When during the Disney movie catalog does Disney become DISNEY? There are two generally accepted positions on the subject. Some believe that the moment is the release of the first feature length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Some think that it’s Cinderella.
Steamboat Willie people are pretentious and don’t have a leg to stand on.
Here’s why Cinderella is the answer. Cinderella is the first true iteration of the Disney theme. Why are we talking about all of these disparate movies anyway? Why is it meaningful to say that something is a “Disney movie” rather than just a kid’s movie? What is it about Disney that makes talking about its entire canon fun, even though it includes The Black Cauldron and Chicken Little?
Ultimately, Disney is the modern day version of the fairy tales and folk stories that we’ve been telling children (and ourselves) as far back as history traces. Good things happen to good people. If you believe in yourself and in your dream, your wishes will come true. Hard work pays off, and bad guys lose. The ethics are questionable, and the real world application even more so, but that’s the reason that we tell stories at bedtime instead of recapping the nightly news. We all already live in an unfair world where good and bad things seem to happen at random, and dreams don’t always come true. We want to believe that things can be different.
I’m not telling you that we should believe that things can be different. Whether the way the world actually works is compatible with your moral system is up to you. What I’m saying is that all of us want to believe in something and that Disney gives us the stories we want to tell. It isn’t only Disney that does this, but Disney found a new way to do it, a very specific way (full length animated features). And it’s been doing that for longer and with more success than anyone else. Disney invented the animated feature in the same way that The Beatles invented pop music. It didn’t, but who cares? It still did.
Beyond that, Disney came up with a very specific version of this story. There’s a formula to it. This formula, which is present to some degree in all of the Disney films (although not always in obvious ways and not always with success), is the heart of Disney. It’s the reason that we care whether a film is a Disney film or not. It’s the reason that Mickey ears on a car antenna matter and and the reason that the sight of the real life Cinderella’s castle at Disney World makes our heart skip. Disney has a message for you and your children. Wanting to hear that message is why we keep coming back to the metaphorical Disney World time and time again. It’s where the magic happens.
The message is captured in the following lines from “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the official Disney theme song as decided upon by Disney itself: “If your heart is in your dreams, / no request is too extreme.”
That’s Disney-talk. Everyone has a dream, Disney says. If you really believe in your dream, and you really believe in yourself, you can make that dream come true, no matter how impossible it seems. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a down on her luck orphan or an anthropomorphic fox or a cat voiced by Miley Cyrus.
This is magic. It can’t happen in the real world, except on very rare occasions, which is why the serious application of it to real world problems is derogatorily called “magical thinking.” But in Disney World, it’s an inevitability. In Disney World, no request is too extreme. In Disney World, anyone can be anything.
There’s a caveat, though. You have to be a good person (or cat or fox or whatever), and you have to do the right thing. Good dreams come true. Bad dreams, even if they are realized momentarily, do not. You have to be kind and selfless and willing to put the interests of others before your own.
And you don’t get all of your dreams either. Just one. Just the one. Just the dream you put your heart into. Not your dream of Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican pizza or your dream of America taking “One Nation under God” off of the dollar bill. Just the big one.
Maybe you want to fall in love. Maybe you want to be a part of something big, really big. Maybe you want to be a part of society and no longer an outcast. Maybe you want the respect of your father or the job you’ve pictured yourself doing as long as you can remember. But you just get the one.
It’s a bit more complicated than it seemed at first (and, again, possibly ethically irresponsible), but it’s ultimately the story we want to tell ourselves. We want Disney World to be real.
And if it were real, then the entrance to the Disney World utopia would be through Cinderella’s castle, just like in the real world Disney World theme park. Why? Because Cinderella is the first movie that realizes the Disney formula in full.
The complete Disney movie formula is as follows: Likable protagonist has a dream that seems like it couldn’t possibly come true. The odds are against her. But she truly believes in herself, and she puts her whole heart into this one dream. It’s all she wants, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to make it come true. Obstacles are thrown her way. They seem insurmountable. But she never gives up on herself or her dream.
But, and this is crucial, despite her singular focus, it’s not exactly true that she’s willing to do ANYTHING for her dream. She is also a good person. She cares about being kind to others, about things being fair, about doing the right thing, about mercy and forgiveness, about the value of friendship and love. If the opportunity comes for her to realize her dream that would require her to compromise her integrity, she will do the right thing. She will sacrifice the thing she wants most in the world because she is a good person.
And then, improbably her dream comes true. It couldn’t possibly have come true. But it does. That’s Disney magic. This formula doesn’t play out in Snow White because Snow White is barely a character at all, and so we (and she, honestly) aren’t really invested in her dream coming true. We assume her dream must be that some day her prince will come, but we don’t care. We aren’t given any real reason to care. It doesn’t matter to us because she doesn’t seem like a real person. She’s like an animated version of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
Pinocchio doesn’t satisfy this formula either. The story is about Pinocchio, but at its heart it’s really about Geppetto. Pinocchio himself is the dumbest Disney protagonist aside from Winnie the Pooh (whose dim-wittedness is charming, and who, as I outlined in a previous post, isn’t the true protagonist of his movie). Because of how dumb he is, Pinocchio’s stupidity is mostly just frustrating. Do you really feel bad for him when he’s turned into a donkey? Do you really want his wishes to come true? In fact, he isn’t even really a good person/puppet, which is why a moralizing cricket has to constantly keep watch over him.
Dumbo sucks. Maybe he has a dream or maybe not. Whatever. I don’t care about Dumbo.
So these first three movies lack step one of the Disney formula, which is having protagonists who we care about. With this established (and acknowledging that Fantasia is an isolated film in the Disney canon), I think that the best case for an early inauguration of Disney qua Disney can be made for Bambi, the fifth Disney full length animated feature. After all, aren’t we invested in Bambi’s happiness? Don’t we want his dreams to come true? Why can’t Bambi be the first “Disney” movie?
Of course, I have an answer. What differentiates Cinderella and Bambi is the degree to which the main character’s dreams weigh on us as an audience. For Cinderella, in the classic Disney format, her dreams are high stakes. Either she goes to the ball and wins the heart of Prince Charming or she spends the rest of her life in squalor and slavery at the beck and call of women who hate her and an evil cat. We do care plenty about Bambi, especially after the death of his mother (still one of Disney’s most surprising and moving moments), but we get the sense that his twitter-pattion is just a crush. We’re happy for him when he gets Faline to fall for him, but, if he hadn’t, he would probably just have found another doe. He’s awkward and orphaned, but he isn’t living a miserable life that hinges entirely Faline’s love. He’ll be fine if she turns him down, and so his happily ever after doesn’t have the cathartic rush of joy that Cinderella’s does. There isn’t enough tension there for the pay-off to be truly “Disney.”
