Forbidden Door and the follies of the Invasion

Note: Some elements of this post have been repurposed from a piece originally written for http://www.imaintainthedoublefootstompissilly.com, under the title "Styles Clash: Wrestling Without Ideologies, and the Homogenisation of Pro-Wrestling".

Last night, I finally finished watching the AEW x NJPW crossover event, Forbidden Door. This will not be a recap and review of that show - suffice to say I found it largely excellent, if only when taken out of context; the build was underwhelming, and the show did little to address the woes currently befalling both contributing promotions, beyond offering renewed confidence that AEW PPVs are, by and large, extremely good wrestling shows, and that Tony Khan quite often gets how this wrestling lark works.

Instead, this is more a look at "inter-promotional" wrestling in and of itself. It has a messy and rarely satisfying history - while NJPW achieved tremendous critical and commercial success presenting the talent of the UWF as a dangerous invading enemy, so much so that they provided the blueprint for WCW's New World Order, efforts to repeat that success with later iterations of the UWF failed to pass muster, while Jim Crockett Promotions' purchase of the other, American, UWF provided the byword for how not to integrate another territory's talent into your own promotion, that would stand as the defining example of the phenomenon until 2001, and the WCW/ECW Invasion angle in the WWF.

In Britain, the Invasion angle left long and now oft forgotten fingerprints all over the independent scene - as young, fledgling promoters dreamed of playing Vince McMahon, the arrogant evil promoter, or Paul Heyman at his rabble-rousing best in Beyond The Mat, so too they turned to the wrestling of the WWF at the time for booking inspiration, and nary a month went by without fans being "treated" to some form of "invasion", crossover, or interpromotional rivalry between the alphabet soup of acronyms that made up the early noughties British scene. The high watermark was perhaps the interpromotional feud between the FWA and IPW:UK, but it was a well gone to far too often, that played to the online fanatics of message boards like the UKFF and subscribers to Powerslam magazine in a largely pre-social media age, at the expense of British wrestling's core audience, and, in the tradition of the WWF's Invasion story, often placed the emphasis on the promoters and personalities outside of the ring more than where it belonged, on the wrestlers themselves. When fans fantasy book interpromotional events, it's usually from the desire to see unlikely opponents cross paths, setting up dream matches between wrestlers who, by virtue of their contractual obligations, would be unlikely to ever face one another in real life - yet, in practice, promoters have had a tendency to focus in on petty bureaucracy, and rivalries between owners, executives and other assorted non-wrestlers. Putting aside the likelihood that much of this is rooted in ego and fantasy fulfilment, there is an understandable reason why a promoter would feature non-wrestling talent in interpromotional stories; it creates a sense that the conflict goes beyond the usual boundaries of in-ring competition, and that figures that would ordinarily remain passive or neutral are drawn into the fray. The downside is that, by relying on talent that aren't ordinarily wrestlers, there's a very low ceiling for what this can actually achieve - with the exception, of course, of the genuinely excellent match between WWF and WCW head referees Earl Hebner and Nick Patrick, the strength of which is largely a result of Nick Patrick being one of the most underrated heel performers of his time.

One problem with crossovers and "invasions" on an independent level is a lack of any sense of brand exclusivity - with few promotions able to lay exclusive claim to a full-time roster, it's difficult for audiences to pledge promotional allegiance; if a wrestler works for six or seven promotions in any given month, in what sense can they be said to "represent" one side of an inter-promotional affair? Will audiences buy into them as a steadfast defender of a brand that they're far from synonymous with?

