I Dunno, Man, Maybe I Don't Get Wrestling?

Something people like to say about wrestling is that it’s a universal language, its rhythms and omens and outcomes decipherable by anyone whose heart is open to the concept of predetermined, consensual violence. People in this camp, God bless them, tend to reach for other kinds of art — drag! theater! comic books! — or Roland Barthes, who famously wrote the only essay about this great sport from the vantage point in the stands of Paris’ Elysée Montmartre in the 1950s. Anybody can understand wrestling is the line, and given that one of wrestling’s chief demographics is children, this is true. 

One of the great paradoxes of wrestling, however, is how that is less and less true the further afield you stray from your initial comfort zones — wrestling may be for everybody, but wrestling promotions are not. Think of wrestling as a beam of light and the promotion as a prism, the light we see on the other end being the end result of the pure idea of wrestling as refracted by bookers, talent, history, marketing, cultural expectations, and, finally, the audience who finds itself attracted to the way that light is projected. I’ve admitted this plenty, both on social media in conversations with friends who love wrestling, but with my professional attention focused elsewhere and my time for wrestling contracted, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve not only lost my taste for the light, but often my ability to see and appreciate who that light is even for.

This match, the main event of Stardom’s All Star Grand Queendom 2023, had me ready to tap out early. I’ve never seen a Giulia or Tam Nakano match before, haven’t checked in on Stardom since the early 2010s, and all of my language for “big arena joshi” is grounded in the peak of the 1990s. Giulia and Nakano are, in other words, wrestling in a different tongue than the one I’m familiar with, and it’s not exactly one I’m desperate to learn. But here we are! 

And, in fairness, I can see why people are into this. Match length has always been a kind of currency in wrestling, which has remained true as wrestlers have gotten more athletic and flashier. It is also true that a lot of prestige matches built around length are padding things out. There’s nothing wrong with that, and this is not a particularly long match, but there’s a certain kind of pacing and narrative one has come to expect from modern arena-level main events that Giulia and Tam jettison immediately, first when Giulia dumps Nakano on her head outside the ring, then when she bodyslams her off the ring apron through a table the long way. That spot is gruesome, the way the table juts into Nakano’s back more than making up for the fact that they apparently neatly gimmick Japanese tables these days, which will someday deprive Maffew of Botchamania a reliable bit. 

The issue is that nothing really coheres around the big spots of the match. Something cool happens, then time passes, then something cool happens, then time passes, then something cool happens, then time passes, and in the stretches between cool moves where either Giulia or Tam is setting the thing up, the crowd is only kind of hanging with it. Giulia and Tam’s battle on the ramp, in which Tam hits two sprinting knee strikes after reversing a Giulia Northern Lights Bomb into a reverse DDT, inspires nothing from them, or me, and it should because running ramp spots are sick as hell. The problem, I think, is the same thing as what’s so attractive about this match: if you cut straight to the bit where someone is taking a Northern Lights Bomb on the floor, you’re shutting yourself off from a lot of available narrative tools. If the point is that Tam gets her ass beat on the floor and survives once we get back to the ring, that’s fine, but that is not the point: she gets a hope spot reversal and a comeback immediately following the sort of table spot Bushiroad promotions usually build entire matches around, and at the end of all of this, finally back in the ring, there’s no sense that any of it mattered because rather than go for a pinfall, Tam hits a few more running kicks, including one after Giulia does a fighting spirit sit-up, then hits an arm-trapping suplex that Giulia doesn’t exactly struggle to kick out of. 

A decade or so ago, I had a genius idea where I made wrestling the subject of a writing class I taught at the University of Georgia, knowing it would force the freshmen who took it out of their comfort zones and learn how to analyze something that wasn’t a book or a tired-ass subject like the BCS system or the legal drinking age. (Surprisingly I am not a teacher anymore.) One of the first matches I showed in the class was Manami Toyota vs. Aja Kong (6/27/95), which they watched and cringed through and ultimately liked, but before we got into discussing it a student asked me a question I’d never really thought to ask about joshi: Why were Kong and Toyota screaming so much? I didn’t have an answer specific to the wrestlers we were watching, so I talked about selling, about the importance of making it clear that wrestling moves not only hurt to be on the wrong end of, but are difficult to execute. It’s a dissatisfying answer, but wrestlers scream a lot and I watch a lot of wrestling, so it’s always been kind of normal to me, especially since I’m not old enough to remember when wrestling was derisively referred to as the “grunt and groan game.” 

I found myself thinking about that exchange a lot during the course of this match, where the screams and gasps of Giulia and Nakano are filling in for the physical work they should be doing between beats but largely disavow. I didn’t know anything about either wrestler going into this match, I feel like I don’t know anything about them having watched it a few times. I assume Giulia is the heel because eventually someone boos her, but she completely eschews control of the match and gets no heat — her flash pins and counters in the ring almost feel like hope spots. I get that she does hard strikes and big bombs and has a great look, but I’ve been watching wrestling for far too long for any of that to really leave an impression — there are wrestlers whose thing is hitting people hard, and there are wrestlers who hit people hard, and it’s the later of the two who have soul. 

When Giulia finally does take over after landing a Punch with Theatrics and a Knee with Theatrics, it gives Tam an opportunity to be the babyface for a moment, struggling against a Northern Lights Bomb attempt to draw a rope break and struggling, again, against a top rope attempt at the move that she slips out of by going for a sunset flip powerbomb. It’s not particularly distinct, though, and soon enough she’s hitting Giulia with a double underhook suplex off the top less because she’s earned it and more because it’s time for the two of them to take a long, interminable beat, resetting things again. I am not, I swear, the sort of person who gets pissy when people kick out at one on big moves, I think it adds flavor, but when she lands a Tiger Suplex after avoiding a charging Giulia and gets a one, I will admit, I gave up. 

First watch, second watch, third watch, everything they did just kinda flashed before my eyes like badly compressed clips of finishers on a Top 10 Moves MV. Nothing they did in the opening third of the match mattered, nothing they did in the middle mattered, and even though Giulia goes glass eyed at one point, nothing about the finishing stretch feels like it mattered to the match either. Just before the finish, Nakano suplexes an out-on-her-feet Giulia, who kicks out so close to three that it feels like the referee is bailing her out a little. It’s not that the spot is almost blown that nags at me though — it’s that Giulia losing there would have been a good finish, or at least a surprising one. Instead, you get the kind of “valiant in defeat” finish that feels almost perfunctory in modern pro wrestling, the heel kicks out of one death move and gets put down by another immediately.

More than not liking this match, I found myself disappointed by it. The hot take here was Joseph’s, but I don’t read his essays until I finish mine, and watching modern joshi is something I always say I want to do but never get around to, and now that I have I feel a Hunter Month-level of regret in proposing Hot Takes Month. At least Hunter Month was a takedown of a wrestler and mind I genuinely loathe. This was something worse: a waste of my goddamn time.

Rating: * & 1/2