The Old School Lunch

The first few minutes of this just gives me chills considering how close we still are to the Benoit double-murder and suicide. For a business that supposedly has been reeling since the massacre, I find it absolutely ridiculous that they use “storylines” like this. As i’m sitting here listening to Kurt Angle (and, yes, I know these are fake, soap opera storylines with scripted dialogue) talk about how much of a “loving, caring and compassionate” person he is, I can’t help but remember how the wrestling community swarmed around Chris Benoit to say how great of a guy he was, how much of a “family man” he was and how professional he was with his work. All of this despite how he had murdered his wife and son.

It would be a great understatement to say that this is simply in poor taste but TNA wrestling doesn’t stop there. If you don’t watch the entire thing it’s basically an eye-roll enducing characterization of an abusive husband, the woman who is being emotionally (and suggestively physically) abused and the knight in shining armor protector who comes in to kick the abuser’s ass and save the abused woman as she tells the abuser that she’s leaving him. One could say that this is in some way a positive portayal…that the abuser (Angle) got his ass kicked and that his wife left him, all of which resulted from his asshole personality and the way he treated his wife. But of course at the other side of the coin we have the Somoa Joe character, the fan favorite, who comes to Karen’s aid after Angle begins to berate Karen. But is it a positive portrayal? I don’t think it is necessarily. I don’t buy that since our standards for wrestling are so low, we have to say “yea, awesome!” to what we would otherwise just scoff at–the focal point being the male hero coming to save the day. If I saw this on any other TV show, which is hard to imagine since nothing else is so hyperbolic in its forced drama than wrestling, it’d be pretty troubling to see. Yea you could say that the woman telling Angle tell basically fuck off is pretty great…but she leaves the ring, the camera isn’t on her anymore as the attention is all on Joe as he is who the audience now identifies with and cheers for.

(To be continued…)