Narrative Structure in Wrestling Kink

I have no idea what I’m doing, but recently I’ve undertaken two projects involving my lifelong obsession with the eroticism of wrestling—of all kinds: catch-as-catch-can, freestyle, submission, oil, even (for me, anyway) women’s—with the pointed exception of the WWE, whose roster of citrus-colored Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons has no allure for me.

The first of these is a new blog—Ringside at Skull Island: Hardboiled Wrestling Kink—an attempt to blend my passions for wrestling and hardboiled detective stories. (I have long been of the opinion that KISS ME DEADLY would be vastly improved with a wrestling scene involving Ralph Meeker and some strapping Sunset Blvd. gunsel.)

The second of these, which I’ve been pursuing a bit longer, is a running wrestling adventure fantasy a fellow fan in Sonoma, California, and I have been cowriting in alternating episodes—a tale of a young straight dude trying to get to his girlfriend’s cabin in the low Sierras, despite being madly pursued by an effete yet straight-identified LA executive who moonlights as a serial killer—not much of a plot, really, but periodically hotted up with highly improbable (and extremely brutal) wrestling matches between the main characters (the waiting girlfriend has yet to show her face—nor, apparently, does she have a name).

What I have discovered so far is rather interesting, though not particularly surprising, still worth summarizing here:

The eroto-wrestling fantasy, like softcore and hardcore porn, requires little plot and less characterization.

Excessive physical detail and personality traits have, in fact, a negative effect on the fantasy’s hotness. Interior monologue has a tendency to bring the fantasy to a shrieking halt.

Even elaborate detailing of physical traits (beyond simple and highly conventional signifiers like “hairy” or “swimmer’s build” or “young”) detract from the allure—slowing down the action and interfering with the readers’ ability to cast favorite movie stars and athletes or nostalgically recollected boyhood heroes.

Minimal dialogue should take the form of barked-out challenges, insults, and humiliating concessions.

Usually the participants are straight—or straight-identified (an altogether different thing)—or pre-gay (not yet sexually active or socialized as “gay”).

Fucking (actual fucking) is relatively rare, almost always deemed unnecessary—like icing on a pound cake. If it occurs at all, it occurs as mutual masturbation among straight buddies, all innocence, or, more perversely, in elaborate rape fantasies involving bondage and discipline or (in our story, anyway) virtual necrophilia (don’t ask).

Unsurprisingly, the focus should be on strong action verbs, and subjectless sentences (“Slams my face to his knee”), which provide no mediation to the hot, strenuous, and intense rolling, slugging, sweating, heaving, grinding, gouging, etc.

The hottest wrestling scenes tend to occur outside the ring and off the mats—outdoor and swimming-pool battles are particularly popular.

One sees this tendency in pro wrestling, as well, since one longstanding device for upping a match’s excitement is to have the opponents tough it out outside the ring ropes, away from the meddling interference of a ref and official rules.

A true sign of the fetish nature of my obsession with wrestling is that it is not limited to participants I would otherwise find physically attractive. Lady wrestlers, midgets, animals, children, the elderly, and cartoons—if engaged in sufficiently solemn rough-housing, all are a turn-on.

I recall my earliest sex fantasies as a child involved Mighty Mouse kicking feline butt—then Johnny Weismuller’s doughy but curiously hot Tarzan—giant crocodile wrestling was a special delight (note to Dr Freud).

Both the 1933 and 2005 versions of King Kong have fight scenes between Kong and dinosaurs that I find sexy.

Even Borat’s famous nude wrestling match with his hugely overweight producer does the trick.

And can I be alone in the world in being turned on by the cripple fight between Timmy and Jimmy on Season 5 of South Park?

Face to Face, Hand to Hand, Eyeball to Eyeball

At 55, I have not mastered the verbal jazz-dance of party talk.

I like parties, in general, particularly when there’s booze, good food, uncontrollable laughter, and dancing. But I tend to shun events where I’ll be expected to stand around, holding a cup of fruit punch and a paper plate of cookies, peanuts, and a wedge of pepper jack on a Ritz, where the burden of fun is on me to think of polite so not too clever things to say to people with whom I share one or at most two common interests. (I’m writing this now, while skipping just such an event—a brunch for community-college teachers like me.)

I’m not shy. One on one, with anyone with wit, passion, and a shared obsession, I do well enough, if not brilliantly. And it’s not for lack of ego. Mine rages. Sometimes I think I keep mum because I want to keep that tiger in its cage. I have no qualms speaking in front of a classroom of students either—the attention (such as it is) is half the appeal of teaching for me. It’s been years since I’ve done community theatre, but the bubbling nerves that count as stage fright for some energize me.

