The Guardian

Weekend TV By Desmond Christy
The bigger they come:: 11/08/1999
The Guardian

There are forces at work in this world that no hero ever had to
contend with before. But that can wait. We must first introduce our
hero, Brett 'The Hitman' Hart. Brett is a wrestler for the WWF, but the
real point of Brett is his 'character'. In character Brett is a hero, the
world's No 1 Good Guy. There are a lot of Bad Guys in the world but,
as Brett says, 'it is so hard to find a hero anywhere'.

You and I may never have heard of Brett a Canadian, after all but
billions of people around the world watch his bouts. In Hitman Hart:
Wrestling With Shadows, a film by Paul Jay, for Storyville (BBC2),
we saw Brett being mobbed by a crowd of boys in India, like he was
a god come down to sort out the wicked. Perhaps little boys haven't
realised that Brett's kind of wrestling is not part of the world called
sport, it is part of something called sport entertainment. You would
call Brett a fake though perhaps not to his face, for fear of
rearrangement but Brett calls himself an artist.

'The real art of professional wrestling is that you should never get hurt. You should be able to put your boots on and go home.'

Half a billion people WWF bouts reach around the whole world may
watch you being punched or kicked to pieces, but there are no
bruises, if everything goes according to plan. Brett will have agreed a
storyline with the owner of the WWF who is called Vince McMahon.
The basic storyline can then be choreographed by Pat Patterson.
Which wrestler will assault the referee, that kind of thing. Anything
goes, so long as it has been arranged in advance.

Brett works for Vince. Before that, years back, he worked for his Dad, Stu. Dad is bent over now, like some wrestler twisted his bac out of shape and forgot to bend him back properly. Dad liked to take young wrestlers down into the gym below the Hart house and take their measure. Have some discipline, boy. My, how they screamed. Dad liked to take them to 'the top of the mountain'. In non-wrestling parlance that means screaming for your life. Brett remembers his
father having him in some terrible hold and telling him that he was
breathing his last.

Things have changed since Dad's day. Dad doesn't know much about
a corporate wrestler called Ted Turner, television billionaire. Ted
owns CNN and loads of other stuff, including Ted Turner's World
Champtionship Wrestling TV show. Ted and Vince are locked in
corporate combat. What can Vince, up there in Canada with his
Canadian wrestlers, do against the sheer mean muscle of American
capitalism? Ted Turner's men offer Brett Dollars 9 million to come
and fight for them. Brett refuses like the hero he is. Isn't Vince like a
father to him?

Bad things are going down in American wrestling. The good guys
are being booed. Audiences think mean is cool. Where does good
guy Brett Hitman Hart fit into this world? Vince's wrestling
transmissions get raunchier.
Brett tries being bad guy in America but wraps himself in the Canadian flag and heroism when fighting at home.

To an American audience, Brett says: 'If you were going to give the
United States an enema, you'd stick the holes right here in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.'

A hero can't be doing with Vince's smut TV, but in any case Vince
wants out of Brett's contract. Things are real bad for Brett. He even
asks for the camera to be turned off for a while. No man is a hero to
his own documentary-maker. Vince is turning out the lights on the age
of the hero. 'Surely the era of the superhero urging you to say your
prayers and take your vitamins is definitely passe?

Vince, a capitalist rather than a superhero, does the wrestling
equivalent of putting Kryptonite in Superman's tights. With a slick bit
of choreography and a quick ring of the bell he ends Brett's last fight
with the World Wrestling Federation without letting Brett into the
secret. Worse, the wrestler fighting Brett defeats him with the
Hitman's favourite hold. Our Hero is reduced to spitting from the ring
at Vince. Later he follows up with a punch. Sure, Brett can put his
boots on and go home, but 'what they did is they murdered the
Hitman character'.

Brett fights for Ted Turner now. I don't imagine that is a world fit for
heroes. But good old Hitman. He tried real hard, didn't he folks.