Tag: WWE

Give Me What I Want

A few weeks ago, I was watching WWE, and there was a promo segment between Batista and Triple H. Batista had just returned to wrestling after embarking on a successful Hollywood acting career in movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and was setting up a feud with his former mentor for WrestleMania. His rustiness from the business might be why he seemingly forgot all of his lines when he went on stage, which resulted in one of the most awkward verbal exchanges I’ve seen in my years of watching wrestling. For multiple minutes, all he did was yell “GIVE ME WHAT I WANT” at Triple H in his most intense wrestler delivery that sent spit all over the place. The absurdity of the promo helped it reach instant meme status.

Beyond the comical nature of the promo, what I think resonated about it was how Batista unwittingly captured the tone and tenor of fanbases in 2019, especially WWE’s, which is notorious for spending most of its time grumbling about the company’s booking decisions rather than enjoying the show. But while hardcore wrestling fans have long been known for being jaded and miserable, the “give me what I want” ethos has now spread to almost all circles of fandom via the internet. Unlimited viewing, listening, playing, and reading options have cultivated a sense of entitlement in audiences, who increasingly want their entertainment to only reflect their own personal tastes, values, and desires. A popular TV show like Game of Thrones comes with weekly episodic recaps on 240 different websites which all tediously pick apart the storytelling choices, character beats, directorial decisions, possible plot and logic holes, etc. Like wrestling, a lot of TV now is watched by groups of “smart” fans who are less invested in the story itself than in the making of the story and whether it fits their own vision for how things should go.

Thrones has been the most frustrating in this regard. This is an incredible show, with a scope and scale never before seen on TV and a roster of morally ambiguous, well-drawn characters with compelling backstories. It’s delivering spectacle with huge battles and dragons, but also is examining dark, adult subject matter like rape, abuse, suffering and redemption in a way that is far deeper than ever attempted on TV. Yet if you look to find analysis of these artistic qualities of the show, you mostly will come up empty outside of the work of a couple of dedicated writers (my favorites are Sean T. Collins and Gretchen Felker-Martin). Instead, what you get is every random writer on every website complaining about what the writers should have done instead, bemoaning choices made by characters, complaining about “problematic” elements of the script, etc. Rather than take the show for what it is and appreciate its obvious strengths (while still pointing out areas where it could be improved), I get the sense that many are going out of their way to be dissatisfied with it as it reaches its final episodes.

I’m always in favor of thinking critically about art, but this strain of fandom feels jaded, myopic, and unproductive. I don’t think most people doing this are seriously engaging with the show and what it is trying to say; they’re viewing it with an ironic detachment, snarking about minute details and completely missing the bigger picture. Everyone spends more time wondering how the characters traveled from Winterfell to King’s Landing so quickly instead of thinking about the actual overarching themes of the work. No one is obligated to enjoy Game of Thrones or all of the creative decisions of the show, but there is rarely even an attempt to engage with it in a reasonable way. So we’re in this weird situation where this show is massively popular, it’s amazing, and yet it feels almost underrated as a work of art, because so few people are even making a good faith effort to engage with and appreciate the greatness that is right in front of them.

But far from just cultivating a blasé attitude towards art, this “give me what I want” mentality also causes art to be more safe and less impactful when it’s taken seriously by creators. A few weeks ago, the creator of Bojack Horseman retweeted someone saying that shows shouldn’t depict rape for the same reason they don’t depict someone having diarrhea — because audiences don’t want to see it. It concerned me because Bojack is one of my favorite shows in part because it has made such an effort to show its audience what it doesn’t want to see. As a viewer invested in the characters, I didn’t want to see Bojack and Diane self-destruct and struggle with depression and alcoholism. But because they have, the show was able to explore mature themes about overcoming personal demons in a way that resonated and was cathartic. The version of Bojack that avoids uncomfortable topics would basically be a kid’s cartoon.

That tweeter’s hot take was almost certainly aimed somewhat at Game of Thrones, which has been notorious for its portrayals of rape and abuse towards women. A certain segment of liberal types have hounded the show with accusations of sexism for years, assuming that the on-screen depictions of violence against women are endorsements of that behavior from the makers of the show — an extremely ungenerous reading of the material that doesn’t really hold up to any reasonable interpretation. The prevailing belief seems to be that these sorts of taboo, sensitive topics should simply never be portrayed in media due to their unpleasantness. Actress Jessica Chastain recently tweeted as such, saying “Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger. A woman doesn’t need to be victimized in order to become a butterfly.” This was in response to the Sansa Stark character acknowledging the abuse she’d faced, how she still lived with it, and how it had shaped who she was. In Chastain’s desired version of the show, Sansa never would have faced suffering, and there would be no insight into the very real abuse women face at the hands of men, both in Westeros and the real world.