I’m part of the problem with the state of communication today. Worse than most, even, as I prefer e-mail to phones or chat rooms.

Today, communication is basically advertising. Harmless enough in the pursuit of detergent sales and gym memberships, ad talk has seeped also into politics, religion, corporate-sponsored science, the arts, and education, where its effects have been to soften and corrupt.

Alexander Pope and Oscar Wilde would be appalled. The bon mot has become the sound bite—at the cost of shitloads of culture and community. Fewer people entertain at home now—and when they do, the focus is usually on TV or a video game.

As for public speaking, the art is practically lost. Most of the venom directed against Barack Obama has been for his eloquence. His detractors attack him precisely for wanting to meet with world leaders, rather than skip the foreplay of diplomacy and fire the rockets. We have the “better angels of our nature” on one hand versus pitbulls with lipstick on the other. I can’t imagine that Abraham Lincoln could win the Republican Party nomination in 2008, much less the Presidency, because he hardly ever smiled, his wife was raving mad, and his speeches were generally brief and free of sarcasm (also, he flip-flopped on the issue of slavery).

Conference calls, televangelism, and “smart” (computerized) classrooms have nipped conversation in its last remaining buds: business, church, and school.

Why do I feel so much more comfortable alone with my laptop this morning than together with peers over bagels and cream cheese?

Partly because I’m an introvert, yes. Partly snobbishness, perhaps, at times. Mainly, I suspect, because I live in a society that, though far from peaceable, views argument as too direct and potentially disorderly, and so a society that fosters a sort of blithe stupidity averse to wit, surprise, and stimulation not effectively mechanical or predictable in nature.

We have signs of resistance to this trend, of course. American men, traditionally less articulate and convivial than women, have looked to sports to offer opportunities for increasingly brutal contact—basement fisticuffs, shoot fighting, and catch-as-catch-can wrestling in organized or informal fight clubs—where the impact of body upon body cannot be mistaken as “virtual.” Forms of touch and intercourse (i.e. communication) that lack mediation and subtlety—thus also lacking insincerity and disregard.

Associations with homoeroticism in these contexts cause participants, both straight and gay, no small amount of anxiety, sometimes exacerbating the violence, sometimes turned inward as self-loathing or feelings of guilt.

Boxing champion Roy Jones, Jr. (who took a freshman writing class from me back in the 1980s, writing every one of his essays on the subject of boxing) said this year, “In sports the one beautiful thing is you never know a person until you do battle with them, you share something special with them” (1).

I don’t think we’ll ever hear this statement on Oprah, but I believe it’s true. Life in a disengaged society causes us to find new ways to connect. A fight is as good as a dance or a peck on the cheek in creating intimacy.

Within a society where talk is becoming increasingly abstract and vague, often merely phatic noise, where mass media supersaturate every area of life with ideologically enriched sameness, where feelings are as programmed, massaged, and disposable as the laugh track of a sitcom (2), the thump of knuckle on bone is reassuringly human, intense, and personal.

How else can we know each other? What means of personal engagement remain, as manners and civilized forms of social intercourse vanish?



(1) Qtd. in “Joe Calzaghe and Roy Jones Jr Quotes and Videos.” East Side Boxing. 12 Oct. 2008 .
(2) Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. Rev. ed. New York: Holt, 2007.

Sunday Night at the Movies: TARZAN ESCAPES, dir. Richard Thorpe (1936)

I used to rush home after elementary school to watch old Tarzan movies on a local TV station, every weekday afternoon at 4:00.

I was born in (north) Africa, so jungle pictures had a peculiar fascination for me because, by my logic, I was African. (I did technically hold dual citizenship till age 14, but my fancy attached itself solely to the romance of Africa, and not so much the Libyan Sahara, where I was born on a U.S. military base.)

My earliest erotic dream had me dangling from Tarzan’s bare feet as he swung from vine to phallic vine beyond a Mutia escarpment where I was Boy and Jane did not exist.

One Tarzan film in particular left its mark on me—a movie that, though heavily censored, retains a general air of rawness and menace, laced with Freudian sex-dream symbolism from beginning to end.

Of all the MGM Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weismuller, TARZAN ESCAPES, the third in the series, was the biggest problem for the studio. It went through two years of production and five directors—including William Wellman, who had directed the first Oscar-winning Best Picture (WINGS), and John Farrow, future husband of Maureen O’Sullivan (Jane) and, even later, Mia’s dad. Only Richard Thorpe is credited.

