The Oscars are right around the corner; the WrestleMania of the Hollywood calendar. Among the films nominated for this year's Academy Awards, there's "Marty Supreme," the tale of a carny table-tennis player who is laser-focused on achieving greatness in his niche sport, as well as "Song Sung Blue," the story of two singers who love each other almost as much as they love Neil Diamond.While the two films could not be more different in content, demographic, aesthetic, and any number of ways, they do share two similarities: One has a tagline of "Dream Big," while the other's is "Dream Huge" (Crazy, right?), and they are wrestling movies that aren't about wrestling.Wrestling is about more than predetermined fights and spandex. It's a part of a much larger world of carnies, con artists, showmen, and other artists; a world of sensory assault, paper-thin stories of good and evil, and an understanding that the truth, even reality, is up for negotiation."Marty Supreme" and "Song Sung Blue" did not emerge from a vacuum. There is a rich tradition of wrestling movies that aren't about wrestling, and in the true spirit of professional wrestling, it's a tradition that I made up.This will not feature any movies that are literally about wrestling. "The Wrestler" is not on this list, nor is "The Iron Claw" or the classic "...All The Marbles." No, this will deal with movies about acrobats, porn stars, magicians, tap-dancers, and yes, even table-tennis players and Neil Diamond tribute acts, all of which light a beacon of recognition in any wrestling fan, and should give wrestling cinephiles like Bronson Reed some films to add to their Letterboxd watchlists.
If there is one film that I hope everyone who reads this article watches, it's Carol Reed's 1956 film "Trapeze," quite possibly the most any film can be about pro wrestling, without actually being about pro wrestling.Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis play acrobats who, when they aren't fighting overGina Lollobrigida, are determined to put on the best trapeze act the world has ever seen. Lancaster is an old veteran whose body is already breaking down, and Curtis is a young hotshot who is determined to add a third spin to the mid-air somersault. Lancaster has tried it before, and it nearly killed him, and he doesn't want to see Curtis go down the same path. He thinks Cutis has what it takes to make the audience believe that "the circus is real," like they did in the good old days, but also thinks he takes too many risks.It's a film that lays out the eternal struggle in the hearts of wrestlers like Will Ospreay: The desire to do the impossible, and the limitations of physics and the human body. It is a battle that has claimed the mobility of stars like Kota Ibushi, Dynamite Kid, or Kurt Angle.There is nothing else on this list that will be quite as literal, when it comes to its connections to wrestling, as "Trapeze." From the debate on adding a third spin to an already-dangerous move, to the backstage politics of carnival folk, it's not hard to watch "Trapeze" and imagine word-for-word reenactments in the AEW or WWE locker room.
Bertolt Brecht believed that the more an audience is aware of a performance, the more they are willing to believe. After all, what is more trustworthy than a performance that has already told you it's a performance? Brecht would've loved professional wrestling.Call it "pre-determined." Call it "kayfabe." Call it "fiction." No matter what you call wrestling, it's ultimately built on a lie. Hatreds and friendships are manufactured, emotions are manipulated, as it is every wrestler's job to play with the audience like putty.Orson Welles's 1973 film "F Is For Fake" is about magic tricks and forgeries, but its central conceit is that an audience has no good reason to trust an artist, even if that artist is claiming to be transparent. The audience wants to believe that there is objectivity in Welles's film/parlor trick, and Welles lets them believe until the very end.It's a lot like "WWE Unreal," or any other reality show for that matter, the appearance of transparency, despite all the usual machinations and manipulations of fiction.You ever watch a match and started to wonder if the two wrestlers actually don't like each other? Every wrestling fan, at one point or another, has said, "I am completely aware that this is all staged, but there was some real animosity behind that punch/kick/promo/etc."Nine times out of ten, it's all just a bit of show, and that is what makes wrestling, movies, magic, and any other performance so much fun. If you want to get a slightly better idea as to why it is that audiences are like that, "F Is For Fake" is the perfect place to start.
