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| Don't make Orange Cassidy the avatar for your stupid Twitter war Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein |
You can't have it all all of the time. You can be critically successful or commercially lauded. Usually, it's one or the other. It's more likely to have neither than to have both, but some things have been popular and acclaimed, like The Lord of the Rings or LOST. It's hard though. There are two ways the brain can be wired, and what tends to be favored those who think about content in artistic or intellectual terms isn't accessible to the wider masses. There's nothing wrong with this paradigm as long as you can come to an understanding of what you like about the things you do and not throw a temper tantrum that everyone else doesn't hold everything in the same esteem as you, or everyone else, do.
That is rarely the case lately, and it rarely ever occurs as the arthouse dorks kvetching that their favorite Jim Jarmusch movie isn't raking in Endgame money. It's the people who complain that movies like Avengers: Endgame isn't held in as high regard as the movies that end up winning awards. It's always the people who respond to legitimate criticisms that Disney is strangling the entertainment industry by loudly screaming that the big box thing they like is art, and they will scream it at you until they're blue in the face and yours is red. It's not enough that Disney is a faucet they can work to get them gratification almost at will. You have to recognize it for its artistic merit even if the artistic merit is foisted upon you by people who see art in its most basic terms. It doesn't matter if the thing is done well; if the thing is there, you must recognize it or have your notifications column be overrun by angry nerds who want their cake and to eat it as well.
As you can plainly figure out from the URL this post is located, it happens in wrestling too, only I'm not so sure arthouse wrestling is a thing that exists. There's no Jim Jarmusch making wrestling nowadays. Mike Quackenbush was, if anything, a low rent Kevin Feige who turned out to be a Joss Whedon, but even highest on my own supply, I would never deign to compare Chikara to Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. If anything, WWE is a homeless person's Disney, and everything else is some other major studio of a varying degree. The comparison isn't completely one-to-one, so you can't really look at artistry as much as you have to look at degrees of popularity and execution.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no analogue in wrestling to the Academy Awards. Perhaps the biggest independent awards given out belong to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which probably would be analogous to something like the Critics' Choice Awards or some other much smaller ceremony. People like to say that Dave Meltzer being the biggest critic, historian, and tastemaker in wrestling is problematic, but they're wrong, not in theory, but because I'm not sure Meltzer matters enough to the masses at large in order for that to be an issue. Wrestling's beginnings never attracted a legitimate media to it like other sports or entertainment. It's always been in such a weird niche that covering it would be nigh impossible for traditional approaches. Thus, journalists like Meltzer, his cohort Bryan Alvarez, or anyone else with a newsletter that originated in the pre-Internet era like Wade Keller, always followed a different model that resonated more with "The Boys" than the millions of people who would call themselves wrestling fans at any given point in time.
It's my personal theory that Meltzer is always given much more of a sphere of influence than he really deserves because people in the wrestling industry see him as the closest thing to media as possible. If that person is going to be complementary to you, you will give him access. If he's adversarial, you will give him the run-around. Meltzer, outside of the short time he was actually on the then-WWF's payroll (which he says he regrets), has styled himself as adversarial, at least with WWE and with most other companies until he started giving out sixth and seventh stars to matches in the Kenny Omega vs. Kazuchika Okada era of New Japan Pro Wrestling.
He's always heard cries of bias towards New Japan and now to All Elite Wrestling, but for that to really rate discussion, it would have to matter. Thinking that Meltzer ravaging WWE programming and lavishing praise on AEW's makes a hill of beans of difference is psychosis. If the writings of film critics in an industry where criticism is well-established and more reputable can't dampen the Disney machine and commercially lift up the movies of filmmakers like Jarmusch, Scorsese (whose films always do well financially because he's been doing it for decades and has a built in audience), Bong Joon-Ho, and the like, do you think it's going to matter a lick of difference in wrestling, where Meltzer's subscribers may rival that of current-day Impact Wrestling's viewership? When COVID-19 is over (if it's ever over), go to a random WWE house show in Pine Bluff, AR or whatever other backwater market that doesn't rate the A-loop. Poll a hundred people in the audience to see if they've heard of Meltzer. I doubt the number will top 35 percent if I'm being generous.
