A look behind the scenes at the last wrestling show on earth reveals a world so inventive that we couldn't spoil it even if we tried.
Untitled Document
by Spencer Hall
Lucha Underground is a television show about wrestling that airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. Eastern on the El Rey Network. It is in its second season and currently shooting its third. It follows the passions, failures, and triumphs of luchadors and luchadoras as they try to claw their way to the top of The Temple, a mythical arena owned by a mysterious madman bent on creating as much chaotic violence as he can. It is not a wrestling promotion: it is a television show about a wrestling promotion. Sometimes, people fly off stuff.
Angelico, in particular, flies off stuff. Angelico is a South African wrestling under a Spanish name in an American warehouse pulling out Mexican lucha libre moves in between flights off the woodwork. Angelico’s leaps, in context, are not sane; they come from the balconies and from the top of his boss’s ringside office, and often begin with a full-bore running start. Angelico does not drop like Batman from the rafters. He hurtles into the ring with the violence of a flying squirrel misjudging its flight path and smacking headlong into a tree. He is also proof that a flying squirrel the size of a man would be a terrible, terrible thing.
The plot is inexplicable.This is the plot — the heavily edited plot. There is a weekend wrestling promotion called Lucha Underground. It films without really telling its audience much of anything about what is happening. There are mics, and obvious roles. Here is a heel, a rudo; there is a face, a técnico. There are longstanding rivalries, and reversals of those rivalries. If someone attended a few tapings in a row, you could theoretically begin to piece together what was happening with some reasonable accuracy. But there is also this television show, the one that has all these layers the Believers — the crowd in the Temple — don’t see or hear. There is a commentary layer, provided by Matt Striker and wrestling legend Vampiro. There are the interstitial dramatic scenes, the ones that explain most of the plot. For example: a character was murdered in season one during one of these scenes, the ones shot during the week away from the crowds. Executive Producer Eric Van Wagenen, backstage staring at the monitors, admits this may have its advantages when it comes to keeping the plots a mystery for the upcoming season. “We may be too weird to be spoiled, plot-wise.”
They’ll still tell you “NO SPOILERS” in advance. It happens, right before the show when the fans have filed in, the production assistants have thoroughly arranged the crash pads on the floor and the band is on the platform overlooking the stage playing through a Spanish-language version of some recent American rock standard. (“Lonely Boy” by the Black Keys, for one show.) The pre-show announcement is one for the ages: it warns that you may be exposed to strobe lights, wrestlers entering the stands and
“Blood!”
(crowd goes YAY)
“Sweat!”
(louder YAY)
“... And BODILY FLUIIIIIIIIIDS!!!”
(loud, sustained YAYYYYYYYY)
It matters why Angelico is leaping. Angelico’s leap, put into context: he is bailing out his teammates, Son of Havoc and Ivelisse. They are both battered, and mostly helpless after surviving a full three-way trios match. Leaping into Mr. Cisco and Cortez Castro, Angelico turns the tide of the match, and redeems the trio’s often dysfunctional chemistry with a victory. This is actually the third trio Angelico’s team has to fight here, even though this was billed as a three-trio match. The malicious owner of the promotion, Dario Cueto, made them fight the trio you see in the clip only after beating two other trios, and then springing this as a surprise — because that’s what he does. (He’s a dick who likes violence and making up rules. That, and his screaming monologues, is a large part of why people love him.) After a miraculous recovery, Angelico and Son of Havoc execute perfect flippy dives off the turnbuckles to finish the match, win the Trios title and put a thunderous capper on a 20-minute-plus epic of a fight. Tension, delivery, payoff: it’s a neat, bite-sized melodrama you can digest in a sitting.
It does not matter at all why Angelico is leaping. Then again, none of this matters if you just want to say: sweet Jesus, what the hell did I just watch. There have been other wrestling shows that work high-wire/aerial. There have even been other shows attempting to work in fantastic elements and lucha libre. Few have done all of it with the editing, violence and intimacy that Lucha Underground does. Just start with the stadium: it looks small on the screen, but in person The Temple — in reality a hundred-year-old rail warehouse in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles — is even smaller.
It seats about 350 on a good day, and 400 if the fire marshal isn’t counting too accurately. The Believers sit way, way too close to the action, and frequently scatter like bowling pins when the wrestlers enter the stands. A fan I talked to in line after a brawl scene had his shoe taken off his foot by a wrestler to use as a cudgel against another wrestler. “Security kept telling me to not touch the talent, and I was like, dude what do I do when the talent is touching me?” The guy got his shoe back eventually.
