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| Plisken, an example of racial angles done right? Photo Credit: Texas Anarchy |
We've established that wrestling is art, but usually, when a social issue is tackled, companies are criticized for handling it. Well, to be fair, it's mostly WWE who is criticized because WWE's idea of handling a social issue is to toady for the social conservative talking point, even if they're in a campaign against whatever is being wronged. I mean, Triple H's idea of bullying is sending out Paul Heyman to speak on behalf of his client. Meanwhile, his idea of combating that bullying is, as a trained, muscular wrestler, to beat the untrained and flabby middle-aged lawyer, and then have his wife come out and beat up said lawyer. Only at Titan Towers does this make sense.
Regardless of how terribly WWE handles this kind of thing though, does that mean these kinds of topics should be off-limits for any company? I'm not just talking about bullying. I'm talking about things like sexism/misogyny, racism, homophobia and things like that. We know that tackling those issues the way WWE does is inherently problematic because oftentimes, the good guys are the ones who display those attributes at best, and at worst, the bad guys show them too and suffer no comeuppance for their bad social behavior. For example, Triple H was allowed to do everything short of calling Booker T the n-word, and during that entire feud, the only upper hand Book got on Trips was besting him in a tag match the week before WrestleMania.
Is there a way for a wrestling company to be able to book and use a character with terrible societal morals? I toyed with this idea when I ran an e-fed ten or so years ago. A respected handler in the community came to me with an idea for a character who was an out and out racist. He had offensive tattoos, used racial slurs, the whole nine yards. Even though the intent on the character was to offer up a mega-heel for a big comeuppance down the road, it drew legit heat from the start. People were pretty pissed off about it, and it never really got off the ground.
That makes me wonder if any kind of character who embodies the kinds of scuzzy attitudes that would get social groups up in arms could succeed in any wrestling promotion long enough to get what's coming to him or her without the societal pressure scrapping it prematurely. Maybe an independent promotion could run with it. One could argue that Anarchy Championship Wrestling's Anarchy Champion, Jaykus Plisken, is an example of a racist heel being set up to take a fall in the future. Maybe the key is having a promotion that actually embraces wrestling as art like ACW executing a controversial character to get people to understand that the bookers and fans don't support racism/sexism/etc.
Real life has a vast array of characters, ranging from noble to absolute scum. There are a wide array of personality types and foibles that can be represented in art, whether cinema, television or wrestling. There's no reason why the full spectrum can't be portrayed in a wrestling ring as long as the people portraying it know how to do so in a way that produces social good. How can that good be achieved though? There are so many ways to do it that it would be really disingenuous and potentially preachy for me to sit here and construct guidelines other than "racism/sexism/whatever is bad". No one in their right minds would think that statutory rape and incest were good things, and in the movie Chinatown, the main villain gets away with his crimes. However, I'm also sure no one watching said movie would think that the message from it would be endorsing said villain's actions.
So then, what made Triple H's Sambo-ing of Booker T an endorsement of racism? Trips was the heel, right? Well yeah, but he was at the height of his "coolest, toughest, strongest, smartest and most awesome dude" run. When he started to put guys not named Shawn Michaels or Undertaker over in a meaningful way, it wasn't to pay the piper for his social misdeeds. He never really had to change the person he was, and he never paid for race baiting Booker. The racism was just a trope and a throwaway one at that.
If you're going to inject something controversial in nature into a story, it shouldn't really be a throwaway thing. At best, you risk turning off the fans who'd be affected by it, and at worst, you come off as being racist. I don't know if Triple H, Vince McMahon or anyone in WWE really is racist at heart, but I'd have a hard time arguing against it judging on the evidence of the art they create in front of me.
The point is that WWE may have ruined being able to run certain characters without people getting defensive about it, and that sucks. The underlying problem is that people equate WWE with wrestling when it's only a part of the scene, but that's a post for another time. Risqué characters, characters that embody the worst of society, are almost necessary in a good wrestling promotion that wants to create good art. It would be a shame to jump to a foregone conclusion for a company that may not deserve it just because WWE doesn't know how to treat women, racial minorities or non-straight people with any respect.
