Cultural Vandalism (That Time of Year Again)

[nisidhe]

This may be moved, locked, etc. depending on how the discussion turns.

Anyway here goes:

About a week or so ago I came across this article about a phenomenon which, as a wrestling fan, jumped out at me:

www.vulture.com/2018/05/the-cultural-vandalism-of-jeffrey-tambor.html

While the article does not specifically discuss certain controversies in our little corner of the world, it did give me a term with which to pin down our collective and sundry feelings about Chris Benoit's legacy, among other questions that have arisen about pro wrestling's past - cultural vandalism. The idea that the misdeeds of an individual can taint or destroy our collective memory of any of that individual's accomplishments has been a common one in these parts, probably nearly a decade before #metoo took off. Our responses as fans towards the events of June 22-24, 2007 have run the gamut, from total condemnation (the "Burn in Hell" crowd, to compartmentalization (Benoit the in-ring performer vs. Benoit the man outside the ring) to contextualization (the effects of CTE on behaviour and mental health) and all points between and beyond. All point to ths same result: the way we have watched his work, or even whether we do, changed between that moment we thought all was well with him and that moment we learned that he had committed two murders then committed suicide.

At the same time, however, the destruction of our illusions about one man also saw the beginnings of a new and deeper appreciation for pro wrestlers as human beings, and gave rise to a new concern for their safety and long-term well-being. Daniel Bryan's period of retirement and the worry many of us had about an impending return outside of WWE were a direct result of the lessons we learned from the life and death of Chris Benoit. Moreover, the Benoit tragedy brought about a huge boost in awareness of and the need for intervention in cases of CTE, post-concussion syndrome and other organic causes of mental illness. Shortly after Benoit's brain samples blew wide open the NFL brain study, researchers studying the homeless population of Toronto estimated that 50% of that population had suffered some level of brain injury. scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=toronto+homeless+brain+injury+study&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

Our collective experience as wrestling fans, particularly in this case, has encountered a Banksy-esque scope of cultural vandalism: some of it deeply destructive, but also extraordinarily creative; certainly transformative to the pro wrestling world. Such, I suppose, is the result of all cultural vandalism in that lessons are learned and repairs are made which also change to an extent the culture as a whole. While Jim Cornette can certainly entertain and provide insight on how wrestling was during the territory days, I'm not sure that many wrestlers or fans would relish a return to that period.

But what do _you_ think? Benoit needn't be the only example here, though he is the most obvious.

[111111]

I'm sure I read this exact same post a week or two ago.

[nisidhe]

Jun 19, 2018 6:59:39 GMT -5 111111 said:

I'm sure I read this exact same post a week or two ago.

Then you may have been reading the AskAMod section where I first brought up the idea of posting this thread with the mods.

[111111]

Jun 19, 2018 7:23:47 GMT -5 nisidhe said:

Jun 19, 2018 6:59:39 GMT -5 111111 said:

I'm sure I read this exact same post a week or two ago.

Then you may have been reading the AskAMod section where I first brought up the idea of posting this thread with the mods.

Ah yes that's exactly what it was lol.

I thought I was going through the most vivid case of deja vu I'd ever experienced for a moment there.

[Push R Truth]

One of the things I disliked about some of my college art classes is that not everything has a big long-winded point to it. I recall a large mural at the university student union where their was big discussions on the meanings of the color of the flowers. How it meant that "all people of all colors should live together in harmony". When the artist returned to be a guest speaker (it was his alma mater) he said the flowers were that color because it was the same colors he remembered in his grandmother's garden.

What I'm getting at is that while cultural vandalism is probably a thing, i think it's far more simple than that... in my opinion of course. I'm a big believer that it makes many small steps/ideas to travel a great distance. To me, the simple step for Benoit is :the reason Chris Benoit is "more or less erased" is because people don't love to even slightly celebrate murderers, let alone ones that murder their own wife and child. So it's naturally difficult to talk about him beyond very vague mentions.

Then the next issue of increased awareness is because you had a high profile guy go batshit crazy and his brain was available for study. This became public knowledge for the first time for many people. it's a case of "You didn't know because you didn't know." It's not that unlike Micheal Vick and dog fighting. Many people didn't even know that was ever a thing until it hit the major airwaves.

