The Intro
An interesting week in the world of wrestling. Punk got ’squashed’ by The Undertaker and allegedly has heat with management again, Matt Hardy acted like a dick and blamed internet fans, AJ Styles and Matt Morgan signed contract extensions, and I told Matt Jackson via Twitter that I intend to start a Young Bucks chant at Jeff Hardy’s arraignment.

Meanwhile, Raw was actually a good show this week, I’m struggling to remember what happened on Smackdown, I vividly recall chuckling to myself at Christian’s team psyching themselves up before the big ECW eight-man tag (told you Goldust had comic talents), and Impact wasn’t repeated on Saturday morning so I didn’t see it. There was a PPV in there somewhere as well, but I didn’t order it and I’m glad. It didn’t (and doesn’t) sound very interesting. Not many WWE events do lately.

Can you even imagine sixty minutes of Cena/Orton? Hype Man John called it the match of matches, but then he also called this a rivalry for the ages, when the reality has been less rivalry and more weird B-movie with disturbing S&M overtones.

Speaking of movies…

The Results

Don’t ever tell me I don’t know how to segue from topical musings to poll results, my young friends. You’d be hard-pressed to find transitions like that in a John Cena match. That said, Cena apparently has a hell of a lot more fans than I do, and nobody really wanted to talk about this wrestling movie thing, with the majority of vocal respondents feeling that either Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is the quintessential cinematic rendering of the business, or that – heck – wrestling is its own narrative form, rendering movies about it pointless.

I beg to differ on both counts, which is good. We wouldn’t have much of a column if I didn’t.

The Analysis
A stupid comedy that exposes the business/It’s already been done, baby. Hogan and Zeus. Yeah – 5%
Leaving aside The Wrestler for a minute (and I suppose I should point out that I’m referring to the 2008 release as there was a film by the same name released in 1974, starring the likes of Verne Gagne and Don Muraco. Apparently, it’s not half bad), these two options do a pretty good job of covering the entire spectrum of pro wrestling movies. By ‘entire spectrum’, I mean No Holds Barred and Ready To Rumble, the only other two flicks about pro wrestling to achieve any degree of success.

In No Holds Barred, Hulk Hogan and Zeus pretty much play themselves with an eighty minute build-up to show how badass they are before a climactic battle that ends when Zeus is apparently killed (or at least badly injured). I’d only seen this film once before re-watching it for the purposes of writing this column, and I was surprised to find myself laughing throughout, occasionally to the point where – red-faced and with tears streaming down my cheeks – I had to pause it. This movie is a fucking masterpiece. From Hogan causing a limo driver to literally shit himself in terror to Zeus making his entrance by smashing through a wall with his bare hands before palming a waitress’s entire head and tossing her aside like Evan Bourne, it has everything. If it wasn’t for the fact that I want to make a serious argument at some point before I sign off this week, I’d end the column right here.

Ready To Rumble, on the other hand, is a moronic, insulting piece of crap with literally no redeeming features whatsoever. I want to say that in another decade or so I’ll be able to sit down and watch this flick and feel the same giddy glee I did during No Holds Barred, but the sad fact of the matter is, you’d have to tie me to a chair and pin my eyelids open to make me sit through it again.

So No Holds Barred flies only as an ironic watch, preferably in a room full of friends and well in your cups. Ready To Rumble, the archetypal stupid comedy that exposes the business, flies like…well…David Arquette as world champion.

A fan’s journey, where the star isn’t retarded in some way/Other – 16%
I think a wrestling fan’s journey could make for a very interesting film. I deliberately inserted that caveat about the star not being retarded because Ready To Rumble is, in many senses, about a fan’s journey. And since the vast majority of pro wrestling fans are drooling vegetables, it’s probably not as inaccurate as I’d like it to be.

No, a fan movie would have to be directed by someone genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about professional wrestling, rather than somebody who wants to make a movie about what dickheads wrestling fans are. It could be a movie about the connection between performer, promotion, and fan, and about all the memorable moments wrestling is capable of delivering, both good and bad. It could be a movie about friendship (two of my strongest friendships were cemented by shared wrestling fandom) and all of the ridiculous conversations and arguments wrestling fans have with each other. In the hands of a talented writer, that kind of thing is gold. It could be a movie about some of the things I’ve written about in the column these last few weeks, like things that embarrass us as fans or how we cope when guys like Benoit and Guerrero die, knowing that we support a business littered with such casualties. It could be one of these things or all of these things. It could be a very cool movie.

