OO Column: The Obtuse Angle by Jeb Lund (Pro Wrestling News, Analysis, and Commentary... WWE, WWF, WCW, ECW, The Rock, Brock Lesnar, Triple H, Rob Van Dam, Hulk Hogan, Undertaker, Trish Stratus, Lita, Stacy Keibler, Divas, RAW, SmackDown, WrestleMania, S

THE OBTUSE ANGLE
Your Opinion Matters (Now)/(Maybe)
December 17, 2004

by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

I was watching Raw and Smackdown last week, and I noticed how many Diva Search contestants were on both shows. It was hard not to. Eventually, I asked myself, "Didn't we vote these chuckleheads off the island?" We had. Interestingly, WWE personnel had decided that one of our few true instances of audience commentary and intent was not worth paying attention to.
I'm a realist. Despite predicting before every pay-per-view that Jericho will win, I know he probably won't. I allow my hopes a little bit of daylight and usually lock them away soon after, protecting them, stifling them, keeping raging frustration at bay. Despite my realism, I find myself very angry at the presence of so many Diva castoffs on my TV.
Anyone who follows WWE long enough recognizes the beginnings of the WWE pattern of pushing something they "want" or have decided is the right thing. After a while, the signs start popping up everywhere. Even if you weren't a smart fan, you would understand that Orton doing an Austin imitation and RKOing everyone in sight sort of, you know, said something. Often, WWE's wanting something comes at the expense of our comments. Cheers and boos and silence are our comments. For the most part, it's all we have. WWE presents a new wrestler who's supposed to be a babyface, and we boo the guy because he sucks. WWE repackages him as a heel, and we keep silent because he sucks. This is our only avenue of communication. We are telling WWE: no matter how you polish this turd, it's a turd. Get rid of it. Sometimes it works. Great! A lot of times, it doesn't. Again, we're used to this. Perhaps WWE misinterprets our one line of communication: maybe the presence of a more popular heel caused us to boo the babyface; maybe the presence of a terrible babyface caused our silence regarding the newly turned heel. These are reasonable assumptions. There are numerous intangibles to our limited communication, and I cannot fault WWE planners for sometimes trying something else with a person or product that we have deemed unwanted through our ambiguous means of communication. And, yeah, sometimes they have an idea that they just can't wait to try, need and yearn and want to try, and they will see it through regardless of reaction (Orton as an Austin-like babyface comes to mind negatively; Brock Lesnar as a debuting monster comes to mind positively). The Diva Search contestants are a unique case. Granted, we were not asked to vote on the idea of the Diva Search itself. I suspect this non-option came about because of WWE fear of outright rejection or pretty comprehensive indifference outside the under-eighteen crowd. But once the process was in motion, our collective votes eliminated diva after diva. WWE finally asked us, "Who do you want?" We told them. They ignored us. When Carmella appeared on WWE TV a week after being eliminated, I did my WWE Fan shrug of resignation. (Any long-term fan learns this shrug — a defense against anger, a protection of hope, a little knowing gesture of here-they-go-again.) Video packages had done a fairly decisive job of painting Carmella as a lazy, self-satisfied and loathsome… well, bitch. I could see how WWE minds would immediately think to parley that into a new heel diva character. I didn't like it, but I saw the reasoning. Then Maria cropped up on TV as a breasted microphone stand, and again I didn't mind too much. I figured that maybe WWE had picked up cheap supplemental talent, that maybe she had some knack or je ne sais quoi that would eventually manifest itself on screen. Plus, I thought she was the best looking of the crop of Diva candidates, so I admit that I selfishly didn't mind. Then divas — who could actually wrestle — got released. Many of them. Then more Diva Search candidates began popping up on screen. When I watched Raw and Smackdown this last week, they were appearing left and right, like some bimbo version of the multiplying scene in Fantasia. And I was furious. Yes, like many others, I was outraged that talented women wrestlers (and even Gail Kim) were being released only to be replaced by women who could not wrestle or — by many accounts — speak English properly, appear aware of their surroundings or complete a thought. Admittedly, that's terrible. But what made me most furious was that WWE asked us our opinion and ignored it anyway. They ignore us in so many regular ways so often; yet, this time, they asked us our opinion directly, then told us to take our opinions and go fuck ourselves. (Here is probably the best time to talk about Taboo Tuesday. Yes, that pay-per-view featured WWE listening to its audience and directly asking us what we wanted. Well, sort of. They deliberately moved many wrestlers into compartmentalized feuds and matches. The booking in some cases all but explicitly told us whom to vote for. In those cases, it was less a matter of us telling WWE what we wanted and more a referendum on WWE booking. "Do you approve? Check yes or no." Yes, it was feedback, but very controlled feedback. To a certain extent, it was like kicking a man and hitting him in the stomach, then asking, "Which do you like? The kick or the punch?" Sadly, "neither" wasn't on the ballot. In still other cases, fans were given wide latitude to pick performers, but only regarding mid-to-low-card matches. I absolutely understand that some of this compartmentalization was simple practicality. WWE couldn't have said, "Here are 40 wrestlers. You can have eight matches. Now pick the matches, the stipulations, the titles and the wrestlers." It couldn't have worked. All the same, you can compartmentalize matches without coercing them. With Randy Orton in particular, the pre-Taboo Tuesday booking seemed especially coercive. Thus, while I'll concede that WWE was asking for fan input regarding the pay-per-view, I don't think it was a fully honest invitation. It was far closer to my punch/kick poll than a broad survey of audience desires.) So that's where I was mentally, sitting on my couch and trying desperately to take WWE programming seriously. I was thinking, "I've already voted these plasticized twits off the island! You don't care what I think about Orton; you don't care what I think about