Angelico here jumps a good twenty feet out and off Cueto’s office. It’s about 12 feet down, at least, and 20 feet out, and all done with two dudes who have to take what is at least a nasty clothesline at the bottom. Watched as an isolated looping GIF, Angelico barrels into the screen from multiple angles. The best of them is the final in the sequence, the one most similar to a car crash where there is no Angelico, and suddenly for a frame there is. And then there is violence, just a burst of limbs and kinetic energy and human confetti. It’s wrestling, so it’s choreographed violence, sure. So was every nuclear test ever conducted in the Nevada desert, and you still needed cobalt blue goggles just to look in its direction.
Angelico is just one of many human and non-human characters in the show. There are a lot of characters on the show. Bear with us here. Not all of them are human, and that’s fine. Angelico does a pretty good imitation of being superhuman every now and then, but he’s a South Africa native who worked his way up the ranks of the Mexican wrestling world. There’s a lizard character, a mythical hunter and a guy in black jeans named Prince Puma who kind of looks like an Office Depot employee but can triple-tuck flip off the top rope. There is an inspiring wrestler with the mostly awful name Sexy Star who enters the ring holding a My Little Pony-themed battle staff, and who often leaves the ring covered in blood. (Usually someone else’s.)
There are unkillable masked brutes, a time-traveling astronaut; Famous B, a wrestling agent who promises his clients fame and delivers them face-first into matches they cannot win. There is Cage, a man so muscular it hurt just bumping into him in the green room. The character Drago is a dragon — a real dragon, just in human form, who just likes hanging out with humans and occasionally beating them with nunchucks. He’s got a mask and everything. Like, a good one. He spent a chunk of one season just skulking around on rooftops and being mad.
The Mexican luchador Fénix is human, though his brother, Pentagon Jr., is iffy on that count. He’s definitely real-life brothers with Fénix. He may also be some kind of blue-eyed glowering demon with a thing for breaking his defeated opponents’ arms.
Why you should just know this, but keep going anyway. Pentagon Jr. ended up fighting a match against his mentor, who is also a vampire? And the color commentator for the whole show, who somehow hid for a whole season that he was secretly Pentagon Jr.’s master, despite sitting right there at the ringside announcer’s table? And they worked it all out, and are still bros? Let’s keep going, we swear it makes more sense when you just keep going and say: yes, a secret master who craves broken arms, let’s just keep going.
It is a big world. There are no fewer than forty characters, many of whom are unique to Lucha Underground. Before a single episode of Lucha Underground aired in October 2014, the creators of the show spent nine months on world-building alone, using whatever they could to create a wrestling cosmos all of its own. That included consulting the work of the Mesoamericanist scholar Karl Taube, whose work on Mexican mythology gave the show a lot of its base imagery. (What, your wrestling show doesn’t base some of its characters on the totem animals of the original tribes of old Mexico? I pity you.) Chris DeJoseph, a former WWE writer and the head writer of Lucha Underground, says the instructions were simple. “Eric Van Wagenen walked into our writers room and told us to write it like it was the last wrestling show we’d ever write.”
It is also the last wrestling show on earth. That “last wrestling show on earth” ethos meant using a hybrid of lucha libre and every other wrestling style on the planet. Though the word is right there in the title, DeJoseph is the first to acknowledge that Lucha Underground is an amalgamation of styles that incorporates the high-flying, masked catalog of lucha libre. “We pay tribute to the traditions of lucha libre, but we’re not bound by it. It’s a hybrid, and we acknowledge that.” There are tons of Mexican wrestlers from the country’s largest promotion, AAA, and almost everyone in Lucha Underground uses some variation on luchador moves. Even Cage, the beeftank dude with quads the size of utility pipes, will fly through the ropes and do flipping moonsaults onto waiting opponents. (Cage might look terrifying when he does it — but he still does it, and with a shocking delicacy for his size.)
