[COLUMN] The Iron Claw Makes an Argument for Wrestling as Quintessentially American Sport | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The Iron Claw is an impressive movie for any number of reasons. However, it’s particularly interesting because it exists in a relatively small canon of hefty dramatic works about professional wrestling. While boxing has been the subject of any number of prestige biopics, from Raging Bull to Ali to The Fighter to Southpaw, wrestling has more often been the fodder of feel-good puff pieces like Fighting with My Family or goofy action films like No Holds Barred.

Before The Iron Claw, the prestige wrestling movie canon began and ended with Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, a well-regarded film that earned a total of two Oscar nominations for actors Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. It’s easy to understand why Hollywood might find it easier to construct sports movies around boxing than wrestling. Unfairly, wrestling perhaps lacks the prestige of boxing and is frequently dismissed as “fake”, blurring the boundaries between sports and entertainment.

The Iron Claw tackles this idea directly. On her first date with Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron), his future wife Pam (Lily James) asks him directly, “Ain’t it all just fake?” Kevin bristles at the question, and the film does too. The audience has seen the damage that these stunts can do to the human body. “Fake?” Kevin replies. “There’s nothing fake about what we do.” Pam accepts the point and adjusts her question. “All right. Not fake… Prearranged? Written?” This exchange is the key to The Iron Claw.

Director Sean Durkin makes a bold choice to open the film with an invocation of Raging Bull. The opening sequence is shot in black-and-white. Ominous orchestral music, quite unlike the rest of the film’s 1980s score, rises on the soundtrack. There is something impressionistic about these first few minutes. There’s a wide shot of an arena that is strangely empty. The ring itself looks like a film set, something from a German Expressionist horror film.

The camera fades to an intense close-up of patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), the veins popping in his neck and the sweat dripping down his face. He looks like a movie monster. Fritz has his opponent on the mat. He’s literally kicking the vanquished foe while he’s down, as the referee (Mike Dell) tries to pull him off. It’s the most stylized sequence in the entire film, a statement of intent. It’s also a direct allusion to a film widely regarded as one of the best sports movies ever made.

After the fight, Fritz joins his wife Doris (Maura Tierney) and their kids outside. “It sure sounded like everyone was angry at you,” Doris remarks of her experience of the bout from the carpark. “That’s the idea,” Fritz explains. He walks the family over to their mobile home, parked outside the arena. Doris is shocked to find that Fritz has upgraded their car to a Cadillac during the show. “What are you thinking?” she demands. “We can’t afford this.”

Fritz explains his decision. “I was talking to the promoter, and he said if I wanna be a star, I need to act like a star,” he tells his wife. “So, he told me to rent a Cadillac.” This juxtaposition, between the brutality that Fritz demonstrates inside the ring and the aspiration he feels outside of it, is central to The Iron Claw and its understanding of professional wrestling as a uniquely American pastime. To Durkin, wrestling is a sport about believing in something so much that it hurts.

Wrestling is not fake, but it is pretend. The film does a decent job of dramatizing the mechanics that shape a match. Before his professional debut, David Von Erich (Harris Dickinson) huddles with his brother Kevin and their opponents to agree on a rough order of play for the evening’s match. When they agree Kevin will end the match with the Iron Claw, Fritz’s signature move, Gino (Ryan Nemeth) jokes, “All right, just don’t fuck with my hair too much, okay?”

The Iron Claw tells the story of the Von Erich family, a dynasty of professional wrestlers beset by a series of horrific tragedies during the 1980s. These misfortunes came to be known as “the Curse of the Von Erichs”, and – if anything – The Iron Claw downplays the family’s suffering. Of course, curses aren’t real. They are just an ordering principle, a way to make sense of events that exist outside an individual’s control. In that way, they’re not unlike the narrative of a wrestling match.

To a certain extent, Fritz is the curse of the Von Erichs. Throughout the film, Fritz is presented as a brutal and abusive taskmaster, an athlete who never lived up to his potential who has chosen to live vicariously through his children. Fritz is committed to the idea of realizing the family’s success through his sons, no matter what it takes. As that opening sequence establishes, Fritz is brutal and unrelenting. He ranks his sons in order of preference, and makes them compete for his affection.

Fritz’s children believed in their father, and everything they did was to fulfill his dream. “Pop tried to protect us with wrestling,” Kevin explains in his opening voiceover monologue. “He said if we were the toughest, the strongest, the most successful, nothing could ever hurt us. I believed him. We all did. We loved our father. And we loved wrestling.” The Iron Claw is essentially the story of four brothers trying so hard to believe in their father’s love that they might conjure it into reality.

In the world of The Iron Claw, everything is a performance. In particular, and appropriately enough in the context of a movie about professional wrestling, is the idea of masculinity. In particular, Fritz instills a sense of emotional stoicism in his sons. After David dies, he warns the surviving sons, “I don’t wanna see any tears.” Later, when Kevin reaches out to Fritz with concerns about his brother Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), Fritz replies, “You boys need to work it out among yourselves.”

