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
Battered Fan Syndrome
September 23, 2005

by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

If this was a franchise/product/series that had NEVER been good, and had never drawn ratings or fans, then I wouldn't care so much... but the fact is, we've seen good wrestling shows. We know what they consist of. And we know how big wrestling can be when its not doing dumb things to drive away casual fans. The fact that we've seen the good times makes it impossible for me to be satisfied with what WWE's stubbornly servicing up...

I have a theory: that of the people still watching wrestling and still really caring about it, they are such long-time loyal fans that maybe they honestly feel like "decent" is good enough for them. They can't stop watching, so they might as well enjoy it. Clearly, the "healthy" thing for somebody as disenchanted as I'm getting to [be] would be to just stop watching. Like the other 70% of fans who used to be around in 1999 and 2000, but are long since gone. And I would probably do that the second that I sensed that wrestling was broken, that it simply couldn't ever be good again.

But as long as the improvements seem so easily-made, I can't do that.

— Rick Scaia, "Online Onslaught," 19 September, 2005

When I was in college, a friend of mine lived off campus and had a cable hook-up. I went to his apartment on Mondays for RAW. He was a lazy fan and wouldn't have watched on his own; but, hey, I brought beer. Recently he mentioned how I used to rave about great storylines and matches. Now, he said, I tell him that a bad match that annoyed him was probably part of a worse storyline. "You don't sound like you're enjoying yourself," he said. "Aside from your column, why are you watching?" My response was, basically, "I don't know. I just keep hoping it gets better."

Even though I have the fun of writing a column, I write rarely and yet watch weekly. I watch because I'm a fan, because a part of me still wants to love it, and because deep down, I really hope that the shows improve. I watch for the reasons Rick mentioned in the above quote. I manufacture reasons to believe that WWE still cares. That

still doesn't explain my viewing habits.

A few months ago, it struck me that my reasons for watching sounded eerily like Battered Women's Syndrome. Rick's column hammered home that point. I will not pretend to be an expert on Battered Women's Syndrome, Rick's particular fandom, or anyone else's. I do, however, understand mine. My experience tells me that my attitudes are reflective of at least the pop-culture Law & Order: Special Victims Unit understanding of Battered Women's Syndrome. Call my affliction Battered Fan Syndrome.

Television tells us that a woman suffering Battered Women's Syndrome is: depressed, cut off from other options, and convinced that her partner's abuse or shortcomings can be changed and that he will return to the good person he originally was. I may not be totally isolated, but I think I'm all three.

I do not mean to trivialize Battered Women's Syndrome. It's a horrible condition, and I realize that relating it to watching a TV show is frivolous. I mean no offense. But the more I think about it, the more it seems the most apt parallel. I know I'm a guy (happily married), but this all seems so familiar. Wrestling depresses me, and sometimes it's so bad it hurts to watch. I used to watch it to thrill and exult in new matches and confrontations and promos. When I watch now, I just hope that clichés won't get barfed at me by clumsy lunkheads.

I won't insult anyone and try to draw a one-to-one relationship between Battered Women's Syndrome and Battered Fan Syndrome. Unlike a battered woman, the battered fan isn't really cut off from the world by being economically dependent on an abuser. I don't have to watch RAW. I can watch John Madden go ape with the Telestrator on Monday Night Football; I can go to a bar or go sit in my garage and huff gasoline. I have tons of options. I can watch TNA or get tapes of ROH or go to sleep.

Still, the parallel seems valid. WWE repeatedly releases wrestlers that I feel positively about. They're dismissed to obscurity and forbidden to use their familiar names. They become strangers. The same goes for wrestlers I liked in the WWE in various guises. They don't get cheered enough or they get cheered or booed at the wrong time and suddenly they're shipped away for "retooling," to be reintroduced in a guise I neither desire nor favor.

A far uglier parallel is lies, broken promises and more lies. I never really believed Vince McMahon when he said that he would no longer insult my intelligence. I felt that making such a promise in the context of professional wrestling pretty much insulted my intelligence then and there. I knew that Doink or Gillberg would get at least one more WWE payday. It stank of inevitability.

The thing is, he (or WWE as an institution) keeps pretending to keep that promise. I remember being so disgusted with the Katie Vick story that I wrote a multi-paragraph column about it, featuring the word "fuck" or a variation on it about 35 times. Then I deleted it and started over, trying not to pummel the keys on my laptop so much. Then I watched again the next week. Kane got buried at the pay-per-view. I watched. WWE's response to the Katie Vick outrage was to parade Shawn Michaels weeks later for a quick mid-promo shoot comment.