Bambi doesn’t really, deeply want his dream to come true. Not in the same way that Cinderella does. And so it isn’t particularly magical when it does. In fact, you could argue that it isn’t his “dream” at all. This is why the entrance to Disney World is through Cinderella’s castle. Cinderella is the first truly MAGICAL Disney movie. It’s still one of the most magical, in my opinion. Her transformation is the quintessential Disney moment. Magic makes a good person’s lifelong dream come true. That’s what Disney is really all about.
People frequently ask me “What do you do all day as a stay-at-home parent?” I find myself at a loss when this question is put to me, and I usually respond with something like, “Oh, I guess nothing. You know. We just hang out. It’s the best job in the world!”
Which is partly true. It is definitely the best job in the world, but it’s impossible to do nothing for an entire day. It’s more that what we do is so unremarkable or so context-driven that it isn’t worth articulating. But people keep asking me, and I can’t blame them because I wondered about what stay-at-home parents do myself before I became one. So, here’s a breakdown of what we do in the Rearick house on your average day.
6-7:30 am: Somewhere in here, Miles wakes up. Without opening my eyes, I change his diaper (if he needs it), warm up a bottle that has been refrigerated for this purpose, and feed it to him.
7:30-8:30 am: After feeding him the bottle, I rock him in hopes of getting to go back to sleep, a process that takes anywhere from 15-40 minutes. About one third of the time, he goes back to sleep, and then so do I. The other two thirds of the time, I continue to fruitlessly rock him while singing his lullaby (“Titania’s Lullaby” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) on loop. Eventually, I give up. These times are approximate, by the way, since I still have my eyes closed.
8:30-9:00 am: Miles wakes up, if he wasn’t awake already. I put him in his crib with a book (Colors from a publisher called Alphaprints) to keep him occupied and return to bed. Although I cannot truly fall asleep, since he is not quiet even while he’s reading, I pretend that I am sleeping for the sake of my mental health. His chatter goes from stream-of-consciousness remarks made to himself to observations on the time of day (“Morning! New day!”) and objects in our room to, finally, an endless series of “Dada! Dada! Dada!” This last series goes on, first joyously then increasingly more needlingly, until my alarm goes off at 9.
9:00-9:05 am: I get up, put on my robe and socks, and turn off the nightlight. I go over to the crib, where Miles is now yelling “Dada morning!” or “Good morning!” An elaborate ritual of catchphrases, sing-song, tickling, and kisses ensues.
9:05-9:10 am: We go to the bathroom, where I brush my teeth, put on deodorant, and run a comb through my hair. I throw The Six Pistols on shuffle while I go through my morning routine. I take two pills of the anti-seizure medication that works as a mood stabilizer to level out my bipolar. I pick out my clothing for the day, putting on my awesome Dude Love shirt, which is pictured below.
9:10-9:30 am: Another diaper change, if needed. We go into the kitchen, where Miles chooses among grapes, oranges, or a banana for his breakfast. Since he ate four oranges the previous day, I eliminate oranges from the options, and he chooses a banana. I cut it up and put it on his high chair. While he eats, I listen to my current audiobook, the thirteenth book in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s called The Penultimate Peril, and it’s quite good, as good as the third book (The Wide Window) and the ninth book (The Hostile Hospital), but not as good as the first two books in the series. I wash the dishes and clean the litterbox, making sure that Miles is actually eating and not playing with his food, although this is rarely a problem at breakfast. Then, I pull a chair into the nursery and draw the blinds. Here’s what the nursery looks like at the beginning of the day:
I then make myself a cup of coffee, using the Ristretto pod for our cool Nespresso coffee maker. I top my coffee off with Oreo Cookies n’ Creme creamer and a generous helping of Nitro whipped cream.
9:30-10:00 am: This is my allotted daily time to drink my coffee and play on my phone while Miles plays independently. Today, he has chosen blocks as his morning focus. I go through my regular routine of the websites on the News app that I check daily, hitting the major categories of my current interests. Here’s what my News app page looks like:
It’s not a particularly exciting day in the world of Internet articles, but I do learn that there’s a woman named Marianna Simnett who is doing some interesting work with short films. I try to find out how to watch her film The Bird Games, which seems promising, but it was only available online for a short window and that has elapsed. I make a note to check back on this woman later to see if she does anything else cool. I also learn how the Bachelor and Bachelorettes know the names of all their potential suitors during the rose ceremonies. Here’s a sample of the kind of articles I’ve read.
I text my wife good morning and set an alarm on my phone for 10:30 to remind me to take medication for my gastrointestinal ailments. I’ve learned that the most reliable way to make sure that I take it on time is to set a new alarm every day, even though that doesn’t make any sense in 2021. Miles gets tired of the blocks and wants me to hang out with him around 9:50, but we’re still in the phone-time window, and it’s a necessary self-care period for me, so I redirect him with Theodora Teapot.
During this time, my wife makes a brief appearance in between meetings to say good morning, which is always fun when it’s happening and a little less fun when she leaves. I redirect Miles with the blocks, which he now has a renewed interest in since he’s already forgotten that he just spent like half an hour playing with them.
9:30-10:00 am: I have a few errands to run, so I get Miles dressed. I put him in a rainbow shirt to match the tie-dye of my Dude Love shirt. It’s important to coordinate.
I make sure the diaper bag is replenished of the necessities for a short car ride (water, a snack cup, a couple of books, a robot letter), and then we put on our shoes and head out. Before leaving, I select a toy for him to play with on the way. Since he’s in a good mood and our errands won’t take much time, I don’t anticipate any problems, meaning that I don’t have to select a top-tier toy. Since I’m wearing my Dude Love shirt, I go with Kooky Cat, a Beanie Baby from my wife’s childhood that has been given a new name to reflect his new Dude Love gimmick. I remind Miles that Kooky Cat’s catchphrase is “Ow, have mercy!” and he cheerfully repeats it back to me.
Our errands go smoothly. I have to drop off a bag of Nespresso pods at the post office so that they can be recycled. Nespresso sends you a bag every time you buy more sleeves of the pods, and I am in charge of putting the used pods into the bag. They can’t be mailed from home because they’re shipped via USPS, but it makes me feel like I’m doing my part for the environment to recycle them rather than just throwing them away, so I’m willing to make the trip.
I also have to go Walgreens to get more of my gastrointestinal medication. The price for the medication is outrageous because it’s the beginning of the year, and we haven’t met our deductible, but there isn’t much we can do about it. The line is long, but Miles doesn’t mind. I listen to Say Podcast and Die, a Goosebumps podcast where a pair of English professors who also happen to be a lesbian couple go through the series book by book. I don’t normally like podcasts, but the ladies are funny, and the final section of their show, in which they connect the relevant book to horror films and literature, often yields productive insight. Today’s book is The Phantom of the Auditorium, which is a decent but not great one. I’m still at the beginning of the podcast, when they summarize the books and make humorous comments on it, so there’s not much to report.
