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Words From the World of Pro Wrestling #1: Interrogating Extreme of ECW |
» Reported by Ben Hagen of WrestleView.com
» On Monday, March 17, 2008 at 9:41 PM EST
Words From the World Of Professional Wrestling #2
"Interrogating the "Extreme" of ECW"
March 17, 2007
Reported By: Ben Hagen of WrestleView.com
I’m currently taking a course here at the University of Rhode Island entitled “Fictions of Extremity” in which we’re reading a great deal of theory (trauma theory, genre theory, psychoanalytic theory, poststructuralist theory, what-have-you) as well as a collection of novels that we will either deem—or not deem—“extreme.” For instance, we’re reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (both which we might call “tower” or “9/11” novels). But novels about “extreme” events like the happenings of September 11, 2001 or the horrors of the Nazi death camps of World War II are not the only “kinds” of books included on the syllabus; rather, novels like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and, to go the film route, Fight Club have made their way as well. These fictions also fit within the confines of the course as novels obsessed with violence, revolution, mastery, control, etc. Overall, the point of the course is to attempt to come to some sort of conclusion for what it means for a contemporary novel to be “extreme,” how we can come to understand what some describe as a world wide literary phenomenon, one that attempts to offer a new way of reading, a new way of seeing, a new way to understand the boundary-line between art and reality, fiction and “life,” fantasy and normality, artificiality and authenticity . . . in short, the fake and the real.
“Why are you telling us this?” you might ask. As wrestling fans, we always find ourselves on the threshold between the real and the fake, between life and fiction, and I think with the recent events of the Benoit murders and suicide, we all struggle to make sense of that line at some point in our hyperfandom. I argue that the line separating fiction and reality has become increasingly problematic throughout wrestling’s history. A few decades ago, Hulk Hogan’s face peered back at us from the cover of Sports Illustrated. Today, HHH makes jokes on live television that undermine the artifice of pro-wrestling’s spectacle, small wrestlers in certain indy promotions perform parts of their matches in slow-motion, and the promos that win “Best of the Year” often develop out of real life passions and emotions: i.e., the “worked shoot.”
And while we can argue that the seeds of such recent problematizations were sown in pro-wrestling’s early days as regular carnie fare, I find it interesting that the first major effort to push wrestling towards its own limits came to us via a company called “Extreme Championship Wrestling.” Can there be some sort of link between the class I’m taking and my passion for professional wrestling? After all, every federation from Ring of Honor to Pro Wrestling NOAH to World Wrestling Entertainment offers us fictions: the storylines are plotted, the narratives overlap, and the results are predetermined. Hearts are broken, injuries are staged, and horrid betrayals balance out with heart-warming redemptions. So, I can’t help but wonder, does ECW—whether present or past—fit alongside the novels to which I’m being exposed? Can the efforts of Paul Heyman and his crew from the 1990s be put into dialogue with the theory I’m reading? Perhaps. For the purposes of this column, however, perhaps it is best to keep theory out of this for now and just play a bit with the term “extreme,” try to make sense of the way in which Extreme Championship Wrestling has inspired the blurring between fiction and reality that both disturbs us and enthralls us.
I still remember watching ECW on TNN—the last of their many television deals that eventually went sour—and enjoying the opening video and music, always punctuated by the famous phrase: “This . . . Is Ex-Treme!” In what way, or—rather—in what ways can we think of ECW as the “The Land of Extreme”? What does it mean for professional wrestling to be marketed as “extreme,” as an “underground” alternative to—at the time—the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling? I argue that part of this marketing serves to completely sever professional wrestling from association with the amateurs (a relationship that commentators continued to maintain throughout the eighties and early 1990s), to divorce it from “real competition” only to replace that connection to “reality” with a different model: a model that attempts to present a spectacle that assumes its own fictionality (as well as that of its competition) all the while attempting to establish a real-er relationship to the Real (at least real-er when compared to McMahon’s or Bishoff’s antics). Certainly ECW introduced us to the “cat fight,” to a heightened sexuality, to storylines that disturbed us (think of the strange twist and turns in Raven’s feuds with Sandman and Dreamer), to PPV titles like “Barely Legal” and “December to Dismember,” and all of these have their place in this discussion. But first, I think it is worthwhile to think about its marketing and its relationship to violence.
Professional wrestling has always been violent, of course (Adbullah had been stabbing people with forks and Dusty Rhodes had been blading his arm long before Eastern Championship Wrestling replaced “xtreme” for “astern”), but the limit to which it actually hurt people (and the way in which such violence was marketed) . . . well, that has changed I imagine. Why is it that we enjoy watching tables break? Have we gathered this from films? What is it, exactly, about breaking furniture that makes us want to chant, “ECW! ECW!”? The video highlights one would see of ECW involved balcony dives, broken tables, stiff chair shots, and a list of weaponry that became flat out ridiculous: VCRs, beer bottles, crutches, road signs, cookie sheets, etc. While Heyman certainly never booked the crazy Death Match stuff one can find in Combat Zone Wrestling or Big Japan Pro Wrestling, nevertheless, I don’t think American fans quite took to flaming tables before ECW put it on the map. Now death match fans get treated to 100-Light Tube Barbed Wire Bat Matches that leave the ENTIRE bodies of wrestlers scarred . . . imagine Dusty Rhodes’ forehead. Now picture that sort of scarring covering a person’s entire body.