Then with Daniel Bryan it's a case of "here's a nice guy I like, I don't want him to go down that dark path Chris did because of the similarities I see between them".


I guess I believe it's a series of very simple steps in baseline human logic. No more, but no less.

[HMARK Center]

Jun 19, 2018 7:58:51 GMT -5 Push R Truth said:

One of the things I disliked about some of my college art classes is that not everything has a big long-winded point to it. I recall a large mural at the university student union where their was big discussions on the meanings of the color of the flowers. How it meant that "all people of all colors should live together in harmony". When the artist returned to be a guest speaker (it was his alma mater) he said the flowers were that color because it was the same colors he remembered in his grandmother's garden.

What I'm getting at is that while cultural vandalism is probably a thing, i think it's far more simple than that... in my opinion of course. I'm a big believer that it makes many small steps/ideas to travel a great distance. To me, the simple step for Benoit is :the reason Chris Benoit is "more or less erased" is because people don't love to even slightly celebrate murderers, let alone ones that murder their own wife and child. So it's naturally difficult to talk about him beyond very vague mentions.

Then the next issue of increased awareness is because you had a high profile guy go batshit crazy and his brain was available for study. This became public knowledge for the first time for many people. it's a case of "You didn't know because you didn't know." It's not that unlike Micheal Vick and dog fighting. Many people didn't even know that was ever a thing until it hit the major airwaves.

Then with Daniel Bryan it's a case of "here's a nice guy I like, I don't want him to go down that dark path Chris did because of the similarities I see between them".


I guess I believe it's a series of very simple steps in baseline human logic. No more, but no less.

On the first point, I can't say I completely agree; if we just go by authorial intent when discussing art we miss out on a lot. The artist might have simply wanted to replicate a color he remembers from his childhood, but could there be something more to his line of thinking? Maybe, maybe not, and maybe some of the guesses people have about it are off base, but there's almost always social and personal forces beyond our immediate thoughts and comprehension shaping our creative decision making processes when we make anything. Tolkien swore up and down that the World Wars didn't at all shape his depiction of Middle-Earth when writing The Lord of the Rings, but his intentions while writing don't remove him from the historical milieu he came of age, grew, fought, worked, and wrote during, and the odds that those things didn't influence his creative decisions, even without his noticing, are very slim.

With regards to Benoit, it's certainly true that watching him the same way is a near impossibility now, even if you're able to put aside what he did most of the time while watching his work. For example, I know I can watch Benoit matches without much issue, but if a match of his gets to a spot where someone slips up and Benoit hits his head or something, I can't stop my mind from jumping to "ugh, that couldn't have helped things".

It's why the conversation about "separating the art from the artist" can be so tough; I can't control if my mind has a tougher time, say, watching a Woody Allen movie these days without finding certain jokes a bit off compared to how I might have viewed them before, because there's now more of a question of what might have been shaping Allen's creative process while he crafted them at first. That doesn't mean I can't watch his movies and it doesn't mean I can't laugh at them when they're funny, but the mind is a complex place and we can't always just bid it forget things that are now public knowledge and which could have played a role in shaping art we enjoyed.

[Allie Kitsune]

Jun 19, 2018 7:58:51 GMT -5 Push R Truth said:

One of the things I disliked about some of my college art classes is that not everything has a big long-winded point to it. I recall a large mural at the university student union where their was big discussions on the meanings of the color of the flowers. How it meant that "all people of all colors should live together in harmony". When the artist returned to be a guest speaker (it was his alma mater) he said the flowers were that color because it was the same colors he remembered in his grandmother's garden.

I'm personally not a fan of "Death of the Author" sort of thinking, but people like to navel-gaze.

That's actually a big thing that made me give up on writing, years ago. I didn't like the idea of someone being able to tell me "no, THIS is what you REALLY meant!" and have so many people agree with them that I'm considered to be a liar about my own thought process.

As far as Benoit goes, I tend to agree that there are simpler dots to connect than trying to assign a theoretical phenomenon to it. I'm not even sure one can say he's laid down as 'transformative' legacy as one might think. We've still got guys throwing headbutts (and head-first through-the-rope dives even moreso) on the regular. Even knowing how things turned out for Benoit (and Shibata, as long as I'm talking headbutts), we've still got 300+ pound Lars Sullivan using a diving headbutt basically every match.

