The Return of John Morrison and Pro Wrestling as Performance Art

As wrestling fans, we all have a variety of interests in the different styles and characters found within this form of performance art. Some enjoy the arguing soap opera that climaxes in grudge matches, some prefer the sporting athletics in the Japanese ring, while others want the jazzy cyclone of lucha libre. There is one common denominator that links us all: the moment when we realized what we were seeing wasn’t a real fight.

Following that enlightenment, as an audience we are forever chasing that blissful ignorance. Some of us choose to do so by drowning ourselves in the backstage gossip and business news of the industry, some look for the extremes of death matches and shoot style fights, while others want to analyze the safety of the collaboration in the ring where any error is a hint of the reality behind the movements.

It’s incredibly rare that a pro-wrestling match can combine all of these elements to create such a grand illusion that you once again think that what you are watching is “real”, even just for a moment. A few examples that illustrate some of these elements include the infamous Undertaker vs. Mankind Hell in a Cell match, Bryan Danielson vs. Roderick Strong at ROH This Means War in 2005, and the No Holds Barred match between John Cena and Brock Lesnar in 2012.

However, the most recent example was my favourite match from 2018, a forgotten gem that headlined IMPACT Wrestling’s flagship annual PPV event Bound for Glory that year. Before we get to that I first want to discuss the nature of dramatic performance. One of the biggest conceits of wrestling fans is defending matches as not fake but art. Professional wrestling clearly has its own artistic language but I don’t think it’s as easy to call it an art form as many fans would suggest. Dramatic performance of art requires more than simply providing the acrobatics and symbolism promised with the price of admission. I believe art needs to trick you out of your head through the abstract by combining craft with vision. Movie fans often forget that drama was meant to elicit this effect because they’ve been manipulated by Oscar-bait such as The Irishman for so long that, like smart wrestling fans, intellectual movie audiences are too busy tripping over themselves to connect technical dots about what they insist SHOULD be art.

Art, especially in the dramatic performance, is not meant to be dissected down to its mechanics; you are supposed to feel it… once. That’s it. That instant of transported “holy shit” is what makes for pure art. And it still can be achieved.

The most griping scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood saw Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Rick Dalton, seemingly at the artistic end of his movie star career and now doing guest spots on rote TV Westerns. For half of the movie, DiCaprio plays Dalton as a restless, frustrated performer looking for another opportunity to show what he can do but by trying to pay his bills and stay relevant in the industry he is just spinning his wheels. Then comes a moment where he throws a “Hail Mary” dramatic performance as a TV Western villain that drops like a pebble in a pond of your metaphysical understanding of the movie while also shaking you in the physical seat you occupy in the theatre.

In that clip it is hard to encapsulate the experience of watching that scene in cinematic context, the layers within the performance actually double back on the audience in such a subtle way that you really don’t even notice. In order to accept that Rick Dalton the actor is doing a great job of finding his dramatic performance mojo again we have to subconsciously accept that Leonardo DiCaprio has been portraying Dalton as an actor struggling with his craft. DiCaprio walks the tightrope of playing a poor and cheesy character who is an actor without doing a poor or cheesy job as an actor portraying the character. On top of that, the direction of the scene flips that you’re watching the filming of a scene to be as if you’re seeing the finished product like you would on TV. This is an incredibly transcendent moment of cinema that requires the convergence of many unseen factors to present the illusion of an actor portraying an actor performing his greatest scene on a TV show set that appears as a scene in a film YOU are watching inside a theatre. The effect is that you find yourself automatically re-thinking the first half of the movie while being set up for a ridiculous historical fiction ending of orchestrated violence, humour and mystery, which all can happen to you only once for a brief instant at the end of that scene.

Pro-wrestling, of course, is not a movie. But the dramatic performance of a wrestler needs to sometimes play with your meta-expectations of what is real or fake in order to truly create art. One such match that was able to harness this magic was the IMPACT Championship match between Austin Aries and Johnny Impact/John Morrison in the main event of the 2018 Bound for Glory event.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6vi5xr

First there was the pre-match build up. So much of professional wrestling these days is wrestlers having feuds and intense matches followed by them hugging afterwards or Instagram-ing themselves out-of-character doing all kinds non-wrestling stuff. Rarely have we seen social media help to blur the lines of what we consider reality in pro-wrestling, but the rivalry between Aries and Impact prior to their match did just that. I’m not going to get into the details, but Aries made some disparaging comments about Morrison’s wife Taya on social media which garnered a lot of attention and judgment, including a segment on TMZ. Do we know that Aries’ comments were real? A lot of people probably thought so, but we never knew for sure.

