WWE How the Storytelling Medium of Professional Wrestling Broke Down
At
its best, professional wrestling is a storytelling medium — albeit one
that’s mostly built on guys in tiny pants beating each other into
submission two or three times a week — but over the past year, World
Wrestling Entertainment’s mechanism of good guys, bad guys, plot twists
and the strange logic that leads every single conflict to be settled in
the ring has become increasingly broken. There’s a disconnect between
what they’re telling us and what’s actually happening in their stories,
and there’s no character that embodies that problem more than John Cena.
Even if you don’t watch pro wrestling, you’ve probably seen John Cena
at least a few times. He’s the big square guy in jorts, dog tags and a
crew cut who’s responsible for selling an entire rainbow of t-shirts
advising young wrestling fans to live by the nebulous tenets of “Hustle,
Loyalty and Respect.” As a character, he’s spent the last ten years
evolving from a wannabe gangsta to the top good guy in wrestling, a
stand-up hero who fights for what’s right no matter what it might cost
him.
The thing is, he’s not. He’s more like the snobs who tried to get Delta House guys in
Animal House kicked out of college.
For better or worse, Cena’s the face of World Wrestling
Entertainment. He’s the one on the programs and the collector cups, he’s
at the top of the card in every event that he’s at, he’s even the one
playing the role of conductor in that new video where the roster sings
Jingle Bells. The trick is that at this point, his character almost has
to work in a very specific way. He’s the king, and because of that, he
really only works as a hero when he’s fighting against something from
outside his kingdom.
That’s what his feuds through 2011 were all about: using his status
as the top dog to build conflicts that had actual weight, rather than
just having him win because he wins. Admittedly, there was also this
weird month-long diversion that was structured like a horror movie about
Kane throwing Cena’s inept-but-likable pal off a loading dock, and that
ended with the kind of slut-shaming and misogyny that even pro
wrestling should’ve moved past by now, but overall, he came out of it
okay. He had defeats and triumphs, and more importantly, he had
motivation that was both clear and heroic.
Unfortunately, 2012 rolled around and the storytelling mechanism of
the WWE promptly shot itself in the foot at every single opportunity.
Part of the problem was that over the course of that big year-long
epic, they’d pretty much exhausted their supply of outsiders for Cena to
fight. His brutal victory against Brock Lesnar was a symbolic defense
the entire concept of pro wrestling against encroachment from MMA and an
incredible triumph for his character, but it also put him pretty
unambiguously back at the top of his field. Like Alexander, he had no
more worlds to conquer. But unlike Alexander, he still had to show up
and fight somebody on the next Monday Night Raw.
As the WWE’s favorite son, Cena doesn’t really need the championship
belt. He’s a ten-time champion already, so it’s not like he’s looking
for that one last shot at immortality. He’s the star of the show whether
he has the belt or not, unlike CM Punk, who clings to it as a symbol of
the respect he hasn’t been able get in any other way. Cena’s desire for
the championship seems to come from a sense of entitlement. At worst,
he just doesn’t want CM Punk to have it, and at best, he just feels like
it ought to be his — a sense of entitlement that seems more in like
with joining Neidermeyer and the rest of the Omegas in plotting against
those misfits in Delta House.
He’s also aligned himself with authority figures, which might be an
even biggest sin, as fans tend to rally behind hell-raisers who buck
authority. Perhaps the most consistent power fantasy of wrestling is the
common man battling against the rich guys and the corporate big shots, a
story that gives fans a chance to vicariously vent their frustrations
at their boss/principal/mom/teacher.
It’s a formula that almost always works. But despite ostensibly being
the good guy, Cena’s role as the biggest and most marketable superstar
has lead him to buddy up with the same evil fatcats that we loved seeing
“Stone Cold” Steve Austin drag through an arena at gunpoint back in the
’90s.
The worst of it came recently, when Cena allied himself with WWE
chairman Vince McMahon. It’s worth noting that in the ever-changing
continuity of WWE, Vince had previously been ousted as CEO back at the
start of this whole mess, only to swagger back onscreen with no
explanation whatsoever. Equally inexplicable was the fact that he was
met with cheers from the crowd, even though his return involved
humiliating his subordinates and forcing them to call him “sir.”
But the nostalgia of a wrestling fan is a tricky thing. Much like the
world of superhero comics, any reminder of that stuff you liked ten
years ago — in McMahon’s case, his genuinely amazing tenure as the
villain to Steve Austin’s anti-hero — is typically met with nostalgic
approval.
The latest development in Cena’s descent into Snobhood? McMahon
announced that he’ll be forcing this year’s winner of the Money in the
Bank ladder match, Dolph Ziggler, to put his shot at the championship on
the line against Cena at the next big event, giving Cena a convenient
way to get back to the main event.
It’s the most blatant example of pulling strings to give him an
endless amount of chances, and to make matters worse, it’s a pointless
storytelling move. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is; if he loses,
it doesn’t mean anything because it’s become evident that he’ll just be
given another chance. If he wins, he doesn’t really gain anything
because he’s in the exact same spot that he always is, and Ziggler loses
some of his legitimacy to fix something that ain’t broken.
And all the while, Cena’s been playing up to his role as pro
wrestling’s Greg Marmalard. His promos are built around insulting any
funny-looking members of his competition even when he’s not even
remotely involved in their storylines. Recent video packages have had
their colors desaturated to turn the pink baseball cap he wore for
breast cancer awareness month into a muted gray now that October’s over.
His current storyline involves a nebulous grasp of blackmail where the
major hardship is that he’s given the petite and adorable AJ Lee the
worst kisses ever broadcast on national television. He might as well
just challenge Rodney Dangerfield to a game of golf and get it over
with. And yet, he keeps getting cheered, because WWE presents all of
this stuff as positive and heroic.
I’m not saying Cena has to come out, rescue a kitten from a tree, buy
everyone in the crowd an ice cream cone and shake hands with his
opponent before every match, but to be honest, that’d be better than
what we have right now. Right now, we have a guy who looks like he’s
trying to shut down the rec center unless a gang of scrappy kids can
raise enough money by breakdancing to stop him, and that means
something’s broken.