[Dub H]

Jun 19, 2018 7:58:51 GMT -5 Push R Truth said:

One of the things I disliked about some of my college art classes is that not everything has a big long-winded point to it. I recall a large mural at the university student union where their was big discussions on the meanings of the color of the flowers. How it meant that "all people of all colors should live together in harmony". When the artist returned to be a guest speaker (it was his alma mater) he said the flowers were that color because it was the same colors he remembered in his grandmother's garden.

What I'm getting at is that while cultural vandalism is probably a thing, i think it's far more simple than that... in my opinion of course. I'm a big believer that it makes many small steps/ideas to travel a great distance. To me, the simple step for Benoit is :the reason Chris Benoit is "more or less erased" is because people don't love to even slightly celebrate murderers, let alone ones that murder their own wife and child. So it's naturally difficult to talk about him beyond very vague mentions.

Then the next issue of increased awareness is because you had a high profile guy go batshit crazy and his brain was available for study. This became public knowledge for the first time for many people. it's a case of "You didn't know because you didn't know." It's not that unlike Micheal Vick and dog fighting. Many people didn't even know that was ever a thing until it hit the major airwaves.

Then with Daniel Bryan it's a case of "here's a nice guy I like, I don't want him to go down that dark path Chris did because of the similarities I see between them".


I guess I believe it's a series of very simple steps in baseline human logic. No more, but no less.

It is like that classic image:
What Your English teacher thinks they meant:The blue curtains represents his immense depression and lack of will toc arry one

What Auhtor Meant: The curtains were blue.

[Deleted]

Benoit's death caused a massive change in the way certain wrestlers are reacted to, especially guys like Brock and Nash who are clearly in it for the money and very little artistic value. We're okay with that now. We're totally fine with doing it for the money, because we've seen the way the workrrate thing destroys people if you become obsessed with it. I still think we don't really have a full understanding of all the ways he changed wrestling.

[HMARK Center]

Jun 19, 2018 9:27:52 GMT -5 Dub H said:

Jun 19, 2018 7:58:51 GMT -5 Push R Truth said:

One of the things I disliked about some of my college art classes is that not everything has a big long-winded point to it. I recall a large mural at the university student union where their was big discussions on the meanings of the color of the flowers. How it meant that "all people of all colors should live together in harmony". When the artist returned to be a guest speaker (it was his alma mater) he said the flowers were that color because it was the same colors he remembered in his grandmother's garden.

What I'm getting at is that while cultural vandalism is probably a thing, i think it's far more simple than that... in my opinion of course. I'm a big believer that it makes many small steps/ideas to travel a great distance. To me, the simple step for Benoit is :the reason Chris Benoit is "more or less erased" is because people don't love to even slightly celebrate murderers, let alone ones that murder their own wife and child. So it's naturally difficult to talk about him beyond very vague mentions.

Then the next issue of increased awareness is because you had a high profile guy go batshit crazy and his brain was available for study. This became public knowledge for the first time for many people. it's a case of "You didn't know because you didn't know." It's not that unlike Micheal Vick and dog fighting. Many people didn't even know that was ever a thing until it hit the major airwaves.

Then with Daniel Bryan it's a case of "here's a nice guy I like, I don't want him to go down that dark path Chris did because of the similarities I see between them".


I guess I believe it's a series of very simple steps in baseline human logic. No more, but no less.

It is like that classic image:
What Your English teacher thinks they meant:The blue curtains represents his immense depression and lack of will toc arry one

What Auhtor Meant: The curtains were blue.

Eh, but odds are when you're writing that if you're going to assign a color to something, odds are there's at least some kind of quality you're trying to ascribe to it, otherwise why mention it? I know, it's an old saying so it's not the perfect example, but while I don't fully buy "Death of the Author" as an all-encompassing theory of analysis I also think folks often hear the phrase and think it's something much bigger and scarier than it actually is. Like, did everybody in the 1980s just love dystopian cyberpunk futures THAT much, or was there some sort of social impetus driving a lot of creative people in similar directions when it came to how they viewed a technology-driven future? Probably a mixture, but it still begs some questions about how we arrived at that point.