There are lucha moves, and Mexican circuit stars. But there are also indie regulars like Joey Ryan and The Mack, along with WWE-system veterans like Cage and Johnny Mundo, the current heel du jour for Lucha Underground. The Mack — a jiggly, crowd-owning wrestler in an extremely small and ill-fitting pair of yellow briefs — reels through acrobatic lucha moves with ease, but also gleefully throws down a Stone Cold Stunner whenever he can, complete with middle fingers and all. At Ultima Lucha, he even cracked two beers and gave Cage the full Steve Austin double-middle-fingers-in-the-face treatment afterwards, all while play-by-play announcer Matt Striker yelled “THAT MAN HAS A FAMILY.”
Lucha Underground’s backbone as a universe is the backdrop of The Temple, but the limbs and feathers and exterior of the show are pure mutt DNA taken from WWE, PWG and every other wrestling promotion you can name. Oh, and the promotion can break many of the rules lucha libre never would, because they have a built-in license to blaspheme The Temple’s own rules: a heel character from beyond all other heel characters’ homeworlds, Dario Cueto.
An important note on jiggly heroes. Before I forget: The Mack in motion looks like a gleeful, malevolent sack of muffins and springs.
Entra El Jefe. His name is Dario Cueto, the founder of The Temple. He is a man who may have something to do with an imminent end of days, and a sign on his desk reads “I’M KIND OF A BIG DEAL.” His office sits in a corner of The Temple just a few feet from the ring, and on the door painted on frosted glass it reads “DARIO CUETO: PROPRIETOR.” Several people have been slammed through its ceilings in the course of matches, including his own brother, the monster Matanza. Dario Cueto wears black pants, a black button down and a black jacket at all times. He stands at maybe 5’8 in shoes with a generous heel. He wears his hair slicked back like a villain in a Robert Rodriguez movie, or perhaps a good guy in a Robert Rodriguez movie. This is not coincidental: Robert Rodriguez is an executive producer on the show, it airs on his El Rey network and Rodriguez himself sketched out many of the first season’s costumes.
El Jefe, cont’d: Cueto is played not by a wrestler or the actual owner of the promotion, but by classically trained actor Luis Fernandez-Gil. It shows. Fernandez-Gil struts into scenes with the confidence of someone fresh off fourteen straight nights playing Macbeth in London. He almost always enters from his office door; like a true heel, his Cueto waits for the crowd to acknowledge his supremely confident self before addressing his minions. Everyone on Lucha Underground was hired with the ability to act in mind, mind you, but Fernandez-Gil is on an entirely different plane of theatricality. His Cueto preens, sneers, insults, cajoles and bribes. He thrashes with cartoonish fear when cornered. He runs when there’s trouble he made, and dodges its consequences whenever possible. In prerecorded segments, Cueto lounges with wrestlers in tense negotiations sipping brown liquor and issuing barely concealed threats. Live, he swans out of his office with mic in hand and his entrance splits the crowd into two camps: those who boo him mercilessly, and those clapping for the slick-haired embodiment of sadistic evil management.
El Jefe, Cont’d, Cont’d: Dario Cueto also happens to be an amazing plot device. He can enter a match and immediately invalidate its results, if they do not please him. He can and has introduced dangerous and usually illegal weaponry and constraints — like ladders, nunchucks or steel cages — whenever he pleases. He demands instant rematches; he forces wrestlers into ludicrous wagers for their careers. Dario Cueto is the trap door Lucha Underground can pull whenever it needs to send a convention or rule hurtling to its demise. He is a chaos agent, timed to appear at the moment of least convenience to everyone but himself. When he points one finger in the air and says “BUT! BUT!” you know, for lack of a better phrase, that some deep and deeply entertaining bullshit is about to happen. He is the writer’s best Uno card to play when they need maximum violence with minimum explanation. He may be the most charismatic television villain since Gus Fring straightened his tie.
The man who plays Cueto is serious about it. Fernandez-Gil declined to interview for this piece because he takes it and his privacy that seriously. He is the Daniel Day-Lewis of wrestling actors. Do not test him either: he may be slight, but he does have a black belt in judo.
This can all be simple. There are so many things that make Lucha Underground simple, or at least simpler than other wrestling shows. They shoot mostly on weekends, leaving wrestlers free to roam during the week — a visual you have to like only for the vision of Prince Puma in his black jeans and mask, climbing the San Gabriel mountains shirtless and free. They always shoot in the same place for matches, so there’s no travel to Charlotte, Greensboro or any other long litany of Ric Flair-certified destinations on the wrestling circuit. Their cameras are usually in the same places, they shoot with the same crews and they get a lot of the same people in the crowd from week to week.
