On Action, Progress, Meaning, and the Need to Rebalance the Scales

Ricochet and Ospreay wrestled last week. There was a lot to like in the match. They did a good job feigning competition even in the face of incessant counters. It was meant to be a crowd pleaser, something celebratory. It fulfilled that goal. It built to a double pin, a restart, and then it all getting snatched out from under them (and the fans) by Takeshita to set up the PPV match. That double pin though... In a year that Ospreay had kicked out of so many things (sometimes multiple times) and in a match where both wrestlers hit things both bigger and smaller, it felt like it came out of nowhere; it took everyone out of the moment, and not just because no one likes a double pin. It didn’t feel earned. It didn’t feel warranted. How could it in a world with finishes stretches so elaborate and moves meaning so little? How would anyone even know?

Pro wrestling is a weekly serialized narrative of a shared universe. It's a fairly unique artform, akin to comics and soap operas and not a whole lot else. It follows a certain set of rules and norms; deviations from these carry consequences. Everything that happens, in ring and out, has narrative value in the moment, but also over time. That's on the feud level, the match level, and the move level. There's a cost and benefit to everything that's done and they affect more than the exact point in which they happen.

It's almost impossible to talk about this because of the bad faith arguments that happen generationally and lead to immediate dismissal of the notion. We've all heard the stories about old timers that thought Flair and Steamboat or Shawn Michaels were doing too much (not Kurt Angle though, because they all wanted to leech off of his credibility). As wrestling has survived and had its ebbs and especially flows in popularity, it becomes very easy to dismiss any such talk as jealousy and laziness and a selfishness over their spots and their legacy, even as ignorance. It becomes impossible to even invite the idea that a rise in action and athleticism might have forced something meaningful and worthwhile to be lost as well.

There's also the notion of a chemical change, that the goal of wrestling today simply is different: it was never about whether it was real or not, not in the last forty years at least, not in most places. Instead, audiences once wanted to see (vicariously experience) a babyface triumph over (or at least punish) a heel in the same way they would go to movie where the good guy won in the end. Or maybe they bought tickets to see a simulated sporting event (face vs face title matches for instance) where the winner was the most important thing, all the better if it was a hometown hero. In those cases, the athleticism at play and the moves being executed were much more the means than the ultimate end. Today, as a big chunk of the audience watch to see (conventionally) great matches for the sake of great matches, that dynamic (means and ends) has flipped.

Greatness is subjective however. When it comes to art, the idea of progress is as well. More is not inherently better. Craft is not only found in increasing excess, in pushing the bounds of athleticism. That doesn't mean there isn't inherent value in the idea of "more." It's complicated. Ultimately, however, all such things should be tools to serve an overall aim, to give life to a vision, and this vision has to be bigger than any one sequence or any one match. It's hard not to watch an older match and be amazed how much a wrestler could get out of a punch, a look, a hold, how much it all resonated and stuck with fans.

Wrestling has always had great athletes. At any point in history (maybe up until now), wrestlers could do more than what they chose to do. Restraint was often not a matter of what could be done, but instead what should be done. So long as narrative value was preserved, fans would meet the wrestlers halfway, suspending their disbelief and allowing themselves to be moved this way or that. The skill came not in what was done, but in the how and in how both wrestlers reacted to it. The more they showed they cared, the more the fans would care.

Throughout wrestling history, so many of the leaps towards increased action were driven by smaller wrestlers who weren't allowed to get over through more conventional methods. You could say that they offered the audience an exciting alternative. Usually though, it came at a cost. There's the most obvious consequence, the strain on bodies. If the notion of "more" is accepted as progress, is taken as the goal, the only path forward is towards ever increasing excess. It's just not sustainable. 90s AJPW showed a specific proof of that in a very specific way.

More than that though, it changes the internal dynamic of how matches work. In order to get something like a punch or body slam over, so much is reliant upon the reaction, the selling. It's reliant upon the set up, the struggle to even hit such a thing. It's reliant upon the execution in the moment. It has to be set up well and be seen as worth hitting (or avoiding). It has to look to be hit well. It has to be sold as having impact. With flashier moves, none of this is nearly as necessary. To keep things moving, they're often set up as part of a fast counter sequence and recovered from quickly. In order to enable this, more often than not, the dynamic has to shift from simulated struggle with real impact to a far more visibly cooperative series of set-ups and a lack of clear consequence.

Therefore, not only are wrestlers required to do more, but everything they do now means less in the moment. That doesn't mean there isn't any value to action or to athleticism. It doesn't mean they should do the bare minimum, no matter how much craft I personally find in accomplishing as much as possible with as little as possible. It's more a case of building to it, of having another gear to go to, of utilizing it when it matters most: in individual matches, on a show, or over multiple shows, of getting the most value and meaning possible from not just the least but also the most as well. 

As things are now, it's a cycle. Fans are conditioned to expect more, to value each individual spot less, to reward those who do as much as possible. The art of wrestling, if it is nothing else, is about manipulation, about training reactions over time, about establishing values (and moves) and cashing them in to achieve a greater goal. Right now we're in the midst of a spiral, a race towards sensationalism where each generation of wrestler and fan will expect more and more as the base standard, while each individual action means less and less until the bottom falls out.

It doesn't mean it's too late to grab the reins and pull back. It'll take a concerted effort from the top down, even from the people who have been rewarded the most by this cycle, by this notion of "progress." They have the goodwill now, have the influence, have the leverage. They can take a half step back now and try to make everything resonate just a little more, and then once that works, even more still. They can build to sensational spots, sensational moments, sensational exchanges, but the key is to build to them, that there will be a sense of escalation within matches and shows and over time. They can rebalance the scales, replenish the value of the smallest, most intimate moments so that the wildest, most athletic ones can mean all the more. A greatness can be achieved that isn't disposable, that lasts with the audience for more than a day or a week or a month, maybe even forever.

It may not be what the fans claim to want right now, not what would get the most immediate short term reward, but it's very much what they need, what we need, an investment in the future of the artform, a way to stop the spiraling and guide it forward in a steady, controlled manner, where the wrestler, not the audience (and yes, not even the critic) charts the course with purpose in mind.