Remember when Rishiki walked out on the
WWE stage and proudly proclaimed that he had, indeed,
run over Stone Cold Steve Austin? They were on to something
there. Not only did it set Rishiki up for a hell of
a push and right into a hot feud, but it did something
wrestling seldom does and should do more often. It gave
Rishiki, the character, the WWE and wrestling as a whole,
a more realistic feel. For one brief moment, Rishiki
wasn’t a clear cut villain. He was a man who perceived
injustice in the system around him and acted out on
it, as Malcolm X would have said, “by any means
necessary.” Had the storyline been allowed to
progress, it would have been gold.
However, WWE backed away from it quickly. So quickly,
in fact, that it was nearly forgotten by the next week.
Triple H was behind it and yada yada yada, we were back
to a cut and dry good guy vs. bad guy feud based on
whatever it was they were feuding about at the time.
I can’t really remember anymore.
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As much as Vince McMahon likes to push the entertainment
part of sports entertainment, for all of his talk of
WWE
being drama, a soap opera for men, shocking, surprising,
anything can happen, he runs away from serious issues
faster than an anorexic running from an all you can
eat buffet. He goes back to the tried and true: stereotypes,
over the top bathroom humor, and good guy vs. bad guy
driven storylines.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Part
of what I love about wrestling is that it’s predictable.
It’s simple in an otherwise confusing and complicated
world. It’s escapist entertainment at its most
sweaty best. It reinforces and draws from mythological,
larger than life archetypes that writers have been writing
about since the birth of Greek Drama. You have the hero,
the villain and all of the subcategories that characters
fall into: The cowboy, the psychopath, the daredevil,
the bombshell, the grizzled veteran, the brash young
upstart. I could go on and on.
But let’s imagine, just for a moment, that it
wasn’t like that. Let’s try to imagine that
WWE wanted to write a more subtle type of drama—something
like the highly acclaimed, but seldom watched Huff.
Huff is one of those rare shows that manage to be both
really funny and dramatic—exactly what WWE strives
for. During the last wrestling boom, Steve Austin broke
out as a major star by going against the grain. He was
a new kind of Byronic anti-hero. He was the tough SOB
that would rather pass out than tap out. There was,
at least at first, some complexity to his character.
And have no doubt, drama starts with the characters.
The plot is secondary. If we don’t have any reason
to care about (whether we love them or hate them) the
characters we’re not going to give a damn about
what happens to them. And we usually feel more empathy
with characters that are more like us—flawed.
Someone might be a really good guy who just happens
to be an alcoholic. Or a character might be an all around
ass, but we have a bit of empathy for him because he
had a horrid childhood and he’s really good to
his kids.
Next week, on RAW, Cena needs to come out, do his little
homophobic spiel, and Kurt Angle needs to snap, beat
the hell out of Cena, get in his face and say, “You
just got your ass kicked by a fag (Note: this is not
a term I would normally use, but it would add realism
to the angle). Then, Kurt’s character needs to
stay the same. His character shouldn’t change
one bit. He should make a non-issue out of it. But,
the way other characters reacted to it would be priceless
entertainment. Shawn Michaels might try to convert him
to Christianity. A diva might see him as someone who
needs a shoulder to lean on. Who knows? John Cena, whose
character is supposed to be a street-wise, white thug
living the rapper lifestyle, would almost certainly
dislike Angle even more. I like hip-hop but let’s
face it, as Kanye West has said, it’s a pretty
blatantly homophobic culture.
Perhaps Cena would even refuse to wrestle him for fear
that it might turn Angle on. Or in a flashback to the
Magic Johnson era paranoia towards AIDS, he might back
away from a bloody Angle for fear of infection. Of course
there’s pretty much as much chance of a straight
guy having AIDS as a gay guy, but most people don’t
realize this. Again, a tad of realism.
It would be an entirely new type of title chase. Instead
of the coward heel champion ducking the face of the
moment, we’d have the naïve good guy champ
refusing to face the aggressive, angry contender solely
because of his sexual preference. And this isn’t
M*A*S*H we’re writing here, the feud could end
with something as simple as a great match between the
two and a handshake afterwards. A sort of acknowledgement
from Cena that hey, Kurt’s not so bad after all.
Don’t get me wrong; I can see the complications.
First of all, if we’re going to discard the over
the top, humiliating, non-funny and stereotypical characterization
of every “gay” wrestler from Gorgeous George
to the West Hollywood Blondes we’re going to need
to keep the rest of our storyline a bit more realistic
as well. We don’t want to do a Billy and Chuck
(who were actually a step forward in the way homosexuals
are portrayed on WWE—not a huge step, but a step)
and just up and say well, Angle isn’t gay anymore.
It’s not realistic and it’s insulting to
the collective intelligence of the audience. I’m
pretty positive that this isn’t something Angle
would like to be stuck with the rest of his life. Probably
because he’s straight.
It would also reflect the homophobia of the wrestling
audience. As much as we smarks hate to admit it, a large
part of the wrestling audience is still the beer guzzling
red-neck. Angle, being portrayed as a *gasp* real live
gay person with feelings!, would be subject to vicious
taunts. There would be a whole new breed of sign that
would need to be confiscated during the shows. I’m
not sure this is a bad thing. I mean, the whole idea
is to instill passion into the audience about the characters,
right? On the other hand, there would be the left wing
liberals like me who would just as passionately cheer
Angle on (well, I do anyway) because of his bravery
and his righteous anger.
Finally, it could turn Cena heel. Maybe the wrestling
audience would suddenly wake up, realize how dumb Cena’s
lame gay jokes are, and start rooting for Angle. I doubt
it, but so what if it did happen? Cena was better as
a heel anyway.
Look, I don’t want to take away what is good about
wrestling—the fun! The convoluted storylines,
the over the top characters, the outlandish costumes,
even the Undertaker, it’s all fun. I don’t
want to get rid of any of that. Wrestling should be
fun. I’m just saying it would be nice to have
some characters with a little more depth to them. I
would like to see Vince McMahon and his writers stop
taking the hacks way out and relying –entirely-
on stereotypes for both their humor and drama. And it
would draw a lot of mainstream press—something
McMahon craves like a junky craves crack.
And let’s face it, wrestling is the most gay of
all sports anyway. In a poll done by Adequacy.com WWE
(not wrestling, WWE specifically) was voted as the gayest
of all sports by a vast majority. It’s sweaty
men rolling around in tights trying to “pin”
each other for god’s sake. Either that, or it’s
two women trying to rip each other’s clothes off.
Forget angle, I know he’d never do it. But I’d
bet my right arm that there is a wrestler out there
somewhere, possibly on WWE television, who is gay. This
person should be the first. The bravest. They should
say to their boss, “I’m gay and I’d
like to portray a gay character on television that is
not based on a cheap punch line.”
