Mark Naglazas 02/04/2000

The West Australian 5

Copyright West Australian Newspapers Limited, all rights reserved.

POP culture critics have been telling us for years that wrestling, not

Greco-Roman but the kind involving body slams, sleeper holds and

red-faced finger pointing, is the equal of Shakespeare when it comes

to pure drama.

However, until I sat mesmerised through Hitman Hart: Wrestling

With Shadows (Sunday, SBS, 8.30pm) I hadn't realised how far the

wrestling-as-theatre metaphor went.

Starting out as a rather conventional documentary portrait of

Calgary-based Bret The Hitman Hart, tracking his path to

superstardom within Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation,

Wrestling With Shadows becomes a mind-boggling examination of

middle America's desperate need for heroes and villains.

For most of his stellar career Bret Hart was one of the heroes, a

good guy who relished the role of being a role model in both his

native Canada and in America, which welcomed him as one of her

own. However, in the mid 90s the mood of America started to darken

and suddenly the bad guys, such as the brutish, stone cold Steve

Austin, were regarded as the true heroes while goodie-goodies like

Hart's Hitman character were seen as out of touch with harsh

contemporary reality.

Thus the opportunistic McMahon, ever sensitive to audience

demands, engineered Hart's shift from being a good guy to bad guy,

forcing the patriotic Canadian to rile the audience by spewing out

anti-American bile.

What is remarkable about this turn of events, which film-maker Paul

Jay followed closely over a couple of years, is how seriously Hart

took his role as a hero and how uncomfortable was the transition to

villainy. All this boiled over when Hart, after much agonising, decided

to take up a huge offer from Ted Turner's rival World Championship

Wrestling, an historic break played out in front of the cameras and

milked for every drop of theatrical blood, sweat and tears possible.

What makes it so extraordinary is this final match between Hart and

Sean Michaels, which involved what one pundit called "the biggest

double cross in wrestling history", is that art and life become

deliciously confused, transforming what is nothing more than a bit of

white-trash Americana into something akin to the kind dizzying

post-modernist spectacle you'd expect to see at the Perth

International Arts Festival.