This is where the “give me what I want” mindset goes past simply being about lame crowd-pleasing stuff and crosses over into something resembling censorship. Of course, any time the subject of rape is brought into entertainment, it needs to be taken seriously and portrayed in a thoughtful, humane way. I don’t think the Thrones writers have always gotten it right (the infamous Jaime/Cersei scene from a few years ago being the predominant example), but for the most part the show has made an effort to portray the realities and effects of abuse on its victims. Characters like Sansa, Theon, and others have endured abuse and lived with the consequences in a way that has rarely been depicted on TV. If your argument is that rape should never be in entertainment, then that is diminishing a major part of art’s function, which is how it can express feelings of personal traumatic experiences in a shared way that makes people understand it better.

A lot of these arguments strike me as the same types you see from people who want to ban classic novels for being too “dangerous.” What these people really want is for art to be a sanctuary, and for all entertainment to be blandly inoffensive, shiny and flawless. Those who nitpick every barely relevant detail of the logic and character choices often think of themselves as being smarter than the rest of the audience and the writers, when really they have this same childlike mindset towards art. For them, a show like Game of Thrones only exists to be joylessly ripped apart as a means of validating their own perceived intelligence. They don’t want to think about the actual themes or the storytelling.

As we stare down the barrel of another eight million superhero movie sequels and live action Disney remakes, it’s hard not to be a little concerned about the future of art that actually attempts to provoke and challenge audiences. Part of my frustration with the response to this season of Game of Thrones is that we’re really witnessing an end of an era — I doubt another show will capture the public imagination quite like this one, much less one with this much depth and artistry. And yet the response to it by many seems to be a collective shrug, a snarky comment or two while glancing at their phone. That’s why the present and future of entertainment is Marvel movies and other audience-pleasing franchises that don’t require too much thinking or attentiveness. Of course, there will still be real artists making powerful, important work outside of the mainstream — but good luck trying to discuss it with anybody.

Becky Lynch is Making Wrestling Real

Wrestling fans are used to hearing people tell them “you know it’s fake, right?” My rebuttal to this is to point out that all TV shows are fake. It’s like asking a fan of Game of Thrones if they know that the dragons in the show are CGI. If anything, wrestling is much more real than other things on TV, including heavily edited “reality” shows. It has predetermined outcomes, but the physicality is more real than most people assume and the storytelling is often tethered to reality in a way that other scripted shows aren’t.

I think wrestling is at its best when it has that connection to reality and gets viewers to forget that they’re watching characters. But these days, with social media and WWE’s branding of itself as a “sports entertainment” company, wrestling is probably the least immersive it’s ever been. The talented wrestlers are often stuck delivering overly scripted, inauthentic promos and too many matches feel like choreographed ballet routines instead of a fight. While the show has moved away from larger-than-life characters like The Undertaker (a dead guy), it is still hard to get emotionally invested in what’s going on because a lot of the wrestlers aren’t allowed to truly show what they can do.

This all ties into why the last few months of Becky Lynch have been so satisfying. I already wrote about her feud with Charlotte Flair, which culminated in Becky keeping her title at Evolution, WWE’s first all-women’s pay-per-view, in an epic last woman standing match that was my favorite in WWE this year. Since then, Becky’s star has continued to rise: I don’t know if she is literally the most popular performer in the company, but nobody is getting the reactions she does, and her character is connecting with the audience in a way that few ever have. And much of it is due to how her character feels real, how it intertwines with her actual self, and how she tells stories in a way that creates maximum immersion. It’s to the point that when Becky is on TV, I actually do think wrestling is real for a brief moment. I want her to win, I feel happy when she gets cheered, and I hate her opponents. I’ve always tried to keep an ironic distance from wrestling because it’s “cooler” to watch that way, but I’m all the way in this and there’s no getting out. I’m a “mark,” as they say, and it feels great.

After dispensing with Charlotte Flair, whose father once famously said “to be the man, you gotta beat the man,” Becky has christened herself The Man in a clever post-gender angle. It’s her character showing confidence while also acknowledging the reality that she’s on top and is genuinely the most exciting thing in wrestling. WWE tried to portray this new-found confidence as villainous, but it resonates too much with people who feel like they’re not getting what they deserve and lack Becky’s ability to do something about it. While most people are stuck without real options in scenarios where they feel undervalued, Becky’s character lives in the wrestling reality where you can beat the crap out of your co-workers and show you’re better than them. It’s very cathartic, and I think fans are living vicariously through Becky as they witness someone who they perceive as being underrated by the company climb all the way to the top while taking no prisoners.

Becky has created this unique connection to the audience in part by showing a deep understanding of her character and staying true to it in publicity appearances and on social media. When she explains why she calls herself The Man, it’s part Becky Lynch, part Rebecca Quin, and the line between the two is blurred in a way that only happens with wrestlers. Observe how she toes the line in this interview for an LGBT news outlet, touting her accolades from the wrestling world while also making real-world points she actually believes about gender/sexuality equality.

