March 17, 2000 | Early in Beyond the Mat, a documentary that contemplates the phenomenon of professional wrestling as performance art, writer-director Barry W. Blaustein fesses up: He’s a die-hard aficionado of the head-banging, face-smashing, body-slamming spectacle.
During his childhood, Blaustein recalls in his eager voice-over, he devoted countless hours to watching wrestling on TV, forever “mesmerized by these images of strong guys taking matters into their own hands.” And even though he realized long ago that the matches are scripted and the violence – well, OK, most of the violence – is choreographed, his ardent enthusiasm remains undiminished. Indeed, you can’t help getting the impression that Blaustein – whose screenwriting credits include The Nutty Professor and Coming to America – drove himself to succeed in Hollywood only as a means to an end, so he could someday make a movie that would enable him to hang out with the likes of Stone Cold Steve Austin.
And yet, to a surprising degree, Beyond the Mat emerges as something appreciably more substantial than a fan’s mash note. Blaustein devotes relatively little time to actual in-the-ring mayhem, and offers only fleeting interviews with other devotees of the “sport.” Instead, Blaustein strives for an up-close and personal approach, focusing on a handful of individual wrestlers – including superstars, wannabes and a couple of flickering burn-outs – as he seeks a definitive answer to his own provocative question: “What kind of man bashes another man’s skull into a ring post for a living?”
Throughout five years of on-again, off-again production, Blaustein gained unprecedented access to the inner workings of the World Wrestling Federation. He’s even a witness at creation, so to speak, while WWF honcho Vince McMahon – a self-aggrandizing dynamo who occasionally gets into the ring himself – manufactures a new identity for ex-football player Darren Drozdov: “Since you are able to regurgitate on command, it seems logical that your name should be… Puke!” Blaustein also captures a weirdly sweet backstage moment as Mick Foley, decked out in his creepy-goofy Mankind mask, introduces his two small children to The Rock, an amiable fellow who jokes with the children. Later in the evening, during a mega-hyped pay-per-view match-up, the kids and their mother watch in bug-eyed horror while The Rock repeatedly smacks Foley over the head with a metal folding chair.
Foley may fret over the example he’s setting for his children, but his moral qualms are not nearly as distressing as the sad story of Jake “The Snake” Roberts, a former WWF luminary who’s now reduced to grappling for dollars on the independent circuit. A middle-aged, gone-to-seed crack addict who can barely communicate with his estranged adult daughter, Roberts is something of a fallen hero in Blaustein’s eyes. But Roberts takes a far less charitable view of his condition: “I do not feel sorry for myself,” he confides to the camera. “I asked for everything I got.”