On the subject of both death and things that embarrass us as fans, and just as an aside, one of the things I find hugely embarrassing both in the forums and from some of the columnists here at IP are the jokes about Guerrero and Benoit and whoever else. I don’t know if it’s a coping mechanism or an attention-seeking thing or if they genuinely think it’s funny, but I cringe every time I see it. I know, I know…if I don’t like it, don’t read it, but it really bothers me when it’s guys who are otherwise intelligent or talented or funny or even all three. Trust me, you’re either trying way too hard or you’re nowhere near as witty and withering as you think you are. Give us all a break.

Oops, got a little preachy there. Hey, if you don’t like it, don’t read it, right?

Onto other…

Iain Burnside and kromadas mentioned an HBO show about the business. I did some research and came up with the apparently greenlit series Everybody Hurts, which is/was being developed by Norman Lear (a well-regarded TV director once attached to both The Jeffersons and All In The Family) and Aaron Blitzstein (has worked on Letterman and The Riches and was apparently once a marketing guy for WCW). Information on the status of the project is a year old, so I really have no idea if it’s still alive or not. However, it was to feature a family promoting a wrestling business out of New York in the Seventies. I did manage to drop a line to Mr. Blitzstein to ask him whether or not the idea had been canned, but I haven’t heard back yet. I’ll share the information as soon as I do. It does sound like an interesting concept, though, and given HBO’s reputation for producing strong drama, it really has a shot at being something special.

Providing, of course, it still exists.

AFN mentioned that he thought John Carpenter’s They Live was the greatest wrestling movie ever made. This was countered by kromadas, who stated that it merely had the best wrestling scene ever. I went ahead and found said scene so you can judge for yourself. I count suplexes of the back and gut-wrench variety, plus a drop toehold and some kind of sideslam thing, which ain’t much for a five minute fight scene. Granted, it’s more than your average Randy Orton match, but I’m not sure it qualifies as a wrestling scene. Great B-movie that They Live is (and if you haven’t seen it, consider that a Poll Position recommendation that you go rent or buy it), it’s not a wrestling flick.

A sobering drama that exposes the business – 26%
I rarely venture out to the movies these days. The ever-decreasing gap between cinematic and DVD releases and my horror at the thought of being in a crowded movie theater means I’m more than happy to wait a while to see the vast majority of films I’m interested in. It’s only if I really want to something that I’ll go.

See, I get the idea behind watching movies with a bunch of friends and making a social event out of it. I even recommended it further up the page. What I don’t get is doing it with a movie you’ve never seen before. Why go out and spend ten bucks on something you know you’re not actually going to appreciate because you’re going to be talking to your friends the whole time? Why not just hang out at the mall or whatever? More to the point, why waste my ten bucks by constantly interrupting the experience with your bullshit? I am capable of frightening levels of anger when I feel I am being fucked with. If you ruin my movie, I will get my ten dollars back, and it will come from your wallet, probably as you lay unconscious in the aisle.

Which was not the actual point I was trying to make, but it gets us there. I went out and saw Zombieland this past weekend, and District 9 the weekend before that. Prior to this veritable festival of movie theater attendance, the last film I cared enough to go out and watch was The Wrestler.

I liked it. I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you that The Wrestler is a poor movie. It’s overrated, has way too much drag for such a short film, and has far less substance than it wants you to believe, but it holds the attention, contains some strong performances, and it’s an interesting and relevant look at the fringes of the professional wrestling business.

What I don’t get is this idea that its very existence negates the need for any other serious films about wrestling. Surely the opposite is true. For me as a viewer and as a wrestling fan, the one thing that really makes The Wrestler a good movie is that you ultimately come away with a greater understanding of Rourke’s character and his motivations than you had at the start, and hence a greater understanding of the role professional wrestling plays in the lives of both performers and fans.

I was stunned when WWE became involved in the promotion of the film, though. Here is a movie openly depicting the abuse of steroids, HGH, and painkillers by professional wrestlers at a time when the topic remains an open wound for the promotion, and yet they’re talking about what a great film it is. All for the sake of a celebrity crossover angle at Wrestlemania? I don’t think so.

The gap that The Wrestler bridges so effectively is really the final frontier for professional wrestling. Call it understanding, call it acceptance, call it legitimacy, but it’s the one that WWE are desperate to cross. Kayfabe is gone, realism is compromised with an acknowledgement on one side that wrestling is fake and an acknowledgement that these guys get hurt on the other, so what’s left? The idea that the business of wrestling is genuine, that there’s a reason these guys do what they do, that they make real sacrifices to get to the top and that it’s real talent that gets them there.

