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| Who's the good guy? Who's the bad guy? Those are the wrong questions to ask anymore. Photo Credit: WWE.com |
In that light, the more I watch WWE, the more I think it's starting to bear an uncanny resemblance to Seinfeld. The traditional ideas of babyface and heel, good guy and bad guy or hero and villain don't seem to apply anymore. Everyone is flawed. No one is really a decent human being except for those whom we know nothing about. It might seem hard for a guy like Kofi Kingston to be employed by WWE for five years and not have anything known about him except he switched residences from Jamaica to Ghana sometime in 2009/10, but then again, no one ever accused the WWE writers of being good at their jobs on a regular basis.
This was all punctuated on RAW last night, showing the cavalcade of terrible people doing terrible things with the crowd almost arbitrarily deciding whom to root for. Sheamus and Alberto del Rio are presumably still feuding over the World Championship. Sheamus won at SummerSlam on a technicality, because the referee didn't see del Rio's foot on the ropes. When confronted with that, he basically shrugged it off and asked Michael Cole "u mad?" It's not like del Rio played the part of victim with any sort of grace either. After his SummerSlam was over, he tore into the relatively innocent Ricardo Rodriguez, verbal abuse that continued into RAW the next night.
It's not like this is something new for the Mexican Aristocrat either. I get the feeling that I've been putting off the vibe that we should feel sorry for del Rio for what he's gone through in the last month, and that's really not the case on a complete level. Yeah, having his car stolen with little to no repercussion is a bit extreme for the things he's done, but let's not gloss over the fact that del Rio has taken to sneak attacking Sheamus just for matters of greed for gold.
In fact, almost every feud in WWE right now except maybe Cody Rhodes vs. Sin Cara is filled with people who are scoundrels on some level. Daniel Bryan and Kane both have extreme anger issues, which really makes their feud a representative avatar of rage. Maybe that's why it's the best feud going right now. Damien Sandow is a braggart and an elitist, but that doesn't excuse Brodus Clay for attacking him after the match for nothing more than defeating him cleanly. Big Show has legitimate beef for how he's been treated forever in WWE, but he's going about it the entirely wrong way. AJ Lee has let power get to her head to the point where David Otunga simply asking for a job netted him a rage beatdown from Show. Then again, as we know from his tenure as John Laurinaitis' legal counsel, it's not like Otunga was on the up and up. Dolph Ziggler speaks the truth and for his troubles gets mocked and attacked after matches by Chris Jericho. Then again, it's not like Ziggler is a martyr here; he's taken to sneak attacking people out of spite or just to get an unfair advantage himself.
And last but not least, John Cena and CM Punk might seem on the surface to be a right vs. wrong feud, but then again, as I noted last night, it doesn't account for the fact that Punk is actually right in everything he says and that Cena is nothing but bloated and delusional. In fact, one could pretty much make the case that Cena is unintentionally playing the role of a bad guy one-percenter on a figurative, career-token based level better than anyone they've had playing a literal one.
I'd say this is almost a literal facsimile of the Seinfeld universe except for two things that are related to each other. One, on the sitcom, their actions ALWAYS had consequences, and those consequences often led to hilarious results. Those hilarious results are what made that show a comedy. WWE has comedic elements, but it's far to complex a beast to pin down as one single genre of show (which is why the label of professional wrestling should cover so much).
Secondly, I'm not sure Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David and the rest of the writers meant for the cast to be heroes in a sense that the fans should emulate them. It was a display of absurdity, and the goal was to make people laugh. Heroes are not needed for comedy. One could argue they're not needed for wrestling either, but then again, while I don't need good guys or bad guys, I fully admit that I'm different than a lot of other wrestling fans.
Whether Vince McMahon, Triple H, Stephanie McMahon and the rest of the writers and agents have a very fucked up way of how we should view our heroes or they subscribe to the theory that if a wrestler is marketable, it doesn't matter how they act, the company has seemingly thrown all pretense of alignment out the window. Unlike some commentators, I don't see this as bad, per se. Maybe this is the next step in the "choose your own adventure" path, whether they mean for it to be so or not. Jerry Lawler as Greek Chorus can let us know who they want us to root for, but at the same time, as long as they keep making merchandise for the ones they don't want us to root for, they're at least letting us know we have the freedom of choice.
So maybe the similarities to Seinfeld begin and end as to the moral fiber of the characters within each show. Still, to me, a sea change happened sometime in the last decade or so where it didn't matter whether good guys did actual good things. You can blame Steve Austin for that, but then again, it's not like Steve Austin made them make everyone like him in terms of their propensity to give nary a fuck about anything. Is it a good sea change though? I don't know, but I tend to say yes. It's 2012. We don't need someone telling us whom to root for.
Now, if only WWE will stop pretending that they need to keep the hype on, we might be in better shape going forward. Then again, it's not like WWE to intentionally be forward thinking, is it? Even if it is a happy accident though, it's one that I'll take as a wrestling fan.
