This is not the first time this year that WWE has botched a heel turn. Famously, they had Daniel Bryan turn heel by joining the Wyatt Family during their feud. Yet when 'Daniel Wyatt' started to fight as a member of this sinister family, he was still getting much bigger babyface pops that the nominal faces he was opposing. Realising this looked ridiculous, WWE reversed the heel turn within a fortnight, and the whole sorry business was never mentioned again. Bryan then started a fresh face run which led to the Championship belt. I think WWE deserves credit for realising that it wasn't worth digging deeper with a storyline that wasn't working and essentially owning up to their mistake. However, they showed a total lack of foresight. Given the depth of Daniel Bryan's popularity (he is probably more over than any face since Stone Cold), wasn't it obvious what would happen here?
There is a deeper issue here. Isn't the whole concept of heel and face turns inherently ludicrous? On a dramatic level the notion that someone who is supposed to be a baddie can, overnight, become a good guy and vice versa seems somewhat absurd. If this happened in a television drama or a film, you'd struggle to take it seriously unless the script gave a convincing psychological explanation for this sudden change. In wrestling, this happens all the time, usually with scant justification.
As I've said previously, TNA is currently something of a blur. Storylines are developing so quickly that it's hard to keep up with what's happening. MVP joined the company as a face in late January, but turned heel a few weeks ago. Even more jarringly, Bully Ray, who, as leader of the Aces & Eights, was the company's star heel is, somehow, now the principal face. As it happens, Ray is a strong enough performer to pull off his new face role, but this seems a waste given that his re-invention as a monster heel was one of the most triumphant performances in modern American wrestling. He's worked so hard on the character, and now he's had to adjust it further as a not-entirely-convincing good guy. It doesn't seem natural at all. And it seems as if over half the roster has turned over the past six months. This is all too much.
I apologise if I'm about to come across as a nostalgic old man banging on about how 'it used to be all fields round here', but when I watched British wrestling as a child, characters were far more coherent and consistent. Turns weren't unknown, but they were rare. Mick McManus was a career heel who was surely playing to his strengths by being a villain. In fact, as the principal booker for Joint Promotions during the 70s and 80s he could have changed this at any time, but he was happy to remain a bad guy.
This touches on another point. Most modern wrestlers are more comfortable in one particular role. Edge is an example of a wrestler who could play a face if needed, but, surely, people will recall his heel runs more. He was far more convincing as the conniving, opportunist character that dominated Smackdown in the mid 00s. To an even greater extreme, The Miz is a wrestler who can only play a heel; when he's a face, he comes across as too smarmy to be likeable. On the other side, Daniel Bryan is the reverse of Edge; he has played a heel pretty well, but the character is far more suitable for a face role. Performers who are equally effective in both roles are rare: examples include C M Punk and the aforementioned Bully Ray. Perhaps the oddest example is Austin Aries. He's been turned so often in TNA that it's often hard to remember what his current role is. And yet, he never actually changes at all; he's always the same cocky, superior character with a series of crowd-pleasing moves. He genuinely seems beyond classification. And he has a cool cape....
So why are turns so popular? Well, on a basic level, they help shore up flagging storylines by altering the dynamic, so writers can always reach for a turn when a story has reached a dead end. TNA actually used Bully Ray creatively during the Aces & Eights saga. Before he was unmasked as the leader of the faction, he was given a fake face turn, as he pretended to be on the side of Hogan and TNA's other senior faces. This led to a real shock when he revealed his duplicity. The story sold us a very effective dummy here, and they sealed this with a superb montage section featuring Bully's explanation.
As an aside, it has also been argued that Rollins' heel turn could also be fake, and is a ruse to infiltrate The Authority. Sounds a bit convoluted, but we'll see....