It wasn't even an apology. It was a non-apology apology, but I allowed it to lighten my heart precisely because I knew it was the best I could get. I put up with it because it sounded something like remorse. Looking back, I know what I should have said: don't waste my time with non-apologies that are supposed to be an edgy promo; if you're going to spend any time or thought on this, spend it thinking about how to make sure this never happens again.

I could also make a huge stink about misogyny in wrestling, but I have to admit that I, like pretty much everyone else, have come to accept it as inevitable. I shouldn't. Not because misogyny can't be an effective and compelling storyline tool (it works in TV dramas all the time, ones that damn the misogynist), but because it's a tool WWE hits me with. They don't know how to use it properly and instead start swinging it around and occasionally belting me in the eye.

Various wrestlers tormenting, stalking, assaulting or raping women into a relationship offends on almost every level. It's disgusting from an equality and personal rights standpoint, but it's also a giant assault on my devotion. Like I said, I didn't believe my intelligence wouldn't be insulted anymore, but these stories are insulting even to sub-intelligence. Kane practically rapes Lita; Lita doesn't seem to mind after a while; Snitsky Abort-o-Bombs a baby out of her. WWE ignores the Katie Vick lessons and visually and intellectually assaults me again.

After Katie Vick, WWE promised me that this sort of thing would stop. Then they pulled the Stupid switch again with Kane-Lita-Snitsky-Edge, and they didn't even have the decency to apologize for it. Instead, Matt Hardy bailed them out by allowing them to turn this abusive schlock into a real-life story, which was then kayfabed into a kind of abusive meta-schlock. I guess I was supposed to forget that I hated it for being bad by loving it for somehow now being "real" bad. Then they turned it into something fake and bad again. Apparently, this rewarded me in some way.

Championing all of this schlock was the inhuman WWE promo machine. They didn't just gut-punch me with sickening storylines and 'roided oafs; they told me it was the greatest thing ever. It was like a husband punching out his wife and saying, "Dumb whore, you ain't never gonna find anyone as good as me. Think anyone else will buy you this good shit? Keep you in clothes?" Plug in the words "stupid mark," and "pay-per-views" and "popular wrestlers" and the message is pretty much the same.

Even though I have the right to complain, WWE doesn't listen. Boos get edited out, cheers amplified, signs removed and the rest ignored. If a pay-per-view tanks this November, they'll schedule two in November next year and report an increase over this year's November earnings. Thanks to creative accountancy, my dollar can be edited and manipulated as much as my cheer or boo. To them, I'm just a tool. A tool doesn't think for itself, doesn't have feelings and doesn't object to how it's handled.

So why do I keep watching?

Though they never say it in shows like Law & Order: SVU, I've always suspected one reason why it's so hard for a woman to leave a long-term abusive relationship is the fear of looking a fool. After a husband hits her once, it might be rationalized as an aberration. But after years of this behavior, the apologies and make-up presents ring hollow. At that point, walking away from the relationship means admitting that she made a mistake. If she'd walked away the first time, it would have been a bold statement of pride and zero tolerance. But if she walks away after two, three, five years, it means that she has to admit she willingly believed a lie and kept herself in harm's way for a long time. Even though it's not her fault, she's afraid someone else might think that some of it was.

I think something similar works in my head as a wrestling fan. If I watch one awful show, I try to dismiss the little things that went wrong and see all the opportunities for what could go right. One bad show doesn't mean that next week's show will be bad. Wrestling's real potential is always to be great. I keep hoping that it'll show its good side next Monday.

I've been doing this for over three years, where aside from a few good stretches, quality has either stagnated or continued to decline. Each week, that internal rationalization of "there's plenty of stuff that could go right next week" seems a little bit more desperately false. I have to admit to myself that I can't stop watching because I don't want to feel stupid. I don't want to admit that despite all my intelligence, I kept getting horrible results and somehow thought that it indicated better things were still to come.

I think each of us, as wrestling fans, instinctively starts tolerating bad shows and watching anyway because every week has the potential to be the week the new "Austin 3:16" is coined or another "Benoit v. Angle, Moonsault v. Flying Headbutt from the Top of the Cage" match happens. For the most part, we keep doing this after a few years because we don't want to look stupid. If you watch wrestling for around six years, as I have, and admit to yourself that three of them were mostly pretty terrible, you sound sort of like an ass. Why did I waste so much time on something so consistently unlikely to be good? After investing so much time, concern, passion, maybe even empathy, it's crushing to acknowledge that it went unappreciated or unnoticed. I pled and cajoled in the few ways I could. I wrote these little columns; I withheld my dollars from some shows and gave freely to others, but I still lived with it every week. Nothing much changed; what I did never really mattered.