Triple H; you don't care what I think about Edge, Steph, Vince, Snitsky, Lita, JBL, Undertaker or anyone else. You don't care that I like Eddie, Benoit, Jericho, Christian, Kane, Molly, Haas, Benjamin, Tajiri, Rhyno or anyone I cheer. But you asked me what I thought about these fucking knuckleheads, and you ignored me, and you're fucking with me!" And that's it. That's the last straw. WWE gave us this boon opportunity to issue feedback — albeit about something pretty irrelevant — and they then ignored the feedback. Chants, cheers, boos and silence already work haphazardly or not at all. We sure booed those Diva Search segments, too. But how can we take our collective and shaky vocal audience feedback even remotely seriously when our direct and on-point written feedback was thrown out the window too? They asked; we answered. Apparently it doesn't matter how or what we answer at all. But there's a catch. You can make an argument that each diva search competitor was someone's favorite, because of the structure of the voting. Each week, we were voting for the person we liked the most, rather than voting someone out. So technically, each diva got a chunk of internet votes that said, "We really like you." Each diva, no matter how early she was eliminated, technically had an audience or a following. Thus, WWE can argue that their employing the Diva Search losers is a response to the desires of the audience by giving them more appearances of a performer/torso that they liked. What's interesting about this is that, to argue this point, WWE must necessarily admit that The Internet Fans and their concerns are important, something they already dangerously almost addressed with Taboo Tuesday. What's more interesting is that those who voted on WWE.com were merely a subsection of the overall Internet Fan audience. Surely many mature (or gay) or generally disinterested fans stayed away from the Diva Search voting. But Pandora's box has been opened (again, some may say). The only public defense for the employment of Diva Search failures is that WWE is catering to those diva's built-in internet audience. Suddenly, the internet audience is important. When one part of it is important, all parts of it gain a little credibility or value. In short, if these divas are sent out to placate us now, then we cannot be dismissed down the road without (another) total exposure of WWE hypocrisy, self-indulgence or outright contempt for its internet fan-base. If we're being thrown a bone with the diva losers, then we should be thrown a bone about another Jericho title reign, or a Christian or Mysterio title shot, right? That's the catch, at any rate. In all likelihood, WWE won't be caught by it. Look for more hypocrisy, self-indulgence or outright contempt. H.L. Mencken once said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Similarly, WWE has never gone broke by ignoring or soiling the demonstrable will and desire of its core of fans. It's lost some money in the past, but never to a degree that the loss forced a total concern for the audience. Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels might have gotten belts in the WWF's dark days, but there were two Sparky Plugg-like menaces for each of them. Gestures are made — some token, some permanent — but they are always garnish, the spoonful that makes the turd (polished or unpolished) go down. The polish on this one is that you and I and the other guy supposedly won't mind a random gang of talentless idiots because it happens to be a random gang of talentless idiots with breasts. The polish is that Christy Hemme is "the one we voted for" and "the good one" and the rest are just bad or evil or not worth thinking about. We feel good because "our girl" won. We can hate the other girls and thus play right into management's hands. (They're getting heel heat and reaction regardless. Mark it in the WWE win column!) Better yet, in our disdain for these other girls, we can forget that no one asked for a Diva Search in the first place. Better still, we can get wrapped up in bad promos, in hateful columns, in scathing message board posts, in close-ups of boobs, in wet t-shirts and sexual innuendo (if it even qualifies as innuendo with this lot), in Snitsky hurting precious fragile barbies, in nasty wrestlers who aren't nice to the be-jugged mic stand stertorously asking questions. We can wallow and be distracted by all of this. Doing so makes us twice the losers. Our cheers and boos are ignored often. In this case, though, we were asked a direct question and gave a direct answer. It was ignored and treated with no concern. Remember that. Don't get wrapped up in the curvy distraction. Remember the worth of your opinion and your own comment. And remember that the next time you see some hard-nippled scantily-clad girl you didn't vote for, a girl who lost a contest you didn't vote to have, a girl who couldn't tell left from right without holding up her index finger and thumb and seeing which one made an "L" shape — remember that WWE asked you to open your mouth and voice your opinion, and that the very fact of that girl being on your TV represents WWE shitting directly into it. Because, if anything, that'll shut you up. And perhaps that foul gesture from them would matter, if your voice concerned them at all. But it doesn't. Yet. On a Much Nicer Note Since I've railed about silly and untalented women, allow me to promote a woman who is most definitely the opposite. I long ago got a clever and insightful email from an English artist who declared to me her Orton fandom. I spent several emails trying to explain to her that Randy Orton is the avatar of all that is boorish and ugly in the American Jock, that I always get the vibe that he's one more keg stand and spritz of Tommy cologne away from turning into the archetypal date-rapist. She was unmoved. She's still a fan. Dang it. She is, however, a good artist (insofar as my limited artistic acuity is able to tell), and she's a pretty delightful person. She's produced a kind of subset series of wrestling paintings, just for larks. This is, by far, my favorite But your mileage may vary. Feel free to check out her other wrestling paintings and horrifyingly non-wrestling-oriented work at: http://www.chloepaintings.co.uk/ There! You got the plug, Chloe. Now forsake Orton and all his works!

E-MAIL JEB LUND
BROWSE JEB'S ARCHIVE

Jeb Tennyson Lund is the Pope of Online Onslaught. If you want to read his sadly less wrestling-oriented columns, go to www.citizenscholar.net.

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