For Fritz, the only measure of a man’s worth is success in the ring. Touting his World Heavyweight Champion belt, veteran wrestler Harley Race (Kevin Anton) boasts, “This belt is the only measure of who is the man.” The boys conceal their suffering from Fritz to perform to his expectations. David conceals his ruptured intestine, leading to his death. After losing his leg, Kerry forces himself back into the ring. “I see how much pain you’re in,” Kevin tells his brother. “Can’t just hide this, Kerry.”

To acknowledge any pain is to become less of a man. When Kevin’s back is hurt after Race throws him onto a concrete floor, Fritz is less than sympathetic. “You gotta take it and get up.” This rhetoric is repeated by later World Heavyweight Champion Ric Flair (Aaron Dean Eisenberg), who declares in a television interview, “The bottom line is, if you’re a man, you take the ups and downs.  If you’re a real man, you’ll never go down. You’ll just stay up.” Of course, that’s just make-believe.

The Iron Claw is ultimately the story of four young men trapped in the grip of their father’s expectations. Pam recognizes this, telling Kevin as much when his brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is brain-damaged during surgery for a wound he received in the ring. “If you want to blame someone, you blame your father, but it is not your fault,” Pam assures her husband. “There is no getting through to that man.” Indeed, Kevin’s journey is breaking free of his father.

There’s a lot of discourse around the idea of “toxic masculinity.” As much as the term has become a clumsy rhetorical cliché, Fritz embodies that idea. He models a version of masculinity that actively hurts his own sons. However, the beauty of The Iron Claw is that it proposes an alternative. Kevin is still a masculine ideal, but he is tender, vulnerable, sincere and caring. At the end of the movie, he breaks down crying, understanding that his father was wrong. Men can and should express emotion. It’s a choice that makes the movie so compelling and so ultimately heartwarming despite the grim subject matter.

However, there is a deeper idea stirring within The Iron Claw. This is a movie about performance in general, and the performance of masculinity is just one facet of that central theme. Preparing for Mike’s funeral, Doris breaks down because she’ll be wearing the same dress that she wore to David’s burial. “Everyone will recognize it,” she tells Pam. “I can’t. I… I need a… a new dress.” Even in this moment of mourning, Doris is putting on a performance, presenting herself to the world.

The Iron Claw understands that professional wrestling isn’t just about the performance of masculinity. It’s also about the performance of American identity. A giant American flag hangs on the back wall of the Sportatorium. The first time that the film shows Kevin wrestling, he’s fighting the Sheik (Chavo Guerrero, Jr.), an allusion to the nationalist and political archetypes that populated the sport at the time. The Von Erichs repeatedly stir up Texan pride to an enthusiastic audience.

Underpinning all of this is capitalism. Wrestling is not just a hybrid of sport and entertainment. It is a business. Kevin explains the mechanics of professional wrestling to Pam, “Look, you move up in any industry based on your performances, right? So a belt – like my Texas title – is really just a job promotion. The promoters keep you moving up if you do well.” The increased commercialization and consolidation of the sport during the 1980s plays out in the background of the film.

As much as Kevin desperately wants his father’s love, success is also measured in financial terms. Flair boasts that he’s “got the biggest house, on the biggest hill on the biggest side of town. That’s why this sports coat costs $800.” He continues, “That’s why I’ve got on lizard shoes and a Rolex watch, and I’ve got a limousine out there, a mile-long with 25 women in it just dying for me to go, ‘Whoo!’” Of course, this is just performance. In reality, Flair is staying in the Holiday Inn.

It recalls Steinback’s observation that America is a nation of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Like Fritz renting the Cadillac, Flair assumes that he can materialize success simply by performing some imitation of it. Given Flair’s boast about a Rolex watch, it feels somewhat pointed that several early shots of Fritz training his children draw attention to the expensive timepiece on his own wrist. When Kevin takes over the business, he’s shocked to discover that his father stole from the company.

“I’ve been through the books,” Kevin complains. “It doesn’t add up. I didn’t make nearly what it says I did.” Realizing what his son is getting at, Fritz cuts him off. “You think living here was a free ride?” he replies. Underneath all that grandstanding about masculinity and strength, Fritz’s relationship to his children was purely economic. It was a way for Fritz to afford his family home, his fancy watches, and even that Cadillac. Everything else was pretend, set dressing and performance.

It's interesting that The Iron Claw comes out so close to The Curse, another recent A24 production about how the idea of a supernatural curse allows individuals to avoid confronting the underlying realities. For all that boxing might seem like a more prestigious and more honest activity, there is perhaps a deeper truth to be found in unpacking wrestling. As David Shoemaker wrote of the sport, “Wrestling is storytelling. It’s mythmaking, every Monday night, spread out over months and years.”

With The Iron Claw, Durkin makes an argument for professional wrestling, a sport that rarely gets the respect that it deserves, as perhaps the most quintessential American pastime. It’s a sport about taking all of that pain and brutality, and constructing an elaborate mythology around it that one can succeed through perseverance, even if the ending has been determined well in advance. It’s about taking it and getting up to continue the act. It’s the American Dream, rendered vividly on canvas.