10:30-11:00 am: We get home as my alarm goes off, and I take my medication. Miles requests to draw, so I pull out his My First Big Book of Dinosaurs coloring book and put him in his high chair. He has a variety of different crayon boxes/bags, but today I’m feeling lazy, so I give him his first ever crayons, which are in a bag because the box got destroyed. They are a bit woebegone, but they are also easier to keep up with than the homemade ones my little sister gave him for Christmas, and he can use all of them at once, unlike the big box of 64. He draws independently for a while, then begins asking for me to contribute, by which I mean he asks me to draw specific numbers and the letters RWO. I comply.
11:00-11:30 am: Lunchtime for me, which means a sandwich made of leftover barbecue that my parents made last Saturday, a Cosmic Brownie, and a can of Mountain Dew Major Melon. I’m currently working my way through all the Wrestlemanias that occurred between when I stopped watching in 2002 and when we picked it up again in 2019. I’m on Wrestlemania 27 right now, and the match we watch is Michael Cole vs. Jerry Lawler. Miles enjoys a tasty snack of raisins while I slog through an awful gimmick match that is particularly embarrassing now that Michael Cole is a respectable announcer again. Also, someone named Jack Swagger is involved. Yikes.
11:30 am-12:00 pm: We head into the nursery. I have to do manual entry for a freelance editing project I’m doing for a friend, so I work on that while Miles plays independently. I ask him what he wants to do, and he begins by asking for his choo-choo train, but, as we all know, the choo-choo train is ineligible as a toy until I’m done with manual entry. He elects to read instead, going through a large pile of books while I fix comma errors and typos. The books in question are a board book version of Anne of Green Gables, Nevermore (a board book version of Poe’s “The Raven,”), and The ABCs of Space.
12:00-12:30 pm: I’ve finally finish the manual entry, and the choo-choo train is now in play. “Choo-choo train!” Miles exclaims with a level of pure joy unmatched by anything I’ve experienced since the last time I had the Popeye’s chicken sandwich.
Here’s the deal with the choo-choo train and why it can only be an available toy at specific times.
It’s a great toy. Along with the letters that stick to our fridge, it has helped Miles learn how to spell five words (Miles, cat, dog, love, and Luna, which is his toy wolf named after the real-life wolf he sees at the animal park we frequent). It also teaches him problem solving because the magnets only stick together when faced in the right direction, and the train routinely breaks up if pulled too fast or constructed of too many letters. I suspect that it also helped him learn his colors, which we had struggled with for a while. And, of course, he loves it.
But there are several problems with the choo-choo train. The first is that, like all problem solving toys for toddlers, it has the tendency to frustrate him when such problems arise. In addition to the issues I already mentioned, he also hates it when the letters fall over. So, the choo-choo train brings with it the occasional cry of exasperation or outright sobbing when he gets too overcome by emotion to solve the problem immediately. Although he has the vocabulary for the solutions down by now (“fall over!”, “fix!”, “turn around!,” “stick!”), he can’t always make it work. Nor is it the case that me playing choo-choo train with him alleviates these unhappinesses, for the malfunctions with his personal train are no less frequent, and his frustration is equal in such situations, even with me sitting next to him.
The choo-choo train works for independent play for a shorter amount of time than many of his other toys, and once I’ve sat down to play with it next to him, I can’t get back up again unless some other major activity comes after the choo-choo train, which in this case would be feeding him his lunch. Any attempts to move on without such an event elicits a roaring succession of “Sit down, Dada!”, “Dada do it!”, and “Dada, help!”, to which there is no end.
The choo-choo train is out for now though. While we play, I throw on Rakim’s album Follow the Leader in the background since I’m re-evaluating it to make sure I still believe in my claim that Rakim is the greatest rapper of all time. However, I am quickly reminded, as I have been three days in a row now, that there is no way to hear Rakim’s complex lyricism while a toddler shouts “Cat train! Meow! Dada do it!”, so I switch to Tool’s Aenima, which I am also re-evaluating, though with lower stakes.
12:30-1:00 pm: Lunchtime for Miles, which today means leftover fried rice that my wife made from scratch earlier in the week. He assists me in cleaning up the choo-choo train first though.
Miles likes most of his lunch’s ingredients, although his famous distaste for green beans has not waned. While he eats, I clean his bottles and prepare one for his naptime. I also flip to the next page of The History of Photography, and examine the photograph on it. I keep a book on the visual arts in the kitchen, and I look at a new page each day as part of my new “getting into the visual arts” initiative. After three books of paintings and one of sculptures, I have moved on to photography. Today’s photograph is The Two Ways of Life by Oscar Rejlander, which is apparently a giant collage of different pictures that he made in 1857. It’s pretty cool for a giant collage from 1857.
I pour myself a tumbler’s worth of water, to be consumed later when it isn’t so cold, and set up our bedroom for his nap, which entails laying out his Zipadee-Zip and turning on the fan. As I heat up his naptime bottle, I check in to make sure he’s eating his rice. This hasn’t been a controversial food, so it doesn’t require constant observation, but he’s been doing this new thing where, when he’s full towards the end of the meal, he simply picks up the remaining food on his high chair and throws it on the ground. We do not like that, so, as his meal winds down, I keep a close eye on him for telltale signs that he’s almost done. Today, we have no problems since he likes the rice, and I don’t feel compelled to force him to eat the green beans, as the meal already contains two other vegetables (carrots and peas).
He’s done with the rice. He’s eaten almost all of it, but not quite. It was the end of the rice though, which meant it was a serving too large for him to eat all of it. Satisfied, I dump the rest and clean off his face, using a round of the alphabet song to mitigate his displeasure at having his face washed. Knowing that he’s about to go down for a nap, my wife takes a moment from work to come out and say hey. He gives her much love, and then she goes back to work.
1:00-1:30 pm: We go into the room, where I put him in his Zipadee-Zip and attempt to give him a kiss. He pushes me away, then, when I pretend not to care anymore, he grabs my face and forces multiple kisses on me. This is a daily, pre-nap game. I give him his bottle and rock him to sleep. As usual, the midday rocking is uneventful, and he goes down right away.
1:30-3:00 pm: While Miles naps, I read. I start with the manuscript that I’m freelance editing, the one I did manual entry for earlier in the day. After I read 10 pages of that (only 40 left to go!), I finish James Baldwin’s Notes from a Native Son, which I only had a few pages left of. It’s fine, but when I blindly checked it out from the local library, I thought it was a novel and not a collection of essays, so it wasn’t what I wanted. I pick up the copy of Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas that I also blindly checked out from the local library and read 20 pages. That’s about as much Thomas as I can do at once, so I take a break to check social media. People are mean on Twitter but less so on Facebook and not at all on Instagram. Dylan Thomas would probably have had all three.