Fact or fiction, they integrated that online tension into the opening moments of this match. Whereas most matches between people who “hate” each other start out so “pro-wrestling” that you know instantly that it’s all just part of the show, this one was so awkward at first that it was unclear if Aries was legitimately being uncooperative. On the surface, Morrison is playful and Aries is overly serious, which isn’t too weird until the first motion results in an all too-real guillotine choke by Aries. A difficult struggle to escape for Morrison ensues, after which he punctuates hits a stiff “what are you doing” kick to Aries’ chest. There is then some unnatural outspoken match calling negotiations between the two mid-ring before they start attempting moves and strikes but neither gives in like we expect to see. Aries tries a kick, Morrison tries a take down, they scramble, nothing looks right or smooth or collaborated.

The interesting thing then is that you begin thinking about all the strategies pro-wrestlers could use in a situation where the main event of a major PPV might just turned into a real fight. Do you ruin the entire show by trying to make it a “shoot”? Do you just work stiff with the other guy, but still go through the collaborative motions? Do you try to goad the guy into making an embarrassing mistake? They used that creative juice to really push what the pro-wrestling style can be in a live fight between collaborators in the ring.

Next was a sloppy strike exchange that looked like something you’d see on a street, with both men heaving afterwards, standing cautiously apart like they’re gauging how real that just was and if the other guy is going to be upset. They seemingly start “working” together from this point, but it’s never comfortable, every moment looks like two kids wrestling in a schoolyard without any training and thus getting more angry with each move they let the other guy get in on them. The final real splash of cold water happens when an errant back kick that’s supposed to safely land between Morrison’s shoulder blades instead hits him in the back of the head, making him pop up instantly and slap Aries hard across the face. After that the match seems to level off slightly from this tension.

The match ends after a terrifyingly great choreographed sequence where Aries inadvertently dives to the floor to crash into Taya, prompting an ultimately fed up Morrison to end things with a series of his signature moves. Many of the headlines coming out of the match revolved around what Aries did afterwards, which was quickly recover, flip off the crowd and walk off. Of course, as a snippet removed from the context of the match it seems weird, but when experienced at the end of this struggle following those transcendent opening moments, it’s a clearly reverberated beat that ties the whole viewing experience together.

To this day we still don’t know what went on here. And we should never know, that’s the point. That’s pro-wrestling. That’s art. Transporting you to an unreal state of mind just for a moment, creating doubt and wonder. This is what I want from pro-wrestling. But not THIS again. It’s gotta be different, unexpected, surprising and real. And one of these performers is getting the opportunity again to do it on the grandest stage of them all.

I’m revisiting this match because of the imminent return of John Morrison to the WWE. This man has had a fascinating and layered career. He hit the mainstream as a standout on the WWE’s Tough Enough reality competition show, then shined as a tag team wrestler, straddling humour and workrate with a deft touch, before graduating to Intercontinental-level status. He seemed to be on the traditional, long-term trajectory to the main event in the WWE but he suddenly left and reinvented himself with four seasons of godly performances in Lucha Underground as Johnny Mundo, where he was able to flex those main event level pro-wrestling muscles alongside hilarious and nuanced acting, hardcore wrestling, and technical wizardry. This star turn in the grindhouse theatre of LU was the centrepiece of a trek across the indies, AAA and IMPACT where Morrison demonstrated that he is still in his prime and can adapt to any style thrown his way.

And nothing illustrated that better than the masterpiece Bound for Glory 2018 main event. So while WWE has recently brought back some of their mid-card veterans for late career safety runs, like we’ve seen with The Hardys, Shelton Benjamin and Rhyno, Morrison is a samurai sword who has sharpened his skills while away. Not utilizing him as a main event star would be a mistake, and the WWE would be well served to play off of his LU Worldwide Underground persona as a charming yet delusional Hollywood brat. However, that Bound for Glory performance makes me hope there is a new twist coming to the John Morrison story. His career, like that match, has been unpredictable so far, and here’s to hoping the next act gives us something else we don’t see coming.

UPDATE: About a day after I wrote this column, Austin Aries went on the Chris Van Vliet podcast and talked about the Bound for Glory 2018 match at length. While I’m not a fan of this kind of structuralist behind-the-curtain explaining (and neither is Aries, he admits), it coincides with some of what I assumed and certainly does not alter any of of my feelings above, but it is an interesting listen if you want more detail about this match.