Lucha Underground is also complicated. DeJoseph and the rest of the writing staff had to rewrite the entire first 13 episodes of the show in season one when, on the first day of filming, several Mexican wrestlers had visa issues and could not make it to The Temple. They spent all night rebuilding the plot, and ended up with something they eventually liked better anyway. But that last-minute improvisation of an entire story arc isn’t unusual. Wrestlers get injured, wrestlers have contract issues, wrestlers get sick and ultimately wrestlers sometimes have to be written around while they work out all of those things. Hell, the show wasn’t even sure if it was coming back for a second season at one point, and the entire Temple set was taken down. When they got the renewal from El Rey, the whole thing had to be rebuilt.
Lucha Underground has always been complicated. It airs on a less-than-well-known network, El Rey, and survives via the financial commitment from Mexican producers and reality show baron Mark Burnett. El Rey itself exists in part because, when the FCC approved the merger between Comcast and NBC/Universal in 2011, Maxine Waters and other members of Congress pressured the company to create more minority-owned networks; thus was born El Rey, and thus Lucha Underground, and thus Angelico flying twenty feet across space to clothesline two men he probably hangs out with after the show.
It’s an odd duck born in a little wormhole of interest generated by the huge machinations of media corporations and power structures shifting way, way above the roof of The Temple in Boyle Heights. Lucha Underground is a tiny little rose growing in a micro-atmosphere on just the right asteroid. Its backers claim to know how long this could take, and don’t care about the long run-up/investment period. That’s what everyone says at the start, but the show is shooting its third season right now, the checks are clearing and more people from the show are getting stopped and gripgrinned in airports.
“They’re not wrestling people.” That’s Matt Striker, talking about the slice of the fanbase he sees. “They’ll say, ‘My favorite show was Sons of Anarchy, but now it’s Lucha Underground.’ It’s not about the wrestling for them, but about the characters. They’re talking about them as if there’s a character from Star Wars. There’s a young fanbase, and the visuals. They love seeing strong women.”
Lucha Underground’s relationship with women is complicated. Lucha Underground has intergender matches that, like everything else on the show, involve a shocking amount of theatrical and not-so-theatrical violence. Women, particularly when they fight a deranged psychopath (like Marty “The Moth” Martinez) or a baby-oil toting chauvinist (hi, Joey Ryan), get horrendous treatment from male characters: dragged by their hair, thrown into turnbuckles and, in the case of the intergender match between Taya and Cage, slammed multiple times into the mat by men.
The degree of brutality in Lucha Underground is already a point of pride, but almost especially so with regards to the relative equality women have in receiving and doling out punishment — both to and from men, and to each other. The producers of Lucha Underground clearly believe intergender wrestling is its own form of equality — the rules of The Temple are the rules of The Temple, and those rules say everyone fights everyone, regardless of size, gender or species affiliation. (Hi, guy who is really a dragon.)
To wit:
ALSO TO THAT POINT: No figure matters in this respect more than Sexy Star, she of the abuse backstory and the My Little Pony staff and ruffled lamé skirts. She’s the same wrestler behind the ferocious season two match with nemesis Mariposa where, in the throes of an apparent finishing submission hold, Sexy Star dared the FCC by screaming, “FUCK YOUUUUU MARIPOSAAAAAA” before pulling out a stunning victory. From one angle, it’s theoretically pure: Sexy Star, wrestling without a cordoned-off women’s division, can enjoy the ECW-ish hardcore violence applied equally. A woman can get curbstomped through a cinder block on Lucha Underground; a man can get curbstomped through a cinder block on Lucha Underground. Then again, a woman is still getting a backbreaker thrown on her by a much larger, stronger man in a society with a real problem in particular with violence against women. Then, pivoting again, Sexy Star will drop this same move back on a man, and do so in the construct of scripted entertainment.
Ivelisse, a Lucha Underground wrestler who started in Puerto Rico at the age of 15, knows how far that violence can go firsthand. Check out Angelico’s big leap again: that’s her in the corner with the shocked/pained reaction face. For that Trios match, Ivelisse entered the ring with something she thought was “an ankle thing.” She finished the match with the clear understanding that she — either sometime before or during the match, it’s impossible to tell — had broken her ankle. She knew she was limited, but by the end of the fight, when all three wrestlers on her team were supposed to be spent and at the limits of their tolerance for pain, Ivelisse was the only one clearly faking nothing. Her pain was real. Being pros, they simply worked around it, announcing team included.