I go back to reading, this time Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She keeps quoting Paradise Lost as if people in the seventeenth century took it as a legit guide to moral behavior, making me wonder how its reductive conception of womanhood affected female poets from his era. This leads me to revisit Lady Mary Wroth, the only female poet from the seventeenth century whose poetry I’ve ever enjoyed, although she preceded Milton. We don’t own a separate book of hers, but we have multiple anthologies with her in them, so I reread a few poems, which are about as good as I remember. Remembering that I saw an anthology of seventeenth century women’s poetry at a local bookstore and thought “Are there really enough good seventeenth century female poets for an anthology?”, I decide to give some of them another chance, even though I actually did just that a couple of months ago under different circumstances. I open up our anthology of seventeenth century poetry, and read randomly selected poems.
Eh. I feel the same as I did before. Oh well.
I debate whether to read more Thomas since I know I’ll read Wollstonecraft tonight when Miles goes to bed, but I’m not really up for it. I’ve been thinking about his influence on Plath the entire time I’ve been reading him, so I open The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath to around the middle of her career and read a couple of poems to compare her to Thomas. I feel vindicated in my original assessment of Plath as a direct follower of Thomas who had better control of her content, exercising a self-restraint that, although it makes her earlier poetry a little thin, allowed her to rise above Thomas as she matured. Thomas has a great ear, and some of his poems are fantastic, but, despite his elaborate and deft use of form, he manages to simultaneously lack the self-discipline necessary to consistently produce great poetry. As a friend of mine put it, Thomas sometimes gets carried away with how a poem sounds and loses his grip on the work itself.
This method of reading, where I jump from poet to poet at will, is only possible because I’m not actively reading a novel and so I have open space in my reading schedule. Otherwise, I feel guilty hopping around like this, choosing poems at random and assessing them quickly. Of course, I still do it all the time anyway. But I usually feel guilty.
3:00-3:40 pm: Miles wakes up from his nap. Another daily routine occurs in which I call him a Toblerone and ask him how he feels about me, to which he initially replies “Blegh!” and then, at my feigned shock, changes it to “Yay, Dada!” I take him out of his Zipadee-Zip, and we head back into the nursery. It’s unclear how long it will be until my wife gets off of work, so the choo-choo train is not in play at the moment.
We run around in a circle, shouting “Christmas party! Madman! Miles time! Christmas party!” That’s about five minutes right there.
Miles is feeling good after the Christmas party and wants to read. I’m trying to get him to read the Walt Whitman board book we have so that I can get credit for it on Goodreads, but he wants to read the board book version of The Hound of the Baskervilles for the thirtieth time this week. We get halfway through before we arrive at the page that has a clock on it, and that’s the end of his interest in me reading with him, as he dives off of my lap onto the floor, his face literally an inch from the page.
I decide to play basketball with the back-of-the-door hoop and weird green ball that I’ve been using since I started being a stay-at-home parent. It’s mid-season, and my team is the second overall seed in the league, but we’re looking to make a push for the number one spot. My teammates let me down in the Finals last season, and we got off to a rocky start at the beginning of the year, but we’re firing on all cylinders heading toward the All-Star Break, and we’re eyeing our seventh win in a row. The team we’re playing is undersized, and I take advantage early on the low block with a dizzying series of skyhooks, Dream shakes, and fadeaways, leaving their helpless center shell-shocked. They smartly double-team me, so I kick it out to my open teammates, but they start to blow easy shots, and the other team takes advantage on fast breaks, going on a quick 13-2 run. I call a timeout from the floor. In the huddle, we revise our strategy, and, knowing that the team is expecting me to continue playing in the paint, I catch them off guard with two quick threes. At this point, I’m shooting 6/15, with four threes and a couple of free throws. A good individual game for me, but we’re down by seven, so I’m not pleased. I take it hard to the hoop, get blocked, but muscle in for the rebound anyway and get fouled laying it in. As I start my free-throw shooting motion, my wife comes in.
And that’s it. That’s what a day looks like in my world.
If we consider Confessionalism as a historical movement, the Confessional poets are Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. If we consider Confessionalism as a poetics, like Imagism or Surrealism, then anyone can be a Confessional poet, including you.
What is a Confessional poem like?
A Confessional poem is one in which the world of the poem exists entirely as the inner world of the poet’s psychological experience as she works through trauma. It is written for the purpose of self-therapy, and it takes the form of a psychodiary.
What?
The speaking subject is always at the center of the Confessional poem. This makes the Confessional poem a kind of projection in which the inner world of the speaker becomes a metonym for the external world. All other figures (including the reader) become displaced into this projected internal world. The Confessional poem is not just the expression of emotion but is the subsumption of all that exists outside of the speaker’s emotional experience. Edward Byrne characterized the movement by saying that Confessional poetry is “defined by its content, the intimate, sometimes sordid, autobiography of the poet revealed in explicit first-person narration.” This kind of description represents the commonplace among critics writing about the school. It includes many details these critical categorizations share: the notion of a strong connection between the real-life poet writing the poem and its content, the conception of the Confessional poem as a purposeful “revelation,” and the tendency of those details revealed in these poems to be unflattering or disturbing. For many, the Confessional poem seems radically, almost obscenely autobiographical.
So, um, is Confessional poetry autobiographical or not?
This is a tough question, and it forms the major dilemma for readers when they approach Confessional poetry. The idea that the poems are purely autobiographical in a way unlike other poetry, where the speaking subject is traditionally assumed to be different than the poet herself, persists because one has much difficulty reading poems so obviously connected with the real lives of the poet without associating them “transparently” with those same lives.
But this a misconception. The mistake is not the connection between the real lives of the poet and poem, for the fact that, for example, Lowell’s poems about his institutionalization mirror his actual stays at mental hospitals (and are even dated accordingly) is clearly significant. The most obvious problem with a transparently autobiographical reading of these poems is that, while the poems contain experiences that occurred in the actual lives of the poets, they do not record them consistently or honestly. The poems are deliberately both factual and fictional.
This produces the dilemma I mentioned, for the nakedness of the poems seems to indicate an attempt to render the real life of the poet in an unmediated way and the inclusion of such specific personal details adds to the notion that the poet wants the reader to have her real life in mind when reading them. Why else, Edward Hirsch asks, would “Berryman and Lowell each [publish] poems in which they included their own home address”? These poets “make no attempt to disguise the autobiographical elements” of their poems, adds Miranda Sherwin. “Their use of proper names, places, incidents, and other specific details of their lives indicates that authenticity is an important effect of the poems.”
