After last night, Dean Ambrose might be my favorite wrestler of all time. Oh, the hilarity! I am hopelessly in love. That man is a brilliant character. I thank the gods he did not go softly into the lunatic fringe. I will say I was concerned — he was on the verge of becoming a one dimensional madman, and wrestling has a history of turning promising characters into simplistic types. But suddenly he appeared composed,…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
I couldn’t help but feel that the veil of kayfabe was wavering as John Cena railed against Paul Heyman on RAW Monday night. There was a tremble and a fervor in Cena’s voice as he laid out his grievances: he shows up and works hard every day even if he doesn’t feel like it because he “loves this place,” and where’s the respect? We may have been seeing real emotion there, his frustration as he…
In a Divas division stocked primarily with vacant hotties, Paige and AJ are finally telling an honest catfight story. Most of WWE’s divas are delightful performers, but as actresses they lack depth of character. They are straightforward male fantasies – cheerleaders, bimbos, silly pretty girls, etc. – all of which is fine, a perk for wrestling’s target audience, but this sort of character struggles to ascend beyond the confines of the male gaze into literary…
Fully embracing his inner Hamlet… Ok interweb, have fun with this one.. #lifewouldbebetterif I turned heel. @twitter feed crash in 3….2….. — John Cena (@JohnCena) July 25, 2014 Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to step aside for Roman Reigns or vindicate Bray Wyatt. That is the question!
Well now, this is rather interesting: Disgusted. @TheDailyShow talks of blah blah blah… Propaganda. Moving on. — LANA (@LanaWWE) July 23, 2014 So WWE apologizes for Lana’s insensitive remark about the plane crash, meanwhile Lana herself dismisses the controversy with a swift tweet, and manages to sneak in a dig at Jon Stewart. Propaganda, ouch! The truth hurts! Wouldn’t it be fair to describe what he does over there at the Daily Show as “agitprop”?…
John Cena had this to say on Twitter just now: You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villian.True or not I am and have always been me.Thru crisis or triumph #nevergiveup — John Cena (@JohnCena) July 22, 2014 I can see he recognizes his own hero problem, which I have written so much about. To be a heel or not to be a heel, that is the question! And earlier,…
Just a few thoughts that arose from the results of Battleground, because things are moving so quickly that RAW has already changed everything! I was happy to see Rusev dominate that knucklehead Jack Swagger. Hopefully this will keep Lana’s mean girl foreign policy lectures in the mix a while longer. And really, how could she not allude to the plane crash in Ukraine? Lana’s whole purpose as a character is to comment on this stupid…
I really just want to add an addendum to my last post about my frustrations with the Bray Wyatt character. I caught in the replay a segment I had missed from Smackdown, in which Bray Wyatt accused Chris Jericho of having promised to always be there for his fans, and then abandoning them. To which I say, really dude? This is the best they can do with a character they build to such grand heights?…
Imagine the narrative complexity of the fatal fourway that awaits us at Battlground on Sunday. Any man can pin any man and become the champion. At first it will start more or less as two against two. But then it will start to break down, there will have to be a parallel storyline outside the ring. Cain will most likely turn on Randy Orton, that much has been telegraphed. There will be battles within battles.…
Lana is a character who can fill a stadium with ironies that refuse to resolve themselves. She lectures us, America, about our tendency to always solve our problems with violence, that we are saviors who cannot save ourselves. She likes to tell us that our country is crumbling, warns that pride always comes before the fall. Mean girl as she is, she’s not wrong about these things. Then, inverting her lecture into a ruthless satire,…