In a slightly different configuration, that was one of the problems affecting the WWF/WCW/ECW "Invasion" storyline - the WWF's inability or reluctance to sign some of WCW's bigger names from their lucrative Time Warner contracts, and evident lack of desire to present what star names they did acquire as credible threats, meant that the license to print money that was a WWF vs. WCW storyline had the waters muddied, first by the inclusion of an ECW group illogically aligned with WCW, and subsequently by the bolstering of the WCW/ECW ranks with wrestlers like Test, Christian, Ivory and Kurt Angle, who had spent their entire major league careers in the WWF, and Stone Cold Steve Austin who, despite having spent time in both WCW and ECW under previous gimmicks, was utterly synonymous with the WWF at its most successful. By the time the story came to an end, at Survivor Series 2001, the names WCW and ECW were rarely used, in favour of "The Alliance", and the feud-ending 5-on-5 tag team match saw the invading forces represented by a team including two men who had never wrestled for either WCW or ECW, one of whom was yer actual Shane McMahon, while only two members of the team had joined the WWF subsequent to the WCW buy-out. Elsewhere on the card, fans eagerly looking for interpromotional dream matches were met with the likes of Al Snow vs. Christian, Edge vs. Test, and the Dudley Boyz vs. The Hardy Boyz, all strictly WWF affairs no matter how they're dressed up, that could have taken place on any episode of RAW or SmackDown! in the preceding two years. Hardly the stuff of fantasy bookers' dreams.

I won't indulge myself in concocting my own version of a WWF vs. WCW storyline or supercard, as it's a thought experiment that any wrestling fan of a certain age engaged in for years, and it's widely accepted that the WWF fell well short of pretty much anybody's efforts (except, perhaps, for the utterly insane marathon card proposed by Jim Cornette on his Guest Booker shoot interview). But it is worth exploring the question of why the WWF did so badly. Let's assume that there was no possibility of them securing the services of the likes of Sting, Ric Flair, Bill Goldberg, Scott Steiner or the New World Order, or even of Eric Bischoff as WCW figurehead, in time for the story as planned. That puts them on a backfoot in terms of star power, and the obvious solution would be to better elevate the stars they did have access to - Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page come to mind on the WCW side of the equation, while the likes of Mike Awesome, Lance Storm, Tazz, Rhyno and Raven could easily have been better promoted as credible threats.

Instead, the best of the WCW talent were presented as clowns, jokes and WWF wannabes, with recurring implications that Booker T was simply a bargain basement answer to The Rock, while the lesser lights of the Alliance were barely given a sense of character at all, just presented as a sea of mooks in identical T-shirts. Some of the fault doesn't lie with the WWF - the WCW brand was tarnished beyond repair by 2001, after years of illogical, counter-productive, and intelligence insulting booking, and it would have been a hard sell to present a watered down version of that WCW as a threat to the WWF at the height of its powers.

And that is where "invasion" storylines so often go wrong. The truth is, when we used to fantasy book dream WWF vs. WCW events, none of us were factoring in how the matches we concocted would tie in to the events of that weeks Monday Night RAW or Nitro, we weren't picking talent based on the ongoing storylines of the day. What we wanted was the platonic ideals of the WWF and WCW; a grab bag of the biggest names available from any point in the companies' histories. By choosing to book the invading WCW as purely the WCW of early 2001, rather than a broader representation of the idea of WCW, pulling from its rich history, the WWF could never live up to the sky-high expectations that a WWF vs. WCW programme offered. One of the WWF's most powerful and compelling moments at the outset of the Invasion was an inspiring promo delivered by an elderly "Classy" Freddie Blassie to the WWF locker room, effectively asking the stars of today to fight on behalf of the WWF of the past as well as the present - would appearances by, say, Ricky Steamboat, Dusty Rhodes, Harley Race or Arn Anderson as legendary spokespersons for the WCW side not have added similar gravitas?

