WWE Extreme Rules and the Booking of Bray Wyatt

Many superstars have entered the WWE towards the upper echelons of the roster, promoted via series of vignettes or introduced or interposed into main event feuds, thereby being instantly posited as main event talents. Fewer have managed to stay the course to thoroughly establish themselves as main event stars. Yet even amongst those who have achieved this, Bray Wyatt appears exceptional. Since he and his Wyatt Family debuted in the WWE last July – after a series of vignettes which positioned Wyatt as a backwoods cult leader, combining anti-societal and quasi-apocalyptic rhetoric with the hypnotic sounds of southern rock music, with the visuals and atmospherics of horror films, as Wyatt sat and swayed in his evocative wooden rocking chair, with one of his followers adorning a sheep mask – Wyatt has been afforded consistent television time in the ring and on the microphone, engaging in significant feuds with Kane, with Daniel Bryan and CM Punk, and now with John Cena.

The will of the WWE has been there; but Wyatt has excelled beyond expectations, especially for somebody so young – he is 26 years old – and relatively inexperienced. Versatile, vicious and athletic in the ring, and able to invent and reinvent his persona on the microphone, Wyatt has drawn comparisons with the Undertaker and Mankind. While such comparisons should be made broadly – the Undertaker’s legacy is unparalleled, while Mick Foley’s sprawling intensity of words and actions can hardly be matched – they are certainly understandable given the nature of Wyatt’s character, and as a third-generation superstar with an obvious passion for and an acute understanding of the business, the feeling is that he could be a figurehead of the WWE for years to come.

Yet Wyatt’s momentum has stalled over the last month, following his loss to John Cena at WrestleMania XXX. As I suggested in the piece I wrote reviewing that event, the fact of his defeat ought not to have affected Wyatt: he did not need to win the match to seem a credible main event opponent, and with a memorable entrance and the crowd showing their support, he came out of a solid encounter looking strong. The return match at Extreme Rules last weekend – which pitted Wyatt against Cena inside a steel cage – demonstrated the relative value of wins and losses in the wrestling business, because despite coming away on this occasion with the victory, Wyatt’s character on the night was considerably diminished.

His character has an edge where it is rooted in a sense of place and attached to an apparent reality. His presentation has involved a complex but sensible and richly suggestive admixture of elements: from his rural background amidst a locale of woodland, farm and barn; to his wardrobe of Hawaiian shirts, black vest and coloured slacks; to his fatalistic outlook and his small group of dangerous acolytes. The tropes with which he plays – combining elements of folklore, Gnostic belief, American Spiritualism, and psychedelia – are broad but provocative, and developed by someone with an evident cultural awareness and a close attention to detail.

Some of this nuance has been lost in recent weeks. It is debatable whether Wyatt’s feud with Cena should have continued beyond WrestleMania: this is a match-up that will presumably repeat over the coming years, and perhaps with better timing and with more at stake. As the storyline between the two has progressed, the focus has turned to Wyatt’s utilisation of children – Cena’s biggest fanbase – to disturb and unsettle his opponent. This is interesting in theory, but its implementation has been heavy-handed. The idea that Wyatt could manipulate children to turn against Cena, and that this would strike a blow to Cena’s sense of self, could have been a novel facet of their feud; but it should have been one layer rather than the explicit focus of the feud’s attention.

As it played out, the use of children a couple of weeks ago on Raw constituted a unique visual which made little sense. A children’s choir performed on stage, singing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’. They descended en masse to ringside along with Wyatt; then reemerged, after the lights went out, wearing sheep masks. Without any context to their appearance and judging by the faces of the youngsters involved, they were not labouring under some spell or part of Wyatt’s cult, and nor did they come across as fans of Cena who had been somehow turned. Rather, they seemed what they were – children organised by the company to present a visual spectacle. The stunt was palpably artificial. In the loose and hasty endeavour to show Wyatt keen to use and manipulate children, he appears a bogeyman with a single trick rather than a rounded psychological force.