If someone is put off by the dynamics of intergender matches, particularly that it happens in front of a predominantly male audience, Ivelisse gets why.
“I can totally understand that perspective,” she says. “The whole point is that we're supposed to make it as realistic as possible. If you put a female UFC fighter in a cage with a male UFC fighter that's gonna be hard to watch. You're gonna have mixed feelings even if you believe that the woman has a choice.”
Women in Lucha Underground do have the same choices men have, particularly when it comes to creative direction. Taya, who enters the ring to chants of WE-RA LO-CA (translation: crazy white girl), came to the show through Mexican circuit AAA, and brought with her a reputation for lunatic intensity and a breathtaking pain tolerance inherited from an early training in dance. (Taya: “I showed up at AAA’s gym in Mexico and laughed. It felt just like dance training.”)
“I think it's very obvious that we all have a lot of creative control of our matches and showcase a lot of what we want to do,” she says. “We are the only company where the writers and the producers look at us for input on the matches, how they go and what we do in them.”
As for the obvious, and sometimes disturbing dynamic of watching a woman get thrown around the ring by a much larger male wrestler?
“You can't look at it that way. We're two fighters. It's not a guy beating up a girl, or a girl beating up a guy. We're both fighters, we're both luchadors trying to win. I'm an athlete. In Lucha Underground, we all know what we're getting into. I don't think there's anything wrong with that."
Ivelisse doesn’t agree with the dynamics of every intergender match.
“Sometimes it's not done how I would like, but there are so many opinions. I know when I go out there, I try to make it look as realistic as possible. I see it a lot, that people forget that. That’s our job: to make it look realistic.”
That realism requires a serious level of trust with the partner, and a lot of thought beforehand. Ivelisse, again:
“The kind of intergender match I'd have with Jack Evans is totally different than the match with Mil Muertes. Every match is different. I have to think, if this is realistic, and he punched me, I'd have a lot more damage than if I punched him, because he's stronger than me. Realistically, if this would happen, what would I do? If I did this, how would he react?”
For example: say you have Taya, who is a strong but much lighter wrestler than Brian Cage. And let’s say you have a match where the two have to fight what is admittedly a lopsided match against each other. The scripting for the fight will have one likely end, and that is a defeat for Taya. But before that, Taya manages to salvage something out of the match. She runs around, she lands some spectacular moves on Cage. Taya ultimately loses to Cage, but like most of the intergender matches/action I see at Lucha Underground, there is always some positive payoff for the woman. (Lucha Underground regular Joey Ryan has said as much — that though he plays a sleazy, often sexist character, it is important for him at the end of an intergender match to end up giving the woman her moment of triumph over that sleaze, aka him.)
It may be off-putting, or hard to watch, but even that perspective might be limited.
LaToya Ferguson, a Los Angeles writer who put together Lucha Underground reviews for The AV Club, thinks that criticism — like Dave Meltzer’s from earlier in 2016 about intergender matches — might be representative of male perspectives only, and missing women’s opinions on Lucha’s mixed-gender brawling.
“When he says that about intergender wrestling, or how the sport is shrinking, he’s ignoring growth with female fans who like seeing women wrestle, whether they’re wrestling men or women. They’re not the only ones who do it, but Lucha Underground usually does them very well. If you see Taya, you don’t see a female wrestler. You see a great heel character. That’s why she and Joey Ryan get their ass kicked. Not because she’s a woman, but because she’s a great heel.”
That growth in female fans will remain anecdotal for the moment. Ivelisse says she sees a lot more little girls getting into the sport, and so does Taya. Ratings do not bear that out: Lucha Underground consistently pulls in somewhere around an 11 percent female audience. That falls far short of WWE’s consistently high numbers with female audiences, which usually hover somewhere around 30 percent. There is nothing to suggest intergender matches drive female viewers away; however, there is also nothing to suggest that they’re helping to attract female viewers, either.
(Note: WWE’s advertising promo slides from 2014 claim more women watch WWE than the Oxygen network. Vince McMahon is for the ladies.)
It is impossible to not admit a few essential and contradictory things about women wrestling in open competition on a fictional show.
That women still make up a small percentage of the roster. They’re there, and are given big storylines and large moments and spotlights galore, but there are six of them compared to something like 36 male wrestlers or so. It is just and good to point out what large roles women play in Lucha Underground, but there’s a need to put it in perspective, too. The space for women is there, and it is exactly this big.
