Dispatches from the Wrestling Underground: The Grand Guignol

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In recent years, wrestling, or more specifically WWE, has made great strides to reinvent itself as a form of family entertainment. Chasing those lucrative sponsorships deals that only come with a pristine pubic image, more controversial elements of wrestling’s “personality” have been toned down removing profanity, blood, and sex almost entirely. And it’s been argued by some that this has always been wrestling’s natural state, and that the controversial elements are a recent addition that only took place in the last fifteen years due to ECW and WWE’s Attitude Era. Unfortunately, this perspective is short-sighted, as American professional wrestling has had a long association with more adult themes. In some ways, it could be seen as an American take on the French Grand Guignol theater.

The Grand Guignol as defined by Grand Guignol Online:

As used today, the term ‘Grand Guignol’ (pronounced Grahn Geen-yol’) refers to any dramatic entertainment that deals with macabre subject matter and features “over-the-top” graphic violence. It is derived from Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the name of the Parisian theatre that horrified audiences for over sixty years. The theatre was founded in 1897 by Oscar Metenier as an extension of the naturalist movement, which had been popularized by André Antoine’s Theatre Libre. A typical evening at the Grand Guignol Theatre might consist of five or six short plays, ranging from suspenseful crime dramas to bawdy sex farces. But the staple of the Grand Guignol repertoire was the horror play, which inevitably featured eye-gouging, throat-slashing, acid-throwing, or some other equally grisly climax. Over the years, and under the direction of several different managers, the Grand Guignol theatre flourished, becoming one of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris. By the early 1960’s, however, the Grand Guignol’s formula no longer had the same impact with audiences, and in 1962, it closed its doors. Despite the fact that the Grand Guignol has fallen into relative obscurity, it has had a profound influence on the art of horror performance and special effects.

While American wrestling began as a legitimate sporting contest, it eventually grew into the stylized hybrid of sport and theater we know today. Eschewing the amoral nature of sports, wrestling adopted a structure to its matches in which participants became clearly defined as good or bad, and its viewers were cast into the middle of an on-going story instead of a finite athletic contest. And while in other forms of entertainment it was standard for the hero to be the main attraction, wrestling was one of the few forms of American entertainment where the villains could become bigger stars than the heroes.

Wrestling’s first true star was an effete, cowardly villain in the form of Gorgeous George Wagner. Whereas many wrestlers were celebrities in their territories, few ever reached national acclaim making George one of wrestling’s first true nationally-recognized celebrities. He did so by ignoring the athletic aspects of wrestling in favor of over-the-top theatricality and melodrama. Instead of competing fairly, he would take every opportunity he could to cheat, his own personal mantra being, “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat!” It was because of this that he frequently escaped matches with victories where before it would be common for the hero to pull off the win.

George ushered in a form of theater to wrestling that would only expand as the years continued, and many would take it even higher levels. A spiritual successor to George could be seen in arguably wrestling’s biggest villain of all-time, Ric Flair. Losing the effete aspects of George’s character in favor of that of a suave playboy, Flair still carried all the theatricality of George but added a level of athleticism to the act making a complete package. And whereas George’s cowardice was limited to running from opponents, Flair took his cowardice in an entirely different and much more violent direction in sneak attacks from his stablemates, the Four Horsemen. These attacks could range from attempting to break Dusty Rhodes’ leg after a cage match to rubbing Ricky Morton’s face in concrete to one of their most sadistic acts: hiring a videographer to follow the group as they pursued Dusty Rhodes to a parking lot and broke his arm with a baseball bat.

This sort of violence was nothing new to wrestling, as the spectacle of George soon was adopted by so many wrestlers that it lost its appeal over time as a draw at a regional level and many promoters were forced to find new ways to shock their audience. An increased level of violence and bloodletting was a natural alternative that fed off an audience’s base urges creating many stars throughout the ’60s and ’70s such as crazed Arabian sadists in Abdullah the Butcher and The Original Sheik, who would carve their opponents with a variety of non-traditional weapons like forks and pencils, and genuine wild-men like Bruiser Brody, who wrestled a hardcore style before the term was ever conceived.

In addition to these over-the-top stars, gimmick matches offered promoters the opportunity to promise their audience an experience in bloodshed they wouldn’t soon forget. One of the most prominent examples is the cage match, which actually is almost as old as wrestling itself, with the first version believed to have taken place in a ring made of chicken wire on June 25, 1937, between Jack Bloomfield and Count Petro Rossi. The structure of the cage evolved from the chicken wire into the now famous chain-link fence, and the match itself changed from a means of keeping to wrestlers in the ring into an excuse for fans’ to revel in a heel’s bloody demise as the face would repeatedly grind the heel’s face against the chain-link fence to their delight. The most notorious example, and one of the matches that could most closely be associated with Grand Guignol, took place on November 28th, 1985, at the NWA’s Starrcade event.

Pitting Tully Blanchard and Magnum T.A. against each other in an “I Quit” Steel Cage match for the United States title, the match is once of wrestling’s grandest displays of violence. What started off as a traditional cage match slowly devolved into a scene out of a horror movie. By the end of the match, both men were covered in blood, although, Blanchard was the worse of the two having suffered a large laceration on his left arm and was forced to submit by having a broken shard from a wooden chair jammed into his eye in a scene reminiscent of the Guignol’s own eye-gougings. It was also one of the few examples of a hero driven to the same sort of depravity as the villains he fought.

This kind of violence was only amplified as wrestling made its way into the ’90s and a new generation of stars that had grown up with men like the Horsemen and matches like the “I Quit” Cage match began to see how much further they could go. ECW emerged in 1993 as wrestling’s greatest tribute to the Grand Guignol, a crazed theater of violence that openly embraced depravity and bloodshed. The line between hero and villain was often blurred, and the stories played with the notion of breaking-the-fourth-wall to draw wrestler’s real lives into the melodrama, creating an environment that also reflected the Guignol’s realist/naturalist intentions. It wasn’t uncommon to see the hero completely disregarding good taste in his quest for revenge, or for the villain to unleash shocking amounts of violence to achieve his goal.

Ultimately, wrestling has always been an over-the-top form of theater that’s written in violence and blood. It’s participants have a long history of amping up theatrical aspects of their personalities instead of relying on their athletics. And there’s never been a clear distinction that good always wins over evil, with even WWE seeming to jump back and forth with the idea over the years. While a PG era is upon us, it’s quite possible it will be short-lived. There’s always money to be made in blood, and wrestling has never been shy about spilling it.