There's more to a wrestling promotion than its wrestlers, though, as odd as that might sound. That's one of the reasons fans get excited by the prospect of a talent they've watched on TV every week for years in WWE jumping ship to AEW - it offers no new opportunity to see that wrestler perform, but it does provide them with potential new matches, and a new environment, free of many of the restrictions imposed by the WWE's house style. That is, in part, because AEW and WWE have very different ideological approaches to wrestling - WWE is, generally, isolationist, prone to historical revisionism, and sells itself as the be-all and end-all of what it calls "sports entertainment", while AEW is somewhat more outward looking, regularly draws deep from the well of wrestling history, and presents itself as one promotion among many, openly acknowledging the existence of the likes of NJPW, AAA and ROH, and treating them as near-equals. It's that ideological difference, as much as the individual wrestlers concerned, that can make interpromotional cards appealing, and that was lacking in the case of the WWF's Invasion. Again, only partial blame can be placed on the shoulders of the WWF - the WCW of 2000 and 2001 bore few traces of the promotion's roots in the Carolina territories, as the crown jewel of the NWA, as the creative leadership of Vince Russo had pushed them further and further toward a second-rate facsimile of what the WWF were selling on the other channel. By giving us the WWF of 2001 vs. the WCW of 2001, the WWF robbed us of any ideological distinction to speak of.

That's a problem that is only more widespread today, as the ease of access to wrestling at all levels from all over the world means that the days of distinct regional differences in style and approach between countries or territories have been gradually ironed out - Lucha Libre is still identifiably distinct from Japanese or North American wrestling, but the differences are far less stark than they once were, and more promotions fall into a homogenised middle ground, where techniques and tropes from one style are recycled in another with little understanding of context.

By way of example of how this can be done well, we should look to an earlier, less well known WWF invasion - the interpromotional rivalry played out between the WWF, ECW and Memphis' USWA in the mid 1990s. On WWF television, ECW wrestlers, and promoter Paul Heyman, were depicted as an outlaw group, yet given the occasional midcard match against WWF talent. Colour commentator Jerry Lawler, playing the heel role, derided them as “Extremely Crappy Wrestling”. In the WWF, ECW were a curiosity, and Jerry Lawler himself was the clear antagonist – it was Lawler vs. ECW. In ECW, however, Jerry Lawler was a representative of the entire WWF, and the presentation of the feud was of ECW as the spirited underdog, the independent cutting edge newcomers battling against the million dollar big business of the WWF, with Lawler as the WWF’s most vocal spokesperson.

In Lawler's home ground of the USWA, however, where Tommy Dreamer “invaded” television tapings in retaliation for Lawler’s invasion of ECW, the programme was painted more explicitly as a conflict of ideologies. Jerry Lawler’s promos, and Lance Russell’s commentary, derided ECW as a group of violent, disrespectful, upstart misfits, looking to upset the established norm that the USWA represented – Memphis wrestling as a cosy, Saturday afternoon television fixture. This was a promotion where Jerry Lawler, as a babyface, could – with a straight face - scornfully put down an ECW video package set to music by, “a band called Nirvana, have you heard of them?”, in 1997, some six years after the release of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and three years after the death of Kurt Cobain. Many of Lawler’s promos at the time pined for the good old days of pro-wrestling, criticising ECW T-shirt wearing fans in his own audience, and sound like your uncle’s “the problem with kids today” Facebook status. This is Memphis wrestling as a cosy, familiar world for Southern old boys and family viewing, where Lance Russell’s warm, welcoming tones are as much a comfort blanket as play-by-play commentary, with Jerry Lawler fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

While in ECW, the feud was presented as ECW vs. WWF, the little man vs the establishment, the promos ECW talent cut to be aired on USWA TV don’t acknowledge the WWF at all – the battle lines are drawn as USWA vs. ECW, North vs. South, Old vs. New. Paul Heyman tries to paint ECW as the true heir to the legacy of Memphis wrestling, citing Memphis’ history of bloody, wild brawls, and the ECW wrestlers routinely say that their matches in the USWA will be “wrestling, the way it used to be”. On USWA and ECW broadcasts, both Lance Russell and Joey Styles effectively try and accuse the other side of hypocrisy – Lance Russell sees ECW as upstarts who think they’re the first to have wild bloody brawls, pointing out that Jerry Lawler had his fair share of “hardcore” matches in Memphis, while Joey Styles makes the same argument to undermine Lawler’s criticisms of ECW, accusing him of hypocrisy for criticising others for having the same kind of matches that The King had competed in for years.