Of course, the most famous swerve of all was Hulk Hogan's heel turn to form the NWO in WCW. This worked because it was so unexpected. Hogan had spent the 80s as the embodiment of all that was good about the vitamin-taking, prayer-saying American dream. Now, suddenly, he'd laughed off everything he previously stood for and betrayed every last one of his fans. The crowd went ballistic, and an avalanche of garbage was thrown into the ring. Eric Bischoff must have been delighted!
It's fair to say that no other turn could ever have the impact of this, and overuse of the device has robbed it of a lot of its power. Usually at this point, it is customary to drag out pro-wrestling's ultimate scapegoat, Vince Russo, for another beating. Here, he probably deserves it. From WCW through to TNA he was singularly uninterested in storyline coherence. Inspired by the sensational nature of reality TV, he wanted programming to rely on a series of shocks to hold the viewer's attention. And, of course, swerves of all descriptions would be utilised as the rug would be repeatedly pulled from under the audience's collective feet. In defence of Russo, it could be argued that his approach was revolutionary and helped shake up a stale culture. If you really wanted to be contrary, you could draw parallels with the French cinematic 'nouvelle vague' of the 1960s. There, young directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais would react to what they saw as a dying French film industry by throwing out the rulebook and gleefully breaking well-established narrative rules. Reportedly, Godard's 1965 film Pierrot le fou was almost entirely improvised.
I think this line of thought ultimately breaks down because a long-running episodic broadcast is a very different beast to a 90-minute movie. In the latter, it's easier to maintain the illusion of a world out-of-kilter as you only have a limited timespan. But in a serial, after a while this approach will get a little tiresome when viewers are struggling to make sense of each show every week. David Lynch, the surrealist-inspired American film director, has made a number of weird but compelling films. However, when he got to make a major network TV serial, Twin Peaks, he struggled a bit. The show's originality and daring led to some brilliant moments but the programme ultimately collapsed as it was getting too strained and confusing by the end. In the same way, Russo's philosophy of throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks would eventually just become migraine-inducing.
Today, wrestling has moved away from Russo's chaotic approach, but it still feels like his influence remains in the need for shocking moments. Rollins' apparently inexplicable actions on this week's Raw is just the latest example of this.
Before I end this piece, I must consider the one event that so many wrestling fans have been longing to see: the fabled John Cena Heel Turn. The argument correctly notes that Cena is currently beyond stale, and as a result faces a mixed audience reaction which is noticeably getting more negative. So, as he already is a heel in many fans' eyes, he should become a heel. It would arguably be almost as big a shock as Hogan's turn in WCW. There is a certain logic here, but it's still a flawed idea. For one thing, modern fans are so contrary, that heel Cena would probably get cheered by those who are currently booing him, so the mixed reaction would remain and a lot of kids (who form Cena's main fanbase) would get needlessly upset. Also, it wouldn't be as much of a shock as so many people have anticipated the heel turn for years. It's for these reasons that I feel that the real answer is to keep Cena face but change his character so he is more serious and less of a cartoon Superman character. He should evolve rather than change overnight.
And maybe that is the conclusion that should be applied more generally. Sudden swerves too often look awkward, but if a character is allowed to change gradually, it is far more dramatically convincing. WWE has on occasion managed it. When C M Punk delivered his famous pipe bomb worked shoot in 2011, he has actually at the start of a face turn. He was still berating the audience heelishly, but he was also delivering a message that many fans agreed with, so the speech was couched in ambiguity. Punk would continue to be a tweener prior to a full face turn that seemed almost organic. WWE has apparently announced that there is no such thing as 'heels' and 'faces' anymore. This is obvious nonsense, but it's still intriguing, suggesting that there should be more room for shades of grey. The problem is that the approach I suggest requires patience and long-term planning. WWE in particular struggles with this concept, with reports saying that Vince McMahon demands re-writes at whim. I even read that one peculiar edition of Raw was actually being re-written as it aired! Maybe what I'm suggesting goes against the grain of that company's current ethos, sadly.
Good read mate
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