COLORADO SPRINGS, CO September 30, 2024
I spent time over the last two days watching MR. McMAHON, the new 5 part documentary series on Netflix. I never liked wrastlin’. It’s fake- and yes, every doc on wrestling tells you (wink wink), that everyone knows. And that those fellers are ath-a-leets. I myself have never said otherwise. Most are at least as athletic as any High School Football Hero, and some probably a speck more. It takes balls to jump 12 feet off the ground and slam into another human, much less one with that kind of pituitary mutation. It’s that if I wanted to see drama, to see storylines, there are fine dramatic actors in plays around the country, as well as movies and television where I can see high drama and comedy.
And listen- as a comic book fan to this day I understand the irony here; comic books, superhero books most especially, are just adolescent wish-fulfillment stories. Nerdy, lonely boys who wish somehow someway they could become special. And that you all would see it. But we’d still keep it secret- our identity, while we’re busy saving the world. And the secretly cute female on the team would fall head over heels in love with us. So, I never really cared about folks who like wrestling. I just never got into it.
Yet the business side of it is fascinating. The old territory system. The rise of the WWE (nee WWF). Whatever the hell the WCW was. RAW is WAR indeed. And the documentary does pain the picture fairy accurately that during the late 90s and early 2000s wrestling really did permeate popular culture. I knew enough to know who Steve Austin was, and that if wrestling didn’t come calling for him, he’d have probably ended up a sherif in a small Texas town looking to arrest him some drifters, spics and queers. And Vince McMahon has been around, well, probably ever since I can recall. Or at least since my very early teen years. And he’s always been an asshole.
Which is why I was so disappointed in the documentary. I suppose I wanted blood, I wanted a hit piece. But so much of it was shot in 2021 and so much of the really damning shit has come out in the last year plus that it seems silly that the doc was released at all. It’s like releasing a doc with Ollie North a few days before he gets in trouble for Iran-Contra. You accidentally buried the lede here. It’s not that the makers don’t try. They do a little here and there. Vince’s infidelities. The periods on the show where the entirety of the operation takes their queues from him in outlandish stories. The overall misogyny and unapologetic stupidity on screen. The aftermath of Owen Hart’s death. The interviewers tip toe up to the line of asking hard questions and then run away. They show others doing it- Bob Costas and Armen Keteyian interviewing Vince and getting the old tough guy routine. Vince edging closer on his seat, raising his voice, acting threatening. If only someone would call him Chris “Krissy” Everett so he could knock their block off, Charlie (look up the reference kids).
There just isn’t a lot here we didn’t already know- and the parts that really matter- former sexual assault charges lodged by employees, payoffs for other sexual misconduct, and the most recent suit alleging sexual assault and trafficking, are really glanced over. The authors of the doc take a moment at the end to acknowledge that people are multitudes. You could be, say a good businessman, but a real creep. Or even a bad person. Or a good person, and a bad businessman. Or bad at both. Why, the permutations are endless!
But that is where the real story is. The doc would have been better served either just being a 8 hour glossy on MacMahon and how awesome he was at running the company, or backed off and redone the entire final chapter to talk about the allegations, what we already know he did in the past, and most importantly I think- how does one at the top create a culture where he is allowed to do heinous things and no one breaks the party line? Who knew and when did they know? Did ANYONE try and stop this? Or were the women brought on as employees and entertainers really just there at the whims? And tie it back in with the sexual allegations made by Ring Boys back in the late 70s/early 80’s. Did Vince McMahon create a full on culture of depravity in his first private then public company and why didn’t anyone do or say anything. That’s a story worth talking about. It’s a missed opportunity to look into a company run by one man for 40 plus years, that was out front and relevant culturally for a period of time, that seems to be rotten at the core.
In five years this same group of filmmakers can get back together and give us the definitive documentary on The Donald, and ask the same irrelevant questions, and remind us that people are people, and they can be both bad AND good, all at the same time. No shit? What a revelation.
Intellectual Dandruff 