The steel cage match at Extreme Rules was poorly booked. Wyatt looked weak, managing little offence and being saved by Luke Harper and Erick Rowan who interfered from the early stages of the match. Cena took on the worst and most criticised aspects of his persona, continually fighting off three men. But then with Wyatt prone in the ring and Cena atop the cage, he proved bizarrely unwilling to drop from the cage onto Rowan, who was flailing about on the floor with a steel chair. Cena could have dropped directly onto Rowan, or he could have dropped to the floor and taken his chances against his chair-wielding foe. In either scenario, he might have suffered physical punishment, but he would have won the match; and in the context of the match Cena certainly appeared to view victory as imperative, for he was constantly trying to escape the cage. So Cena appeared, in the midst of battling three men, briefly a coward; but he retained his dominance, and with all three members of The Wyatt Family defeated inside the ring, victory at last seemed inevitable.

Alas, as he attempted to leave through the cage’s opened door, the lights in the arena went out, and when they came on again a small boy had materialised in front of him. Singing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ in a rasping, heavily distorted voice, this child proved enough to encourage Cena to retreat back into the cage. He retreated only into the arms of Wyatt, who hit the Sister Abigail and left the cage for the victory. Thus the match closed: suggesting that Cena was more than a match for the combined forces of The Wyatt Family; but lost because horrified by a child singing Wyatt’s over-elaborated motif in a funny voice.

The scenario was palpably absurd, and not aided by the overacting of the WWE commentators and panelists, who responded with stunned silences and with mutterings of distress. There are times too when the multitude of tasks now given to WWE commentators becomes counter-productive. The hushed concern upon the conclusion to the match was overdone, but then incongruously broken when Michael Cole suddenly turned to advertising WWE products. A scene which had, however ridiculously, been meant to profoundly unsettle had at once lost all of its power.

There were problems with the rest of Extreme Rules. The commentators flubbed Jack Swagger’s elimination at the hands of Rob Van Dam during the opening triple threat elimination match – apparently forgetting that, at short notice, the match had been changed into an elimination affair. Alexander Rusev’s handicap match success was functional rather than impressive; and while Bad News Barrett’s victory over Big E in the Intercontinental Title match was something to be celebrated, it demonstrated in part how little Big E was promoted during his reign. The match did not receive the sort of reception the talents involved deserve. Moreover, in spite of his tremendous wrestling ability, Bad News Barrett’s Bullhammer can be an uneven finishing manoeuvre, dependent on good selling and a perfect connection if it isn’t to look more meagerly like a clubbing forearm.

Across his feud with Daniel Bryan for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, the WWE have determined to dub Kane ‘The Demon Kane’. This is meant to be indicative of Kane’s present rage and fury; but to establish a different name for a particularly violent version of the character hardly seems conducive to coherent long-term storytelling. The name does not sit easily with the character’s origins, when he was at least as destructive but had only the single identifier; and at what point in the future and for what reasons ought a heel Kane no longer take the epithet ‘Demon’?

The backstage action in the main event was chaotic. Having been struck by a crowbar, Kane appeared unconscious for several minutes as Daniel Bryan drove him back to ringside hoisted on the forks of a forklift truck. Yet somehow – after Bryan had dropped Kane from the forklift into the ring, mounted the vehicle, and landed a diving headbutt – Kane came to his senses to kick out on the count of two. As the match drew towards a finish, Kane set a table at ringside on fire, only to find himself driven off the ring apron through the flames. Then a safety officer with a fire extinguisher seemed to provide Daniel Bryan with an assist: as Kane immediately rose from the fire to his feet, the fire extinguisher blasted him, and he lumbered disorientated into the ring, to be hit by a running knee for the pinfall.

The following night on Raw saw Sheamus triumph in a 20-man battle royal to take Dean Ambrose’s United States Championship. A concerted effort was made to establish Cesaro as a heel, as he beat down on Rob Van Dam: a difficult and a dubious task given how popular Cesaro has become, and how over many of his moves are with the audience, but understandable given the WWE’s relative lack of heel talent. The feud between Daniel Bryan and Kane continued with a convoluted scenario reminiscent of the worst of the Attitude era. Bad News Barrett retained his Intercontinental Title following a rematch with Big E. And Raw closed – after a battle pitting The Shield against The Wyatt Family – with Evolution gaining a degree of revenge over The Shield, having been defeated by the trio in Extreme Rules’ standout encounter.