Chronicle of Higher Education

Peter Plagens

09/24/1999

Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright UMI Company 1999. All Rights Reserved. Copyright
Chronicle of Higher Education Sep 24, 1999

WHEN the stentorian voiceover intones at the outset, "It's hard to
find a hero," you may think you're about to watch another one of
those insufferable, super-slo-mo, pseudo-Herculean sports
documentaries. You'd be wrong. Hitman Hart: Wrestling With
Shadows-shown on the AE cable-television network last December
after a successful tour of the fall's documentary festivals-is actually
one of the best films of 1998. It shows up frequently as a rerun, so
you can still catch it.

Wrestling With Shadows boasts one pretentious credential ("a film
by Paul Jay," the director putting his name right out there, like in a
Merchant-Ivory movie) and a solid one (the National Film Board of
Canada sticks its imprimatur on the title crawl, too). But what most
recommends Wrestling With Shadows-a truly great subtitle-is its
pervasive, Baudrillardian postmodernism.

Hall-of-mirrors trifles like This Is Spinal Tap, Natural Born Killers, The
Truman Show, and The Matrix pale in comparison. Someday, in the
middle of the 21st century, when they talk about the film that took
today's nearly unanimous intellectual assumption-that "reality"
(whatever that means, dude) is nothing but a series of socially
constructed misidentities-and made it into a work of art, they'll have
to start with Wrestling With Shadows.

It's a two-hour bogus documentary (and "bogus"-meant here as a
complimentdoesn't begin to encompass the film's complex layering
of fictions) about an alleged personal, professional, and moral crisis
in the life of the real-life professional wrestler Bret "Hitman" Hart.

Hart-in both the film and real life- is a 41-year-old, boyish-faced,
Canadian mesomorph who's been grappling for money half his life.

He comes from a family of 12-eight brothers, who all became
professional wrestlers, and four sisters, each of whom married a guy
in the same line of work as her brothers. Stu Hart, the grizzled,stooped patriarch of the clan, was himself a professional wrestler. He
was one of a breed called "shoot wrestlers," whose purpose in a
match was not to pin an opponent, but to capture him in a painful vise
and apply pressure until the opponent, usually screaming for mercy,
surrendered. One of the fonder childhood recollections of Hitman, his
siblings, and their gentle, graying mom is of the screams of purported
agony emanating from their home's basement gym (called "The
Dungeon") when Stu "worked out" with aspiring young shooters.

AT THE FILM'S OUTSET, Hitman is a day away from a big
"showdown" in Montreal-"the biggest fight of my life," he says. The
reason? For 14 years, the film's story line goes, Hart has been
wrestling for the World Wrestling Federation, known on Tshirts and
television logos everywhere as the W.W.F. The organization is run
by a former wrestler, a pop-eyed, chinless, musclebound creep
named Vince McMahon. The film explains that the W.W.F.'S
television ratings are being eroded by World Championship
Wrestling, an outfit owned by the Atlanta media-billionaire Ted
Turner. To stave off the w.c.w., McMahon has made the W.W.F.'s
programs nastier and sexier.

The back story here is that all of professional wrestling has chucked
its old goodversus-evil act in favor of one style of villain versus
another style of villain, to keep up with today's fans-depicted as the
kind of folks whose idea of dinner at a nice restaurant is a chili-cheese dog and a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor consumed in a 7-Eleven parking lot.

The W.W.F. now features more guys hitting each other with folding
chairs, and a lot of scantily clad, silicone-enhanced female
"managers" traipsing around the ring. Hart, who's married (at the time
of the film; he's since divorced) with four kids, is shocked, shocked at
the depravity, and, in the film, questions whether he's done the right
thing in remaining loyal to the W.W.F.

Hart, you see, has made three big sacrifices for McMahon.

First, he agreed to become a villain, albeit a tan, glistening hunk of
one, clad in groovy pink and black. Part of his villainy has consisted
of his telling American fans that America (where wrestling makes
most of its money)-with its racial prejudice, absence of gun control,
and lack of a singlepayer health-care plan-is a disgrace compared
with civilized Canada. That prompts fans in Pittsburgh, Cleveland,
Seattle, etc., to boo him till their throats dry up.

Second, Hart allegedly turned down a $9-million, three-year contract
offer from the relatively clean w.c.w. in favor of a cheaper, 20-year
agreement with McMahon. But now McMahon can't afford Hart, even
on those terms. He's asked Hart to go crawling to the w.c.w. to see if
they'll put that $9-mil back on the table. Hart, of course, is so lovable
that the w.c.w. does so. The hitch: Hart is the W.W.F.'S heavyweight
champion, so before he can jump to its rival, he'll have to lose the title
to another w.w.F.-er. The challenger is a crotchgrabbing Fabio
look-alike named Shawn Michaels, whom Hart describes as
"obnoxious."

Hart's third act of selflessness is agreeing to lose to Michaels on
Canadian soilthe big showdown in Montreal-and risk breaking the
hearts of all his Canadian fans. But-the plot thickens-Hart has been
promised that his defeat will result from a big "schmazz," or chaotic
scene, at the end of the match, and not a pin. That way, his Canadian
fans can leave the arena consoling themselves with the idea that it
was either all a big mistake, or the despicable McMahon had put in
the fix.

A LONG, LONG TIME AGO, professional wrestling-along with roller
derbies, Western movies from the 1930s, and kids' shows with hand
puppets-was one of primitive television's few entertainment offerings.

In 1948, my parents used to make popcorn, place chairs in a shallow
arc on the livingroom rug, and invite our televisionless neighbors over
to watch wrestling on an 80-pound R.C.A. "table model" with a
magnificent 10-inch screen. In those days, there was heated debate
about whether the wrestling was fake or not. About half of the
people in our living room thought the only difference between a
wrestling match featuring Gorgeous George (an effete villain with a
valet who sprayed him with perfume when he entered the ring) and a
prizefight with Joe Louis was that boxers wore gloves and were
limited to punching.

