Werner Herzog’s bizarre love for WrestleMania: “The poet must not avert his eyes”
Despite being one of the most acclaimed auteurs in cinema history and a man whose work rarely intersects with anything resembling the mainstream, Werner Herzog is no culture snob.
To prove that Herzog doesn’t sit at an ironic remove from the rest of us regular folks as we roll around in the cultural dirt with our action movies, loud music, and TV sports packages, the iconic German filmmaker once revealed that his ideal night out would involve football and a few scoops.
“I like attending good soccer matches, and then heading to the pub for a good beer,” he told The Independent in 2008, before dropping the bombshell, “I used to be the striker for a very poor fifth division league team.”
However, instead of just leaving the world with the bizarre image of the cinematic artiste behind Grizzly Man playing upfront for a Sunday League side, Herzog added that he may have an alternative, perfect evening in mind.
“I also really enjoy WrestleMania,” he revealed. “Maybe that would be my ideal night out.”
Yes, that’s right: Herzog has a penchant for the uniquely American creation of pro-wrestling, or as Vince McMahon’s WWE loves to call it, ‘sports entertainment’. In fact, this was far from the first time Herzog had mentioned McMahon’s flagship annual wrestling extravaganza in an interview. He’s actually been talking about the peculiar fascination he has for the athletic morality plays of the WWE for the last 25 years.
For example, in 2000, he was talking about how opera singers must project their performances to live audiences of thousands, and he mused, “It’s like watching a basketball game or WrestleMania.”
Then, in 2007, when a dumbfounded NPR interviewer asked why he would bother watching such low-brow entertainment, he argued, “Why do I watch WrestleMania? My answer is the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world. In order to understand what’s going on, you have to face it.”
As amusingly pretentious as this quote sounds, it’s actually vital in understanding what Herzog gets out of watching wrestling. He may very well enjoy the athleticism of the athletes involved, the pomp and circumstance of the glitzy event, or the impressive physical storytelling that plays out in the ring. However, it’s also entirely possible that he doesn’t pay a lick of attention to any of this. In fact, it’s not even clear if he knows WrestleMania is just one show, and the WWE is actually a travelling enterprise that stages multiple televised and non-televised events every week, all over the country. At the core of it, to Herzog, WrestleMania is both the dawning of a new form of drama and the story of culture writ large.
“Something very crude, something very raw is emerging,” Herzog told The Austin Chronicle in 2002. “A very raw, primitive form of new drama is being born…as it must have been in the earlier Greek times before Sophocles and before Euripides, when something like this emerged for the public eye.” WrestleMania, through this lens, is a modern version of ancient Greek drama, which pitted good against evil, and loved a good family tragedy.
When Herzog caught the latest WrestleMania at the time, what he saw was pure chaos – the whole McMahon clan was in on it. Vince, his wife Linda, their son Shane, and daughter Stephanie had each picked a wrestler to fight on their behalf, all scrambling for control of the company. Thing is, they were all genuinely related, but the characters they played? Completely dialled-up versions of themselves – a bit of theatre wrapped in family drama. Oh, and at the time, Linda had supposedly been rendered blind and paraplegic. Spoiler alert, though: it was all a ruse.
“I do believe that what is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with four girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them,” Herzog recalled.
Overall, the Fitzcarraldo filmmaker recognises that these storylines are trashy, just as reality TV is trashy. But, he also understands that millions love watching wrestling and reality shows, and if he was to stubbornly remove himself from the world and not try to engage with what people like, it would be detrimental to his art.
“You have to understand the world in which you live,” Herzog concluded in 2010. It just so happens that the world involves greased-up, spandex-clad warriors fake fighting for the entertainment of the masses.
