Batwoman Begins Again
The Comeback Kid Versus Kayfabe
Signal Boost
Where You Can Find Me This Week
Signing Off / Playing Out

 

There's a scene in the first episode of the new season of Batwoman I've been waiting a very long time to see. It does the thing that countless, lowest-hanging-fruit grabbing Bat-family stories have attempted to do: address the fundamental privilege of a white billionaire punching criminals in the brain while claiming to be defending their city. If Batman really wanted to fight crime he has literally thousands of non-violent options. But we all know it's not crime Bruce, in all his myriad forms, is fighting. It's guilt. And the best he can ever hope for is a draw.

We'll come back to that scene in a moment. But first, I need to tell you that if you bailed on the show in the first season, you should seriously consider coming back. It's not that Kate Kane (Ruby Rose), the previous incumbent of the suit, was bad. Rose has a specific style and does a very specific thing but it never quite meshed with the show. Coupled with working hurt and the pressures of being on every call list, Rose left at the end of the first season. Her departure is the inciting incident here. It's also the shot of adrenalin the show needed.

Kane's disappearance gives the show's supporting cast a lot of fun stuff to do and neatly upends the power dynamic in this iteration of Gotham. (Hi Dougray Scott! How does it feel being a mostly good guy again?). Gang leader Alice, Kate's younger sister discovers her arch rival killed her sister and doesn't realize she also killed her nemesis, Batwoman. Kate's father becomes even more of a militaristic fist trying to close around the 'Burning Man and the Event Horizon get drunk at the office party' aesthetic of Gotham. And Kate's various friends and colleagues are just legitimately very sad. Camrus Johnson is especially great as Luke Fox, equal parts preppy technical genius and guilt-ridden angst storm. All of which is a perfect set up for a season without Batwoman at it's core.

Except, she's still there. Javicia Leslie doesn't so much pick up the ball and run with it as bust through a wall and spike the ball into the heart of the earth. Her character, Ryan Wilder, is a homeless ex-convict who witnesses Kate's plane come down and finds the Batsuit. Exhausted by society's refusal to get out of her damn WAY, she puts it on and goes to work and that's when the fun really starts.

Ryan is, of course, a martial arts instructor (Gotham actually gives you a black belt in Judo at most express checkouts) but she's also gifted, altruistic, damaged and far too used to living on the other side of the law. Which is where the fundamental genius of Ryan as Batwoman, and that scene I mentioned, returns.

Take a look:

Pro wrestling is unreality presented as reality. It's often brilliant, occasionally absurd, frequently brutal and sometimes garbage. I leave it up to you to decide which of the following is which:

That last may be a cheap joke, but it also puts us in the same wheelhouse as David Arquette. Like Terry 'Hulk Hogan' Bollea, Arquette is more famous for being involved in wrestling rather than actually wrestling. Unike Bollea, Arquette isn't a 70 year riding a creaking wave of nostalgia, racism and terrible life choices. Arquette is a quiet, friendly, troubled man in his mid-40s, trying to work out what the difference is between his career and that of his peers.

Or to put it another, way pro wrestling has a complex relationship with kayfabe. David Arquette has a complex relationship with pro wrestling. Welcome to the show.

In 2000, Arquette starred in the profoundly terrible Ready 2 Rumble as a fan who wins the WCW world championship. In a movie only fractionally less stupid than every other thing WCW did, they decided to 'put the strap on him' for real. The wrestlers involved knew it was a terrible idea. Arquette knew it was a terrible idea. It happened anyway and the moment it did, his career by and large stopped.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette explains all this and picks up on Arquette in the present day. He's happily married, on good terms with his ex-wife, and dotes on his children. But he also feels stuck, not only with a career highpoint of Scream, but as the lead of Ready 2 Rumble. He's isolated from wrestling fandom. He's ostracized by his industry. What can he do?

Pick a fight. Learn to wrestle, work off his bad reputation and prove to both industries he really can do it all! Or at the very least the movie wants to present him like he does!

If I had to guess the exact moment Arquette's story crosses into kayfabe, it would be the blink and you'll miss it cameo appearance of Diamond Dallas Page, Arquette's erstwhile opponent turned sensei. In reality, Page has forged a career doing blue collar yoga that many members of his profession credit with them still being able to move. (I own these workouts, they're great. Page has an X-shaped exercise mat and everything.) In the movie, he's a shouting man on a beach doing karate for a few seconds. Page is a major player. He deserves more. But he doesn't fit the shape of the story directors David Darg and Price James had in mind.

But the Mexican street wrestlers do. In an incredible sequence they and Arquette stage thirty second matches at stoplights, literally in the road. Arquette joins them and, after a wobbly start, earns some respect and, it's implied, an invite to that night's event in the ring. That in turn leads to one of the movie's most genuine moments as Arquette interrupts his best friend's to camera piece, in tears because the rudo (bad guy) they worked with gave him his mask as a sign of respect. It's absolutely genuine and untidy and real and you never like the guy more than you do in that moment.

The following morning the two men accompany the luchadors to a hilltop and scream like warriors at the rising sun. Arquette's experiences in Mexico are never mentioned again, forgotten like the proverbial training montage.

Back and forth, call and response, the movie dances across the line between kayfabe and reality with the sort of focused precision and gleeful freedom of movement that chain wrestling (pro wrestling's equivalent of 'clashing blades!') has to offer. Here's the late, great Eddie Guerrero with my favorite hairline in pro wrestling, Dean Malenko, to demonstrate:

A deathmatch tends to be bloody, brutal, and the most severe, with a heavy emphasis on the use of heavy bleeding and the usage of fluorescent light tubes, light bulbs, panes of glass, barbed wire (sometimes electrocuted when tied around the ring), fire, thumbtacks, razor blades, gusset plates, syringes, explosives, bed of nails, bed of barbed wire, staple guns, concrete blocks, live piranhas, cactus plants, and live scorpions and all other dangerous wrestling weapons, along with graphic violence, to induce extreme and heavy bleeding and will typically led to bloodier, more brutal, and more violent contests. The types of foreign objects and the nature of the foreign objects are used so as to be extremely graphic, brutal, dangerous, bloody, and violent in nature. (Again, more here.)