I’ve been pretty out of the loop on wrestling recently, but I happened to need something to listen to so I put on the most recent Flagship Plus from Joe Lanza (patreon link). The theme of his monologue was inauthenticity in wrestling, talking about the fact that Samoa Joe – a guy who is past his prime, who isn’t a draw at this stage – is the most badass person in All Elite Wrestling today. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the show but that’s what I remember from when I was watching. As Lanza says: “The guy has an authenticity and an I· Will· Fuck· You· Up· energy that breaks through the walls of kayfabe and jumps right off the screen, YOU· BELIEVE· in Samoa Joe.” He’s real fired up about Joe and it’s hard not to be. Everything that Lanza says is absolutely true.
The specific line of thought that made me want to reflect on the monologue was Lanza feeling disconnected from AEW today, despite the fact that they put on what’s pretty uniformly thought of as great wrestling. Early on he says “This [Dynamite] had all three of the elements you look for in a great episode of Dynamite. … There are wrestling shows historically where maybe the boxes that need to be checked would be a bit different to constitute what a great show would be.” A couple of minutes later, he follows that up with “The problem is … I am struggling to connect with this promotion right now. Or maybe it’s the other way around, this promotion is struggling to connect with me right now, and I can’t really pinpoint why.”
That sentiment hit me hard because I have been extremely disconnected from AEW for a few years now. I know last year I was making an attempt to watch Dynamite weekly… but that didn’t succeed, did it? And the reason I stopped is largely because it began to feel like a chore. In the beginning, I was engaged because I was primarily using it as a launchpad to reflect on Lanza and Kraetsch’s thoughts about the shows. But if you’re doing it week after week, the show itself starts to loom larger, and the fact that I wasn’t really enjoying it became more critical.
Like Lanza, I’ve always wondered why this is. Because AEW should hit all my boxes. Great wrestling, good characters, well-presented. It’s something I should at least be able to tolerate on a weekly basis. But it just doesn’t click with me. In a way, it feels like Lanza is hitting the point that I hit a while back. But that’s not really true. I mean, I don’t know exactly how Lanza feels, but he has said before that if this wasn’t his job, he would have stopped watching AEW at a few points. Since it isn’t my job, I just did, but maybe Lanza would be a casual follower now if he had that opportunity.
Anyway, I can’t answer the question of “why isn’t AEW hooking me?” for everyone, obviously. I’ve written before about the different kinds of audiences there are. But I’m going to attempt a mono-audience answer; that is, a single answer that will account for the general shift, rather than specific ones. This is my answer, but I think it’s one which will resonate for anyone looking at modern wrestling, especially modern American wrestling. If you’ve read me write about wrestling, you’ve heard some of this before, but I think I’m taking it from a new angle.
The problem with pro wrestling is that it does not center the wrestling anymore. I don’t mean this in a thematic sense, which is how I feel like I’ve tackled this before. I mean in the sense of what is being and can be produced for the audience. I’m not the first to point this out, but modern pro wrestling tries to sell itself as a variety show, but it isn’t a variety show. Pro wrestling is pro wrestling. Trying to make it more is bound to fail, and I think we’ve seen a slow-motion failure of pro wrestling for the past few decades.
But before I go off the edge with my apocalyptic predictions, let me try to explain what I mean.
If you go to a music concert to see a band you like, you are going there to hear the music primarily. That’s what the people who are performing do: play music. If they have a song you like, it’s probably that no one else can play that song like them, or in some other way, them playing the music is a special experience. That is the experience you’re looking for.
Let’s say that band introduces stage lights. They bring on pyrotechnics. They’ve got a bunch of dancers on stage now, they’ve got video boards, they’re creating a Broadway-level technical showcase to have Star Wars-style lightsaber duels in front of the audience. All that shit might be exciting to some extent. But let’s think about this in two different ways.
First, what is the likelihood that the stage show and all these elements being brought on are going to be done at the highest level? You have a band who, while they may not be the most musically talented ever, still bring a specific musical talent that you are into. But as far as the dancers, the stage show, the wild lighting: is all that going to be the best? Is that going to have its own unique value? And secondly, if you took the band out of the equation, is this show appealing at all anymore?
