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WRESTLING SOCIETY X: A strange, renunciatory art seeks a higher narrative life form. |
The thing about reality is, you never quite know when you’re in it. Can there have been a more startled solicitor of whores, for example, than the unfortunate gentleman on last week’s Armed & Famous who found himself trying to pick up La Toya Jackson? Episode #3 of the celebrity cop show (CBS, Wednesdays at 8 pm) and La Toya and Trish Stratus, in acid-washed jeans and make-up tastefully suggestive of recent pimp batterings, were undercover in the midnight streets of Muncie, Indiana. Bleakness at curbside — the cold glare of brake lights, the male voice raised over the snickering engine. Counseled by her partner, the no-bullshit Kesler, to “use your big-girl voice” (rather than her customary fairy-tale squeak), La Toya got down to business. “Are you masturbating?” she enquired, peering into the dark cab of an idling sedan. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”Well, it probably did. But not for long: fellow celebrity enforcer Erik “Ponch” Estrada was bearing down in his cruiser, in a Wagnerian overkill of lights and noise. Fish-in-a-barrel time for the Muncie PD! In a trice this mild onanist was all cuffed up. He protested that he was out “getting some gas.” “You were masturbating in front of a police officer who was La Toya Jackson!” bellowed Ponch, out of his mind. Ponch is a riot, but the real star of Armed & Famous is the city of Muncie and its wonderful superfluity of human misery. Young lovers have a tiff and break some bottles; by the time the cops arrive they’ve carved each other up. “I love you!” says the woman, her face festively laced with blood. Two hog-like sisters scream at each other on a knuckle of scuffed lawn while their children moan from the porch. A man dies quietly and alone in front of his TV. And in the background, inserted into the scene almost surreptitiously, we see small, hunched people with patchy chemo hair or monstrous braces bolted to their heads, clues and indicators of a fallen world.
Neither was it all fun and games over on VH1, where the bellicose Tiffany a/k/a New York was sorting through her suitors on Episode #3 of I Love New York (Mondays at 9 pm). The challenge this time was for the assembled dogs to impress NY with a boardroom presentation outlining their net worth, earning potential, big-business dreams, and so on. Altogether too much for the fragile, frowning Pootie, who had a verbal breakdown — “I’m running from the repo man . . . I was an extra in War of the Worlds. . . PLEASE don’t interrupt me!” — before collapsing into wheezing sobs and then passing out. Dining that night with NY’s mother, Sister Patterson, Pootie was trembling so hard he couldn’t hold his soup spoon. “I’m scared for my life,” he told her. Psych alert: Pootie had to go. “Don’t do anything stupid,” advised the swollen jock 12-Pack as Pootie jammed his clothes into a bag. “I’d never do nothing to harm myself, man,” replied Pootie, very wise for an instant. “Only God knows my destiny.” The winner of the challenge, meanwhile, was the lisping T-Weed, who claimed to have assets worth $100 million. And over dinner with New York he spoke the glittering language of cyber finance, of “source files” and “programming codes”: “We deal with clients and there are, uh, inflows of money . . . ” Inflows? Sister Patterson ran a background check: T-Weed’s credit cards were maxed out and his last job had been a month-long engagement at Munchie’s Pizza.
Now then — how do you feel about professional wrestling? Wrestling Society X, which premiered this week on MTV (Tuesdays at 10:30 pm), is billed as “the greatest, dirtiest, and most dangerous wrestling competition on TV.” The green-faced shade of T.S. Eliot makes an improbable cameo when ring announcer Fabian Kaelin roars that WSX is beginning “not with a whimper . . . but with a BAAAAANG!” Thereafter it’s business as usual. On a cramped, undecorated set, in a carefully wrought atmosphere of low-budget violence, various enlarged and artificial personalities toss one another expertly about. Vampiro, 6-Pac, and Teddy Hart do their thing, stamping and roaring, making those foreshortened, thick-limbed movements particular to pro wrestlers. I always appreciate the great tenderness with which a pro wrestler will take the drooping head of a “stunned” opponent in his hands, as a prelude to delivering the smackdown: the touch is as delicate as an osteopath’s. What a strange, renunciatory art it is: they rarely hurt one another, but they frequently hurt themselves.
The innovations of WSX appear to be confined to presentation — rag-stuffed turnbuckles, for example, and the addition of a live band to the proceedings. (Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society warmed up the fans with some furry-tongued booze metal this week.) Pro wrestling, of course, was reality avant la lettre — the story lines, the pumped-up feuds and romances, the coarse moral gratifications — but it appears to have stalled at an earlier stage of narrative development, in an epoch of ogres and maidens, as it were. Can it learn from reality’s more advanced forms? As New Jack performs the time-honored “ref bump” by exploding a small, powder-filled guitar on the back of the ref’s head, one finds oneself thinking wistfully of the cruising johns of Muncie, or of Pootie in I Love New York saying, “I think I need to go sit down and talk to somebody, man.”
Next week: VH1’s White Rapper Show, and if my blood sugar holds I may finally approach the heathen temple of American Idol. Stay tuned.
