N.C. Harrison sings the praises of the massive, powerful bad guys who force our fictional heroes to rise to the occasion.
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As a particularly large person (I have often described myself, to my mother’s ongoing chagrin and annoyance, as “almost comically enormous,”) I have always been drawn to the big, powerful and, well, darned conspicuously impressive as opposed to the lean, swift and aesthetically pleasing to the mainstream. Stories about Thor, in D’aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths, were my favorites as a little child, just as I preferred Samson to any of the other biblical Judges of Israel. With shoulders already wide enough to almost overflow my dad’s old Terry Bradshaw jersey I could imagine myself doing battle with Jotuns and Philistines, and felt much more at home with Herakles and his wars with the Nemean Lion and Cretan Bull (we also read, frequently, from D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths) than I did with the notion of racing Atalanta. She would probably have left me in the dust, golden apples of Aphrodite or no… although I always did imagine that a big, strong Amazon girl like Wonder Woman or Xena, Warrior Princess would be all right for me. Conan the Barbarian, likewise, had an enormous effect on me, when I watched it one late summer night between fifth and sixth grade. The sight of Arnie, swinging that ridiculously heavy Atlantean sword (and praying to Crom, by Crom!) inspired me to pick up my granddad’s old dumbbells and, by the time I had started playing football in seventh grade, build up a fairly impressive set of little small caliber guns to fill my sleeves.
Pro-wrestling, maybe naturally for someone with these inclinations, always lay near and dear to my heart. I could watch WCW Saturday Night with my great-granddad, listening as he said that it wasn’t real but “could be pretty doggone good,” like the cowboy movies we watched earlier, especially if Dusty Rhodes happened to be on the card. WWF was the domain of my paternal grandfather. He loved the Macho Man Randy Savage and, until the day he died, referred to the Federation’s owner as “Vincent K. Mock-Mahunn” and hated the man with an old hill fellow’s burning passion.
One can only watch guys cheat and use weapons for so long before the thin strand of credulity which sustains professional wrestling snaps entirely, even if you are a tiny child. “Surely,” even the dumbest viewer would say, “somebody would catch on to this level of mischief and call shenanigans.” There’s no escape valve like that with Lesnar, or any truly effective monster heel like him.
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For my own part, although I enjoyed whatever came on the screen—wrestling was almost as good as cartoons—I really, really loved the big, dominant monster heels you still saw back in those days, much more frequently than you do now. One Man Gang was pretty cool, as was the Warlord, although Hulk Hogan usually made them look like absolute idiots. Haku was better, and as I have grown older and learned more about him—like the fact that he bit a man’s nose off in a shoot fight—I have always felt good about my determination that Haku, even if he was destined to lose to Hogan in the end, seemed like a man that it would be wide to avoid if he was in an angry—or hungry—mood. I saw him wrestle live in his latter days with WCW, as Meng, and saw that he still exuded the same raw, barely controlled fury while he mauled Screamin’ Normal Smiley (who I’m not sure I ever saw win a match) with hard, stiff shots that would have felt more at home in a movie like Roadhouse than an off the beaten path wrestling house show.
Lately, though, it has seemed like the monster heel is no longer a thing which wrestling promoters are all that serious about developing, even though it is a proven formula which can keep audiences on the edge of their seats. All the ones who were great in my youth got older and retired—some, like Vader, even having to undergo major surgeries like knee replacement—and the one recent bright spot, the monstrous Brock Lesnar of 2002-2004, left for the greener pastures of mixed martial arts. The heels who had replaced the mostly seemed to be of the “cowardly weasel” variety. I liked sitting with my sister and booing guys like the Miz, but they just didn’t seem to have the same panache—and the bookers seemed to have even forgotten what that attitude of “ruthless destruction” could do. This is why even Seamus, a six foot six inch pale brute of a man, was booked as a craven rule breaker during his early 2010 run. Mark Henry had a somewhat effective run as a monster heel, promising people a term in his House of Pain, in 2011 but as an older performer, Henry was sidelined by nagging injuries and unable to do much with it.
Brock Lesnar wrestles legendary Iowa heavyweight Wes Hand.
That seems to be over now, however, with the semi-permanent, full time return of the aforementioned Brock Lesnar. He ended the Undertaker’s streak, earlier this year at Wrestlemania, and last Sunday, at Summer Slam, handed John Cena the most decisive, ugly defeat that the Chain Gang Commander has suffered in the entire time that I have watched him bobble along, more or less competently, at the head of the company. And he did it cleanly, using simple moves and a series of sixteen German suplexes—how long since I’ve seen anyone but Kurt Angle use that!—which would have put Superman under, let alone a mere mortal. It was a ferocious match and so violent and inelegant that it could have fooled you, for an instant, into thinking that it was real.
Which is, I guess, why monster heels like Lesnar are so effective. He is, on one hand, a legitimate bad ass, having walked successfully onto an NFL team, won the UFC championship on more than one occasion and won the National College Athletic Association national wrestling title as a heavyweight. It is totally believable that even a hero to millions of children like John Cena could fall to him with no foul play. And this is, after all, the most important issue for the suspension of disbelief. One can only watch guys cheat and use weapons for so long before the thin strand of credulity which sustains professional wrestling snaps entirely, even if you are a tiny child. “Surely,” even the dumbest viewer would say, “somebody would catch on to this level of mischief and call shenanigans.” There’s no escape valve like that with Lesnar, or any truly effective monster heel like him. He is depicted as a ruthless, amoral beast—and there is nothing that your heroes can do because he is simply better than them. We know that he could beat Cena, CM Punk or Daniel Bryan minus a Shaolin secret, act of God or, perhaps, orbital bombardment.
Lesnar pulverizes WWE mainstay John Cena at SummerSlam 2014.
This makes it better, so much better, when a dominant man like Lesnar or his old brethren, the monsters of yore, are finally defeated. Their fury and power are overcome by a hero who is strong, clever and, yeah, more than a little tiny bit lucky. He will have been the winner not because he overcame the odds stacked unfairly against him, but because he overcame a truly dangerous opponent. We can sit, as an audience, and finally feel catharsis, like the Saxons must have felt so long ago, listening to the stories of Beowulf and his grim struggles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. And so I still find myself waiting for a great hero, to fight a monster worthy of him, still a child listening for the sounds of Thor battling the denizens of Jotunheim and throwing them down to the icy earth.
Photo–Flickr/Ed Webster