Yet the fact remains that these poems embellish, misdirect, and often fabricate similarly specific details. Melanie Waters shows us the beginning of the path to solving this problem when she talks about how simultaneously factual and fictional content of these poems is “a mode of psychobiography.” That is, rather than being accurate records of the poets’ real-life experiences, “the emotions that [the Confessionals] portray are always true to their own feelings.” When Waters says “feelings” here, means “psychological experience” or “inner world.” The Confessional poem depicts the world of the poet’s mind as she revisits and reflects on past experiences. This accounts for the presence of the intimate specificity of the poems, for the psychological world of the poet naturally takes as its foundation the poet’s biographical history. However, re-visiting and reflecting upon real-life events often involves changing them, especially when those events are traumatic in nature and when the goal of the reflection is to work through those events on the way to self-discovery. Here, poetry “intentionally reshapes and colors the raw materials of experience,” says Gale Swiontkowski.
But there is a problem with this “psychoautobiographical” reading of the Confessional poem (psychological in subject matter and autobiographical under the assumption that the poets write about themselves with a public audience in mind as their primary reader). The term is misleading for two reasons. First, these poems do not record the actual historical life of the poet, as a true autobiography would. Additionally, the public is not the most important audience for the poems. The poems are, first and foremost, written for the sake of the poet herself. They are poems written ABOUT oneself addressed TO oneself. A better term, my own coinage, would be “psychodiary” since diaries are the literary genre in which people write about their own experiences with themselves as the primary audience.
Why are Confessional poems written with the poet herself as the primary audience?
Aside from the inconsistencies inherent in the unreliability of our memories of ourselves, which may account for the need to fill in the gaps with fictional events or people, the Confessional poet allows herself the ability to fictionalize her own life because the creation of the Confessional poem is a means of self-therapy. The focus on a public audience implied in the term “psychoautobiographical” undercuts the subsumption of the external into the internal so central to the Confessional poetics. The Confessional poem is not composed for its readers, although of course this does not mean that the Confessional poet cannot have in mind publication when she wrote them. At its heart, the Confessional poem is necessarily narcissistic; “the writing of the poem is an ego-centered…act,” in Robert Phillips’ words, for a very specific reason: “its goal is self-therapy.”
Therapy exists for the patient, so these poems are more for their subjects than for their readers. They consist of the poet describing, synthesizing, and working out her own experiences by writing. The collapse is total; even when other characters speak in these poems, they remain merely dramatis personae in the psychodrama of the poet’s soliloquy. The psychodiary consists of an effort by the poet to come to terms with her experience by means talking about it to herself. For Sherwin, this means that “the impulse motivating this choice of subject matter…[is] not an autobiographical one, but rather a strategic one enabling [them] to delve into the mysteries of the psyche and the construction of the self.”
This process need only remain true to the poet’s feelings, rather than the facts of the poet’s life, because one’s psychological experience is the center of the therapy session. The Confessional poem records (if it does actually record at all) the psychological state of the poet as she works through past trauma. Therapeutic writing does not always record reliably. The process of working through a traumatic experience can benefit from a variety of different approaches to composition, a collaboration between the factual and the fictional among them.
The poet’s psychological experience is the ONLY material in the Confessional poem. One’s inner world can contain, for example, both real people and exaggerated versions of real people (or entirely fictional people), making all viable candidates in the Confessional poem’s dramatis personae. Diaries are about the author; what the author needs, what the author wants, what the author hopes to accomplish by the act of writing. The Confessional poem is a diary with the highest possible stakes, it’s goal the mental healing of its writer.
What makes Confessional poetry different from other types of self-centric poetry?
Karl Malkoff notes that there is “nothing new” about Confessional poetry. The collapse of the external world into the poet’s psychological experience has existed in poetry at least as far back as poets of antiquity like Sappho and Catullus, and English, at least as far back as Wyatt and Surrey. And, of course, the Confessionals did not invent the idea of using poetry as self-therapy.
One of the innovations of the movement was the decision to create poems that provided the readers with an unprecedented level of intimacy. Delmore Schwartz claimed that what previous “literary methods…exclude from all but the privacy of the journal or the letter is brought to the surface and exposed to direct examination” in the works of Confessional poets. Confessional poetry represents a new level in the history of sharing one’s emotional experience in verse. Sherwin notes that for Confessional poets “nothing was too personal or too private to represent explicitly” and that these poets “plumbed new depths of literary self-revelation, each increasing in the potentially devastating exposure of its authors.” Because the poems exist as methods of self-therapy, they do not keep any of the poet’s experiences at bay. Confessional poetry names names; gone are the riddles of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” or Sidney’s “Astrophel.” Instead, the two major Confessional sonnet sequences are entitled Sonnets to Chris and For Lizzie and Harriet.
The other distinguishing feature of the Confessional poem is its connection to madness. The mental illnesses of these poets has been well-documented, so much so that Thurston glibly boasts “Confessional poets are crazy. Don’t take my word for it; their biographers and critics are happy to provide supporting detail.” Poetry of madness is not unique to the twentieth-century, but the relationship that the Confessional poem has with the madness of its speaker violates norms of what approaches to madness in poetry ought to look like. Building on Plato’s idea of furor poeticus, poems like those of John Clare and Christopher Smart portrayed madness as semi-divine. But the Confessionals, madness becomes “stripped of nobility,” in Malkoff’s words, as the poet explores “extremes of emotion to discover…the mean, the petty, the embarrassing.” In this way, M.L. Rosenthal concludes, “private suffering” stands as the Confessional poem’s “ultimate referent.”
Ultimately, Thomas Travisano puts this better than I can: Because the Confessional poets struggled with mental illness, they used poetry as a way of “struggling toward survival, toward self-knowledge, and even toward tentative or contingent forms of recovery.” The Confessional poet finds herself “engaged in a process of exploring the self of reaching back…toward the elusive junctures of the traumatic past.” This “uncertain process of coming to know the traumatic past” spurs the creation of the Confessional poem.
The Slammys are back! I don’t know why the ever left, to be honest. A wrestling award show? It’s a genius idea. The only issue is that the WWE did a so-so job deciding on the proper recipients. Here’s how things would have went down if we had given out the 2020 Slammys instead.
Moment of the Year: Becky Lynch announces her pregnancy
WWE’s Pick: The Undertaker’s final farewell
This is me rolling my eyes at “the Undertaker’s final farewell,” which was a manufactured moment that didn’t go anywhere and somehow stretched out for both two weeks before and two weeks after it actually happened. This will also definitely NOT be the last time we see the Undertaker, and I feel like the WWE is insulting my intelligence by trying to sell me on that.