While professional wrestling existed for decades before Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa traded blows in Moscow, the 1985 feature film is essentially the primordial ooze from which modern professional wrestling crawled. The build to the fight, the post-fight promo, and the black-and-white, good-vs-evil, America-vs-USSR tone of the proceedings have been copied, parodied, and pastiched by wrestling for the last 40 years.I am not glib enough to suggest that "Rocky IV" created the idea of the foreign heel. Ivan Koloff was riling up fans in MSG long before Sylvester Stallone started acting, and Nikolai Volkoff sang the Soviet Anthem at that year's WrestleMania, but there is a cartoon simplicity to the film that was made for wrestling.Everything about the way the film built up Ivan Drago as an unstoppable killer would be copied by the likes of Brock Lesnar, Heidenreich, The Great Khali, and literally every other wrestler over 6'5. Former WWE United States Champion Rusev and his wife Lana were doing a 1:1 recreation of Drago and his wife, until someone in WWE realized he was Bulgarian. Hulk Hogan, partially made a star by his cameo in Rocky III, basically spent the entirety of 1985-1991 in Rocky IV mode, a contradictory mix of humble underdog and super-powered star of electricity, possibly even with a robot butler.To be honest, the entire Rocky franchise probably could've been put into this article, especially with how much CM Punk keeps going back to the "Rocky III" well, despite never watching the movies, but Rocky IV is so baked into the language of professional wrestling that you can still see flashes of this maximalist blockbuster in the product even today.
If wrestling has been doing "Rocky IV" on screen for the last 40 something years, it's been doing "Strictly Ballroom" behind the scenes for even longer.Baz Luhrmann's 1992 dance film is a retelling of The Ugly Duckling, but the central conflict is between Paul Mercurio's Scott Hastings and the ballroom dancing establishment itself. The establishment is firm in the belief that there are "no new steps," and Hastings is determined to win ballroom dancing gold with his new steps.How many times have old wrestlers told young wrestlers to slow down, only for wrestling luminaries like Dave Meltzer to remind them that their generation was told the same thing by the generation before them, and so on and so forth. Scott Hastings is any wrestler who dared to take the medium one step further. The Tiger Masks open the door for the Great Sasukes, who open the door for the Will Ospreays, who open the door for the Je'Von Evanses, and so on and so forth, and all the while, old men yell at clouds and tell them there are no new moves, no new ideas, no new steps.
It's not just wrestling that's predetermined. The conman shenanigans that became wrestling traditions have existed in plenty of different forms of entertainment, especially the 1950s quiz show. Where wrestling was able to make the pre-determined nature of its outcomes part of the entertainment, the discovery that quiz shows were pre-determined caused such societal outrage that there were hearings held. The controversy destroyed blue-blooded nepobaby Charles Van Doren, who gave up a cushy life of academia for a shot at glory.Robert Redford's 1994 film "Quiz Show" is about Van Doren's fall from grace, with Van Doren played by Ralph Fiennes, and it's the kind of story any washed-up wrestler knows too well. He started to believe the gimmick.Despite getting answers in advance for the show "Twenty-One," Van Doren started to believe that he was the man he played on TV, as did the previous champion, Herb Stempel. When Stempel is humiliated by an easy loss, he breaks kayfabe and begins telling any and all that the fix was in and the show was rigged.Van Doren's mind was as strong as any wrestler's body. It's entirely possible Van Doren could've been a success in the world of quiz shows, or at the very least a minor figure in academia, but he was weak to the lure of stardom and the path of least resistance. He tried to have his cake and eat it too when it came to his success, and he will forever be known as a cheat.John Turturro, as Stempel, is a vision of the shoot interviews that would become a staple of 2000s wrestling. Exposing the business, complaining that the guy who came after him was just a haircut that the sponsors liked better, Van Doren might as well be Hulk Hogan, and Stempel is any aggrieved veteran who felt slighted by Hogan's dominance, or Reigns, or Cena, or any of the other franchise faces of wrestling.
