Why pro wrestling and the smark community have no mainstream acceptance.

I thought long and hard about the contents of this particular piece, and getting into geeky and low-rent territory such as this, but I feel that the subject is particularly valid. First, let me get into boring exposition. I have been a wrestling fan since I was around seven years old. I probably should've never watched the hyperviolent WWF product of the late 1990s and thankfully, I forgot most of the more misogynistic and exploitative parts to remember great matches and moments that I never forgot. Of course, I never knew about a smark community, either. Smarks are "smart wrestling fans." They obviously know about the fakeness of the business and seek to find out why a match works, who is loved in the locker room, etc. They also overanalyze the basicness of the business.

Pro wrestling is art, in that art can and should apply to anything expressive. Of course, pro wrestling is also sleazy, pretty racist, and kind of wrong, sort of like Hollywood with lesser money being handed to the athletes. And both properties are art for the same exact reason that they attempt to accomplish the dynamics of a human story, even with midgets, scantily clad divas, and a couple of giants.

I might be calling the kettle black here because I bitch about what I don't like in pro wrestling, as I do with everything else in entertainment at times. But I've grown tired of the idea of worrying about burials (when fans feel that a star is being put down a card) and about what Vince McMahon thinks of a guy. Because what does it fucking matter to anybody? It doesn't. Yes, the pro wrestling business is the only one where on a weekly basis, putting over (losing) and being put over (winning) can change on a dime, but the true amount of bitching and whining over such arbitrary things is pointless.

You do not see film fans complaining that at the end of The Usual Suspects, they were swerved and that Keyzer Soze is Kevin Spacey. No, because it's in the story's plans. Mind you, film is a more concise art, but even then, did anyone complain that the ending of The Wrestler was basically left uncertain? These are arbitrary things and people look like true geeks when they make an argument that "Man B shouldn't be getting buried because he has a better workrate than Man C." There's also a reason why Chris Klein gets as much work as Paul Giamatti in Hollywood and that's because sometimes the look is just right. It is why Keanu Reeves and Will Smith are A-listers while J.K. Simmons is awesome as a character actor. It is because sometimes, the look is a better fit than the work itself. Should it be that way? No. But it is that way. And it is that way not because Vince dictated it or Hollywood dictated it. It is because your girlfriend might be drawn more to seeing Channing Tatum shirtless (as you would be if say Jessica Alba was shirtless). That's basic science and how things are.

My current favorite show on television is a show on Starz called Party Down. In it, there is a nerdy character named Roman who is vastly unlikable, brags about his prestigious blog (HEY!), and also makes semantical arguments about science fiction movies (such as arguing why Edgar Allen Poe isn't a drunk in a movie when the premise of the movie is Poe fighting vampires). You change sci-fi movie to Vladimir Kozlov's workrate and you literally have the same character as the majority of the smark nation. Should we like every little thing that comes out way? Well, no. But to argue the impact of burials or the evils of Vince's revisionist history (because again, revisionist history is such a new concept) or whatever is wasting life. It's semantical. Like drunk Poe fighting vampires.