More than that though, the WWE just *hovers* over these things, not giving you any space to decide what your emotions are for yourself. They told us at least two weeks in advance that the Undertaker’s “final farewell” was going to be an emotional moment, gave us endless video packages to make sure we fully understood the weight of it, then slotted it as the main event of Survivor Series, and then sent two weeks after reminding us how powerful it was. There is no way to have a sincere experience under these conditions. This happens pretty much every year with at least one, if not all, of the scheduled and baldly telegraphed “Wrestlemania Moments,” although they’re rarely as forced as the “final farewell,” if for no other reason than because they CAN’T announce them in advance. Although you get the sense that they would with some of them if they could.
In contrast, Becky Lynch’s pregnancy announcement was a real human moment, and Asuka’s reaction ultimately ended up being the beginning of her face turn. I didn’t cry, but, as a new parent, I absolutely COULD have cried, and that’s pretty big given how much the WWE over-controls its content. It was also an actual surprise, which is another rarity because of the WWE’s barely concealed meddling in its own affairs. The New Day splitting up had a similar feel, but it wasn’t really a surprise, and it was diluted by the fact that Big E is still wearing his New Day gear. Becky Lynch’s announcement didn’t have that issue, mostly because I’m guessing they just told her she could go out and speak from the heart.
As far as actual wrestling goes, Drew McIntyre winning the Royal Rumble is the moment that defined how the year played out in the men’s division. Bayley turning on Sasha Banks similarly defined the women’s division.
A few miscellaneous ones. Roman Reigns returning was an awesome surprise, but we didn’t KNOW he was a heel yet. Otis winning Money in the Bank was my personal favorite moment, but the WWE decided to bury him, so it can’t really win anything.
Honorable Mentions:The New Day splits up, Drew McIntyre wins the Royal Rumble, Bayley turns on Sasha Banks
Rivalry of the Year: Bayley vs. Sasha Banks
WWE’s Pick: Edge vs. Randy Orton
I get that it’s cool that Edge came back for a couple of months, but he only had one good match, and the whole Greatest Wrestling Match Ever angle wasn’t an organic part of their feud. It was just the WWE trolling the wrestling world hoping to get more views for Backlash. When wrestling historians look back on 2020, they’re going to scour old episodes of Raw to find out how the Greatest Wrestling Match Ever angle originated, only to ask someone who was there and find out that the WWE literally just decided they were going to promote it as such, in advance, with no explanation or build-up. And then they gave Match of the Year to a totally different match (that had already happened before Backlash too).
That rivalry really wasn’t that interesting, and it didn’t last very long. And the Greatest Wrestling Match Ever angle costs it SERIOUS points. I don’t see how this award could go to anything other than Bayley/Banks. The “when will they?” question has been one of the most compelling stories in the league since….January? The payoff wasn’t as excellent as it should be given the build-up, but wow could you say that a hundred times over about that Edge/Orton feud. At the end of the day, the Bayley/Banks Hell in a Cell match was great, the feud dominated the entire women’s division (BOTH brands) for most of the year, and it was, at times, really nuanced storytelling, playing off not only their history together but cross-indexing it with whatever superstar was actively competing for Bayley’s SmackDown Championship. I think the rivalry hit its peak at Summerslam when both women wrestled Asuka in the same night, but, like I said, the climactic Hell in a Cell match rocked. My major complaint is that the rematch on SmackDown was a big letdown because Bayley’s character would never have tapped to Banks’ regular finisher in 10 seconds like that. That’s why they needed the extra bit about the chair to make it believable for the Hell in a Cell match! The ending of the rematch undid some of the good stuff the feud had accomplished, but no one else remembers it happening except for us, so it’ll be okay.
I don’t think there was a defining men’s rivalry this year. Drew McIntyre didn’t click well enough with Orton for it to be worth an honorable mention, and that would be the next most obvious pick. I liked what Roman Reigns and Jey Uso have done over the last few months, but it hasn’t been a rivalry the whole time. Still, it’s what cemented Reigns as the league’s best heel, so I’ll go with that. Also, I loved every second of Otis vs. Dolphi Ziggler, and I don’t care what you think about that.
Honorable Mentions: Roman Reigns vs. Jey Uso, Otis vs. Dolph Ziggler
Match of the Year: The Undertaker vs. AJ Styles, Boneyard Match, Wrestlemania 36
WWE’s pick: The Undertaker vs. AJ Styles, Boneyard Match, Wrestlemania 36
This has been the consensus pick from the WWE universe for most of the year, and I almost don’t want to give it to it on those grounds, especially since the WWE had the gall to bill a match right after that as the Greatest Wrestling Match Ever and then still not pick it for Match of the Year. The Boneyard match had its own documentary, which the WWE fed down our throats all year long, leading to (but sadly not culminating in) that dumb Undertaker’s “final farewell.” With this stuff in mind, I don’t want this match to win, just on principal.
But it has some major things going for it. The best post-pandemic matches have used the lack of a true audience as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. For the most part, wrestlers have proceeded as normal. Really, what other choice do they have? But for a few of the most creative minds, this singular situation has actually enhanced what they’ve been able to accomplish. Although the Boneyard match came out on the same PPV as the Wyatt/Cena “Nightmare at the Firefly Funhouse Torture Fever Dream Extravaganza,” that match remains impossible to evaluate, and we’ve mostly ignored it. If you want to talk about a singular experience, that’s one of the most singular I’ve ever seen in wrestling, but I’m still not sure if it was any good or not. I could watch it a dozen more times and not know.
The Boneyard match, however, was just solid gold from start to finish. Shot with complete abandon in the style of a horror movie, it blew past the regular boundaries of suspension of disbelief and went straight for the jugular. It was a bold move for the Undertaker’s last match, and, although the WWE is milking the fact that it was ground-breaking for all it’s worth now, I think we ought to remember that it polarized fans when it first aired. Cinematic wrestling can be a tough pill to swallow, and many rejected its inherent silliness and its undermining of the fantasy world of wrestling at first. I’m guessing many still do, but in the wake of the meh-to-terrible cinematic matches that the year gave to us after (excepting Money in the Bank, which I loved), it’s easy to look back on the Boneyard match as the golden moment that showed us the apogee of what the specific circumstances of 2020 could produce. I loved it right away, but a lot of people didn’t; many of them actively hated it. Those people have refocused their energies on worse matches, and cinematic wrestling appears to be dead, with no long-term harm done to the WWE world. In part, that’s because the Undertaker himself is (supposedly) gone, although that still leaves us with the question of how AJ Styles survived being buried alive. Oh well. It’s a great match.
