How much do narratives shape how we think about workers?

[JerryvonKramer]

I wanted to have a crack at this outside of the confines of the GWE. I don't think it is necessarily a GWE topic, but it is quite interesting.

 

Takeaway #3 - Narrative creation and popular narratives of many workers played a major role in the process

 

I have mentioned this before in regards to Akiyama and I think that is an excellent example, but I also believe you see something of this in the over all placement of a Bret Hart, or even Ric Flair. Pro wrestling is a business about working fans, and part of that work is the creation of narratives about the career trajectories and relative values of people in different promotions. As hardcore fans these narratives are also shaped by coverage and reporting, and a broader fan culture. I think one of the more easily identifiable schisms in this project was between those who bought into those narratives and in many cases added to them, and those who were more resistant to them, or at least willing to challenge them. Believe it or not, I am unsure which of these approaches is "right," but I do think that the idea of Bret Hart is more powerful than the idea of Christian and at least part of that explains where they ended up in the final results.

Similar things have occurred to me.

 

I've jokingly asked Matt D a few times if Nick Bockwinkel's gimmick of being the smartest guy in the room actually contributes to our view of him as a "smart" worker?

 

I don't see Jim Duggan being described as a smart worker very often. His gimmick was, for a very long time, "patriotic idiot".

 

Backlund and Bret Hart -- their gimmick was "fighting champion" and "best wrestler around".

Misawa and Jumbo -- their gimmick was "ace", top dog of the hierarchy

Tenryu and Kawada -- their gimmick was upstart, rebel, challengers to the status quo

Flair and HBK -- their gimmick was GOAT

Kobashi -- his gimmick, to an extent, was "chosen one"

Stan Hansen and Vader -- their gimmick was "force of nature"

Arn Anderson -- his gimmick, especially around 1993 sort of time when he started wearing the glasses in his promos, was "total pro".

Tully Blanchard -- his gimmick was "hatable prick"

 

We can keep on moving down the line. But I think the blurring between the kayfabe character and our perception of them is interesting at least to ponder.

 

It's often occurred to me that the older generation's view of Dory Funk Jr as one of the very best essentially boils down to the fact that Gordon Solie just told them so.

[supremebve]

I think that narratives can make us buy into some workers more, but if they don't live up to the narrative it can diminish them greatly. I think guys like Flair and Bockwinkel being great wrestler's who are pushed as being the best makes us believe their greatness more than we would without it. Let's say Cesaro got signed by the WWE and pushed as the best wrestler in the world from day one. A lot of us believe Cesaro has been one of the best wrestlers in the world for his entire WWE career, but he was never pushed that way. Would Cesaro have finished higher in the GWE voting? I think he would have, despite not much changing with his actual skills as a wrestler. Then you have someone like Antonio Inoki, who was always pushed as a great wrestler doesn't consistently live up to that hype, and it goes the other way. I can't stand Inoki, and I think he's actively a bad wrestler. What I can't possibly know is whether or not that is because he's actually bad, or if his boring ass matches were a huge disappointment when I finally got around to watching them. My disdain for him could be based on the fact that I'd heard so much about him as a legendary wrestler, but then watched someone who didn't live up to the hype.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

It's one thing to have a gimmick, it's another to execute it. All those workers you mentioned, for the most part, did a good to great job of executing their gimmick and making sure their gimmick wasn't just a manufactured narrative that falls flat when it comes time to implement it and develop the character.

 

Does it help to be told repeatedly that workers like HBK and Flair are the GOAT or that Arn is a "total pro?" Sure. But if they didn't do a good job executing those gimmicks in the ring, during promos and in vignettes, we'd tire of the "narrative" pretty quickly and it would go away.

[Loss]

I think narratives play a huge role, but in a different way. I tend to get skeptical when they get too clean, not because I think they are untrue, but because one person says them and then they are repeated by other people who don't show their work, which makes me wonder how they formed those conclusions. I think when this happens, the phrase develops more power than the person who originally said it ever intended.

 

Examples, all of which I've seen repeated by multiple people, and to be frank, most of which originated with Dylan, I've listed below. Again, I don't think it's a matter of Dylan doing anything wrong or encouraging it, but I've noticed that other people sometimes repeat his points.

 

- Shawn Michaels peaked as a tag team worker in 1986 AWA

- Fuyuki was better than Kawada in the 80s

- Hamada was better than Tiger Mask

- Ric Flair was the worst worker in the world in 2003-2004

 

There is nothing wrong with any of those opinions, but when multiple people start repeating them without explaining how they too came to that same conclusion, it gives me pause.

[El-P]

Some people are trendsetters. Some people follow trends. Human nature.

 

The WWE narratives surely are the strongest in term of setting trends that the mianstream fan is following. Shawn Michaels = greatest wrestler ever is one. It sure helps his case in some circles. Not so much around here, where it probably even has a negative, opposite effect as a reaction.