That intergender matches can make for some legitimately cringeworthy moments, especially for a first-time viewer of Lucha Underground, and especially when you know the audience watching that match is often around 90 percent male. Maybe they’re thoughtful wrestling fans who appreciate the good work of two skilled luchadors independent of gender, admiring the hard work, trust and coordination it takes to successfully throw someone through a table without anyone getting hurt. That might be the case. They might also be the kind of men who especially enjoy seeing women thrown through tables for their entertainment, and not for art’s sake.
This won't matter to someone who wants to see violence against women, which is the unavoidable problem. The match could have complete trust between wrestlers. You could be appreciating it properly, and in accordance with Lucha's principles of gender equality. The hope, I think, is that the audience will follow that idealistic approach. I'm not that optimistic. For the performers, I get that they believe they're working as equals. I actually think, based on what everyone to a person said when talking about intergender matches, that this is how things work inside Lucha Underground. I also think hoping a largely male audience--mostly those at home or watching for the first time-- will be able to handle this without slipping into the rut of misogyny is naive.
That Lucha Underground follows their intergender ethos absolutely, sometimes with women crashing through stuff to the ground, and sometimes with women winning matches against much larger men. In almost every match I watched, each wrestler got something out of the outcome: an ovation for their pain tolerance, a conciliatory hand for getting cheated by fate or Dario Cueto, or a moment of brand magnification for whatever flag they flew as a wrestler. Heels got to look more heel-y; faces grew more virtuous even in (or especially because of) defeat.
It was true for women and men, but seemed especially so for women. Even in defeat, they got a sliver of victory or triumph. That moment of triumph usually involves — you guessed it — an extreme, simulated violence. And to that point: if that’s a dealbreaker for you, honestly, how did you even get this far into a discussion of Lucha Underground? A show where the villain who runs the whole thing admittedly maximizes the violence of the competition for his own pleasure? A show where the father figure for the whole production says this out loud at a taping: “Remember: Lucha Underground is about love. And also violence, which is good.”
A JUGGALO-LOVING FATHER FIGURE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE AND ALSO THUNDER BAY, ONTARIO. That quote is from Vampiro, the color announcer for Lucha Underground. It comes at the end of another left turn Lucha Underground makes: admonishing its crowd to please, please stop shouting “puto” at heels like Johnny Mundo, because that happens to be a homophobic slur with a nasty edge that the producers and cast do not want on the air. The show isn’t chaste in the language department: the Spanish-speaking luchadors throw around “Chinga te” and other snakebite-sharp profanities in the ring with regularity, the fans chant “holy shit!” and “¡culero!” at the action frequently and Vampiro himself will drop “shit” and other non-PG profanities on air. But this? This can’t be in the show, Vampiro says, addressing the crowd in a slow 360 rotation with the tired but supremely confident air of someone who has done this so many times that one-on-one conversation feels odd.
VAMPIRO FACT: As a young man in Los Angeles, he served as personal security for Milli Vanilli.
“I take a couple of caffeine pills, do a couple of shots of Jägermeister, and I’m good to go.”
That is how Vampiro says he preps for a taping of Lucha Underground. This is gentle treatment for Vampiro, in terms of how Vampiro treats Vampiro. He looks like the kind of tatted-up middle-aged man who owns a krav maga gym (he does) and who might listen to Insane Clown Posse. (He does, and considers himself a Juggalo for life after Shaggy 2 Dope leaped into a “potentially bad situation” in L.A. once and had his back.) The crowd pays him as complete attention as a hyped-up wrestling crowd can; there are no “putos” from the crowd during taping.
Vampiro came up as a young wrestler in Mexico, where he arrived from his native Canada in 1989 with a hundred dollars in his pocket, no return ticket and zero ability to speak Spanish. After showing up with blue dreadlocks to a gym, he somehow ended up in the ring less than a week later. His lack of Spanish and experience was overcome by the enthusiasm of women in the crowd for his good looks and Vampire Lestat style. Vampiro, in his own words, became something like a Tiger Beat sensation in a matter of a few weeks. He’d wrestle over thirty times in a week sometimes. Another wrestler gave him a Halcion to sleep on a bus between stops; Vampiro woke up in a hotel room 12 hours later. His buddies said he’d clotheslined a priest at a bus stop. Vampiro says he responded by buying a box of 2000 of them at a nearby pharmacia.