Runner-Up: Randy Orton vs. The Fiend, Firefly Inferno Match, TLC
But it isn’t my favorite match. Impossibly, my Match of the Year came in what was essentially the last eligible slot, the main event of TLC, December’s PPV. Like the Boneyard match, this match (billed as a Firefly Inferno Match but for some reason only minutes before the match started) utilized the lack of crowd and the resultant ability to incorporate horror movie conventions to its advantage. However, the Firefly Inferno match has a few advantages over the Boneyard match. For one, it’s the product of an actual feud with two major and active wrestlers who have a meaningful angle with one another. For another, the horror movie conventions make more sense here because, even though the Undertaker’s character is strongly tied to horror as a genre, the version of him that participated in the match was Mark Callaway the Biker Badass, which doesn’t fit with the setting or match style. Most importantly, the Firefly Inferno match FINALLY gave the character of The Fiend the full horror movie monster treatment that he deserved, the kind of treatment that his matches with Seth Rollins and Braun Strowman were supposed to give us but never did. It was also the only successful version of the “inferno” gimmick I’ve ever seen, in part because of the excellent camerawork (which many have derided using unfair evaluative criteria that don’t take into account the donnee of the match itself) that presented the fire itself as a third participant in the match at all times and in part because it ended in a satisfactory way, with The Fiend not just catching fire but then being RKOed by Orton WHILE ACTIVELY ON FIRE. And then being SET ON FIRE AND LEFT TO BURN TO DEATH AFTER THE MATCH.
This was obviously only achievable given the lack of a live crowd, but that shouldn’t take away from the match. If anything, it shows how brilliantly Wyatt and Orton were able to use what has been a hindrance for so many other wrestlers as a way to create a classic. A lot of people are rejecting this match because they aren’t accepting it on its own terms. A wrestler actually dying in flames on camera is too much. That’s fine, I guess, although these people didn’t seem to have a problem with all the other impossible stuff The Fiend has been doing for the last year. I get it. It’s too far for some. But it’s not too far for the subplot, in which it’s actually a logical parallel conclusion to Orton burning down the Wyatt Family Compound. It’s also not too far for The Fiend character, who has done things like survive underwater and turn into a stuffed pig. I have scarcely been as excited during a wrestling match this year as I was during the Firefly Inferno Match. It exceeded every expectation (although the WWE may have purposely not set the expectations high by not billing it as an inferno match in advance, thus providing a surprise factor that the awful Rollins/Mysterio Eye vs. Eye Match didn’t have).
Still, I can’t say this enough, Randy Orton RKOed Bray Wyatt while he was on fire. If that’s not quality wrestling to you, we aren’t looking for the same things in life.
This is one of those times where my vote for an award is contextual. I think the Firefly Inferno Match is the year’s best, but if I ran the Slammys, I’d still give it to Boneyard match for a variety of outside reasons, such as respect for the Undertaker’s legacy and the desire to avoid a firestorm of controversy. If I knew that everyone else was voting for the Boneyard match, I’d happily cast my vote for Fiend/Orton. If I had the sole vote, I’d give it to Undertaker/Styles. This one of those fascinating and paradoxical evaluative situations that awards put the awarders in, which is why we love to talk about them so much.
Honorable Mentions: Roman Reigns vs. Jey Uso, Clash of Champions; Sasha Banks vs. Bayley, Hell in a Cell match, Hell in a Cell
Outside of the nexus of horror and wrestling, the superstar who has used the pandemic to his benefit the most is Roman Reigns, and it’s a landslide. Reigns didn’t invent the concept of using the relative quiet of the crowdless atmosphere to cut promos WHILE wrestling; Seth Rollins had been doing it for months before to sell his Monday Night Messiah gimmick. But, fair or not, Rollins was saddled without that interminable rivalry with the Mysterios that made for some of the year’s least compelling television, so he won’t get any love for being at the forefront of this technique. In contrast, Reigns’ heel turn is arguably the hottest thing in all of wrestling heading into 2021, and a big part of the reason why is how effectively he’s sold his character during these in-match promos.
Although most people seem to prefer his Hell in a Cell match against his cousin Jey Uso, I think their original match told a superior story and included stronger development of the Tribal Chief character, particularly with the use of the lei. It’s splitting hairs to a degree because both matches were awesome, but the presence of the triple Hell in a Cell/Uso Has to Be Reigns’ Slave If He Loses/”I Quit” stipulations actually hurt the second match a bit. I think the original, stipulation-less match allowed the focus to stay on Reigns and his sustained promo rather than on how those stipulations were going to resolve themselves. I also penalize modern day Hell in a Cell matches up front for unnecessarily using the iconic structure when a regular cage would serve just as well. I don’t think there need to be 2-3 Hell in a Cell matches every year. That’s not the fault of any of the wrestlers, of course, but it’s another factor in me deciding the first Reigns/Uso match was better, and I think it’s a fair complaint, even though both men were working with what the WWE had long ago decided was an acceptable use of the Hell in a Cell cage. Also, the “How you gonna be the head of the table when you can’t even stay on the island?” line from the Clash match was the best thing Reigns has said all year, and he’s said some great stuff.
On the women’s side, I will joylessly cast my vote for the Sasha Banks/Bayley payoff match. You can’t really vote for anything else here, as this match was the culmination of a rivalry that was in the spotlight of the women’s division for well over a year, and it was an extremely good match. However, it wasn’t AS good as I wanted it to be, and it definitely fell short of my expectations for a match that the WWE had been building to for so long. Bayley and Banks were in an impossible situation, since it would have had to be a 5 star match to live up to those expectations, but no one forced them to set those expectations up in the first place. I don’t feel like I can vote for anything other than this match because of how central it was to the women’s division, and it certainly was very good, but I didn’t leave it feeling amazed by how good it was, which is what you want out of a Match of the Year candidate. (This same problem occurred on a much, much, MUCH larger scale with the Edge vs. Randy Orton match from Backlash, which was inexplicably billed in advance as The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever, down to them putting it on the Backlash logo itself, and thus was doomed to failure before it began. It’s clearly a match worthy of an honorable mention here, but I’m snubbing it on principle). My favorite women’s match of the Banks/Asuka match from Summerslam, and I think that Asuka’s part in the Bayley/Banks rivalry was its most interesting wrinkle. But it has to be Hell in a Cell. There’s no way to get around it. I know. I tried.