Adding to the movie’s mystique are rumors that the movie was jinxed. MGM producer Irving Thalberg died just as filming ended. John Buckler, who plays Captain Fry, died in a car accident a month before the premiere. Herbert Mundin, who plays Rawlins, died three years later, also in a car accident.

(As of this writing, the only surviving cast member is Cheeta the chimp, born in 1932 and holding the Guinness world record as the oldest living primate. He lives in Palm Springs—and paints for a living. His ghost-written autobiography—ME CHEETA: MY LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD—is scheduled for publication in February 2009.)


--Cheeta, Untitled Painting (2003)

Ruined by censors and “too many cooks in the kitchen,” the third in the Tarzan series is clearly inferior to the previous two. TARZAN ESCAPES was cut, re-shot, and re-cut before release, since the studio felt earlier cuts were too violent.

The first version, directed by James McKay, featured giant vampire bats attacking adventurers trekking through a swamp. The second version snipped out the bats and introduced a new character to inject some comic relief into what the studio chiefs felt had become an overly savage story.

The character of Rita, Jane’s cousin, was nastier in the original version and in the end was killed by a giant ape. Originally a crocodile killed the arch-villain Fry, who sinks with a subdued gasp into bubbly gunk in the released version.

Further diluting the movie’s brutal Darwinian implications, MGM built an elaborate tree house for Tarzan and Jane—full of Rube Goldberg devices that not only domesticated but gentrified the couple, with hot and cold water, a chimp-powered ceiling fan, and an elephant-powered elevator. The new split-level house helped to disguise the fact that the jungle couple was technically unmarried, a problem as the Motion Picture Code became stricter in the mid-1930s. (Three years later, when the couple was blessed with a “son,” the baby had to fall asexually from the sky—dropped by a plane, instead of a stork.)

Still, the third film retains vestiges of the sensationalistic first version.

What excited me most as a kid—and by “excited” I do mean “sexually excited”—was less Weismuller himself—athletic, 6’3”, but unusually pasty and depilated for a jungle lord—than the art direction. The overall “look” of the first three films oozes exotic, feral sexiness—not the least part of which was Tarzan’s skimpy loincloth.

The MGM jungle is all hairy vines, furled ferns, and soft-focus flowers—suggestive of virility and fecundity at once—a pansexual Eden. Everywhere we see erect, hulking, moss-covered tree trunks, even underwater, even in a cave! Lurking through the paradise, we have nature “red in tooth in claw”—lions, leopards, crocodiles, cannibals, even man-eating plants—a constant reminder that survival of the fittest is the only law this world understands.

As in the previous film (TARZAN AND HIS MATE—a tellingly crude word choice—even Frankenstein has a “bride”), swimming is a metaphor for sex. The nudity in the original Tarzan-and-Jane water ballet doomed the scene to Code censorship, so it is re-enacted, with clothes this time, in TARZAN ESCAPES. Tarzan coerces Jane to “swim,” but despite her squeals and protestations, Jane appreciates the fact that her man takes control.

Jane:
“Out here, Tarzan’s a king. How do I know what he’d be back there [in London]? Perhaps, at first, sort of a freak. And then, as he learned more about civilization, he’d realize he was dependent on his rich wife. He’d never tolerate that. Or if he did, it might be even worse.”

Fry:
“Oh, Miss Parker, this looks like your lord and master coming now.”

The early Tarzan films’ mix of sex and deadly force brings to mind Freud’s theory of eros and thanatos (sex drive and death wish) and hints at sado-masochistic fantasy—that is, the repeated “man-handling” of Jane suggests rape, while avoiding the reality. When Tarzan first encounters Rita, Jane’s cousin, he grips the hair on the back of her head—as if she were a kitten to be held by its scruff. Of course, Tarzan’s roughhousing is merely a primitive, masculine form of affection … or interest—but Jane knows that she and Tarzan have a form of love that the civilized world cannot understand.

This passion has to be sublimated in a Hollywood film, though. Midway through the movie, Tarzan wrestles a giant crocodile to its death and yodels his famous victory call. He hands Jane a water flower and stands over her. His shadow lurches over her reclined body, and with a slight shudder Jane lets the blossom slip from her fingers back into the river.

