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| Bryan doesn't need to resort to vandalism to retain his aura Photo Credit: WWE.com |
What, did you think I was going to reference him beating John Cena and becoming the focus of a story? Sure, the in-ring and the decisions are important, but no matter what your character does to get to the plateau of top WWE dude, once he gets there, he assumes the position created by Austin's firebrand rise to the top and curated by a WWE front office, led by Vince McMahon, that still seems to lose sight of the reason why that paradigm worked in 1998. I've seen it happen with CM Punk, Kurt Angle, John Cena... just about anyone they've tried out in a franchise role, they've subverted their character to be more like the Attitude Era anti-hero.
One could argue that kind of archetype is what the fans want. They react to personalities, and what those people do after they're made isn't so much an issue as long as they can do it in entertaining fashion. I would be lying if, aside from the uncomfortable slurs Bryan has worked into his speeches, I said I wasn't enjoying seeing RAW become the Bryan Danielson Show. My lizard-brained tendencies combined with my inherent appreciation of classic pro wrestling tropes (i.e. if someone introduces a car into the fray, that car's getting defaced at best) and general efficacy of how Bryan relays whatever interpretation of his character that he wants to relay made me love it when he was counting the yeses that he had painted on Orton's Escalade.
But the disconnect between the moment Bryan lay prone in the Staples Center ring, a victim of corporate perfidy, and the one where he told Stephanie McMahon that her husband was a cool dude until he inserted his penis into her yucky vagina feels endemic of a missed opportunity to shake things up for real. I won't go so far as to say that Bryan found Trips' jacket backstage and put it on, but somewhere in the ether between SummerSlam and RAW last week, the corporate machine branded him with a Broken Skull Ranch mark and told him to go out and Stone Cold it up. If you think being a cut-rate Austin is what brought Bryan to the dance, you're sadly mistaken.
No one can deny that Bryan was first created as a WWE superstar in a crucible of his indie fans' making. However, he took that reaction and cultivated it by being excellent in the ring and an exaggerated version of a "regular" person. He was exuberant but paranoid, friendly but mistrustful. He was a real person going through real ordeals that may have resonated with a large percentage of the audience outside of the ring. Of course, inside of that 20 by 20 squared circle, he's the reigning and defending Best in the World, no apologies to CM Punk. No matter how many times Vince Russo repeats it doesn't to himself in his bed before falling asleep at night, wrestling matters. Wrestling is the job of everyone who works in an active performer capacity at WWE, and Bryan is not only good at his job, but he loves his job.
Austin's ascension tapped into the zeitgeist of the common fan's frustration with their bosses as an extension of hating their job. His endgame may have involved winning Championships, but it was during an era when winning titles just happened to be ancillary to the main story of Austin beating the viscera and humors out of Vince McMahon. Now, more than even the pre-WrestleMania days when people still thought wrestling was a shoot, the wrestling is the most important thing. If not, why else would The Streak be tantamount to the WWE Championship at Mania, among other examples? Because the grappling has become paramount, a different vein has now appeared at the surface of the skin for tapping, one for people who realize that hey, jobs are at a premium right now, so having a profession that you can attend and not feel like you're at work is the luxury, one equivalent to the late '90s fantasy of being able to punish physically your own personal Bill Lumbergh.
Maybe because WWE has no competition within its own industry, they think they have time to continue to stick the needle into a vein they've prodded for fifteen years now. To their credit, Bryan might end up being their best tap since Austin, and the vein may never collapse. However, I'm of the mind that wasting potential is one of the grossest sins anyone could ever commit. WWE can metamorphose with Bryan. Instead of having to resort to cheap, cockroach-esque campaigns like "Stand up for WWE," they can belly up to the bar and have their top guy assail Stephanie McMahon not because her genitals turned Triple H into a corporate goon or lash out at Randy Orton without emphasizing the word "pretty" as if it connoted something other than his personal appearance.
And rather than morph Daniel Bryan into "Stone Cold" v. 10.7, they can allow him to be the first American Dragon.