wrestling / Columns

Reigns vs. Bryan & The Dichotomy of Past vs. Future

January 30, 2015 | Posted by Jack Stevenson

As you probably noticed, WWE Raw wasn’t a thing this week in the same way it is usually a thing. Thanks to fucktons and fucktons of snow cascading down on prospective Raw host city Hartford, the eventual broadcast consisted of the marquee matches from the Royal Rumble in their entirety and a few promos from WWE HQ, with the likes of Roman Reigns, Brock Lesnar and Seth Rollins doing their best to inch storylines forward through the blizzardy wilderness. It was actually a pretty fun episode, certainly better than your usual Raw. The format was fresh, the Stamford interviews were mostly pretty interesting, and the two matches from the Royal Rumble made for excellent viewing, albeit for very different reasons. I think WWE did a great job considering the circumstances- sure, it must have been frustrating to shell out hard earned money for the Royal Rumble PPV and then see the only worthwhile matches broadcast for free the next day, but we’re living in an era where WWE lets people see the Survivor Series for free, and will be repeating the offer with next month’s Fast Lane. The inviolable sanctity of pay-per-view has long been shattering, and I don’t think we can complain too much about getting some free wrestling out of it. Still, there wasn’t really enough to fashion the usual 4Rs column out of. I know everyone has been waiting since Monday night with bated breath to find out how I handle this massive inconvenience- it is no exaggeration to state that I, Jack Stevenson, have suffered more hardship than anyone else in the entire world has at the hands of this historic blizzard. In the end, I figured I make a kind of ambitious argument about the Royal Rumble controversy and hope it doesn’t come across as pretentious bullshit. Hopefully that’s an acceptable column. People haven’t got over Roman Reigns’ crushing victory in the Rumble match yet, have they?

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I hope not. It would be a real shame if they had. Reigns is not entirely without merit as a professional wrestler. He demonstrably has the ability to have great matches, to cut great promos, to achieve great fan support. Alarmingly, though, he hasn’t show any signs of being able to do any of these things consistently, or unassisted by his Shield brethren. Of his singles outing since the Shield split, perhaps only his skirmishes with Seth Rollins have surpassed the not especially impressive level of ‘pretty OK,’ and he can’t wrestle Rollins every week. His promos recently have been embarrassing. We laugh at them, but it’s a hollow kind of laughter because seriously, whoever’s scripting them, they’re so completely cringe worthy. His victory in the Rumble match was met by a roaring, towering all consuming wave of furious rejection. Reigns is an unconvincing facsimile of an antiquated ideal in pro wrestling- a muscular, comfortingly formulaic, comfortingly good looking face of a WWE roster that’s real strength lies in its staggering diversity, it’s sheer array of bold, ambitious, inventive wrestlers dragging the company kicking and screaming forward into an exciting new age. He does not represent where WWE is at in 2015 in the same way that Hulk Hogan did in 1984, or Steve Austin did in 1998, or John Cena to an extent did in 2005. People are right to react to his ascent to stardom by howling at him loudly in the hope that the sheer force of the noise will shove him back down to earth.

There is something exciting about what happened at the Rumble though, beyond fans rejecting a wrestler I don’t really care for in a very entertaining way. It’s significant that the man who Philadelphia anointed as their superstar of choice, the man who they wanted to be the… ugh.. “face of the WWE,” was Daniel Bryan. Daniel Bryan is not your conventional professional wrestler. He’s comparatively thin, his hair is thick, graceless and difficult to tame, and outside of the ring he’s passionate about the environment and has been known to read a bit of Noam Chomsky. Ask Hulk Hogan who Noam Chomsky is and he’ll probably just start ranting about slamming that “big, bad, stinky Russian” in the Meadowlands in 1986. Of course, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got no idea who Chomsky is- what’s important is that Bryan’s interests and personality as a whole are considerably different to champions of wrestling past. He’s not all about weight lifting, hunting and partying outside the ring. In short, for a WWE Champion, he’s not especially masculine.

I think this is a really great thing, because wrestling’s obsession with masculinity has been destructive in such a dreadful number of ways. It gave birth to the steroid problems that have blighted the industry for decades and decades, it created a culture where women were routinely marginalized, sexualized, and disrespected, and it made wrestlers and wrestling fans look uniformly like outdated, bloodthirsty, caveman relics. Here’s a quote from conservative commentator Peter Hitchens, attempting to show a similarity between soccer fandom and fascism, the political ideology of choice for historical villains like Hitler and Mussolini. I think the comparison works even better when you substitute soccer for professional wrestling…

“Both have personality cults. Both involve the worship of strutting, violent, dishonest and selfish people. Both are almost wholly masculine in a boozy, sweaty, muscle bound way… both demand the adulation of youth and strength, and both require a great deal of very bad acting, shouting, posturing, eye-rolling and fake injuries or at least fake grievances. Both are based on an angry intolerance of rivals and both spill rapidly into serious violence, given half a chance.”

See what I mean?! You can’t deny the similarities! And obviously, some of it is unavoidable- if you strip the violence away from professional wrestling it loses everything that makes it appealing, although I’d argue there’s a significant difference between your average wrestling match, which is such an exaggerated version of a fight they become almost unrecognizable, and those hideous moments where one wrestler would bash a chair over another’s unprotected head, which have thankfully largely fallen by the wayside. But it’s undeniable that even when they were fan favorite champions, Steve Austin and even Hogan and Cena demonstrated “violent, dishonest and selfish” tendencies. Daniel Bryan doesn’t, not to the same degree. He’s an essentially nice man placed in this baffling, thrilling world where he is forced to unleash his crazy brilliant submission skills to survive. He doesn’t display “angry intolerance” in the same way that Steve Austin did for everyone and Hulk Hogan did for everyone who was a communist. Daniel Bryan doesn’t just move the business away from masculinity, he moves us away from being an unpleasant cult industry. He modernizes and humanizes us and makes this whole wrestling thing more justifiable. And people aren’t resisting this! In all walks of life, such radical change is usually met with fierce trust, but even the notoriously bloodthirsty Philadelphia crowd were literally crying out for it on Sunday. It wasn’t like it was a straight choice between Daniel Bryan and Roman Reigns as to who Philly wanted to win the Rumble. Entertainingly violent psychopath Dean Ambrose was there. Hyper athletic dudebro Dolph Ziggler was an option. Yet they stuck with Bryan, they didn’t get behind anyone to the same extent they did him, and that’s properly promising and exciting.

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Roman Reigns does not represent change. He’s the very picture of masculinity. He’s such a picture of youth and strength, Mussolini is furiously masturbating in his grave. Violence is second nature to him. He is someone who the aggressive, drunken, knuckle-dragging element of the fanbase should be desperately clinging onto. It’s incredibly disheartening to see Vince McMahon is doing so too. Reigns and Bryan represent a striking dichotomy between a dark past and a gleaming future. Fingers crossed that, eventually, WWE will make the leap in the right direction.