Humor me for a moment while I discuss television.
I never really liked Friends. I watched the first season, back when I was in high school, but once I got to college I cut back on TV viewing a lot (not that I was doing anything more productive with my time). I’ve since reverted to my old television addiction, but I never resumed my Friends habit. Although I really wasn’t very familiar with the show when it was finally laid to rest earlier this year, I did read several web articles lamenting its demise. One of them, which I think I read on msn.com, stood out. The gist of it was that Friends wasn’t the last great gasp of the sitcom (as many were arguing) because the show is actually best classified as a soap opera with jokes. In a classic sitcom, let’s say the old Dick Van Dyke Show for instance, the characters begin and end the episode in essentially the same condition. That wasn’t true for Friends, where cliffhangers drove the show as much as jokes. Or so I read.
Like all things in life (or at least in this column), this leads us to the subject of professional wrestling. In the course of a wrestler’s career, he or she will undoubtedly be asked to alter an established character. Sometimes those changes will be as simple as a heel or face turn. Other times the wrestler will abruptly drop all aspects of a previous character or gimmick for something completely differentâ€â€like the Godfather joining RTC and becoming the “Goodfather.†The way I see it, the sitcom and the soap opera are opposite poles of how to deal with the issue of character consistencyâ€â€one end represents stasis, and the other dynamism. Which is better? In the long run, neither extreme is especially good. I’ll take the easy way out and suggest that maybe a third way, which I associate with classical (read: Greek/Roman) mythology, is the best option. Here’s why.
Wrestling as Sitcom
As mentioned above, the essence of a sitcom is that characters do not change from episode to episode. A character may undergo some change within an episode, but any problem will be resolved within the allotted 30 minutes, and the status quo will prevail by the end of the episode (The Simpsons satirized this style of writing in the episode where Homer befriends Flanders). This type of character development (or anti-character development) was always popular in those cartoons that I watched when I was 8 (and some of you still watch at the age of 28), which were really just glorified ads for toys like GI Joe or He-Man. Beast-Man would defect to the side of the good guys because Skeletor emotionally abused him, or something. But somehow, by the end of the episode, he was back on the side of evil, again inadvertently helping He-Man through his own incompetence. There couldn’t be a permanent defection, because that would interfere with the toy line.
Well, in the heyday of Rock and Wrestling, Vince McMahon viewed his wrestling company as but one facet of his empire. There were also toys, cartoons, t-shirts, backpacks with giant plastic Hulk Hogan heads glued on them, and whatnot. So character changes came at a glacial pace, if at all. Here’s a typical Hogan feud: Hogan is wrestling against the challenger of the month on Saturday Night’s Main Event. Hogan wins (of course). At the end of the match, the challenger’s ally comes in and beats Hogan to a pulp, through chicanery of some sort. Hogan spends the next few months in training, as seen in vignettes on the crappy Saturday afternoon show I watched while my father was yelling at me to go cut the lawn. Finally, at Wrestlemania, or the next episode of SNME, you’d see Hogan get his revenge. But then someone else would attack .
Hogan never changed. He never got more wary of his foes, he never altered his style, he never lost. He was a flat characterâ€â€a sitcom character. Just as the audience of All in the Family could always depend on Archie Bunker to sit in his chair and rail against the changing world around him, we could count on Hogan to pray, train, tear off his shirt, and dispatch another opponent from Bobby Heenan’s vast reservoir of dim-witted rogues.
Yes, yes, yes, I knowâ€â€what about Andre? (Or, if you prefer, what about Paul Orndorff?) Well, you see, this model mostly applied to Hogan, and no one else really (except maybe Heenan or Jimmy Hart). As I’ve mentioned before, the entire WWF was booked around the Hulkster, so heel turns came as often as was necessary to keep the Hogan/WWF machine humming. Actually, the feud with Orndorff created a second model for Hulk Hogan feudsâ€â€betrayal by jealous friends. And all of Hogan’s friends were ultimately revealed to be jealous. Even Brutus Beefcake, although he waited until they got into WCW, eventually succumbed to jealousy. (Though I think I read somewhere that he was eventually revealed to be a secret agent for Hulkamania working undercover within the Dungeon of Doom. I’m not sure, as he was already the Booty Man by the time I started watching Nitro.) I can’t say for certain that I was an average WWF fan, circa 1987, but I think I was fairly typical. And for me, Hulk Hogan was the whole show. I liked the rest, but it was all secondary or tertiary to the main event. And the main event was the Hulk Hogan Show, starring Hulk Hoganâ€â€which eventually got old, so I turned to the more mature pleasures of reading She-Hulk comics.
Wrestling as Soap Opera
Characters on soap operas are notoriously elastic. Infants grow into teenagers over the course of a couple of years; rapists become heroes and marry their victims; and, most distressingly, characters’ appearances change so much that you’d swear that a completely different actor was now portraying them (even Vince couldn’t pull that one off). It’s the inverse of the sitcom. On a sitcom, characters are static, and the script is written around them. On soap operas, however, plot twists are the order of the day and characters are stretched to fit into fantastic scenarios.