Look, we need to have this conversation eventually, so let's do it now: Wrestling is a sensual business. I wouldn't go so far as to call it pornographic, but the popularity of wrestling on sites like YouTube has as much to do with it being "porn-adjacent" as anything else. It's why WWE would upload a video of a beautiful woman getting smashed into a cake every other week in the 2010s. They couch it in language like "It's an aesthetic business," but it remains scantily clad men and women grappling, sweating, breathing heavy, and physically exhausting themselves, manipulating the emotions of an audience, specifically to get a "pop."The old story goes that John Cena is who he is today because Jim Barnett allegedly told him to stop wrestling in a shirt.So obviously, the story of a young, athletic man taking on a silly name and being thrust into a world of niche celebrity and cocaine is going to have a lot of parallels to the wrestling business. Dolph Ziggler has outright admitted to taking inspiration from Dirk Diggler in "Boogie Nights."I feel like Diggler's arc is so stereotypically wrestling-coded that I'm going to avoid it, to instead talk about his mentor, Jack Horner. Horner is watching the porn world change over the course of the film. A bona fide storyteller, Horner watches as VHS and tape force pornography into a business that is becoming more and more reliant on shock, exploitation, and extremism than the storytelling that Horner felt made pornography great.WWE, and wrestling in general, would have a similar issue just a year after the movie was born, as the Attitude Era did away with many of wrestling's storytelling traditions, creating a philosophical division in the business that still exists to this day. Heather Graham's Rollergirl might as well be any woman's wrestler who was forced to adapt to the cruel, exploitative world of wrestling post-Attitude.
Alright, if I didn't lose you with "wrestling is porn," then I might lose you with this next one: Wrestling is insanely racist. It's gotten better over the years, but oh my god, man, I still remember that insanely racist ACH shirt.There have been Italians playing Arab terrorists, Irish wrestlers forced to step dance, countless Pacific Islanders treated as savage cannibals, and let's not forget the entire run of Cryme Tyme. It would be easy to write this off as a quirk of wrestling and its demographics, but there is no racism in wrestling that is exclusive to wrestling. It follows in a long tradition of American entertainment, from Looney Tunes to laundry commercials.Wrestling is vaudeville, and vaudeville often had some kind of cursed minstrelsy. The wrestling business, like the entertainment business, has often made wrestlers make tough decisions about how they're presented, hence the inclusion of Spike Lee's acrid, bilious "Bamboozled."It's a film that predicted the rise and fall of Dave Chappelle, a few years before "Chappelle's Show" even existed. A frustrated TV writer channels his frustrations at the state of racial politics at the turn of the new millennium into a "New Millennium Minstrel Show," meant to to satirize, but ultimately becomes a racist sensation, much to the joy of a slur-slinging loudmouth network executive, leading to an entire studio audience showing up in blackface to feel like they're in on the joke.Remember the Nation of Domination? Remember how they were a way for Black wrestlers to couch their frustrations with the racist "Good Ol' Boy" world of wrestling, and America in general, into a wrestling faction? Remember how they've basically been reduced to a meme GIF of a scrawny white guy doing a Black Power fist at them from the crowd? Remember the build to Triple H and Booker T? Remember the time WWE decided to dress R-Truth up like a Confederate soldier in Richmond and had him go on a whole rant about "seceding?" That's Bamboozled. It's the kind of movie that you can't unsee, especially if you watch wrestling.
Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson doesn't spend the first act of "The Wrestler" getting stapled and bloodied just for fun. He doesn't bring up "The Passion of The Christ" because it's a timely reference.Every pro wrestling babyface wants to be Jesus Christ, whether they know it or not. This isn't blasphemy or sophistry. This is reality. The standard babyface performance in wrestling requires them to be beaten within an inch of their life, before being willed back to life, resurrected if you will, by the fans, and triumphing over the evil heel. It is a story built around the story beats of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, usually referred to as "The Passion."While depictions of Christ's execution have often been graphic, especially in Catholicism, there has not been anything as gruesome as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ," where Jesus is ripped with barbs, whipped, broken, and bloodied for roughly 2 hours. Despite having horror movie effects that would put "Saw" to shame, "The Passion of The Christ" was accepted as a family film by much of the American viewing audience, and wrestling never quite recovered.Gibson essentially turns Christ into the ideal deathmatch wrestler, suffering for our entertainment, and still walking away triumphant. Much of the drama of the film comes from watching a guy start the movie with all of his skin and end the movie with much less skin.Randy "The Ram" was not talking out of his ass when he started talking about "The Passion." While deathmatch wrestling has always been around in some form or another, at lease since the Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl, the rise in popularity over the last 20 years might not be directly tied to the popularity of Gibson's bloody passion play, but it at least feels spiritually tied to it, as it pushed the overton window just enough to see guys like Nick Gage slicing people open with pizza cutters on cable TV, complete with a Domino's ad to compliment it.
