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| The Time Loop is here! |
I opted to stay away from WrestleMania this year. As a matter of fact I haven't watched a single episode of RAW since the very disappointing 2013 Royal Rumble. The Rumble itself made it very obvious as to what would happen at WrestleMania:
John Cena would defeat The Rock and earn "redemption" for his legitimately surprising loss last year. It was all-too-obvious, even without the "smark" knowledge that WWE would not keep the title on The Rock, who is a (very) part-time wrestler.
That was an instant turnoff for not only myself, but other older fans who had grown up during the Monday Night Wars. Perhaps we grew spoiled, because that was the time when the art of stortytelling in pro-wrestling was truly at its peak. Competition brought out the best in all competitors. WWE as a de facto monopoly is no longer required to put that extra effort to tell a story the audience would truly be enthralled by.
In addition to the main event, the other matches on the card just seemed incredibly unoriginal. They were either repeats of very recent matches (Triple H/Lesnar, Sheamus/Orton/Big Show vs The Shield) or matches that didn't make much sense for either character to be involved in to begin with (CM Punk/Taker, Ryback/Henry). From what I've been told, the buildup to the event itself was about as awful as it's ever been, with "creative" not even attempting to make sense out of the convoluted mess of the card.
It should come as no surprise then, that orders of 'Mania this year seem to have hit a drop-off. It's only right, especially with an increase in the price to $70 (yeah, really!).
Think of that price in comparison to other forms of entertainment. I can buy a new Xbox game for $10 less, and probably get far more entertainment value than this event was offering. I can see several movies for that price with the same result. The entire Ghost in the Shell: SAC box set is currently being offered for $113.36 on Amazon. For less than double the price of WrestleMania XXIX, you can get a FAR better entertainment value that will last you much longer.
What should this mean? WWE wants to consider itself an "entertainment" company first and foremost, and it sure is no monopoly in that area. It should start thinking of itself as being in competition not just with other WRESTLING (a term they assiduously avoid) companies, but with the entertainment industry in general. A dollar spent in one place can't be spent in another and one person can't be doing two things at once.
Pro-Wrestling does truly have a unique entertainment form that can be exploited to great success. It's live-action athletic theater combining various aspects of culture into a single show. At once both action movie and live drama, it's a blend that can and has been massively successful in the past. But the art of using it to tell a story- a constructed and enthralling narrative, seems to have been lost.
Enter John Cena, undoubtedly the best illustration of this phenomenon.
Like many older fans, I sorely dislike his character. I don't grudge him for "never losing clean" or "the five moves of doom" as many others do. Those are common tropes in pro-wrestling, especially amongst top babyfaces. Heels cheat to win. Babyfaces stage comebacks with their signature moves to knock the heel on his back. It's old as dirt and will always work if done properly.
Rather, it's his stale, unoriginal character that I despise. His promos always seem inauthentic, as if he's trying way too hard. He's almost always thrust in the same situation year in and year out. He's either chasing the title, or he's booked in incredibly bad storylines (that AJ angle last year was just....ugh). During it all, his character never changes. At all. The John Cena character is never presented with new challenges and new opportunities for growth. Through it all, the character stays the same- a cookie cutter good guy with no ill will or malice, no flaws, no dimensions. He never goes anywhere. He is in a way a Homeric god- unchanging and unflinching. Except unlike them, he is neither funny nor interesting in the way he conducts himself. He has no redeeming qualities. Giving the bad guy his just deserts can only take a character so far. And Cena since 2005 has never gone beyond that point. He's never given fans (outside kids who don't know better and those women who simply cheer for him because they think he's hot, which I don't begrudge) a reason to be invested in his character. These days it's even worse. There's nothing left for him to prove and he more or less rests on his laurels.
If nothing changes, time essentially stands still. And that's what John Cena is- an Eldritch Abomination trapping the WWE and fans that desire enthralling entertainment into a maddening time loop. His character stays still, locked in time. And, as the center-of-gravity of the WWE "Universe," (more on that shortly) he has succeeded in trapping much of the latter with him. At the same time, the law of diminishing marginal utility tells us that more of the same without fault leads to less satisfaction, a sobering reality for goods or services trapped in time loops. No one wants to hear the same story over and over again at any reasonable length of time.
Now, I do appreciate the stance of him and WWE over the past few years acknowledging the boos, the jeers, that people intensely dislike and even hate with a godlike passion at times the John Cena character. His taunts at the fans even make him a heel without actually being a heel- which is interesting.
Nonetheless, he isn't booked that way. His overall role is as unchanged as ever, despite these crowd-forced tendencies in his promos. The storyline around him has still not changed, nor has the core of the character. No new facets to John Cena are ever introduced, no real new situations that force him to think or act differently- to adapt, improvise, and overcome, are presented to him. The quest, the journey, has stopped.
And the stagnation of John Cena is both a representation and a cause of the stagnation of the WWE in general, as Cena is not only the "top guy" (and has been for a very long time), but even in situations where he does not have the title, he still main-events shows and PPV's, wherein the title is seemingly an afterthought. Rare before, it is now common. Worse, as mentioned before, his storylines are all stale. Even worse, the "creative" department of the WWE can rarely tell a good story in general anymore, with or without Cena.
The abysmal AJ storyline has already been mentioned, but consider Cena's two-year angle with The Rock, which is bigger than the WWE Championship. Both men acted like buffoons- utter buffoons. The Rock was way watered down- acting like a high-school jock with lame jokes and constant Twitter plugging, and John Cena was his typical self, only now with a silly approval-seeking chip on his shoulder because he had to "prove" he was better than The Rock. Why? No real reason. Rock just "went away" and Cena was still there, etc. The promos were utterly terrible, and their ring chemistry wasn't good by any means.
And WWE wants to do this twice despite last year's feud being mediocre at best?
Now consider the disappointing mid-carders over the years- guys that had potential but have been blown off course, perhaps irretrievably. Consider how many guys WWE has just dropped the ball on: The Miz and Ziggler come first to mind on this particular date. It seems that the bookers just can't find a way to build new characters and put them in good storylines at all, not that there aren't exceptions (The Shield and Antonio Cesaro being a couple of recent ones), but they get buried by the ever-mediocre main event.
CM Punk, WWE's hottest angle in years starting in mid 2011, was I think, in the long term, ruined by his heel turn. It not only didn't make sense at the time, but what has it ultimately done for his character? It turned him into a good antagonist for The Rock and The Undertaker to defeat, both making for a very disappointing conclusion to the CM Punk narrative, not only because we've seen those two triumph time and time again (and they're getting on in years), but it seemed an artificial roadblock to further growth of CM Punk's character.
I suppose I can continue to go on, but the main thrust is that WWE seems to be clueless most of the time as to how to tell a good, enthralling story that an audience wants to see and hear, one that the people it comprises would be willing to part with time or money that they could be spending on something else. The Monday Night Wars perhaps spoiled us older fans, and pro-wrestling in general may very well never reach such heights of quality again, but the fact remains that WWE could be doing so much more but just aren't seeming to make the effort to try, as this WrestleMania can attest.
Don't even get me started on TNA. Hulk and Brooke Hogan? Instant pass.
I may go into more detail later on as to how I think the storylines and characters can actually be improved rather than being entirely negative, but WWE, if it is truly serious about being an "entertainment" company first and foremost, needs to think of itself in competition not just with other wrestling entities, but other parts of the entertainment industry as a whole. It has tools enough to do well in this market (yes, including John Cena), but, in an air of complacency, hasn't made the effort to use them properly. That's my biggest pet peeve of all.
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