Receiving Votes: Asuka vs. Bayley, Summerslam; Daniel Bryan vs. AJ Styles, Smackdown, June 12th; Kofi Kingston vs. John Morrison vs. Jimmy Uso, Triple Threat Ladder match, Wrestlemania 36; The Fiend vs. Daniel Bryan, Leather Strap match, Royal Rumble; Sami Zayn vs. Jeff Hardy vs. AJ Styles, Triple Threat Ladder match, Clash of Champions; Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins, Falls Count Anywhere match, Wrestlemania 36; Roman Reigns vs. Drew McIntyre, Survivior Series; the Men’s Royal Rumble; Money in the Bank Ladder Match
(Aside: I didn’t know I was giving out this award, so I didn’t keep close enough track on the television matches. There was probably a Street Profits match in there somewhere worth mentioning or something. I actually really liked the Alexa Bliss/Nikki Cross match from a month or so ago, but it was only like 5 minutes long. If I had to pick a Raw Match of the Year, it would be Randy Orton vs. Drew McIntyre Round 4, but I liked their first match best of them all. I wanted to pick the first Aleister Black/Buddy Murphy match, but that happened on December 30th of 2019. Oh well. I’m sorry I let you down, absolutely no one.)
Female Superstar of the Year: Asuka
WWE’s Pick: Sasha Banks
It’s tough not to give this award to Bayley, who spent most of this year (and last year) as SmackDown Women’s Champion, in addition to a decent run as Women’s Tag Team Champion. Bayley has been the dominant force in the women’s division since last year’s Clash of Champions, and statistically she’s the easy choice. So why didn’t she win the award from either us or the WWE?
Simply put, Bayley is a decent but not great heel. She’s certainly improved leaps and bounds over the last year, but she still isn’t the best in the division. Sasha Banks is a very reasonable pick, but I give the nod to Asuka. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me at the beginning of the year that Asuka would be convincing in a new role as giggling, dancing face without compromising her “deadly super-striker submission machine” gimmick, but she’s somehow managed to pull it off. She’s also at the top of her game as far as in-ring skills goes.
Honorable Mention: Sasha Banks
Male Superstar of the Year: Drew McIntyre
WWE’s Pick: Drew McIntyre
This was an easy one. Roman Reigns is probably the best male superstar in the league right now, but he’s only been back since Summerslam. Drew has carried Raw for an entire year now.
Runner-up: Roman Reigns
Tag Team of the Year: The New Day
WWE’s Pick: The Street Profits
I don’t have strong feelings about this. The Street Profits had a great year on paper and a solid year in reality. They’re good wrestlers, and they fit what the WWE is looking for, almost to a fault, especially since their matches are as formulaic as it gets. Has there even been a Street Profits match that DIDN’T involve 5 minutes of Montez Ford getting demolished followed by a hot tag to Angelo Dawkins? I think The New Day had better matches overall, and they’re a more creative team in the ring. It’s kind of unfair because they’re technically three people, and two different combinations of them held titles this year, but it also appears to be the last year for them as a trio, so I think it’s okay. The Street Profits could easily win this again next year the way things are going.
As for the women’s division, it’s the Golden Role Models (I’m never calling them that again) and no one else.
Honorable Mentions: The Street Profits, Bayley and Sasha Banks
Breakout Superstar of the Year: Drew McIntyre
WWE’s Pick: The Street Profits
This is a weird award. It appears to function under the same logic as your average Most Improved Player award, which means that it rewards someone who has gone from bad/decent to good/great within a given season. That’s fine, and I’m in support of it in practice because it gives the chance for midcarders and teams that aren’t title contenders to get something at the end of the year to make them happy. The Street Profits are a reasonable choice using that logic, especially since the WWE decided to bury Otis, who would otherwise have been a lock.
In principle, however, I dissent with the WWE’s pick. These awards are often given to the wrong person because they automatically exclude people who went from great to one of the best or even people who ascended to the top from middling status. Giannis Anttek didn’t win Most Improved Player in 2019, even though he made the biggest leap of the year in going from a regular All-Star to league MVP and arguably the East’s best overall player. Similarly, Drew started the year as a midcarder with no gimmick, and then, from Becky Lynch’s retirement on, he was basically been the show’s main face (if only by default). This calendar year was a textbook example of a midcarder breaking out and becoming a main guy. He’s the league’s biggest face now, but he wasn’t even on the card in 2019’s last PPV. But, even though that’s the very definition of a breakout year, he isn’t a midcarder, so he wasn’t even nominated. That’s lame to me.
Honorable Mentions: The Street Profits, Otis
Ring Gear of the Year: Roman Reigns
WWE’s Pick: The New Day
There are some unanswered questions with the criteria for this award. It seems like only wrestlers who changed their look in some way during the year are eligible, which makes sense, but then why did Shinsuke Nakamura get nominated? It also isn’t clear to me whether this award factors in t-shirts. It likely doesn’t, although wrestlers wear them as ring gear all the time. I wouldn’t mind having a separate award for the two, honestly, because they use different conventions and accomplish different things.
I say that because going by ring gear alone would give this award to The New Day, who continued to innovate month to month even though they already had one of the most distinctive looks in the league. But their look doesn’t translate well on a t-shirt. Roman Reigns would win T-Shirt of the Year hands down with his character-defining “Wreck Everyone and Leave” minimalist shirt. You could argue that it was that shirt, not his allegiance with Paul Heyman, that first sold him as a true heel. I toyed around with the idea of buying myself one of those shirts because it’s so cool, which is saying a lot because they’re like $30, and I’m not a big enough Reigns fan to own any of his apparel. It’s just that awesome of a shirt.
So, if they both factor in, who wins? I give it to Reigns because of his addition by subtraction decision to wrestle shirtless, which helps sell both his monster badass gimmick AND his Tribal Chief character (because of his chest tattoo) at the same time. I’d also give a shoutout to “Play and Pain” Alexa Bliss, who has fit nicely in the Firefly costume world. Since The Fiend has the league’s best ring gear (but can’t win because it’s the same as it was last year), she has to get a mention.
Honorable Mentions: The New Day, Alexa Bliss
Comeback of the Year: Edge
WWE’s Pick: Edge
Yep.
Honorable Mention: Roman Reigns, Xavier Woods, Charlotte Flair
Okay, and also, I added the following two categories:
Worst Subplot of the Year: The Street Profits vs. The Viking Raiders
Curveball! I know you thought this was going to be the 9 million month long Rollins/Mysterios feud, and that was definitely a solid contender, especially since it kept one of the league’s best wrestlers occupied with boring nonsense for the better part of the year, involved the unreasonable push of the charisma-suck that is Dominik Mysterio, and included an Eye vs. Eye Match (ouch). But you’ve forgotten about the nadir of cinematic wrestling, when these two tag teams engaged in a series of wacky competitions, culminating in a match in which they fought a bunch of ninjas and then gotten eaten by the compactor monster from Star Wars. I’m not kidding about that. It happened. At Backlash.
Runner-up: Seth Rollins vs. the Mysterios
Theme Song of the Year: The Hurt Business
Only theme songs that were new this year are eligible for this award, and it was a weak year. I’ve come around on The Hurt Business, and that’s almost exclusively because the WWE gave them this awesome song and a good ring entrance lightshow to match.
blood bank blues 