I bet you can all guess whose work I’m about to compare to a soap opera. Yep, it’s Vince Russo. More precisely, it’s Vince Russo from late 1999 through 2000, when he (off and on) called the shots for WCW. A lot of you hated that period. I can see whyâ€â€just look at poor Mike Awesome. It’s not just that he went through so many gimmicks, as plenty of guys have done that (though few have gone through, by my count, four in a year’s time). What makes Mike Awesome exceptional is that Russo gave him some positively bizarre gimmicks. I won’t go through them all here, but let me just dwell on one for a moment: Mike Awesome, That Seventies Guy. As best I can tell, that gimmick was established for no other reason than to give Mike Awesome (who, let’s keep in mind, was never the best talker) a weekly interview segment. I can think of no other instance in which a wrestler’s character was so drastically altered to meet the (perceived) needs of the storyline (assuming there was a storyline in mind in the first place).
Still, I must confess that I enjoyed the Russo era. I watched the first hour of Nitro every week, and flipped back and forth once Raw was on. I watched Thunder, albeit not with rapt attention, most of the time. WCW under Russo was weird, kind of like the wrestling version of free jazz. You might get the occasional flashes of greatness, like fun (though ultimately meaningless) matches with the cruiserweights, or a classic Flair tirade. Other times you would get the wrestling equivalent of atonal noise, like a 6-man tag match between the Misfits in Action and Lance Storm’s Team Canada (which itself was still sort of interesting, in a cultural anthropology sort of way). But there was no way you could make any rational sense out of it. It just wasn’t that kind of show. In fact, I might be demeaning the good (?) name of soap operas by associating them with the dying days of WCW. (For those of you who read the SNL book from a couple of years ago, this is the epitome of a “Viking funeral†for a television show.) In the end, while generally entertained during this period in WCW history, I never felt like I was missing much when I couldn’t watch it. It’s not like it made much sense even when I did watch.
Wrestling as Mythology
I’m limiting this to classical mythology for three reasons. First, other forms of mythology were occasionally in service to shamanistic religions, which meant that gods were more like forces of nature than characters. Second, I’m most familiar with Greek and Roman myths. Third, and most importantly, classical mythology had no single author. It arose from multiple traditions, multiple poets, and multiple cities. As a result, this mythology really most resembles a sort of quilt patched together from various epic poems, folktales, and the like. The portrayal of a god might vary considerably from myth to myth.
However, the basic essences of the gods remained intact. Ares was always rash and violent; Hermes a bit of an impetuous trickster; Apollo genteel and radiant; Hades brooding and morose; Aphrodite vain; Zeus imperious and overly sensitive; and so on. Depending on the needs of the story, the gods could help or hinder each other, or more likely the mortal (or half-god/half-mortal) heroes who populated the ancient world. So, while Ares might help one hero and antagonize another, his essential nature (bloodthirsty and ill-tempered) remained the same.
This, ideally, is the model which wrestling should follow. Characters should, upon their introduction, have certain elements of their personality clearly established. These should be broad enough so that they can explain motivations as both a heel and a face. They should be characteristics that we can identify with, or at least recognize. These essential characteristics could be virtues or tragic flaws, or possibly both. Most of all, they should lay a foundation for a wrestler’s character, in order to make heel/face turns smoother, and in order to establish a strong personality that eliminates the need for extreme gimmick changes. Let me briefly give you a list of wrestlers who, from the moment of their debut (in the WWE, unless otherwise noted), had specific characteristics established which have persisted into the present (or retirement, termination of employment, etc.):
Jericho: quarrelsome, a bit vain
Angle: overconfident, competitive
Cena: boisterous, brash, constantly seeking attention
Kane: dark, sullen (with the exception of his ill-advised “Freaks Rule!†periodâ€â€though one could argue he was just in denial)
Lesnar: a big bully, sometimes even sadistic
Raven (ECW/WCW): bitter, inscrutable, uncompromising
DDP (WCW): his own biggest fan (as both a heel and a face)
And then, there’s an even longer list of people whose initial character fizzled, forcing a major change in character. The new characters are usually only narrowly related to the original:
The Rock: clean-cut hero to bully (heel or face)
Austin: Ted Dibiase’s protégé to rowdy shit-kicker
HHH: effete snob to “sophomoric†prankster to hyper-competitive elitist whose sense of self-worth relies on external validation
Edge: dark, ersatz goth to goofy cowardly heel to whatever he’s supposed to be now
Christian: goth to goofball to crybaby to creepy, jealousy-inspiring jerk
Randy Orton: all-American third generation star to delusional young punk
Bradshaw: Stan Hansen clone to Satanic accomplice to hell raiser for hire back to Stan Hansen clone back to hell raiser (though no longer for hire) to right wing nut
Val Venis: God, where to start? Okay, here’s my best shot: porn star/male stripper to Libertarian (for about two weeks) to right wing nut back to porn star/male stripper to brown-nosing assistant back again to porn star/male stripper
Billy Gunn: Even harder, and I know I’m going to miss some here. Let’s see here cowboy to rockabilly singer (as a rockabilly fan, let me add this comment: BLEEEAGH) to ass aficionado to Chyna’s knight errant back to ass aficionado to gay wrestler to not-really-gay wrestler back again to ass aficionado
Test: personality-deficient bodyguard to personality-deficient suitor of Stephanie McMahon to personality-deficient generic heel to personality-deficient generic face to insufferable “you can’t fire me†heel (this being the approximate time when he located his personality) to anti-American to testicle aficionado to woman-hater
What do all in the above list have in common? One or more of the following: (1) They were originally given a gimmick that did not promote their strengths, as discussed in last week’s column (e.g., the Rock). (2) They originally received ridiculous gimmicks that prevented them from advancing up the card (Venis, Austin). (3) Their original character was so bland that a drastic change was necessary to get anyone to notice them (Orton). So, in a sense, this list indicates how important it is to give a character a good gimmick upon his or her debut.
