The Spectacle of Excess Posts

October 12, 2016 /

I noticed last night on Smackdown that at the end of the James Ellsworth/AJ Styles comedy match, Dean Ambrose was pointing menacingly at his package as a threat to AJ Styles. You can see it at the end of the clip in this here tweet: THAT'S RIGHT! @realellsworth has DEFEATED the @WWE World Champion @AJStylesOrg on #SDLive! @TheDeanAmbrose pic.twitter.com/46GCT7Mziv — WWE (@WWE) October 12, 2016 Their feud has been focused on the exchange of low blows,…

October 2, 2016 /

Dolph Ziggler cut a devastating promo on Smackdown this week, a monologue that made me cringe with guilt, that indicted us all for our callous indifference toward the hardworking eighties gimmick pretty boy. Ziggler got raw and real, characterizing wrestling as what it is in its ugliest form: a strange addiction, a pursuit that’s hard to quit, even when it’s become unhealthy and unproductive. His voice was unstable and veering into higher octaves as he…

September 23, 2016 /

You might have noticed I haven’t posted to this blog in like three months. AJ Styles has upended my theoretical stance on everything and thus, my affairs are a shambles. I’ve had to completely rebuild my worldview and it’s taken some time. I mean, I have been doing other things and not blogging, it’s true. Life has been on an extreme trajectory as of late. But in fact this hasn’t been writer’s block, I’ve written plenty,…

July 12, 2016 /

Full disclosure: I love Bad Things. I love Troll 2 and The Room and Miami Connection with a full-fat passion that’ll remain long after my skeleton melts down into crude. If something is 1.) terrible 2.) completely confident that it’s not terrible, and 3.) entertaining, I will buy a T-shirt, I will go to panels featuring whatever wildly deluded psychonaut made this thing, I will rewatch it until I lose childhood memories. As a wrestling fan, you’ll have seen…

June 23, 2016 /

Image Credit: wwe.com Haters gonna hate, as the old adage goes. But I think it’s naive and kind of patronizing to get all shocked and judgmental when it’s revealed that a wrestler, even a supposedly upstanding one like Roman Reigns, violated WWE’s wellness policy, which is a euphemism for “probably took drugs.” Now, this wellness policy is apparently overly stringent when it comes to procedural compliance (which is well articulated here in an op-ed on turnheel.com) so it’s certainly possible that Reigns somehow ran…

May 28, 2016 /

Enzo Amore is the first outspokenly anti-intellectual character in wrestling I’ve ever gotten into unironically. (I tell myself that my love of Scott Steiner promos is ironic, okay? Let me have this.) His and Cass’s feud with The Vaudevillains beautifully illustrated Enzo’s lack of interest in the academic by framing the conflict between the two groups as a clash of ideologies: the sneering, erudite Vaudevillains versus two loudmouthed Jersey jerks. When Aiden English compared Enzo’s haircut to a rodent with the…

May 28, 2016 /

The image is a sign I made for Rusev when I went to a Smackdown in Phoenix last October. Sadly I forgot it in the trunk of my rental car, but at least I took a picture. It has been a wild month here at The Spectacle of Excess. I started this blog two years ago just so I could have a space to shoot my mouth off into the void about wrestling and Shakespeare and Roland Barthes and…

May 10, 2016 /

Image Source: wwe.com For the few weeks in which the Ambrose Asylum replaced Chris Jericho’s Highlight Reel as the main roster’s centerpiece talkshow that can be depended upon to end in violence and the upending of furniture, we the people were treated to the strange spectacle of Dean Ambrose holding court with a microphone, a cardboard sign he wrote on with magic marker, and of all things, his potted plant named Mitch. A few weeks later and in…

May 3, 2016 /

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed I’ve undergone a rather dramatic heel turn as of late. It started as a Kevin Steen, had it up to here with El Generico, mental breakdown sort of heel turn. I was all like this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndreaGregovich/status/723762256303923200 You might have caught me tweeting mean comments about puppies, but my inner circle of DM hooligans witnessed a gif and swear word spectacle of Attitude Era proportions.…

April 30, 2016 /

A big welcome to guest contributor Sawyer Paul, who has laid out a thoughtful theory of a not so straightforward question: what exactly is it that makes professional wrestling “good”? Sawyer’s piece gets at the core of what we’re trying to do here at Spectacle of Excess, and that’s to clarify and celebrate the artistry of this pretend sport. So a big thanks to Sawyer (and all the other recent guest contributors) for the help keeping…