Bondage too is a key point of the plot—necessitating the eventual “escape.” The opening scene establishes Captain Fry as a captor of wild animals. His custom-designed duralium cages prevent the teeth and claws of untamed nature from ripping civilization to shreds—the latter embodied by Jane’s white-clad and well-coifed cousins, also introduced at the opening. Bars, booby traps, inhospitable terrain, and “juju” all work to segregate the savage from the civilized—but these are boundaries Jane and Tarzan are able to transcend.

Subsequent events prove that Fry is a villain (first revealed in his brutal treatment of black native workers), and Tarzan, of course, an embodiment of wild nature and Fry’s intended quarry, repeatedly proves himself to be, as one character puts it, a “gentleman.”

Ironically, if predictably, the hunters become the hunted. Natives capture Fry, the cousins, and Jane and tie them to tree trunks. In one of the most haunting images of execution suggested in film (but not directly shown), the natives tie two of the hunting party’s servants spread-eagle to slender trees, restrained by ropes and crisscrossed. When the ropes are cut, the trees spring apart, thus ripping the victims in half.

At the end of the movie Tarzan escapes from the cage Fry has locked him in and unties the adventurers, while his elephant friends stampede through the village. Tarzan and the hunting party escape the natives by slipping through a cavern (“juju” for the superstitious natives, who do not follow), and it opens amazingly to a swamp, which the cave links to mountains! The geography alone is a dream.

The cave’s features are unnervingly gothic. Darkness, mist, black bubbling pools, dead jagged trees. That it represents death is underscored by Jane’s line: “This is the first time in Africa I haven’t been able to see some sign of a bird!”

I believe the standard Freudian interpretation of dreamt caves with monsters inside is that they represent repressed fears of the self, particularly of the unruly id, fount of lust and rage. So the final obstacle Tarzan and his train face in this adventure story aptly symbolizes Production Code-era suppression of sex and violence in American movies.

When they reach the safety of the other side, Tarzan forces Captain Fry to return to the cave to his certain death. This act of primitive justice shocked and thrilled me as a boy, as it does even now.

And for me, as a kid, the fact that this cave squirms with iguanas (reptiles signify the id-driven penis in Freud), growling in the misty shadows, thrilled me all the more.

Custom Made for a Daydreaming Boy

My last day of summer classes was on Monday, and contrary to my expectations, I have not spent the week reading.

I’ve picked up a couple of books, a gay detective story and a gay memoir, but couldn’t get past page 12 on either. The former is clogged up with similes, by my estimate 8-14 per page (like a toilet full of tampons), and the latter tries hard to be David Sedaris but without, you know, humor.

I’m willing to take part of the blame. I’m probably too tired after reading freshmen essays to read much of anything else just yet. I can’t even bring myself to crack open THE MAGUS, though a month ago I greatly enjoyed re-reading Fowles’ THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN.

I’m not watching television either. Everything I find on television is boring—and loud—not a winning combination. I’ve enjoyed watching some dvds (SHELTER is the best-acted gay-themed movie I think I’ve ever seen), but practically every movie I’d be interested in seeing I’ve already seen.

My e-correspondence has not been successful of late. I had already lost one friend a few weeks ago when I defended Barack Obama from charges that he’s a crypto-Muslim and anti-American—looking back, I should have edited the word “dumbfuck” before hitting send.

Last night another friend wrote, “I don’t blame Bush … he gets blamed for everything.” Besides deleting a couple of paragraphs detailing my daydream of personally stomping the President’s face into the sidewalk, I did little to spare the writer’s feelings or illusions. Obviously, these are friends who haven’t seen me in a long, long while—decades, really.

My dog and I take longer walks than usual—about three miles in the mornings and the evenings, when it’s not so hot outside. We play fetch a lot more than usual, too.

I’m gradually upping the amount of exercise I do—nothing spectacular, just push-ups, sit-ups, and curling my 15-pound dumbbells.

And jerking off. I’ve perfected my widescreen fantasy of nude-oil-wrestling Channing Tatum (twins, he turns out to be) in the weightlessness of Barbarella’s spaceship.

I should take a stab at cleaning up the apartment. I’ve washed five weeks’ worth of laundry in the last 48 hours. But there’s dusting to be done, too. And if I could get ambitious, I’d throw out some old stuff that’s just taking up space.

But ambition is what I lack. I am cut out for a life of idleness—physically and mentally. I lounge around the apartment with my dog Tom Ripley, pretty much taking my cues from him on what to do next. Napping excessively works for both of us.

What amazes me is the time just zips by! I used to think that time flew only when I was involved in something stimulating. But I’m hardly into my third nap of the day before I realize the day is over.