Vampiro worked his way along to WCW — ”the absolute worst” — where he wrestled with fellow goth-banger Sting, and through a dizzying alphabet soup of promotions: XPW, TNA, AJPW, AAA and even Juggalo Championship Wrestling. Vampiro eventually abandoned wrestling completely, and returned home to Canada to open a gym before resurfacing to take on whatever his role has become at Lucha Underground.
I say whatever because, at this point, Vampiro does a little bit of everything. He mentors younger wrestlers; he serves as a producer. Vampiro also plays himself, i.e as a wrestler who in season one was the secret master of Pentagon Jr. (Remember him? The guy with the scary skeleton face and undying thirst for breaking human limbs?) His season-ending match and reveal as the secret master of Pentagon Jr. was widely considered one of that season’s highlight matches, and is daffy but gripping Lucha Underground scripting in full bloom: Vampiro, the same gruff-looking guy with a shaved head casually breaking down a match in a hoodie one minute, and then entering the arena in full spectral makeup and papal mitre and genuflecting to the crowd the next.
He also still does color announcing, where he drops monologues like this with casual gravity.
Do you know what it takes to face a man like that? The depths you have to go to in order to face a monster like that? Can you even do that without becoming a monster yourself? How do you handle that? Like, how do you even deal with that, bro?
Matt Striker says the two do little in the way of prep. Pre-show, they just sort of feel each other out, and go from there. “He’s a nurturer. I just ride with how he’s humming at the moment. When he walks into the room you know where he is.”
Striker pauses, and then laughs. “You also know where the door is.”
The point where we talk about your attitudes toward wrestling and the future of sport. I want you to start with Dario Cueto here. Dario is the head of the promotion and the owner. Technically he refers to himself as the proprietor, but titles/names/whatever. He is the commissioner for this league of this sport-tainment, a term we’ll apply to everything in sports that gets televised or shared via some channel of mass communication.
Dario gets to make up rules as he goes. Dario serves his masters — in this case the writing staff and producers and director who want things, within a certain defined framework of actors and rules, to go as they like them to go. He is a frontpiece, a character, a tool to ensure outcomes.
Without getting too many vape hits deep in this: how is this any different from Roger Goodell’s role in your life? There are some easy, quick answers. Dario Cueto is likable, funny and open about his lust for violence. Those are important differences, as is Dario Cueto being an open fiction, an honest plot construct.
There are a few thornier ones, too. To anyone saying wrestling is de-legitimized in the least by its scripting, consider the spectrum of things you already consider rfeal entertainment. You accept the goal line as a thing, even though it is a stupid chalk line drawn an arbitrary distance from one point to the next. You accept endless fiddling with rules and parameters and terms of engagement. You already accept a certain amount of scripting. Like, they even call it that; the act you consider spontaneous is, in fact, the byproduct of years of mindless repetition. Even acts — which in wrestling are the extremely choreographed moves — are legislated and codified down to an almost imperceptible degree of propriety and impropriety. Please watch basketball officiating, and then dare yourself to deny the part about the differences being imperceptible and subjective. Everyone who watches an NFL game devours far more advertising and dead air than they do actual football. If that isn’t a form of scripting — to pause, ask you to wait and then collect a check from a beer company while 22 men stand around panting and looking at whiteboards — then nothing is. At best, you’re watching improv drama with a gymnastic and combat element interspersed through a sea of commercials already.
Every coach in every sport will already admit that the idea is to reduce the spontaneous, the unanticipated and the random to a bare minimum. Wrestling, once a sport where people actually fought, evolved past the pretense of a game being fair or authentic a long time ago — but a lot of other sports have, too. The NBA, the NFL and other leagues all level their competitive gradients with salary caps and competition rules. College sports are dominated by the same perennial powers, and operate under a code where they can’t even pay their players for their labor. Until Leicester City broke through this year, the EPL had crowned only one other non-Man United/Man City/Arsenal/Chelsea league champion since 1992.*
*Congratulations to 1994-95 Blackburn Rovers.