In a larger sense, however, this list also reveals that we may be too quick to pronounce someone as irreparably damaged by early booking mistakes. Audiences are much more forgiving than conventional net wisdom holds. We had absolutely no reason to care about Orton upon his debut in 2002. He was bland, green, and never won any high profile matches. Two years later, and he’s at least the #3 heel on Raw (and will probably be #2 by the end of this year). Of all the wrestlers in the so-called class of 2002, the one to whom Orton is most frequently compared is John Cena. Cena immediately had a strong personality established, which has remained intact throughout his WWE career, despite being turned twice within a year and a half. He was immediately portrayed as a young gun, future-of-this-business type, winning (or nearly winning) several high profile matches. Clearly, Cena has had the more consistent push.
Nevertheless, when compared today, Cena and Orton are equally over. Some might argue that Cena is more over, but that’s really just a function of the current disequilibrium between the two rosters. Cena is a big fish in a small pond, while Orton is a big fish in a big pond. Put Orton on Smackdown, and he’s the top heel; but put Cena on Raw, and he’s quickly lost in the shuffle among faces like Edge, Benoit, HBK, Jericho, and maybe Eugene. Even if a Raw-bound Cena were turned heel, he would be in roughly the same position as Orton (third behind HHH and Kane). Thus, I think it’s ridiculous to say that there’s no hope for a new wrestler if he doesn’t immediately make a mark for himself. Wrestlers, particularly in this day and age, will only get over with time and effort. No one’s going to be a top player right out of the gate, just as no one is going to get permanently buried right out of the gate.
That doesn’t mean, however, that a wrestler will get unlimited chances. Val Venis and Billy Gunn prove otherwiseâ€â€and if Vince and his writers don’t watch out, Test will soon join them. (Time will tell if Bradshaw will join their ranksâ€â€for the record, I think he’s doing more with his push than Test, Gunn, or Venis ever did with theirs, but then again his is a much stronger push than any they ever received.) Both Venis and Gunn have been given multiple gimmicks, multiple heel and face turns, and multiple pushes. Neither has ever sustained any real momentum. It could be there’s something lacking (I’d say Gunn is lacking several things ). However, even if these two men rated very highly across the board, they still wouldn’t stand a chance of getting over in 2004. Fans have come to expect that any character development involving either guy will be only temporary; eventually they’ll return to the towel around the waist, the sleazy saxophone music, and the lame double-entendres (or the lipstick on the tights, the “ass man†music, and the lame double-entendres). And, since Mr. Ass and the Big Valboski have never done anything to make us care about them, we’ll never take those gimmicks seriously either. In a sense, Gunn and Venis are stuck in a no man’s land between the sitcom and the soap opera realms of characterization. Their frequent gimmick changes resemble soap opera characterization, but their inevitable return to stale old gimmicks suggests the sitcom model.
So there is a window of opportunity that the writers and wrestlers must seize before fans give up on a wrestler. If they capitalize on this opportunity, then there is hope for a successful career; if not, then they’ll be sent to the junk bin, where the writers will resurrect them only when desperate for some warm body to fill space before a real player returns from an injury (which is the best case scenarioâ€â€they could also be fired). In the first year or so (with some room for waffling if there’s an injury), a wrestler must establish the heart of his personality. If the character is too stupid or one-dimensional to convey a sense of motivation through a variety of situations, then the wrestler will quickly be seen as boring and predictableâ€â€like re-runs of Coach or Wings. However, if his characterization is so thin that he undergoes an abrupt change more than once or twice, fans will lose interest and label the wrestler as an anchorless lightweight. A wrestler will only succeed if he or she has some consistent personality traits that endure through a dynamic career of heel/face turns, new ring attire, new theme songs, new factions, new finishers, new managers, and new feuds. Otherwise, he’ll seem like JR Ewing or Archie Bunker trying to compete with the gods.
There are a couple of possible follow ups to this subject. One would be a discussion of how well a character can withstand face and heel turns. I’ll get to that eventually, but for now let’s continue to look at the subject of establishing characters for new wrestlers. We’ll take that up next week. Until then, keep the feedback coming (and I’ll keep the parenthetical asides coming).
