This Is Not A Royal Rumble Review
I’ll spare you the opening paragraph about ethical consumption under capitalism (spoiler: there’s not a lot of it about); suffice to say, I watched the Royal Rumble on Saturday. It was my first WWE event since last year’s Wrestlemania - the allure of a Saturday night event starting at the almost reasonable hour of 11pm, when I had no other plans, no reason to be up early the following morning, the ease of it being available on Netflix, and it being the bloody Royal Rumble was all enough to win me over.
I had, admittedly, been tempted to watch the first episode of RAW on Netflix. That was the company planting their flag to say that this was a new era, reaching a whole new audience, and that things would be done differently. This was a company that would putting its best foot forward and trying to impress the world. The first thing I saw from that show was a short clip of The Undertaker pootling around ringside on a motorbike, then leaving without a word or an explanation, having added absolutely nothing. But hey, remember The Undertaker? Not for me, thanks.
But this is what WWE do. One thing I will give Triple H credit for as the current head of creative is that WWE programming under his direction works overtime to tell you that what you’re watching is significant, it’s important, it’s the biggest and best that the company has ever been, and that the stars of today are world-beaters. That is a more than welcome change after years of a Vince McMahon-helmed WWE repeatedly treating its younger talent as an afterthought, something to be swept aside when the real stars turn up to work, and the “Attitude Era” of the late 1990s as the pinnacle of professional wrestling, at the expense of anything going on today. But old habits die hard - if it’s not The Undertaker, it’s Hulk Hogan, it’s Goldberg, it’s JBL. Nostalgia still sells.
That’s what WWE do, and it’s who WWE are. They’ve told us as much. Four years ago, WWE president Nick Khan and Stephanie McMahon were both mocked and ridiculed by fans for claiming, in an official capacity, that WWE was comparable to Marvel, and were in some ways using the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a blueprint for their own future. This was taken, by observers across social media who lacked either the curiosity or the media literacy to look beyond the headlines and actually look at what they were saying in context, to mean that WWE saw their storytelling as similar to the Marvel movies, and fans ridiculed them for daring to think that they could match up to such narrative genius. Personally, if I were in the creative writing profession, I’d be setting by bar slightly higher than Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. No, I haven’t seen it, life’s too short.
But that is to profoundly miss the point - Khan and McMahon weren’t talking about telling stories, they were talking about branding, and about monetising their IP. That’s something that Marvel have done expertly, and WWE have a treasure trove of IP with which to follow their lead - forty years of Wrestlemania, decades of live events and weekly TV content, but just as importantly, the names, likenesses, and merchandising rights to Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, Randy Savage, D-Generation-X, the New World Order, and all of the rest.
WWE is, by Nick Khan’s own admission, not a professional wrestling company, but a content provider. I honestly believe that if they were to balance the books tomorrow and could conclusively see that they would become more profitable by leveraging their existing video library and image rights, at the expense of running any future live events, we’d never see another WWE show again. The old story used to be that Vince McMahon wasn’t booking wrestling, he was “making movies”, but in the coldly capitalist language of today, WWE aren’t booking wrestling, they’re “creating content”.
There’s a Stewart Lee joke that high street chain The Works is nominally a book shop, but run by people who have a deep-seated suspicion of books. WWE is a professional wrestling promotion run by people who have a deep-seated suspicion of professional wrestling. Sure, it’s not as apparent as the Bad Old Days, when the verbal diktat of Vince McMahon prevented on-air talent from even saying the words “wrestling” or “wrestler”, favouring “sports entertainment” and “WWE Superstar”, but it’s the same company. Triple H has just been able to play on easy mode by sweeping away the most obvious and well-known rules enforced by Vince McMahon; one could suggest cynically so, as if to say, “look, they say wrestler now, so times have clearly changed”, as if wiping the slate clean on Vince McMahon’s on-air peccadilloes should be enough to reassure us that the company has just as efficiently moved on from the culture of abuse he fostered behind the scenes.
I call it a distrust of professional wrestling, you may well think of it as a disdain for it. For all the fresh coat of paint, fancy production, and metaphorical New Hat, of the New Era of WWE, it’s still a product that gives you the distinct impression that they see the actual meat of a wrestling match as an inconvenient necessity, something to get out of the way so that they can get on with the real core of their product - entrances, mid-match am-dram monologues, pointing out celebrities in the audience, and prolonged lingering shots of wrestlers silently staring at each other. They are a company that books for the post-show highlight package more than for the show itself; a three hour show to produce a solid two minute sizzle reel, and where the commentators put more effort into celebrating years-old “viral moments” than in explaining the stakes of the match they’re commentating on.