[Ship Canal]

This discussion reminded me of something I was thinking about recently, specifically in relation to narratives attached to Japanese wrestling.

Essentially, hardcore fans like those from the "western world" (not a useful phrase really, but you get me) have relied more or less exclusively on largely unattributed statements from Meltzer et al on how Japanese fans themselves relate to narratives within their domestic wrestling product. There are other voices like OJ who can translate stuff from Japanese and give us a far better understanding of how the big narratives in Japanese wrestling have been traditionally received and interpreted by a Japanese audience, which is a fantastic development, but it still feels somewhat inadequate that we are relying on such degrees of separation overall and I'd be fascinated to discover what kinds of counter narratives and revisionism exist within Japanese fandom itself.

In terms of the influence narratives have on how we think about workers though, and to veer away from Japan and pick out two examples from WWF/E you mention, the source and context of how that narrative is established is important to me: I see something like Backlund/Hart's positioning as "the best" as being more or less an extension of their gimmick, one that has a genuine practical element to it: these guys are the face of the company, lets keep them strong. They also fulfill a very basic narrative function in that they are in some way representing a kind of meritocracy or sense of fair play. This bleeds into their babyface characterizations too. In Bret's case that even shaped his own personal narrative about what he felt he symbolized within the business.

I'd contrast that kind of pragmatic, booking based narrative with one I'm slightly more uncomfortable with, the revisionist positioning of HBK as the "greatest". Its fair to say its a narrative that only really began to take hold and be pushed hard when the Wars were truly over and Vince was the last man standing. Competitive dominance, monopolization eventually leads to the ability to create that hegemonic narrative unopposed (materially and resource wise at least), which is more troubling to me.

[Johnny Sorrow]

So basically, is the role an actor..I'm sorry..wrestler ... plays if that role is permanent part of how he or she is perceived? Yeah. It is. It's supposed to be.

[JerryvonKramer]

I think narratives play a huge role, but in a different way. I tend to get skeptical when they get too clean, not because I think they are untrue, but because one person says them and then they are repeated by other people who don't show their work, which makes me wonder how they formed those conclusions. I think when this happens, the phrase develops more power than the person who originally said it ever intended.

 

Examples, all of which I've seen repeated by multiple people, and to be frank, most of which originated with Dylan, I've listed below. Again, I don't think it's a matter of Dylan doing anything wrong or encouraging it, but I've noticed that other people sometimes repeat his points.

 

- Shawn Michaels peaked as a tag team worker in 1986 AWA

- Fuyuki was better than Kawada in the 80s

- Hamada was better than Tiger Mask

- Ric Flair was the worst worker in the world in 2003-2004

 

There is nothing wrong with any of those opinions, but when multiple people start repeating them without explaining how they too came to that same conclusion, it gives me pause.

It's true to say that these assertions aren't always examined.

 

Chad did some pretty diligent work examining Misawa during his frequently dismissed Tiger Mask II run but I didn't see much engagement with that. See here:

 

http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/33392-the-burning-question/

[S.L.L.]

It's something I've noticed for a very long time, and I was certainly not the first to notice it. I forget whether it was Phil or TomK who coined the phrase "great technician gimmick" - the notion that if a wrestling promoter tells people someone is a great technical wrestler, a lot of "smart" fans will buy it and lavish praise upon said wrestler even if their actual skills are suspect - but once I started thinking about that, I realized you could really expand that tactic to anything in wrestling. A while back, I made the point on Twitter that while Triple H is a great politician, and his ability to transform himself from a pariah among smart fans into a savior is genuinely impressive, the real skill there was understanding that that was the perfect market to con. "Smart" people are often the easiest to fool. They're so confident that they can't be worked that they never question when someone might be trying to work them. It's why a few of the well-educated doctors in my family are likely to vote for Trump this year. It's why one of their well-educated lawyer friends is a 9/11 truther. They're all so smart. Who could possibly trick them? So if someone tells them what they want to hear, why question it? Introspection is for marks. They're smart, so if it sounded good enough to be true to them, by God, it must be true.

 

That's not to say this kind of narrative building in wrestling is an inherently bad thing, either. On the contrary, I actually think it's an inherently good thing, both because wrestling is storytelling (and calls heavily upon narrative to that end) and because wrestling is promotion (and calls very heavily upon narrative to that end). So the problem is really less with them than it is with us. Narrative shapes how we think about workers, and Johnny is honestly right that it should, but I would add the proviso that it should not be so simple as dumping ourselves into the box promoters and critics provide for us and leaving it at that, at least not if we're going to then pat ourselves on the back afterwords for how "smart" we are for doing so. Not that I think a whole lot of people on PWO do that. This board is legitimately smart, in part because we tend to look at the box and try to figure out whether or not we are really going to fit.