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| Pictured, a worked shoot that didn't need to be a worked shoot Photo Credit: WWE.com |
Judging by the in-ring face-to-face interview between the two last night, they're treating it as such. Rather than a titanic matchup between two gods walking the earth, Reigns and Cena built their big match around whose dueling chants are more valid, the merits of full-time vs. part-time work, whether or not their United States Championship reigns were demotions or not, or how adept they were at burying younger talent. It was basically a fever dream of Vince Russo come to life until Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson interrupted them for no reason other than to serve as deus ex machina for a match tagging the two opponents together. Unsurprisingly, Russo praised the first part on Twitter and crushed the second part, but I have no idea why I even suffered the opinion of a miserable human being with even more miserable opinions on wrestling.
Leaning on real life issues a bit too hard is not novel behavior for WWE or wrestling in general. Thanks to Russo and his bosses enabling him, wrestling ushered into a brave new world of worked shoots on a frequent basis starting in 1996. Sometimes, they pop off the screen, like during the initial part of the Summer of Punk II. Other times, they come off as patently artificial and cheap, like basically every time someone in late era WCW went "off script," which you knew they were doing because Tony Schiavone or whatever other commentator said so. I wouldn't go so far as to damn last night's tete-a-tete as completely the latter, but it was much further to that end of the pendulum than the other one.
People are conditioned to think that when someone's "shooting," they're being compelling; in a way, it's fine if you prefer that. To be completely fair, no one really thinks they're shooting anyway. Getting a bit too close to the edge can add some life to program. Think of how bland WWE was in the time after WrestleMania XXVIII, how rote the stories were after the two interesting threads they had in 2010, the Nexus and Miz as Champion, were snipped in favor of Super Cena returning to face a monster of the week. Then think of how exciting CM Punk's Pipe Bomb made RAW every week, at least before the doldrums set in after Kevin Nash "stuck" him at SummerSlam.
But when doing a worked shoot, you gotta consider telling a story instead of just lobbing insults back and forth that may or may not make any material sense in a kayfabe world. In a narrative where I set down and pretend that Strowman and Lesnar are actually going to fight (and possibly knock down buildings) for the right to be called Champion, what use do I have for someone spouting debate talking points from 2003 DVDVR or even worse, 2017 r/SquaredCircle? Cena "burying" someone doesn't make sense in a narrative where results aren't predetermined. It all just smacks of shitty kids like myself expropriating playground insults from our youths, mixing it with insider lingo, and dumping it on a message board forum for e-fed competition.
The biggest problem is that they, whether Reigns and Cena or the writers or whoever is driving the direction for this story, could do so much better. Two stars of that magnitude, and they're bickering over shit dickheads on Twitter have used as proxy battlegrounds for years. Reigns came so close to really sparking something when he mentioned retiring the Undertaker at WrestleMania. Imagine the next guy up working a more authentic, less glib version the Randy Orton Legend Killer character and threatening to do the same with Cena that he did with Taker? That was only one way they could have built a story in the narrative without peering their heads out of it to crib plot advancement from fucking Reddit.
The idea of the worked shoot and that the audience needs to be kayfabed at all times to the point where the only kayfabe left is making them wonder not if the wrestling is real and not worked, but if the company they work for are unprofessional enough to let this kind of dirty laundry get aired on a weekly basis. Vince McMahon obviously thinks so little of his audience that he only thinks those fans can be entertained if they are being fooled. Of course, people took to last night's spectacle because it was a spectacle, an enthusiastic display of dudes shit-talking each other. People have a visceral need to see conflict, the rawer the better. But when the limited supply of talking points run out, and trust me, presenting a wrestling feud over politics backstage has a short half-life, where will the story go?
You saw it last night, how jarring the shift was, going from dudes lobbing bombs at each other to an ineffectual Club tag team coming out so they could have Cena and Reigns work together in some "will they or won't they?" It felt grossly inauthentic, just as inauthentic as it'll be when one of them wins their match at No Mercy and they do the fucking Davey Richards memorial handshake and respect conferral.
I don't mean to sound like a Jim Cornette-level whiner here, but this worked shoot shit has far passed its expiration date. Wrestling storytelling, or more pointedly and accurately, WWE storytelling, needs to evolve to a point where it no longer operates under the assumption that it has to fool the audience into thinking what's happening is real. The audience is in on the joke, and it has been for awhile. You can patronize those fans by trying to blur the lines, or you live with it and tell the best fictional story possible with people more than capable of executing it. John Cena and Roman Reigns are both more than capable of acting out a story that doesn't come straight from a shitty e-fed feud or a thread on Reddit.