I watched The Wrestler last night. I was very excited to see it. As some of you may know, I have been, in the past, quite the afficionado of the professional wrestling. In the early days, I was intrigued by the spectacle, but later, after I started following it closely on wrestling websites and fan discussion boards, I found the far more interesting aspect of the business was the bizarre and often tragic personal life led by the average pro-wrestler. This is a business where even when guys are at the top and really successful, they're wrestling four days a week, getting dropped on their heads and backs and whatnot, all year long with no off season, and making less than an entry level major league baseball player. And when they're not at the top? Well, they're trying to do the same thing, only without getting paid.
The Wrestler focuses on the life of a grappler whose day in the sun has come and gone. It does a good job of portraying many of the issues these guys face - chronic injury, disastrous personal lives, and the addiction to the spotlight - but it doesn't really touch on the current state of wrestling, in that there's no mention of Vince McMahon who is, honestly, one of the most monstrous human beings in America today.
McMahon is the person people probably associate most with wrestling after the big names like Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he has more influence over the entire business than anyone else. His WWE (I still miss calling it the WWF; way to go pandas.) is really the only name in wrestling. Sure, there's TNA wrestling, and Ring Of Honor (which appears in The Wrestler), but the WWE is the only place to go if you want to make any money or be considered a success. To his credit, he took a sideshow business and made it a mainstream success, but the heyday has come and gone and where one could previously acknowledge his 'vision', now it's his personal shortsightedness and unwillingness to relinquish creative control that is bringing down both his television programs and performers. Not only that, but Vince's personal opinion on what a wrestler should be has been incredibly devastating to the average man trying to make it the business. Vince wants every wrestler to look like a bodybuilder, so everybody, everybody, takes steroids. (Ok - one exception: Chicago's own hometown hero CM Punk, the Straightedge superstar. Ed note: Punk is also known as Phil Brooks, and is a good friend of my good friend Steve Lund.) Steroids and growth hormone abuse combined with the incessant travel and performing have led to innumerable wrestling tragedies - countless early deaths from heart failure, life long mood disorders, drug addiction brought on as a result of self medicating mood disorders, death from drug and alcohol overdoses, and incidences of violence, including most horrifically Chris Benoit and family.
The Wrestler does paint a portrait of a man whose health has been significantly abused by the wrestling lifestyle (he wears a hearing aid, consistently wraps parts of his body in tape, and, oh yes, has a heart attack.) But mostly it's about his failed personal life and the dichotomy of life inside and out of the wrestling ring. Mickey Rourke does give a magnificent performance and there are some terrific moments (I think my favorite is his 'entrance walk' to the kitchen.) It is well worth seeing, and I hope it does well, because I feel that the subject matter is a realm full of many more stories that need to be told.
And after talking about The Wrestler, here is a clip from ... a totally different movie! Jules Dassin's The Night And The City (1950) which is in part about the shift from real (shoot) wrestling to the phony (work) wrasslin' of today, and is one of my all-time favorite films.
By the way, today's title comes from the catchphrase of Ernest 'The Cat' Miller, a former WWE performer who appears in The Wrestler.
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