has been hard to find, and my mind has been a thousand places. There are so many things to say — about Lana the post-modern nationalist heel, about Stephanie, the most brilliant McMahon yet, about my thug heartthrob Dean Ambrose — and wrestling keeps charging ahead as…
I didn’t mean to let my beloved lit-smark blog go dormant the past couple weeks. I’ve just had my mind blown by Lana and her flashing of Vladimir Putin’s big head across the jumbotron, and her talking about Edward Snowden and sanctions. Lana as a WWE nationalist heel is a Soviet era cartoon stereotype, a throwback to the era of wrestling that coincided with the cold war. A petite bombshell in a power suit with…
Back around junior high I was mesmerized by Ultimate Warrior’s energy and his epic hero-sounding soliloquies, like Henry V or somebody, only older, more tribal, a Beowulf or Gilgamesh, or maybe or one of those young upstarts in Greek Mythology who charges in to fight the monster and conquers despite all odds. For his gimmick was, on the face of it, a little difficult to take seriously. But what of it? He fucking shook those…
“Over” is interesting. “Over” is what happens when you finally get there. You’re over when you succeed, when you’ve won the support of the crowd. Triple H, who my smark friends think is killing wrestling, has actually worked “over” into his gimmick. He’s called “The Game”, and his entrance video says “Game Over”, inverting that phrase into a new definition, away from its video game, Aliens 2 meaning of “Game over, man! Game over!” As…
Jeff Hardy’s T-shirt captured our attention over the past few weeks. It was old, well laundered, sleeves cut off, with a picture of himself from his early days as a wrestler. Why invoke the past, we wondered, as brother Matt Hardy surges forward in his new gimmick: “Matt Hardy Version One: Mattitute!” Meanwhile Jeff sinks deeper into his body-painted, black-lit alternative gimmick, descending, as Mr. Devin Andrews noted, into an almost aboriginal aesthetic. (Who knew…