It becomes a vicious circle. Bad shows punish you. But to admit that you took punishment for weeks, months or years on end makes you sound like a moron. So you hope against reason that the next week will change it — and you — all around. If I just give WWE another week, maybe they'll discover the new Attitude angle, and suddenly those years of mediocrity and insults to my intelligence will pay off. Instead of a loser punching bag, I'll be the die-hard fan, the true faithful who never gave up. And then I won't just be a moron.

So far, it hasn't worked.

I know where I screwed up. Katie Vick. I didn't like where wrestling had been going prior to that angle, and I knew bad times lay ahead. That angle was so foul that only one thing kept me from walking away. I dug writing a column. I stuck around. Later, just as burnout was reaching its apex, just as I knew that my pre-Katie Vick disgust was justified, Benoit won the Rumble, then won the belt. That hooked me for another year and a half. Now I'm back where I was before.

I know I would have been happier if I'd walked away. My intellectual and visceral reaction to Katie Vick was dead on. Someone would have told me later about Benoit and Guerrero at WrestleMania, and I'd have bought the DVD. But if I waited just a few months after 'Mania before checking back in on wrestling — if I'd gone AWOL from Katie Vick to late 2004 — I'd have gone from mannequin-raping to Bradshaw as WWE Champ and Randy Orton defeating Chris Benoit. I would have missed the payoffs and the drama, but they're glorious blips (often made more glorious by the hours of inanity preceding them). What I would have come back to would have confirmed that I was right to walk away, and I could take pride in all those Monday nights reading books or watching movies or taking walks and spending time with my wife instead of, say, Chris Masters.

Instead I'm here, now, trying to write about how upset I am without trying to equate myself too much with someone who really is physically and emotionally suffering. It sounds vain and a little bit arrogant. All the same, I'm still thinking it, and to me, it still makes perfect sense. I've always sedulously avoided making these columns a personal thing because I'm not actually that interesting. I prefer writing a quip to being nakedly confessional. Nonetheless, WWE just makes me sad. I can't do anything to change it. There isn't anything I can write, shout, wear, buy or not buy that will make any damned difference. It just feels so awful.

Look back at some of the words Rick used in the quote up top. He says that the healthy thing would be to walk away. But as long as he knows there's a potential for change, he can't do that. I saw those words and they resonated immediately. Those two words illuminate everything I feel about my wrestling fandom.

Spending every week watching something that disappoints so much isn't healthy. I've been promised, lied to, jerked around, cajoled, half-apologized to, mildly catered to, but basically I've been jerked around. WWE keeps telling me it means better, but those statements expose their opposite more than anything else.

I can't think of alternatives. I could watch TNA or get ROH tapes, but the effort runs counter to what I've been through. Having devoted attention to a product that crapped on me, devoting time to another seems like asking for it. The investment I already made came to so little; why would I invest in anything else similar? The only solution I can see is a revolution in TiVo, where producers can see what people watch and what they record. Then it might be proved that many don't actually watch RAW. They watch anything else on TV, then later skim most of it, except a few promos and a match. Maybe that won't be ignored.

That's the best answer I have, because walking away has proved so hard. I get lied to, patronized, have wrestlers I like stripped of their names and disappeared. Occasionally, I get a feeble "sorry" that isn't explicitly contrite and is never acknowledged again. Apparently, that's all I'm supposed to need. I'm sick of it. Nothing ameliorates being systematically fed lies, the substandard, broken promises and a voice-over that tells me I should think this is better than the bestest thing ever. I'm not a child; I am not weak-minded. I'm just weak-willed. Despite the fact that it's unhealthy, I'll probably be there next Monday, believing against experience that it will be okay this time. Even though I know it probably won't.

I just want it to stop, because I'm afraid I won't stop watching.

E-MAIL JEB LUND
BROWSE JEB'S ARCHIVE

Two things. One, anyone who wants to share "battered fan" stories as regards wrestling is more than welcome to write in. I'd be curious to see if the phenomenon is as common as I think it is.

Two, I'd like to acknowledge here that while I hope my column seems original and that the term "Battered Fan" isn't an unconscious retread of someone else's idea, another writer made the link between watching wrestling and "battered women's syndrome" before I did. I discovered this, much to my dismay, after I'd already written most of this column. I panicked when google revealed that guest columnist Chip Boots made the connection in this piece from 2001. However, since he mentioned it in passing (and at the beginning of the WWF/WWE's current decline, before the negative behavior/content was reinforced again and again, thus validating the connection more), I felt I could still write my own column without seeming like I was poaching. All the same, he made the connection much earlier, and he most certainly deserves the credit for it. So my hat's off to Mr. Boots.

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