Now established as The Man, Becky entered a feud with Ronda Rousey, WWE’s current biggest star in terms of mainstream appeal who has proven to be a natural at professional wrestling. They exchanged barbs for a couple of weeks, with Rousey notably mocking Becky for taking odd jobs and retiring from wrestling for awhile while she was dominating in UFC. Lynch’s response to this was up there as one of the best babyface promos I’ve ever seen, as she described her real-life upbringing and struggles as an independent wrestler as a contrast to Rousey, who she perceived as being bred for greatness. It was character-defining in establishing Becky as someone who worked her way to the top, never got handed anything, and developed an authentic connection with the fans in spite of how she was often portrayed. Wrestlers are rarely thought of as artists by the general public, but there is real artistry here in her choice of words, the delivery, and the way she connects her real-life self to her on-screen character.

But, as has happened a weird amount of times in this storyline, reality intervened. On the Monday before her big match with Rousey was scheduled, Lynch led an “invasion” of her show, Smackdown, on Raw. They do this every year and usually I find it to be contrived nonsense. But this became a prime example of how the real world and the wrestling world can merge to create unmatched serendipitous drama.

While the wrestlers were randomly brawling, Becky took a legitimate punch to the face from Nia Jax, the giant of the women’s division. Now, I’ve never been in the ring (surprising, I know), but my understanding is that a lot of the strikes, while not being completely fake, are done in a way to protect the opponent and cause no real damage. The top goal in this choreographed play-fighting is to make sure no one gets hurt while still putting on a show that appears realistic. So what Jax did was an egregious blunder: nobody is supposed to just land a full punch to someone’s face or it creates what happened here — a serious injury and a lot of blood.

Becky went down briefly, and had what is later described by WWE as “a severe concussion and a broken face.” But then she got back up and finished out the show with blood all over her face and hands. She hit Rousey with a chair and then taunted her from the crowd, completely owning the entire scene while bleeding profusely and I’m sure being in a tremendous amount of pain (not to mention being concussed). She looked like the coolest person who ever lived and I knew I was witnessing an iconic wrestling moment.

If there was any doubt, this cemented Becky as a legend and a character unlike anything wrestling fans have seen. It was also when I realized that the women’s division in WWE genuinely feels like the most important and coolest thing on the show, which was always her goal. The downside to the moment is that, well, she had a severe concussion and a broken face. And that meant she wasn’t able to actually have the match with Rousey, which was likely going to be main event the show and be a huge moment for women’s wrestling in WWE.

One of the narratives running through Becky’s story has been the idea that the company has “held her down,” which was basically true as she was booked to lose a lot for multiple years. But somewhere during this push, I think she has opened the eyes of people backstage and it feels like the machinery is totally behind her now. A good piece of evidence was this mini-documentary they did on her finding out that she wouldn’t be able to wrestle Rousey.

Out of all of the reality/fiction-blending things involving Becky recently, this is the most impactful. It’s mundane in how it shows her going through a fairly bland real-life routine of calling her mom, checking her phone, and eating. But then she receives the gutting news and there’s this moment where she is simultaneously Becky Lynch and Rebecca Quin. She wants to have this match to kick Ronda Rousey’s ass, but she also wants this match because as a performer, she’s spent years working up to this point, building all this momentum, and now she feels it could slip away because of a co-worker’s careless mistake. It’s heartbreaking to watch and as real as it gets.

The silver lining to all of this is that if Lynch recovers (which isn’t trivial given a concussion), she could be in line to main event WrestleMania, the biggest show of the year, against Rousey, which seemed unthinkable a few months ago. Women have never main evented that show and I honestly never thought they would — not because they weren’t capable, but because I never felt like the company would get behind it. But Lynch has given the company little choice with the artistry of her performances and the way she has rallied fans behind her organically. As a performer and character, she is making wrestling feel real, and it should lead to her finally getting what she deserves: the biggest match of the year, on the biggest stage, with thousands of people chanting her name.

I’m Still Obsessed With a WWE Storyline

A lot has changed in professional wrestling since I started watching as a kid in the late 90s. Back then, WWE was in the midst of its renowned “Attitude Era” when characters like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin were at their peak and the show was geared towards young men, which resulted in a lot of car crash TV techniques, bizarre outlandish storylines, and a high level of violence. Today’s WWE is different: it’s now a publicly shared company and about 10 years ago shifted towards family-friendly PG fare, with a deeper focus on in-ring athleticism. But by far the biggest change in the company in my time as a fan is the portrayal of the women.