I think an example might help here. Wrestlemania X saw one of the most famous WWF matches ever (I don’t think that’s an understatement): the Ladder Match between Razor Ramon and Shawn Michaels. While the match might certainly seem to have some sort of “extreme” relationship to violence (after all, many of the spots really felt uncharacteristic of the WWF at the time, particularly the high risk bumps), but overall the structure of the match felt very straight forward: the one who gets to the top of the ladder in order to retrieve the prize wins the match. The “King of the Mountain” match in TNA (a “reverse” ladder match in which the winner must “hang” the belt) still has the same premise: the winner is the one who succeeds to master the “mountain,” the ladder . . . and the cultural origin of such matches? Playgrounds.
But what of ECW’s version of the ladder match: Stairway to Hell? Most of you will recall the match between the Sandman and Sabu, a match that included many tables, chairs, ladders, and—of course—a cane (didn’t this weapon break Sabu’s jaw?). But I’m more interested in what hung above: the rolls of barbed wire. Unlike the unbearable [insert weapon here]-on-a-pole matches of the past, ECW’s Stairway to Hell match introduced a ladder, that is, the high-risk violence of the 1994 Ladder Match (complete with its instability), but unlike the ladder match, it removed victory from the top. The only reason to climb, the only reason to risk cutting one’s own hands on the wire was to use that wire in whatever creative ways one could think in order to tear apart the flesh of one’s opponent. Usually “on-a-pole” matches included a blunt-force weapon—a nightstick, brass knuckles, a baseball bat, a chain, etc.—but barbed wire does not necessarily help anyone win (in fact, the wire doesn’t even come into play in the final spot of Sabu and Sandman’s match); it is only meant to inflict pain. ECW, then, replaces competition of winner-and-loser with a game of brutality where, despite the traditional three count that ends it, the “story” of the match refocuses out of concern with near falls and changing tides of matches to a spectacle of spots where rabid fans enjoy watching each man fall farther, bleed more, swing harder . . . the “story” is no where near realistic and many of the spots certainly “give away” the predetermined nature of the match: but one still has trouble believing its all fake when flesh tears and fans cheer, when barbed wire becomes a symbol of a violence that does NOT guarantee victory but only another level of pain, another bucket of blood.
But this new model of “real-er” wrestling didn’t just include an increase in the creative use of sharp weaponry and the abandonment of traditional “storyline.” Check out this list of names: Eddie Guerrero, Psychosis, Juventud Guerrera, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Ikuto Hidaka, Chris Benoit, Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko. This is a list of wrestlers, not performers who hit one another with canes or VCRs or beer bottles. What is one to make of this?
When it felt like it, ECW took wrestling to a different sort of extreme, an extreme that truly attempted a sort of “traditional” wrestling, a mindset that has existed to this day where some fans feel that “great” wrestling must be “technical” wrestling: this is the sort of wrestling that has swift mat exchanges, counter wrestling, the infamous “stand off” that brings small crowds to their feet in applause. In other words, a pro-wrestling mind set that does not necessarily abandon in-ring “storyline” but that abandons “heel-face” dynamic. It is amazing how a crowd can move from cheering ridiculously contrived spots that involve barbed wire, a chair, a ladder, and a table set up between the ring and guardrail, and the next sit quietly like a tennis or golf crowd, politely applauding, insisting that “This Is Wrestling!”—as opposed to “those other guys.” Watching Ring of Honor, how can anyone NOT think that Gabe Sapolsky is the true decent of Heyman-style booking? Give ‘em violent. Give ‘em technical. Give ‘em “extreme.”
In a way, ECW also pushed the boundaries of the interview and made famous the worked-shoot. When Cactus Jack performs the famous “Cane Dewey” promo in response to a fa’ns sign that called for violence inflicted against Mick Foley’s actual son Dewey Foley, we begin to see a blurring that again complicates the traditional heel-face dynamic. Are we supposed to boo him when he tells us that we’re sick? Are we supposed to feel guilty? When Steve Austin “shoots” on Eric Bischoff and WCW for firing him over the phone while he was in Japan . . . he’s telling a “true story” on a television show meant to be “fake.”
I could go on and on, but I think—at least for now—that I will cease and desist at this point.
The “extreme,” then does not just reside in our interest in weapons and blood. It moves beyond “garbage wrestling” and “bingo halls” and “rabid fans.” It presses against our ideas of “work rate”; in other words—much like the novels I’m studying this semester—the “extreme” collapses the division between content and form, it influences the storylines outside of the ring and it influences the stories inside the ring that they frame. It influences what we consider finishing moves, and the amount of skin a Diva is allowed to show on national television. In other words, it pervades our concept of what professional wrestling is supposed to be: whether we like ours with barbed wire, deliberate holds and counterholds, or Playboy centerfolds.
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, I thank you for permitting me a bit of academic crossover and wild rambling. In fact, I am writing my seminar paper on professional wrestling. Perhaps, when it’s completed, I’ll share it with you. Until then (or until April’s column—whichever comes first), I bid you all, “Adieu!” Go watch yourself some great wrestling.
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