[carp (SPC, Itoh Respect Army)]

The thing about this phenomenon is, there are ways it's very convenient. I just have become totally numb to all the horrible ways the wrestling industry treats its employees, but there's no way to be numb about what Benoit did or the knowledge it was facilitated by his history of concussions. The WWE as an institution actually responded way better to that than a lot of other companies have in other contexts, but Benoit's bad actions suck up so much of the focus, it's hard to get a foothold.

In the US, we're a culture that comes from protestantism, and embedded in that is a huge focus on personal character. We want to find the Bad People with the Bad Hearts. If something bad happens, we want to find the evildoer. We have a much harder time with situations where there isn't a clear evildoer, but bad outcomes happen anyway. It's a relief a lot of times to go, "OK, Tambor is the bad guy," and deal with how his legacy is tainted, rather than looking at something systematic that may have hurt way more people.

[HMARK Center]

Jun 19, 2018 12:39:09 GMT -5 carp (SPC, Itoh Respect Army) said:

The thing about this phenomenon is, there are ways it's very convenient. I just have become totally numb to all the horrible ways the wrestling industry treats its employees, but there's no way to be numb about what Benoit did or the knowledge it was facilitated by his history of concussions. The WWE as an institution actually responded way better to that than a lot of other companies have in other contexts, but Benoit's bad actions suck up so much of the focus, it's hard to get a foothold.

In the US, we're a culture that comes from protestantism, and embedded in that is a huge focus on personal character. We want to find the Bad People with the Bad Hearts. If something bad happens, we want to find the evildoer. We have a much harder time with situations where there isn't a clear evildoer, but bad outcomes happen anyway. It's a relief a lot of times to go, "OK, Tambor is the bad guy," and deal with how his legacy is tainted, rather than looking at something systematic that may have hurt way more people.

Think you have a good point, there; it's sadly at the root of a lot of conspiracy theories that casually get tossed around, people who can't handle that sometimes awful things happen and it's because we live in a society with structural deficiencies that lead to bad outcomes, and other times due to random bad luck, and so they create shadowy cabals of villains who are responsible for all the bad things...and if they can just stop those shadowy people, why, we've live in a paradise, now, wouldn't we?

[nisidhe]

Jun 19, 2018 11:34:18 GMT -5 @rrnew said:

Benoit's death caused a massive change in the way certain wrestlers are reacted to, especially guys like Brock and Nash who are clearly in it for the money and very little artistic value. We're okay with that now. We're totally fine with doing it for the money, because we've seen the way the workrrate thing destroys people if you become obsessed with it. I still think we don't really have a full understanding of all the ways he changed wrestling.

If anything, the change it made was in driving away, or driving into irrelevance, those performers who had little to contribute creatively to the craft. Lesnar may draw among a certain segment of wrestling fans, but his appeal is by no means universal and his continued employment by WWE has fomented some very deep resentment both among fans and among those in the back. Nash's appeal was somewhat greater but perhaps his greatest contribution was in coining the term "Vanilla Midget" to refer to those whose technical skills and workrate were superior and whose dedication to the craft was greater. Neither man was or has been responsible for raising the pay of anyone else on the card.

One effect of the Benoit tragedy lies in how we regard and cherish the boys and girls, including those to whom we can draw a more-or-less straight line, style-wise or workrate-wise, from Benoit. The ass-riding Daniel Bryan took on these boards for suggesting taking up his in-ring career away from WWE was huge. So, too, was the near-panic many of us (myself included) when Finn Balor, on his second week back from the labrum tear, took the blow from Jinder Mahal and crumpled like a piece of tinfoil. We want these people to do good work in-ring, build their characters into works of art as long as and as safely as possible, then enjoy the rest of happier, healthier and longer lives.

There is a very large cohorts of wrestling's superstars who are no longer around to tell their part of its history, and many of those who are left aren't in good shape or aren't particularly reliable witnesses to that period. Benoit is a particularly deep bit of damage in that maelstrom of vandalism.

[Jacy Derangement Syndrome]

Corey Graves' Culture Vandalism

[GuyOfOwnage]

I just wanted to interject and say that I'm so glad we can have a civil conversation about this finally. In the years immediately following the tragedy, there was a line in the sand, and some not so nice things were said to people on both sides of the argument. I'm just glad that time has come and gone.