There was a disparaging name given to WWE booking of recent years, “The Gratitude Era”, to suggest that the audience’s relationship with the company had changed to a point where rather than rooting for heroes or booing villains based on their kayfabe actions, fans were picking and choosing who they felt warranted a push or a title victory based on whether, in their eyes, the performer behind the character “deserved it”. Wrestling championships as lifetime achievement awards. It’s a question of navigating kayfabe in a post-kayfabe era and, frankly, I’m not opening that can of worms again, I’ll be here all day (but, in brief, we’re not as post-kayfabe as we’d like to think, and kayfabe is a malleable and resilient beast. Buy the book.)
The WWE of today I would deem The Self-Congratulatory Era. Every show is a celebration of WWE’s own success. Cody Rhodes, the newly crowned babyface WWE Champion, ended Wrestlemania by bringing office and creative staff to the ring, calling them by name, to celebrate their part in his rise. Every show seems to open with Triple H or Stephanie McMahon telling us exactly how important they are, and at some point, audiences are encouraged to cheer and celebrate when they’re told how much money they have collectively spent on ticket sales. “Look how much money you’ve given us”, WWE say, and their fans applaud.
There was a video package ahead of WWE’s debut on Netflix, that began with black and white clips from wrestling’s earliest recorded past, moving through to the early days of televised wrestling, all Gorgeous George in black and white, through the territories, WCW, and the WWF, up until the present day. It purported to show “the history of wrestling”, but somewhere around half-way through, the melodramatic voiceover stopped saying wrestling, and said, “the history of WWE”. As far as we’re concerned, they’re telling us, the two are one and the same. WWE is wrestling, wrestling is WWE, and don’t you forget it. Triple H, who has repeatedly talked of us reluctance to be featured on television or to take credit for anything, despite just as repeatedly appearing on television and being publicly given credit for WWE’s success by people who rely on him for their continued employment, gave the voiceover for that history package, and when the “writing of wrestling’s history” was depicted by footage of that history being written out on a typewriter, it was his hands doing the typing. I don’t think I need to spell that symbolism out for you. All glory to Triple H.
That’s the overall message of WWE these days - aren’t we doing well? It’s almost enough to make you forget that they’re currently named in an ongoing human trafficking and sexual assault lawsuit.
One of the bigger indicators of WWE’s approach to wrestling is a comparison I’ve often made - at some point in the late 1990s, WWE TV ceased to be a televised live wrestling event, and became a TV show about wrestling that happened to be recorded live. Allow me to explain.
If wrestling is a live event first and foremost, then the cameras are there to capture the action, and the trappings of television can themselves be a tool in how wrestling constructs stories. But if, as in how WWE approach things, wrestling is a television show first and foremost, then the camera becomes invisible, just as it would be in an episode of Succession or Coronation Street. That opens the doors to edits and re-takes (again, I go over a lot of this in the book), and to backstage segments or outside broadcasts where the presence of a camera crew goes unaddressed and ignored; where heel wrestlers discuss their villainous plans in full of a TV-quality camera, and where anything that happens outside the lens doesn’t count. When you start to question whether the characters in this TV show, who behave in such an illogical way because they are characters in a TV show who are seemingly unaware of the cameras recording them, are then able to watch the TV show on which they appear, it all starts to get very confusing.
This was extremely evident during the men’s Royal Rumble match; a wrestler’s entrance would take up to two minutes, and be the sole focus of the camera. During which time, there was hardly even any thought given over to the idea that anything might be happening in the wrestling ring during that time - because of course it wouldn’t, it’s not on camera. The Royal Rumble match is something we are told is unpredictable, where it’s every man for himself, and eliminations can come out of nowhere - but with the caveat, “only when it’s on camera”. The moment we’re not looking at the ring, wrestlers stop even pretending to be engaged in a physical contest, and simply lie on the mat, waiting for their cue to start again, like Andy’s toys from Toy Story when he walks in to the room.
Contrast that with Rumbles of old, if you like, but I think a more telling counterpoint is the wild and woolly multi-man matches of AEW - the likes of Anarchy In The Arena, and Stadium Stampede, where there is always something happening no matter where you look, too much to keep up with all at once, and it’s the job of the camera to follow the action, as they would in any legitimate sport, rather than for the action to follow the camera. This is how it should be, and I honestly believe that deviation from this is to the detriment of professional wrestling as a whole, as the industry inevitably follows WWE’s lead, and their way is the only way that things can be done. Even with my praise for AEW in this paragraph, I could give you twice as many examples of the worst traits of WWE production and camerawork beginning to infect that promotion as well.
I believe - fervently - that the largest wrestling promotion in the world has forgotten how professional wrestling works, perhaps even what professional wrestling is, and that too many other promotions have spent decades following their lead that they couldn’t tell you what the problem is either.