Now, I don’t mean to denigrate pop fans by saying this; I’m more of a rock/metal guy and I think this depiction possibly reads like having a stage show is always bad. That’s not what I’m trying to say. But I think even with pop acts that do have a lot of stage production, the central part remains the music. You don’t advertise a show by Dua Lipa by going “we’re gonna have a lot of cool lights, and there’s videos that’ll play, and man, the dancers, wow! Those are all the things that you want to see!” No, even then, even for acts like KISS or GWAR, the music carries a lot of their appeal.
GWAR is actually a great example to put alongside pro wrestling. They are a band that’s known for their stage show and not their music, which is… fine. It’s O.K. Nobody has ever called them one of the best metal bands and they’ve never attempted to be one of the best metal bands. That’s fantastic. And they’ve found their lane, their own success.
But are they one of the biggest rock or metal bands in the world? Not a shot. They’re memorable. They’re well-known. But the only people who I’ve ever heard of calling GWAR their favorite metal band were not metal fans to begin with, and more to the point, they don’t have anything like the kind of success that bigger bands have. To me, that is directly because they were not a great metal band musically. That limited their success.
In wrestling, the idea of “accentuate the positives and hide the negatives” is most strongly associated with Paul Heyman. For him, this guided Extreme Championship Wrestling, which broke a lot of the presumed rules about pro wrestling (ECW didn’t originate hardcore wrestling, but the mainstream had been heavily sanitized by the time they emerged). One of the rules that ECW broke was that they didn’t really base themselves around their great wrestlers. They had great wrestlers, absolutely, but their show was not primarily about those great wrestlers. Lots of other elements played into why ECW ultimately never made it as a third national American promotion but I do think one of them is that what appeared to be the main draw of the show was just kind of… slapdash.
Why do I make these comparisons between music and wrestling? In a music show, there is no debate about what the key aspect of the show is: it’s the music. Ideally, your musicians are compelling in a musical sense, and so the songs they play are worthy of people paying money to see. If you have a KISS, you might still enjoy the show and all, but the stage production for them serves to hide their music to an extent, since the spectacle is their positive and the music is their negative (again, I know there are fans of KISS’s music, but I’m trying to say that relatively speaking people are less into KISS for their music than for their stage show, which implies the music is a less-important feature for them). And while this is true, for KISS it did translate into musical success; despite the fact that few regard them as a musically important band, they sold a lot of records.
But while the spectacle can help to sell the substance, the substance does have to be there. And the substance is not “heat and hate”, it’s not big angles, that’s not the key thing about pro wrestling. The key thing about pro wrestling… is pro wrestling.
The theory of the past few decades in American wrestling is that pro wrestling matches drive people away and the only thing that is keeping people’s interest is the ga-ga. WWE has embraced this most wholeheartedly, attempting at various points to promote non-wrestling occasions (like the “confrontation” between Kevin Owens and Steve Austin) as big deals, having matches that stray further and further away from just wrestling in a ring. There’s been a massive emphasis on “storytelling” and “making moments”.
Can you watch Les Claypool go up on stage and tell a bunch of jokes? Sure you can. Could you watch Michael Jordan play baseball? Absolutely. But if you paid your ticket to see Primus, what you want to see is Les play the fucking bass. That’s what you came there for. If you go watch Jordan play baseball, sure you can do that, but you would rather watch him play basketball: the thing he’s best at. In fact, the reason you’d be watching him play baseball is mainly to see how good he is at that relative to how good he is at basketball. What draws people in is doing something which a lot of people cannot do, to a degree that a lot of people cannot. You can watch anyone play music, but you are more likely to watch someone who is either exceptional or unique while also playing music which is compelling. And when that musician is up there, the best way for them to get people’s interest is to play music.
Pro wrestling has convinced itself that people actually want to see pro wrestlers doing community theater. We do not. If we did want to see that, we would not ask pro wrestlers to do it because that isn’t their skill set. While it doesn’t always happen, it doesn’t surprise me that a guy like Lucha Underground’s Dario Cueto (he has a new name in MLW that I’m not going to look up) can jump off the screen: he’s not a big deal actor but he’s a real actor, and he’s working among people who would get cut from the high school play.