A show made by reality people just advances this a step forward by introducing editing. Lucha Underground is a wrestling show, and should be thought of as a wrestling show. It should also be thought of as a reality show in the sense of the current definition of reality show: a heavily edited, scripted piece of entertainment reliant on a measured dose of reality. The reality here: the ogre’s opera of professional wrestling, presented here in a wild hybrid of lucha libre and pretty much every other major influence in modern professional wrestling. Whatever the writers build around the Temple — time travelers, dragons, murder subplots, rogue bikers — the action still depends on the reality of someone hitting their finishing move off the turnbuckle without breaking their neck. There’s a seed of reality; with that planted, everything else blooms above it. Without that, Lucha Underground is just an odd shirtless telenovela. With it, Lucha Underground might be one of the best shows on television.
Lucha Underground is unique, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s certainly no evidence that controlled narrative turns fans of a sport away. In fact, there’s little evidence that editing, curation, manipulation, scripting or outright artifice discourages people from using, engaging with or watching anything at all. Facebook is a stream of FOMO-inducing lies, and it is the most popular social networking site in the world. Instagram is worse — you don’t even have to use words, and can filter images for maximum beauty. The internet is a Sargasso Sea of stale lies, and unlike television they’re made by the real experts in dishonesty: the general public.
With travel and road production and talent evaluation and administration and the skyrocketing cost of TV rights for content providers, the idea is simplifying all this down to a story with definite outcomes. This is not an abstract concept. Most sports fans, specialists aside, deal in heroic and often heroically dumb narratives anyway. Steph Curry was a face, and now he and his team turned heel. Former face-turned-heel LeBron James is now back to face status after winning a title in Cleveland. Who’s the greatest, Tom Brady or Russell Wilson, well let’s find out at the end of this five-week tournament culminating in a pay-per-view subsidized by America’s largest companies. Most sports teams, honestly, wouldn’t care so long as they got their moment in the sun, and a hefty share of the TV deal. (You forget: all a billionaire sports owner wants, in their heart of hearts, is money. Trophies are shiny things to be put in closets.) Keep the physical spectacle, and a good bit of the rest will follow.
There are already paranoiacs on scripting’s side; a good number of fans believe some leagues are scripted already. The question is not about whether the NBA is scripted, though. It’s about, with all the advantages of scripted reality-style sports, when sports will be scripted, and who will take advantage of that. Think of it, college football fan: You like the Kick Six, but don’t want to hang around through six dull rivalry games a season to get to it? Great. We’ll give you the Kick Six once a season. It’s right here in the script.
Then, once you take that one step most people take anyway, here at the end of all things, Roger Goodell would have an excuse for looking dumb. It was not his fault; he was just written that way.
A staggering, spoiler-free moment. Reminder: There are no spoilers in Lucha Underground, so I cannot tell you what is happening in front of the sign. I can give you menu options, sure. This is a real sign: hand-drawn in what looks like black Sharpie. A fan in the second row holds it, and he’s holding it tentatively because the match has spilled into the space between the ring and the bleachers. Matches have a tendency to move from there to the stands, and can stay there for minutes at a stretch, and yeah: he’s got one eye on two wrestlers, and a shoulder ready to turn and lead the rest of his body uphill in case that happens.
One of them is bleeding/recovering from being electrocuted/will be thrown through a pane of glass. The other has been beaten with a large stick/thrown off a balcony/assaulted with a fork. Both stagger with the practiced fatigue of a wrestler waiting for the next piece of choreography to unfold. One breaks away to rummage around the set for weaponry, and gleefully returns with a lunchbox/hammer/bottle, only to turn and face the onrushing desperate last gasp attack of the opponent. The stunned wrestler with the weapon flails theatrically before getting suplexed/piledriven/straight THROWN into the crowd/announcer’s table/a nearby passing car’s windshield/the L.A. River.
The crowd screams HO-LY SHIT! HO-LY SHIT! HO-LY SHIT! HO-LY SHIT for a good ten seconds straight. Both wrestlers somehow stagger up, and back across the stage. One of the wrestlers, now bleeding even more from a gash on his forehead, moves back past the jumpy fan with the handwritten sign, from left to right across stage from camera perspective. He is, for reasons I can’t tell you about in detail, holding his balls theatrically, and grimacing like a man in extreme pain. The sign reads: “WRESTLING IS AN ART.”
I want to frame this image, and show it to you. I can’t, because it contains spoilers, but I’m telling you that in a perfect world, I could, and it wouldn’t matter. It would not matter one bit. Art like Lucha Underground is too strange for words to capture it alone. Art, in the moment, is always spoiler-proof.
Written by Spencer Hall
Edited by Elena Bergeron
Layout/illustrations: Jon Bois