Max Landis has taken to YouTube once again to sit in a white room and tell us about some specific, nerdy aspect of pop culture. This time, it’s wrestling. As Agents of GUARD’s resident wrestling fan, I’m here to tell you what to think about it.
In the near-25 minute video, entitled Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling, Landis recounts the 20 year on screen history of his favorite wrestler, Triple H, in an attempt to answer the question every adult wrestling fan has heard from concerned friends and family members: “You know wrestling is fake, right?”
Throughout the video, his words are acted out by beautiful women portraying the male wrestlers. A host of familiar faces from the world of wrestling and beyond fill out the rest of the cast.
For wrestling fans, it’s an interesting reflection on the development of a single character over a long course of time. It does an excellent job of providing a common thread through the various personae Triple H has taken on over the years and making it seem like an organic progression from one to the other. You could certainly find a lot of narrative flaws if you went back and looked at all the footage from the wrestler’s actual career, yet, even so, Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling provides a powerful example of the kind of storytelling that wrestling, and only wrestling, can provide.
Still, if the intended purpose of the video is to convince non-fans that wrestling is a legitimate art form, the audience’s interest might start to wane after ten minutes of listening to a guy summarize things that a man in tights did 15 years ago.