If Meltzer were an effective journalist, one might have some imaginary merit to their argument when talking about "fairness," but "fairness" in journalism is often meant to be some outmoded idea that everyone in the industry is good and that you have to treat every side of the story as if it's valid. If I ever see Ron Fournier in the streets, I'm gonna punch him in his face for helping propagate that idea in total. Wrestling is a scummy business, and if anything, Meltzer is often too kind when talking about WWE's social record. If anything, allegations of bias shouldn't be put at whether he likes Young Bucks matches more than Usos ones, but that he too often hand-waves away when wrestlers do scumbag shit, especially when it comes to his favorites. He and Jim Ross laughed away domestic violence accusations against Tomoaki Honma. He met more than a few violence or rape allegations against "The Boys" by citing bullshit non-statistics about false charges.
But the truth of the matter is Meltzer matters little in the grand scheme of things. When one comes down to brass tacks, getting angry over the Observer Awards is just being mad that the critical arm of wrestling doesn't appreciate the brand that is most lucrative. Vince McMahon is out here scoring billion-dollar deals once a year to line his pockets, and his legion of sycophantic fanboys who yell at people who critique WWE do his bidding for free. It's ludicrous. It shouldn't matter whether WWE is a successful product or not for someone to have legitimate criticisms about it, so you just have braindead trolls online yelling about these Awards in the same way that Disney fanboys take to social media to talk about how artistic the stuff they like is.
Case in point, the reactions to the Best and Worst Gimmick Awards encapsulate this dissonance. Orange Cassidy won Best Gimmick and "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt won Worst. Apparently, this rankled people to make it the avatar for Meltzer's "bias" like it matters, but forgetting the fact that everyone's biased and that the awards are voted upon by a full coterie of subscribers, one can look easily at either gimmick and see why one is "good" and one might not be. Again, it's not a one-to-one comparison, because I'm not sure there's a whole lot of nuance and subtext behind Cassidy's gimmick of being eternally hungover and not wanting to exert any kind of effort unless he absolutely had to. But one gimmick is "cool" and the other gimmick is what a deranged septuagenarian billionaire thinks is an adequate horror character. If you like the latter, that's fine. I get it. One likes what one likes, but shouldn't the fact that the Fiend character is a moderately successful for a large (but shrinking) audience be validation enough? Do a bunch of weirdos who pay for insider news and retrograde social opinions really have to give you the okay to like him?
To me, that's an INSANE way to spend the time of day consuming things that help keep your mind off your bills, your debts, your job, and the general and accelerating decay of the only planet in the known Solar System that can support life. Still, people have to find unanimous validation for the things they like. It doesn't matter that the standoffish and aloof manner in which Cassidy conducts himself, combined with the sheer athleticism to do what he can do in the ring is a tried and true combination of things that appeal to audiences at large, not just in wrestling, but in life. It has to matter that he and Wyatt are THE SAME PERSON and thus must garner at least the SAME RESPECT if not less because Wyatt is on "your team" and Cassidy isn't.
Meltzer, his awards, basically anything that isn't a wrestler or, more accurately, a promoter in the business mean only what you want them to mean, and giving someone who probably fundamentally disagrees with you at your core on what good wrestling is the kind of power to make your day miserable seems, in a phrase, indefensibly bad. I understand some people have to fight battles every day or else they feel like their life is meaningless, but sometimes, you might just want to know which battles are worth it. I'd say that maybe these people should put their efforts into politics, but knowing what I know about most of wrestling's fanbase and a good chunk of said fanbase that latches onto WWE, that might be a real monkey's paw situation if I ever heard one.
The point is popularity and critical acclaim are two orbits that intersect rarely. If you dive into one pool looking achingly for everyone else to follow you in lockstep, you're going to drown waiting for unanimous support. Art and entertainment are important to alleviate the pain, but they're not important enough to argue to the death with strangers.