Nowadays, of course, everyone knows that professional wrestling is
simply a form of rude theater or crude dance: It's scripted or
choreographed so that the winners and losers are predetermined.

Some people call wrestling "sports entertainment" (which I take to
bear the same relationship to real sports as "a cheese food" does to
real cheese). But even huge, elaborately costumed men crashing into
each other, and occasionally spilling accidental blood, cannot be
sustained as "sports entertainment" without some sort of dramatic

MacGuffin. (Ironically, one of Bret Hart's wrestling brothers recently
was killed in an accidental fall during a stunt entrance into a W.W.F.
ring.)

Enter McMahon in his stage, er, ring persona as the slimy,
double-dealing producer; enter New World Order, a fauxbreakaway
band of wrestlers concocted by the W.W.F., "challenging"
McMahon's authority. And enter, in my opinion, a couple of
Pirandello moves, with professional wrestling extending the frame of
its theater outside the ring and into the world at large.

The genius of Wrestling With Shadows is that it accepts the
postmodern brackets of professional wrestling-the innermost of
them set around winning or losing in the ring, the middle set around
the W.W.F. wrestlers versus Vince McMahon, and the outermost
around a phantom struggle between the W.W.F. and the w.c.w., with
Hart supposedly caught in the middleand adds brackets of its own,
around the "documenting" of Hart's moral struggle. The film has all
the tropes of a real documentary: wobbly, hand-held camera work,
head shots of the main participants reflecting on what it all means,
quick cuts of fans in parking lots outside arenas, foolishly holding
forth on Hart's Canadian chauvinism, and graphics of date and place at the
bottom of the screen.

Soon after Hart mentions the looming showdown in Montreal, the film
scoots back to "one year earlier," picks up the back story, and carries
it steadily forward (except for the deep background of Hart's growing
up with dad Stu) to the climax in Montreal. Along the way, Hart utters
such deconstructivist gems as, "[Wrestling] is far more real than
people think" and "It takes a lot of skill and talent to make it look real."

He butters toast in his kitchen and bumblingly tries to explain to his
worried wife what's going on with McMahon. He sits alone with his
thoughts in a practice ring. He commiserates with other wrestlers on
their way to a match in a big white limo.

The camera work, superb throughout, is truly great in the limo: a
knee-level shot that screams "inside access" and subtly implies
"hidden camera." There's an inspired sequence of outtakes of Hart
doing a promotional interview for an upcoming match. Hurtling
through these planes of unreality-"documenting" the "muffs" from an
"interview" about a "match" that Hart wants to "win"-you get an inkling
of what it must be like to be boomeranged off the ropes by one of
these 250-pound twinkletoes.

The climax in Montreal goes something like this (I'm not "spoiling" the
ending; the industrial-strength simulacrum of Wrestling With
Shadows is even better when you know how it's going to come out):
Hart thinks the referee is down with the program, but he's not.
McMahon has counter-fixed the fix. Before the promised chaos can
break out, Hart gets his shoulders momentarily pinned to the canvas
by his opponent, the referee gives a quick three-count, and the match
is over. The fans are stunned, Hart is stunned. He rampages to his
dressing room, smashing a TV monitor on the way. Hart's wife and
disbelieving young son (he looked merely sleepy to me, one of the
film's few tiny flaws) wander the arena's bowels; she tells the other
wrestlers hanging around, who probably knew about McMahon's
betrayal in advance, "What goes around comes around, you know."

McMahon summons up enough moxie to go to Hart's dressing room
to explain the match's ending. The camera-somebody puts a hand
over its lens, a nice touch-is barred from the dressing room. A few
moments later, McMahon staggers out, held upright by his
bodyguards. Hart says a few minutes later that he just lost it and
clocked the perfidious promoter. Fade to a lyrical shot of Hart
walking on a sun-drenched lawn outside his Calgary home with dad

Stu. Folky fiddle lament on the soundtrack. Graphic: "Bret Hart now
wrestles for Ted Turner's w.c.w." Fade to black.

WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS is so seamlessly artful that most of
the television critics who reviewed its original broadcast bought the
"documentary" premise whole. Barbara Phillips wrote in The Wall
Street Journal that "a stunned Hart countered with a (real) punch to
McMahon's jaw," and that because the w.c.w. clasped Hart to its
bosom after all, "this true story falls short of a tragedy." The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch's critic wrote that the film "gives viewers a perfect look
at wrestling as entertainment and, as Bret Hart found out, a cold
business." Even the showbiz-savvy Los Angeles Times said, "For the
first time in more than 15 years, a pro wrestling match had a
legitimate ending, without a scripted finish."

Only John Allemang, in Toronto's The Globe and Mail ("we never
know how much commitment to give Hart as he pours out his
sufferings and fears. If it's an act, it's much more persuasive than
anything in the ring"), and the Chicago Tribune's Steve Johnson ("But
first you have to consider whether the film is merely an elaborate
crock") expressed real doubt. Johnson was, I think, closest to the
truth, although I'd prefer the kinder term "ruse."

But what if there's yet another set of brackets-around the reviews?
What if not only the wrestlers, Vince McMahon, Ted Turner, and the
filmmakers, but the television critics, too, are in on the fix? What if
the unreality, bogusness, fiction-call it what you will-of professional
wrestling is a slower-moving version of Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's
novel Cat's Cradle, which, once perceived, infects anyone who
touches it with the same kind of unreality? What if, dear reader, I'm in
on it, too? What if The Chronicle is in on it? What if all of academe is
in on it?

Okay, I've gone too far. Just the humanities.