What underpins this entire story is the sense that these are three promotions with recognisably different in-ring styles and, crucially, vastly different ideologies. The WWF is big business, USWA is the homespun family-run dependent hometown favourite, as American and as dependable as apple pie, while ECW is the rebel, new kid on the block, hellbent on disrupting the established norm by any means necessary. Practically every indie promotion since ECW has tried to carve out that “anti-establishment” niche, but can you think of a group of two or three promotions that could work together in reality, and against one another in kayfabe, this effectively today? Where you could identify that their approaches to how wrestling should be presented are so distinct that they are inherently at odds with one another, to the point that the same wrestler could work babyface in one promotion and heel in the other with no risk of inconsistency of character, or motivation? Ask yourself, of two or three of your own favourite promotions, if you could define their ideology, and how they differ from one another.

With that ideology comes brand identity. It's something ECW had in droves, to the point that T-shirts branded with the company's initials far outsold those of any individual wrestler. It's something that any independent promotion should aspire towards - when you have brand loyalty, your audience trusts you to deliver on promises, they believe you when you promote an incoming new talent as a major attraction, and they'll be willing to follow your stories closely, and follow your promotion even when star wrestlers aren't there. Without that brand identity, you have to rely on the reflected star power of individual wrestlers - and when, for whatever reason, those wrestlers are unavailable, you have to weather the storm of their fans leaving with them. With brand identity comes trust, and for as long as promoters don't abuse that trust, comes loyalty.

WCW in 2001 had burned through whatever brand loyalty they had left, by consistently abusing fans' trust, exploiting what lingering goodwill they had for the brand, and chipping away at the promotion's ideology until it barely had any semblance of its old brand identity left. As a conflict of ideologies, the Invasion was doomed to fail.

That brings me back to Forbidden Door. One of the highlights of the show saw the debuting Claudio Castagnoli as a surprise opponent for NJPW's Zack Sabre Jr - an excellent match both on paper and in execution, but one that does raise an interesting thought given the context. On a show made up predominantly of interpromotional AEW vs. NJPW matches, Castagnoli vs. Sabre was, ostensibly, another in that category - but in what sense was Claudio Castagnoli, who had never appeared in AEW before, really a representative of AEW? Again, it's a question that comes down to brand identity and audience trust - AEW has built its reputation on presenting a genre of wrestling, fostered in NJPW, in ROH, in PWG, and in CHIKARA, in many cases utilising talent who made their names in those promotions and others like them, as a viable national television product, after years of WWE insisting that their way of making TV wrestling was the only way. Claudio Castagnoli is, despite having spent the last eleven years in WWE, very much of a piece with the talent that call AEW their home, and the audience's faith in AEW is such that, fostered by the smart branding of social media "...is All Elite" graphics to announce new signings, fresh signings are welcomed with open arms, and their history in other promotions is celebrated; while WWE often treats wrestler's prior success with contempt, a "welcome to the big leagues!" approach where only WWE matters, AEW was quick to incorporate Claudio into its own ongoing storylines, while almost immediately alluding to his history with old rival Eddie Kingston. Put simply, Claudio Castagnoli was an "AEW wrestler" because everything about the booking and the production of his match made him an AEW wrestler, and because the audience's longstanding goodwill toward AEW meant they were ready to accept him as such.

