Beyond the Mat
Year 2000 Trademarks:
- Entire subject of film
- Abundance of Loony Toons apparel
- Before the epic reign of John Cena dominted the Ring, motherfuckers
“The Rock isn’t just some candy-ass on the corner of Know-Your-Role Boulevard and Jabroni Drive. Tonight in front of the thousands of Rock’s fans all chanting his name, and the millions and millions of the Rock’s fans watching live, the Rock guaran-damn-tees to prove to you that the Rock is the most electrifying man in sports entertainment today. If you smell what the Rock is cookin’.” —The Rock, 1999
“Wrestling is theater at its most basic.” —Beyond the Mat, 2000
A confession: I’ve never really been a big of a wrestling fan. Yes, there was a brief period in the late ’90s when I found myself swept up in the weekly saga of WCW Monday Nitro (this was, as my memory serves, during an ill-defined beef between the New World Order and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), but that was more part of my lazy, 13-year-old tendency to watch literally anything TNT fed me between 1993 and 2000 (which is also the only reason I’ve seen Thunder in Paradise) than it was any deep appreciation of watching spandex-clad steroid-junkies throw eachother through particleboard tables while overcaffinated announcers demand somebody stop the damn fight!
Of course a decade ago that confession would be entirely unnecessary. Though both the W.W.F. and WCW in the 1990s were at financial high points, pro wrestling itself was in an embarrassing transitional phase: between its early years when it was considered a legitimate sport and its current status as an impressively performed act. In the ’90s we were still exposing the W.W.F.’s fraud, but not yet examining how impressive that fraud was. Today, on the other hand, the general public has ceded that there was something legitimate about what Doink the Clown did for a living. We accept that wrestling is fake, but hold genuine respect for the athleticism, pain and theatricality that goes into selling the fakeness. This new, postmodern form or respect is due in large part to a pair of films about the harsh realities of professional body-slamming released in the last decade: 2008’s The Wrestler and, more deliberately, its nonfictional predecessor Beyond the Mat, released in 2000.
What’s it like 10 years later?
TERRY FUNK IS THE ORIGINAL LAUREN CONRAD.
There’s no script for what happens outside the ring. This was the tagline sprawled across the DVD box of Beyond the Ring, indicating the goal of the documentary (and by association the W.W.F., which cooperated with the filmmakers): to rebrand professional wrestling from phoney sport to bruttaly real entertainment. The first step of this rebranding was to admit that, okay, the in-ring theatrics were essentially bullshit. That’s right: Yokozuna’s manager didn’t actually sneak a flamethrower past Nassau Colluseim security. The second step was to show that behind the bogus theatrics, there was another layer of actual drama: aging ring kings like Terry Funk, drug-addled stars like Jake “The Snake” Roberts, and family men juggling fatherhood with 9-to-5 bodyslamming like Mick Foley, a/k/a Mankind.
But here’s the funny thing: much of the offstage drama chronicled in Beyond the Mat feels just as fake as any threat Hulk Hogan ever shouted into Gene Okerlund’s microphone. It’s as if the wrestlers have replaced one level of phoniness with another. Or maybe, after years in the ring, they’re so used to improvising melodrama when the cameras are rolling that they can’t fight the instinct, even when the cameras are supposed to be of the non-fictional varitety. In this way, Beyond the Mat predicts MTV’s psudeo-reality-series Laguna Beach, which I guess makes Terry Funk like a pile-driving Lauren Conrad. In one especially suspect scene in which Funk and a former wrestling colleague have a “private” argument (though both appear to be knowingly mic’d), all that’s missing is a maudlin Summer Obsession single playing as Funk tearfully walks off:
It is telling that the most genuine parts of Beyond the Mat feature not the career entertainers the movie profiles, but their fans. One of the reasons I never took to professional wrestling, I suspect, is that most of the “hardcore” fans I knew were the same kids who beat the shit out of me in jr. high: angry white boys with shaved heads, ball-bearing necklaces and Austin 3:16 tee-shirts whose post-graduation plans involved (a) joining the Navy SEALS or (b) working for their stepdad’s welding company. As wrestling fans, my bullies were what I call “Nerds Who Beat the Shit Out of Different Nerds.” Getting slapped in front of your peers never felt good, but it felt so much worse when the offending palm belonged to a W.W.F. viewer whose love of the Undertaker seemed no less pathetic than watching Andromeda.
But Beyond the Mat, in its attempt to show the popularity and influence of pro wrestlers, actually highlights the multi-generational diverstiy of pro-wrestling fanatics far better than it does the wrestlers themselves. Take this brief interview with a family of Jake the Snake enthusiasts — including a bespecacled father in a Tasmanian Devil sweatshirt and an adorable girl with Scout Finch-like enthusiasm — which probably says more about pro-wrestling in one minute than the rest of the movie:
THE UNDERTAKER VS. CAPTAIN KIRK
So what feels 10 years old about Beyond the Mat? The easy answer is that the entire fucking movie is about profesional wrestling. But that’s like saying Hearts and Minds is dated because its about Vietnam. The whole point of documentaries like Beyond the Mat is to chronicle a specific moment in time, so calling it “old-fashioned” is kind of a cheap shot. It’s not like Scream 3, a film whose dated aspects (an alt-metal soundtrack, presenting Internet as scary new threat, etc.) were not intended to be considered “dated.” No amount of Rock quotes, bad music or Loony Toons sweatshirts actually make an academic movie seem, you know, old.
What does feel dated about Beyond the Mat is the tone, which floats somwhere between a genuine respect for professional wrestling and an ironic scoff at these fools who wear neon green muscle shirts for a living and still expect to be taken seriously. In this way the movie, ten years later, raises some important questions abou the nature of irony vs. sincerity on screen. When is a movie celebrating Yokozuna, and when is it simply exploiting Yokozuna like a Street Fighter chararcter? What Beyond the Mat reminded me most of was not Aronofsky’s The Wrestler but Trekkies, the 1997 documentary examination of Star Trek fanatics. Both presented themselves as serious looks at silly endeavors, yet watching either one detects a highbrow air. Listen to their soundtracks: silly “oompa-oompa” music pervades any scene the filmmakers dare take completely seriously.
Today, we take silly things like pro wrestling at face value, but in 2000 we hadn’t reached that level of conditional appreciation. It is worth noting that Beyond the Mat and The Wrestler were both written and directed by former writers of classic American satirical institutions (Beyond the Mat by Saturday Night Live writer Barry Blaustien and The Wrestler by Onion editor Robert Siegel).
Like all important things in life, this phenomenon can be bes expressed by Star Trek. The last Trek film released before 2000, Insurrection, strove to distance itself as much as possible from the cheesy 1960s origins of the franchise by being (by far) the series’ darkest installment. 2009’s reboot Star Trek, on the other hand, embraced the original right down to the awkward uniforms and clumsy art deco Enterprise design. Circa 2000 we were self-aware enough to demand A Very Brady Sequel, but not self-aware enough to make it without wall-to-wall winking references to how corny The Brady Bunch was. Compare the contemporary sci-fi reboots Lost In Space and Battlestar Galactica. The former did everything in its power to appear more “hardcore” than its 1960s ancestor: sexing up the Robinson family’s vehicle, replacing the amusingly mischevious Dr. Smith with the murderous, psychopathic Gary Oldman. 2003’s Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, embraced the original 1970s series on which it was based – going so far as to cast Richard Hatch, the feather-haired disco hero of the original, as a recurring character:
