If I were booking the local wrestling show, I’d build the entire narrative around the female referee at this point. She’s a whole narrative universe. On the surface of it, she is a damsel in distress; in the subtext, she is a professional woman facing a moral dilemma foisted upon her by the men who depend on her. Lady Stripes found herself reluctantly thrust into the spotlight a couple months ago when her beloved babyface…
Tag: heel
The storyline is heating up at the little wrestling promotion where I used to ring announce and am now a smarky gonzo journalist in the audience. The top referee in the company is a woman. Her love, the embattled babyface, proposed to her in the ring after a big show last month, right after he finally won the championship. As she held his hand up to affirm that he was the winner, he pulled her…
Who are we, as wrestling fans, and what have we lost? It’s March 28, 1962, in Los Angeles, California. It’s a Wednesday night at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, just south of Downtown, the famous arena about which Charles Bukowski once wrote, “the gallery boys went ape and the fighters fought like fighters and the place was blue with cigar smoke, and how we screamed, baby baby, and threw money and drank our whiskey.” That night…
After I tweeted my last post On Heels That Should Be Faces and Faces That Should Be Heels, Twitter user @StigsVegCousin asked me to explain how I would book a Cena/Rusev double turn — Cena to heel and Rusev to face — which I alluded to in my post. I appreciated the challenge because really I’m just a chick who shoots my mouth off over here, throwing out my literary ideas about wrestling to see…
Is anybody doing analytics on the number of cell phone lighter apps people are putting up for Bray Wyatt? Some nights it’s stunning. Doesn’t this count for something? Bray Wyatt is amazing. Can we set him up on some kind of sensible narrative trajectory? Couldn’t he aim toward a Jake the Snake-style babyface run? I remember the Jake the Snake of my junior high years was the same exact crazy dark madman as babyface or…
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,…
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,…
I see a rather interesting place that this could go — John Cena finds himself in a quandary. He will somehow be in a position “to play the role of hero while everything around him burns,” as Bray Wyatt described him, and what will be burning is Roman Reigns. Will he sacrifice the belt or let Roman Reigns burn? The answer to this question will determine the next step for his character. If he doesn’t…
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…