Back in the Attitude Era, women were essentially objects. They were run out there to titillate the crowd and were often featured in “bra and panty” matches, mud wrestling, and various other degrading activities. While there were always a couple women who could actually wrestle, they were overshadowed by the slew of models WWE signed for their looks and then trained into mediocre/bad wrestlers who worked sloppy 2-3 minute matches.

In the last couple years, WWE has undergone a “women’s revolution,” where they’ve started recruiting women who are real wrestlers and put them in more high profile matches. This charge was led in part by Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch, first on their developmental show, NXT, and then on the main shows Raw and Smackdown. With the addition of former MMA star Ronda Rousey to the division, WWE has finally put some effort into some semblance of gender equality and has by far the deepest women’s division it’s ever had.

Despite this, some residue from the previous era lingers. Vince McMahon still runs this company and has made a habit of booking cute blonde women as champions, regardless of their in-ring ability. The women get more screen time, but they still rarely feel like complete characters, usually falling into a couple broad archetypes: the heels are Regina George mean girls while the babyfaces are just happy to be chasing their dreams and are always hugging each other and crying. I’m about 99% sure that WWE doesn’t have any women writers on its staff, and it’s evident in the way many of the characters are portrayed.

Meanwhile, WWE has gleefully marketed and hyped its self-proclaimed “women’s revolution,” but the only reason it needed to happen is because they were so shitty in the first place. Fans largely catch on to this, and I think it’s part of what is fueling this Charlotte/Becky storyline that I wrote about last month. Because Becky doesn’t really fit WWE’s mold for a champion: she’s kind of quirky, she’s attractive but not in the very specific way Vince McMahon likes, she’s got an Irish accent and an unusual speaking voice, she’s not blonde, etc. All of this fan resentment over the direction of the women’s division is now coming out in the Becky character and the crowd’s response to her.

When we last left off with our hero, she was chasing Charlotte’s title after “turning heel” at Summerslam, and was in an ambiguous character direction where she was acting heelish but getting huge cheers. To WWE’s credit, they’ve stayed the course with this and are finally writing a storyline that is worthy of the women performers that isn’t draped with their “look at what we’re letting the women do!” sloganeering. At the Hell in a Cell event, Becky reversed one of Charlotte’s moves for a surprising fair win. On the next episode of Smackdown, she celebrated in grand fashion in one of the best promo segments on the show in a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkm5yGMa0xQ

If it wasn’t obvious before, this segment made it clear that in WWE’s mind, Becky is unambiguously a heel. She’s gloating, rubbing her win in Charlotte’s face, calling her a bitch and then beating her up. The announcers fall over themselves defending Charlotte and portraying her as sympathetic (which, to be fair, she kind of is). But the fans are still purely behind Becky, because this is an exciting character we’ve never seen before: a woman who simply doesn’t give a damn. After so many obnoxious heels and flat, goody-two-shoes babyfaces, it’s refreshing to see a woman character who has an edge, who is brazen and does what she wants, the way men like Stone Cold Steve Austin did at the height of the show’s popularity.

And Becky has real depth as a character, in part because Rebecca Quin is such a good performer. Sometimes in WWE, it feels like a flip is switched and someone becomes a totally different person when they change their heel/face alignment. This is the same character the crowd loved before, but she’s gained a new focus and has stopped caring about what anyone thinks of her. And now that she’s champion, she’s very proud of herself and is lording it over everybody while egotistically basking in the fans’ love of her.

I want to talk about Becky saying “bitch” at the end of this promo. Because to someone over the age of eight years old, it shouldn’t be a big deal to hear the word, and I’m sure if anyone who doesn’t watch wrestling is reading/watching this, they’re wondering why the crowd is gasping at it. Part of it is that WWE has been in this very safe, corporate PG era for a long time now, so any swearing has become somewhat unheard of. But also, wrestling has this effect on you where it sort of turns you back into a little kid when it really works, so in the moment I was like “OH MY GOD SHE SAID THE B-WORD. THAT’S A BAD WORD. THIS WOMAN IS OUT OF CONTROL.”

And as ridiculous as it sounds, WWE letting Becky say “bitch” might be the clearest sign that the company is fully invested in her now. The only other people I’ve heard say the word on TV recently are Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar, who are the two top stars in the company. It’s trotted out on serious occasions when they want a character to look badass. When the guys did it, it just came off as tryhard and misogynistic, but Becky being a woman and delivering it with perfect comedic timing made it work in this instance.

WWE is not a very admirable company and I’m loath to give them too much credit for a story that has been partially told by accident. But this story is sneakily pretty progressive compared to a lot of other media. How many other TV shows have a storyline between two women that isn’t about a man, where both characters feel real, have flaws, and their motivations make sense? Not very many, and I hope WWE sees the success of this feud and does more of this, because they have the talent to do so. This is what a “women’s revolution” actually looks like.