The public perception of wrestling is a long way from that point. The professional wrestling business continues to be ridiculed in the mainstream press and viewed as a sideshow full of freaks. WWE spends a lot of time and money trying to reverse this trend to little avail. It’s strange when you think about it. The Wrestler and Beyond The Mat go together in the sense that both show the inherent ridiculousness and negativity of the industry, yet carry an ultimate message of loving it anyway. They are the two most well-received and critically-acclaimed media about pro wrestling of the last decade, and both – in their own way – did more for the business than its own spin.

In this era of reality shows, where newer media forms like Twitter are increasingly closing the distance between subject and fan, perhaps that idea represents a golden opportunity for the wrestling business (particularly the WWE) to come in from the cold. And wouldn’t that be something? The red-headed stepchild of the entertainment industry throwing open its doors, blowing away the last traces of a dead era, and emerging as the Something Different Vince McMahon has been trying to make it for the last twenty-five years.

I’ve deliberately taken a left-turn into outrageous speculation here because the power of The Wrestler (and of Beyond The Mat) cannot be denied, nor can it be written off as something that will never be replicated. The Wrestler, as a story, barely scratches the surface of this industry. It’s really only about one washed-up wrestler who can’t walk away. Do you realize how many other stories could be told? I’m not talking about replicating storylines (as Aaron Glazer pointed out, wrestling has its own fictions), I’m talking about stories that focus on an aspect of the business or use biographical stories as a springboard into fiction. We don’t need an epidemic of such films, but not only is there room for more, they would be beneficial to the wrestling business and to us as fans.

The tale of a performer who makes it to the top without flaming out in an explosion of drug abuse – 32%
As far as the Poll Position Public is concerned, the best idea for a wrestling movie would be a feelgood flick. While I don’t necessarily agree, I like the idea. Getting back to The Wrestler, despite what works about it in both a storytelling and a wider cultural sense, it really is a very negative film. Intellectually speaking, I’m a fan of films with a more cynical take on life because they tend to get closer to the truth, which is – for me, anyway – what good art is all about. Thing is, I don’t always want art. Sometimes I want to laugh, sometimes I want to be scared, sometimes I want to cry, and sometimes I want to feel inspired. I’m not going to apologize for that because I’m a cynical internet wrestling columnist and I’m supposed to be shitting on the product and putting myself over. As I’ve stated before, my belief is that wrestling is about the moments that transcend. Talking about John Cena’s lack of wrestling acumen can absolutely be fun, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in all that bullshit and descend into self parody. Most wrestling columnists do. Nature of the business.

This, I think, is more along the lines of what Glazer was talking about when he made that comment about things working in their chosen field and not needing to switch media. And he’s right. Why do I need to watch a ‘boyhood dream’ story about wrestling when the same story has been used as an angle so many times?

I’m torn on that point. After all, my favorite wrestling moment was Benoit winning the belt at Wrestlemania XX. In fact, I loved that whole storyline. Benoit was my favorite performer, I’d been watching him for over a decade, and I didn’t really think he was actually going to win the belt. In those few moments at the end of that match, from the point Benoit rolled Triple H away from the ropes to the point Hunter tapped, I was a believer again. I was at the house of one of my best friends, both of us longtime fans and cynics, and we were on our feet, yelling for the submission.

How bitter a memory that seems now, in light of all that followed. I’m not one of those idiots whose hysterical frothing outrage at Benoit The Child Killer shows just how effective media spin is, but neither am I someone who can sit down and actually watch a Benoit match without feeling very strange and uncomfortable.

It’s all tied together. The wrestling business has to change because the place it sits in right now leaves no room for that kind of ‘mark-out moment’. Wrestlemania XX is the ultimate extreme example, but when I think back, I can’t actually recall one transcendent moment in my fandom that hasn’t somehow been spoiled since.

Movies have a knack of retaining magic that professional wrestling doesn’t possess.

The Position
Gotta go with sobering drama this week, for reasons I hope I adequately explained in yet another of these giant fucking essays I seem unable to get under control. I hope you guys are enjoying the battle, though, and I wanted to say thanks again for the compliments and encouragement. That what I’m attempting to do with Poll Position is appreciated by a much larger group of people than I’d expected is both flattering and lends validation to the opinion that, like the business it deals with, internet wrestling journalism can be something better than its reputation.

The Pimpage
I will continue to pimp Wheeler’s For Your Consideration… recaps of Raw for as long as they continue to be this good.

If you like podcasts, check out Widro and Ziegler discussing Raw, ECW, HIAC, and Bobby Lashley.

Vin Tastic draws some interesting comparisons between ROH and the old ECW.

The Future
Fuck it, we have danced around this issue for long enough, and it’s still something that bothers me pretty much every time his name comes up. Next week’s Poll Position sets phasers to full-tilt boogie as I ask: What Do You Think About Chris Benoit?