As a whole, AEW took a very different route with Forbidden Door to WWE with the Invasion. In the Invasion, talent were hastily bundled into one of two groups - the WWF, or the Alliance - and while there were moments of internal strife and tension, the focus was on those distinct factions. In more recent years, WWE have got even worse at this trope - every November, in the build to inter-brand matches at Survivor Series, existing feuds and rivalries are forgotten, and wrestlers ally with one another based on the nebulous concept of "brand supremacy", that seems to amount to nothing more than what colour shirt they're wearing. It's a booking crutch that's frustrating in its laziness, but even more so in the missed opportunities it represents; if there were a material reward for the winning brand, we would have some explanation for why wrestlers would be prepared to set aside old grudges and team with former rivals in the name of their brand, there would be drama to wring from the tension of whether those grudges would resurface, or whether a recent signing to the brand is sufficiently loyal, or any number of other nuances and narrative wrinkles, yet WWE consistently take the simplest, dullest route.

In AEW, as Forbidden Door drew clearer, we did start to see NJPW talent appear on AEW television, but this wasn't NJPW as a homogenous mass opposed to AEW, nor were AEW a unified front against them. This wasn't an "invasion", but an interweaving of NJPW wrestlers and their ongoing storylines on to AEW television. The build was at times frustrating, and didn't offer the promise of the excellent show we ended up getting - one thing that can be said of a clear-cut invasion story is that the viewer is quickly introduced to a large number of new talent, and has a rudimentary understanding of their role and their motivations almost immediately. In the approach taken by AEW, though, each new talent introduced is a unique individual, with their own part to play, their own character, and their own motivations, and would have benefited from more than the often brief and cursory introductions given to them by AEW, where the fast pace of the programming and reluctance to provide recaps and replays didn't work in their favour.

I'm not suggesting that AEW should be holding its audience's hands and spelling out every single thing - indeed, I think it's often one of AEW's strengths that they don't insult the audience's intelligence in this way, and trust them to follow a story and, if they don't necessarily know all of the history behind it, to at least recognise that there is a history, and be capable of the mental arithmetic required to figure out the story in question. After all, it's only wrestling, not the works of Umberto Eco, we don't need a guidebook. In this instance, though, viewers unfamiliar with NJPW were confronted with an array of new wrestlers - some 15-20 either brand new to AEW television, or having only made one or two appearances prior - and, with them, new championships, new buzzwords, new characters and new relationships to get their head around, on top of an already hefty roster, with a number of new faces popping up in the same period unrelated to NJPW or the Forbidden Door concept at all.

It was an ambitious undertaking and one that it didn't feel like AEW had pulled off, but they sticked the landing, with an incredible show that - despite lacking some talent on either side that would ideally have been able to take part - delivered on the interpromotional promise, and genuinely did feel like a clash of the platonic ideals of both promotions, AEW and NJPW in its modern iteration. Admittedly, that latter point was aided by AEW still being a young promotion with relatively limited roster turnover, and NJPW having been in the creative doldrums for some years now, so that anyone who clocked out in, say 2016, and was engaging with NJPW content for the first time would be unlikely to feel like they had missed much, given that Kazuchika Okada and Hiroshi Tanahashi were in the co-main events, while Minoru Suzuki was putting on a spirited performance in an undercard six-man tag team match. Plus ça change.

Forbidden Door, despite significant setbacks, succeeded where previous interpromotional shows have failed by jettisoning the hackneyed explanation for most crossover shows in the Western world - NJPW weren't presented as hostile invaders, a rival promotion looking to prove themselves, or as a glorified heel stable, but simply as another wrestling promotion, entering into an arrangement to cross-promote with AEW on friendly terms. It had more in common with Japanese interpromotional "summits" than with something like the WWF Invasion, and was better for it, and hopefully paved the way for future events - Forbidden Door 2 in 2023 seems a guarantee, and it's likely we'll see AEW represented at NJPW's Wrestle Kingdom in January. It was an event that speaks to the value of AEW's decidedly un-WWE approach, in celebrating their place as just one promotion among many, and my hope is that in the future the Forbidden Door will be allowed to open for the other promotions AEW is friendly with, paving the way for more crossovers with the likes of AAA, Stardom, DDT, and Tokyo Joshi Pro. We shall see.

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