I am not entirely sure how to talk about "The Prestige" and how it relates to wrestling without spoiling one of the main parts of the movie. Consider yourself warned.There are two ways to be a wrestler: You can either learn the discipline, live the lie, and stick to the principles of your art, or you can go out on the cutting edge and risk killing yourself night after night to hear the applause.To put it even simpler: You can be MJF, or you can be Darby Allin; Alfred Borden, or Robert Angier.In "The Prestige," Alfred Borden is not one man. He is two men, sharing one life, so disciplined to magician's kayfabe that they miss time with their families, and only relish in the roar of the crowd when it is their scheduled turn to do so. There is nothing real about Alfred Borden's magic act because there is nothing real about Alfred Borden, and magic is just that, an act, as that is what magic has been since it began. Such is MJF, the heir apparent to Randy Orton and all the other "work smarter, not harder" wrestlers of the past.Robert Angier is just one man, trying to make his act as "real" as possible. Magic is real. The roar of the crowd is real. It might be an act, but it's real to Angier. He wants to bask in the applause every night, and if he can't, then he'd rather drown in a box like his dead wife. Much like Allin, Angier is chasing some kind of thrill, as much as he's trying to be a working magician.The rivalry between these two men and their outlooks is so strong that it leads them to invent, reinvent, and adapt. The Borden Twins certainly wouldn't have the act they do if they weren't trying to compete with Angier's mania, and Angier would just be some rich brat if he weren't trying to keep up with disciplined magicians like The Borden Twins. "The Prestige" is a film about madness and magic, and where the line between the two is, and in that way, it should probably be required viewing in every wrestling school.
Every wrestler is trying to sell you something. It's why literally every aspect of the performance is labeled "selling." There is no promotion they won't work for. No place they won't travel to.Even CM Punk went back to WWE and even traveled to take the Saudi Arabian paycheck for which he had graphically lambasted The Miz just years earlier. There is nothing a wrestler won't do for money. Yes, even the one you're thinking of right now, who was so nice to you. Were you at the merch table? Of course, you were a potential sale.It is a simple fact that 95% of all heartbreak experienced by wrestling fans centers on the fact that wrestling is a job, and money wins out. Mad that a wrestler said one thing but did another? Money. Sad that a company won't take a chance on an unproven talent? Money. Angry that wrestling fandom requires more and more streaming subscriptions? Money.Enter Jordan Belfort, the cartoonishly greedy main character of "The Wolf of Wall Street." The film is essentially three hours of Belfort endearing himself to the viewer by telling them every secret, thought, and impulse, and then breaking their heart over and over again for profit. He eventually gets an off-ramp, a chance to cash out and get away clean, and what does he say?"I'm not leaving."The moment has been memed to death, but I can't help but think of it any time a wrestler puts money before principles.
I've already covered the "Wrestling As Pornography" in the "Boogie Nights" section, so instead, I'm going to use Ninja Thyberg's "Pleasure" to discuss the inherent objectification in wrestling. If "Boogie Nights" is the cocaine and success myth, then "Pleasure" is stark reality, where the industry is a meat market, trading broken, damaged people like chattel.In both porn and wrestling, and frankly most industries, women get the s*** end of the stick, forced into positions their male counterparts would never be, infantilized one moment, blamed for their indignities in the next. "Pleasure" puts you right in the head of a young woman, trying to make it in an overcrowded business.Porn producers are reduced to nothing more than glorified pimps, and friendships that only last until one person has a shot at success. In a world where many struggling indie wrestlers often live together and make OnlyFans content together, there are many dark parallels to Thyberg's tale of one young Swede trying to make it in America.This is probably the most extreme film on the list. During its theatrical run, I saw it multiple times, mainly to count the walkouts on rewatch (of which there were many). So if you're some kind of completionist trying to check all the boxes, consider yourself thoroughly warned.