Why does pro wrestling think we want that? Why, in musty high school gyms, are people running attack angles and shit like that? It’s because people have been convinced that pro wrestling matches actually turn people off. People don’t go to wrestling shows to watch pro wrestling, they go to see the ga-ga.
But here’s the thing: pro wrestling is what pro wrestlers are best at. In general, the staged fight which is performed live is a form which pro wrestling has perfected. Not only this, the setting of pro wrestling is uniquely appropriate to present this type of event: it puts forward a fight situation where the rules of the performance are understood by everyone. While Hollywood has to a great extent stolen Asian martial arts filmmaking (especially Hong Kong kung fu), I think Hollywood could have had a unique “Western” style of martial arts film if they had relied more on pro wrestlers for their fight choreography (and adopted filming techniques to accommodate it). Pro wrestling is world class at the thing that it does. It is not world class at the things that it doesn’t do. And because of that, I think when you base pro wrestling on anything other than having pro wrestling matches, the reason for suspension of disbelief – to be engaged in the fight performance – evaporates. Suspension of disbelief is very fragile, so fragile that we’ve stopped even believing in it.
Even promos are not actually the strong suit of pro wrestlers. A wrestler whose strong suit is talking but not wrestling is not a credible world champion, but a wrestler who can work but not quite talk just needs to have a manager. Promos rarely rate alongside serious monologues from theater and film. You might say that it isn’t the point for promos to be “that good”, but that’s actually the point that I’m making, too. If promos were really what was drawing people in, then we would expect someone somewhere to have produced a promo that’s worth studying alongside major dramatic works. Hard Times is not that promo, I’m sorry. It’s a great promo, but it’s great for a wrestling promo, not as a standalone piece of oratory. You might draw someone to a wrestling match by using the Hard Times promo, but I don’t think you can draw a crowd by saying “I’m gonna do Hard Times” the way you could by saying “I’m gonna do Hamlet”.
You can draw someone to a wrestling match with a promo. The match is the payoff. And by payoff, it’s not just “the endpoint”. The payoff is the thing that people wanted to see all along. They did not want to see all the other shit that happened. They did not want to see the angle, the promos, the video packages. I’m not saying that it made people mad to see that. But that’s not what they came for. They came to see a wrestling match. They didn’t come to see “the show”. They came to see the matches. Analytics generally backs this up, showing that matches – at least when the crowd is pretty sure it will be a good match – build and hold audience much better than any angle does.
Before, I’ve largely argued that wrestling makes the most sense when the matches are used as a focal point. And obviously I still believe that to be true. But I also think I’m making a more fundamental critique here. It’s not just that pro wrestling is best when wrestling matches are the focus. It’s that I think we need to realize that what we are doing when we put on pro wrestling is putting on pro wrestling matches. If you are not attempting to put on exciting wrestling matches, you are not properly delivering pro wrestling. The “American style” of pro wrestling television shows that are full of angles etc. is the antithesis of what an audience wants. The idea of “storytelling” is overblown; it’s not nonsense, but it is not the focus. Storytelling is not what people came to see. The purpose of storytelling is to increase anticipation and interest in the wrestling match. But the anticipation and interest is not the end all and be all of the promotion. You do not put on a wrestling match in order to build anticipation and interest. You put on a wrestling match as an exciting event that people want to watch. And if that wrestling match isn’t exciting, the whole thing doesn’t mean shit.
But more even than that. Like I said, pro wrestlers are best at pro wrestling. If we are talking about putting on a show that shows all the most positive positives about those being featured, the thing we are going to tell them to do is wrestle. That’s the thing that draws, that’s the thing that pro wrestlers are meant to be doing. Building shows around promos and badly acted angles is a misuse of the type of talent that you have. Mitch Hedberg has the joke about being a comedian in Hollywood and being asked to do a bunch of comedian-adjacent things being like someone saying “Hey, so you’re a realy good cook! But can you farm?”
Why are we making all of our wrestlers farm? Why can’t we – and I realized that I was going to end on this line halfway through the last sentence, I didn’t mean for this to happen but I’m here now, I’m not going to revise the last paragraph, I’m so sorry, but – why can’t we just let them cook?