I've loved professional wrestling ever since I was a kid, but to be honest in recent years it has lost much of its luster.
What I remember as a kid was my father taking me to the matches—which were often held in smoke filled auditoriums—and seeing these larger than life characters battle it out in grand morality plays that were all about the honor.
The "good guys" (or "babyfaces" in the wrestling vernacular) were these clean-cut sort of All American guys, who usually won their matches clean against the more colorful, but dastardly "bad guys" (or "heels"), with names like Ripper Collins, Curtis "The Bull" Iaukea (the matches I saw were in Hawaii), and "Crazy" Luke Graham.
Even though the babyfaces always played by the rules (well, most of the time anyway) and the "heels" would blatantly break the rules, I always liked the heels because they just seemed so much, well you know, "cooler."
As anyone who follows American pro-wrestling will tell you, it's a cyclical business. For the past few years it has also been experiencing a bit of a downturn since the last boom period in the late nineties. Back then, people like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin sold out arenas and produced huge ratings on Monday night cable TV wrestling shows like WWE's Raw and WCW's Nitro.
The current slowdown has been blamed on many factors. But what I think it really boils down to is the fact that the basic formula of those morality plays pitting good against evil has become a lost art form. Well that, and the fact that in the process of becoming the huge billion dollar spectacle of ten or so years ago, a lot of the mystery was removed from it.
However, in places like Japan, and especially Mexico, pro-wrestling remains as big as ever. In Mexico especially, wrestling is huge, and I believe the reason can be traced directly to both those morality tales and, in the form of Mexico's masked lucha libre style, the mystery behind it all.
As shown in the excellent new one-hour documentary DVD Lucha Libre: Life Behind The Mask, lucha libre isn't just taken seriously by both practitioners and fans in Mexico, it is in fact a way of life.
Although American wrestling fans will tell you that they know lucha libre, the fact is that its exposure here has been quite limited. The masked wrestler who is currently its best known star in America—WWE's Rey Mysterio—in fact once allowed himself to be unmasked on an American TV wrestling show (in the now defunct WCW). As this DVD shows, this would be unthinkable in Mexican wrestling because the wrestler's honor would have been sacrificed.
As we discover quickly in Lucha Libre: Life Behind The Mask, Mexican wrestling is, in fact, all about the honor. In this film, the stories of several luchadors are followed both behind the scenes, and in the ring. None of the luchadors profiled here break character once the whole time we are allowed this rare behind the scenes access.
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