In the early 2000s, Antonio Inoki got a crazy idea to start having pro wrestlers face real MMA fighters. The results were disastrous. Some wrestlers were hurt, others were simply humiliated. Yuji Nagata's career took years to recover. CM Punk's UFC career was an instant joke. Brock Lesnar has had some success in the octagon, but it's hard to really say he made the impact on MMA that he made on pro wrestling. Jake Hager has seemingly bought his own hype so hard that he's bombed out of the wrestling world and will now be a fight geek in the PowerSlap promotion.Ultimately, Pro Wrestling is a gimmick. These are not the greatest combat fighters on the planet, no matter how much the Bloodsport shows try to sell you on it. These are performers who sometimes forget that they are performers.Such is the case with Stan Carlisle in "Nightmare Alley," which was first a book, then a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power, and then a 2021 film starring Bradley Cooper. It's a potent fable about the dangers of believing your gimmick a little too hard.You see, wrestling is a carnival, and there's only one part of the carnival that's real: The Geek. If you start to believe in your own gimmick too hard, you'll find yourself playing The Geek in one way or another, debasing yourself to make people feel better about themselves. You might be a fast talker. You might be playing the cushiest gigs in the world. But everyone in the carnival is one wrong turn from biting the head off a chicken or getting slapped in the head for a living.
Wrestlers are larger-than-life cartoons who strap on sequins and spandex for our entertainment, but they are also real human beings, caught in the same kind of grind as any job, just one that requires much more physical pain. Most biopics either pick the myth or the man, but Baz Luhrmann's 2022, "Elvis" strikes a balance between the two, to show how the two identities worked in tandem, and also destroyed the body that had to contain them both, told by the carny huckster who drove the icon into the ground in the name of profit.Hulk Hogan, The Rock, John Cena, you can probably slot any main eventer into the titular role, and you wouldn't have to change much. Ok, you'd have to replace the songs with grappling, but you get it. I'm sure Elvis bragged about performing twice on Sunday, like most wrestlers from the business's golden age.I'm sure there are some people who believe Ric Flair saw "2001: A Space Odyssey," and decided to enter to Richard Strauss for the rest of his life, but it's much more likely that the sequined "Nature Boy" stole his schtick from Elvis Presley, and who can blame him? There is no franchise face in the wrestling business who doesn't have a little bit of "The King" in them.
Some wrestlers like to think of themselves as warriors. Some of them like to think of themselves as clowns. Some think of themselves as MCU heroes, or villains, in some cases. No matter what delusions wrestlers might hold about themselves, they're all Marty Mauser.The protagonist of the Best Picture-nominated "Marty Supreme" is laser-focused on his own dreams, with enough ambition to carry him across oceans, and a steadfast willingness to say anything in the hopes of keeping up the delusion that he is the Great Man he believes himself to be.There is nothing more indicative of "Marty Supreme's" relationship to wrestling, than watching roughly an hour-and-a-half of a main character who lies, cheats, steals, and screws over anyone he has to tell a sponsor, "I'm gonna do some bad things on the stage, but that's just my character. I'm just playing a character," with absolutely no self-awareness about all the other bad things he's done off-stage.No matter how many wrestlers describe the job as just that, a job, there is not a single person who has made it in this business without being something of a ruthless dreamer. It would be easy if people in real life fell into the clean black-and-white lines of kayfabe. Onstage, someone like Marty Mauser is a villain, but in the real world, he's just a hustler, like anyone, doing what he has to do to get to the next game, or to Japan, or just to get home.
This has been a pretty grim and dour read, if I'm being completely honest. It can be easy to forget that, at the end of the day, wrestling like movies is for the dreamers. You can get jaded and cynical, but sometimes the right combination of earnestness, sincerity, and passion will remind you exactly why you started watching this ridiculous thing in the first place.Wrestling is a lot like a Neil Diamond tribute band. You might hate "Sweet Caroline" deep in your bones, and think that the lead singer looks ridiculous trying to conjure the ghost of a man who is still alive, but you can't deny the artistry or the passion.Yes, "Song Sung Blue" is a kind of ridiculous, manipulative movie, but damned if it doesn't scratch that same corny, high-fructose itch that good wrestling usually does. Carny dreamers in ridiculous outfits, fighting backstage over time and gimmicks.If Marty Mauser is who most wrestlers are behind the scenes, Lightning & Thunder are what every wrestler aspires to be when the lights are on: Someone who can make even an ardent Neil Diamond hater like me sing along to "Soolaimon."
