Category: Wrestling Theory & Criticism

October 1, 2018 /

I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down in the movie theater to watch “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” the new movie starring Hiroshi Tanahashi and a host of other NJPW wrestlers. Considering it had NJPW’s official stamp of approval, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be pulling the curtain aside to show wrestlers calling their matches and bookers deciding who was going over whom. And it was a children’s movie,…

September 10, 2018 /

I reach out and rest my hands on the barricade in front of me. Dan and I are in Brooklyn for SummerSlam 2018, and we’re in the very front row, on the end, right at the stairs to the ring. The crowd roars and rustles around me, and I cheer with delight as Seth Rollins wins the Intercontinental championship, groan with disappointment as the Bludgeon Brothers retain their titles. There’s a lot on the card…

August 11, 2018 /

Few professional wrestlers today embody the word “contradiction” more than Darby Allin.  Indeed, Darby’s two-year journey into the world of independent professional wrestling is best understood as a series of contradictions between, on one side, his personal wrestling aesthetic and accompanying skater culture-infused world-view, and on the other, the wrestling business’s well-established rules and conventions.  These puzzling contradictions, held together in dialectical tension, shape and inform exciting possibilities about what independent professional wrestling can be.  Perhaps,…

July 30, 2018 /

My first love in wrestling was John Morrison. No, that’s not strictly correct. My first love was Starship Pain, his finisher: a flashy split-legged corkscrew moonsault, the first move I ever learned the name of. But over time I realized that it wasn’t the flashiness of it that I loved. When you took away the extra twists and the split-legged flip, the bells and whistles and glitz and glitter, what I loved at the heart…

June 11, 2018 /

It’s December 2016, and I’m at my second New Japan show. I know barely anything about any of the wrestlers, it’s all a buzz of new names and styles. The main event is a tag match, and the first wrestler to the ring is someone who goes by EVIL (in English, in all caps), carrying a scythe and wearing a purple and black velour robe. He is quite possibly the most extra wrestler I have…

May 28, 2018 /

Wrestling exists in a constant state of tension between dependence and independence, with storylines that are constantly playing out that anxiety, running through the options over and over. When is it wise to rely on others and when is it smart to walk away on your own? Seth Rollins betrays his brothers to achieve the pinnacle of success, but later admits the victory is hollow. Even worse, there’s the nagging suspicion he only traded in…

April 23, 2018 /

Telling a story in wrestling is basically like writing a play. Except that each scene is performed in front of a different audience, days or weeks or months apart. And you only get to do each scene once—there are no second takes. And there are no understudies, each role must be played by one and only one person; you can’t say “Oh, Sami sprained his knee, so this week the role of Sami Zayn will…

April 4, 2018 /

Let me tell you a story. This is a story about Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Daniel Bryan, and Shane McMahon. Like most stories, it has a hero. But wrestling narrative is weird, because the supporting character of one story will be the hero–or the villain–of the next, so all four of these characters could be the main character, depending on how you look at it. So let’s try an experiment. What happens if we make…

March 26, 2018 /

Wrestling is palimpsestic, which is a fantastic and utterly useless word to know. In ancient Greece and Rome, a palimpsest was a wax tablet that people wrote on over and over, smoothing the wax to erase the writing before. However, the marks of the previous writings would remain slightly visible, persisting beneath the new writing like a ghost or an echo. Now it gets used in literary theory to describe texts where previous versions–that can…

March 4, 2018 /

This is the preface to an interview I tried to pull together with a Las Vegas wrestler I loved dearly back in the early days of his career at the storied and funky Ultimate Wrestling Federation. My written interviews are challenging–elsewhere in my projects I have tenured professors who are still struggling to get written interviews to me a year later–so it’s no surprise to me that as busy a man as Funnybone never got…