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Moments
by Davies
I really liked the 2012 Royal Rumble.
When I woke up the next morning, I liked it a little less.
Five days later, I’m not sure I liked it at all.
The Rumble match was endemic of WWE booking in the last year or so. It epitomised the same mindset that stops talented newer wrestlers from becoming as valuable to the company as they should be. Those talented wrestlers include the World champion, the WWE champion, the man who won the main event of last year’s Wrestlemania, and the Rumble winner himself.
WWE has become obsessed with “moments”.
Moments like Road Dogg and Hacksaw Duggan making surprise appearances in the match (and by the way, there were multiple layers of irony in the supposed smart fans telling Road Dogg he’s “still got it”), moments like the three commentators taking it in turns to get involved, moments like Kharma’s return, moments like Ricardo Rodriguez’s cameo. Moments that often put smiles on faces, that produce a short burst of excitement, that may trend on Twitter, but moments which don’t help the company draw any money.
There were only thirty spots in the match, and seven of them were sacrificed for the sake of moments. And that isn’t counting Mick Foley’s appearance either.
But that’s not my complaint. To be fair to WWE, the Rumble always has a small number of plausible winners. Instead of a parade of lower card talent that the crowd didn’t care about (although there were plenty of those, too), the company at least kept things interesting by including wrestlers who were guaranteed to get the audience’s attention. Did they overdo it? Absolutely. Did it make a mockery of the fact that the winner gets a world title shot at Wrestlemania? Yes and no, in that Rodriguez and Michael Cole are no less likely to win than Hunico or Jey Uso, from a storyline perspective.
There were only thirty spots in the match, and seven of them were sacrificed for the sake of moments. And that isn’t counting Mick Foley’s appearance either.
But that’s not my complaint. To be fair to WWE, the Rumble always has a small number of plausible winners. Instead of a parade of lower card talent that the crowd didn’t care about (although there were plenty of those, too), the company at least kept things interesting by including wrestlers who were guaranteed to get the audience’s attention. Did they overdo it? Absolutely. Did it make a mockery of the fact that the winner gets a world title shot at Wrestlemania? Yes and no, in that Rodriguez and Michael Cole are no less likely to win than Hunico or Jey Uso, from a storyline perspective.
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My real problem is that the major moments, the ones that are designed to draw money, have no context. WWE is so busy trying to create moments that they forget to tell any kind of story. Sheamus’ victory in the Rumble match had no context to it whatsoever, because there has been so little focus on him for a year and a half. WWE hasn’t told the story of his rise. In fact, they barely told the story of his face turn.
Instead, it seems more time has been spent trying to give the character a comedic side than anything else. The long-term drawing power of Sheamus has been hampered – perhaps permanently – in order to give the fans short-term laughs. Fair enough, he hasn’t been booked to be a loser recently, but he has without doubt been an afterthought; there have been 10-15 other wrestlers receiving far greater focus than him at any point in the past year or so. It was no surprise to hear this week that WWE was still undecided on the Rumble winner going into the weekend itself! Just think about that for a moment. They don’t know themselves what is actually going to happen, so how can there be any context to anything they book? And, as talented as Sheamus is, I can’t help but feel like his victory was booked purely for the sake of surprising people. |
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WWE doesn’t tell stories any more, and therein lies the problem. Because a moment is only memorable in the right context. You might not remember every kiss you ever had, but you remember your first. You might not remember every football match you’ve ever seen, but you remember the ones that sealed a promotion or won an important cup tie. When there is no coherent story being told, and nothing to get invested in, the moments mean nothing. WWE doesn’t realise this because it is too busy booking a comedy segment that will be forgotten five minutes later, or indeed a Royal Rumble appearance by a name from the past who will get a nostalgia pop from the crowd.
When the company does try to tell a story, it invariably ends up being a mess, or they book themselves into a corner where they cannot resolve it and have to pretend nothing ever happened. But most of the time, there is no story at all. What WWE fails to understand is that the reason we remember great moments from the past is because they were part of a wider picture, and involved characters and storylines in which the audience had an emotional investment.
There is no journey, no feeling that anything that happened previously has built to each point. WWE storytelling is like a map with no roads.
Too much time is spent trying to create moments than telling stories. And that’s the irony. If you just tell a good story, memorable moments will happen organically. It’s certainly not the case that Sheamus, or The Miz, CM Punk, Dolph Ziggler and Daniel Bryan are not talented, or are incapable of drawing money if presented correctly. They are merely part of process that is doomed to failure. A process where the writers are more concerned with surprising the fans or writing a funny line or killer insult– often drawing attention to those very wrestlers’ weaknesses and undercutting their drawing power – than telling any kind of story about them. WWE’s creative flaws ensure that Sheamus’ Rumble vicory was prevented from being the very moment it was booked to be.
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