A wrestling show should feel chaotic, unplanned, rough around the edges, always at risk of collapsing. Because, in kayfabe, this a live sporting event, televised for our entertainment. To that end, the only parts of a show that are “supposed to happen” are those that have been officially sanctioned as part of that sporting event - that is to say, the wrestling matches, interview segments, and perhaps a contract signing. Anything else - backstage angles, post-match brawls, wrestlers interrupting each other’s promos, or storming into an authority figure’s office to demand a match - is an aberration, it’s something unplanned, something that has gone wrong, a sign that the promotion has lost control of events. When formatting a wrestling show, it should be vital not to lose sight of that fact.
Someone once said that a WWE TV show is like The Muppet Show, and in a way it is; you have the “Show” in kayfabe, that is to say, everything that takes place in front of the curtain and in front of an audience, and then you have the backstage chaos that ensues when Kermit tries to corral a cast and crew of weirdoes and outlandish personalities into creating that show.
But WWE have long been too over-produced and polished to make that sense of chaos and unpredictability believable and, worse still, they long since stopped even trying to present those breakdowns of order as anything other than a planned moment, booked by a creative team, written on the format sheet, and broadcast on television. There are few moments on a wrestling TV show that frustrate me more than a director cutting to a backstage scene, seconds before two wrestlers begin a conversation - in kayfabe, why is the camera there (or, if you want to put it another way, why are these two wrestlers having their conversation in front of a camera broadcasting live on TV rather than anywhere else), but even more importantly: in kayfabe, what was this segment on the running order? How did the director know that these two wrestlers were about to have a two minute conversation that would be of narrative significance at this point in the show?
Similarly, when a WWE show opens with an in-ring promo, which is then interrupted by a second wrestler, and that sets up a match for later on that evening, does anyone else tear their hair out in frustration? You mean to say that this show, which is actively being broadcast live on television right now went on-air without a main event match booked? What would they have done if the second wrestler hadn’t chosen that moment to interrupt, and goad the first into a match? Were they just going to go off-air ten minutes early? Once again, zero effort is made to make these moments feel genuinely organic, chaotic, or like part of a believable live event, they are just written as part of an ongoing TV show.
Which makes it all the more frustrating when WWE do try and make some moves in the direction of treating their show as genuinely chaotic, only to draw more attention to how bad they are at it. At the Royal Rumble, they explicitly aimed for that sense of chaos when Akira Tozawa was taken out of the match, and replaced in a panicked backstage segment, with Triple H demanding that streamer iShowSpeed enter in his place. Except we then followed iShowSpeed on camera from gorilla position to the entrance, going from being told unexpectedly that he had to enter the match to seconds later entering with music and a custom entrance video, killing any sense of chaos or spontaneity that they had just tried to create. It’s WWE trying to have their cake and eat it too, to have that air of unpredictability, but refusing to sacrifice their micro-managed glossy production. The end result is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
I’m screaming at clouds here. WWE do their thing, and it makes them millions of dollars, and here I am with considerably fewer dollars, telling them all the ways that the thing they do is wrong. I’m not winning this one, am I?
I am not suggesting that wrestling needs to take itself deadly seriously, and that we should be trying to put the kayfabe genie back in the bottle. I have participated in and even booked all manner of comedy matches - I’ve refereed the Invisible Man, been knocked off my feet by telepathic superpowers, commentated in an alternate universe, and been frozen in time. There is space for nonsense in wrestling. There is space for creativity in wrestling. There is space for comedy in wrestling. But, after years spent ideologically devoted to someone who made the declaration that wrestling can be anything you want it to be, I have to take a step back and say that, no, no it can’t. Wrestling can take inspiration from anywhere, it can be influenced by and in turn influence other media and other art forms, and we can use the techniques of wrestling to explore other stories and other ideas, but wrestling can only be one thing, and that is wrestling.
What I’m arguing is not that we get back to basics and strip away the gimmicks, the characters, the comedy, the smoke and mirrors and bells and whistles, far from it. Only that we remember what wrestling is, and respect that. Alan Moore wrote that if the best thing you aspire for a comic book to be is a movie, then the best you can ever hope for is to write a movie that doesn’t move. If what you hope to achieve out of wrestling is “making movies”, then the best you will ever achieve is a bad movie about wrestling. If you want wrestling to follow the same logic as dramatic, episodic TV, then be prepared for it to be judged against the standards of the genre, and be left wanting. I’m sorry to legions of very excitable people on Twitter, but this isn’t “cinema”, and it’s never going to win anyone any Emmys. It’s professional wrestling, and when it’s allowed to be professional wrestling, well, it can do that better than absolutely anything else. So let it.
