💥 How wrestling laid the blueprint for superhero movies

T.G.I.F.

Oct 21 2022

What defines an age of history? Sometimes it is an invention or an election; other times it is a person. For the 1990s-2000s, that person could be The Rock. Dwayne Johnson, then acting under his wrestling moniker, dominated the hearts and minds of fans of the sport and beyond. Along with fellow wrestlers Dave Bautista and John Cena, their artistry was in the ability to perform a never-ending scene, a play carried on in the ring and outside of it. Known as “kayfabe,” (it's pronounced “hey, babe,”) this is the iron-clad performance of deeply planned events as if they are completely spontaneous and absolutely not staged. Ultimately, Johnson, Cena, Bautista, and other professional wrestlers engage in an elaborate alternative world building; a multiverse variant on the truth, if you will.

In our top story today, we explore the distinct success of the wrestler-to-superhero transformation, arguing that it is perhaps these actors’ mastery of their alternate realities that is what is most compelling about their performance and triumph.

We need heroes, after all. Keep scrolling to read this and more mind-bending stories from Inverse. Enjoy the weekend!

What's New

SUPERHERO ISSUE

Entertainment

How Wrestling Laid The Blueprint For Superhero Movies

Before the superhero movie, before the professional wrestling match, there was the circus. The traveling circuses of the 1800s rolled around America showing off people with unusual talents (or, at least, the ability to fake such talents), and so-called strongmen were often the biggest draw. Crowds would gather to watch burly, now-forgotten icons like William Bankier, Eugen Sandow, and Arthur Saxon attempt to lift seemingly unliftable objects — massive barbells, tree trunks, pallets of bricks — while wearing flashy, often skin-tight costumes. The carnival barker would hype up each act of might as though the strongman were more than human. And, when you saw him lift his quarry above his head like it was made of tissue paper, you might even believe he was something supernatural.

The inventors of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, partly based the visuals of that ur-superhero on circus strongmen. Pro wrestling began as a circus act featuring strongmen, then evolved into a billion-dollar industry. The superhero and wrestling ecosystems had divergent evolutions for more than a century but have recently started to converge again, most obviously by sharing talent.

This weekend, Dwayne Johnson, the blockbuster action star once known in the wrestling ring as The Rock, will realize the passion project he’s been trying to bring to life for more than a decade: the Warner Bros. superhero flick Black Adam. Johnson is an executive producer of the film, and he plays the title character, a (somewhat) honorable supervillain from DC Comics lore. He’ll go up against a ragtag band of do-gooders, but odds are decent that he’ll see the light by the film’s end and become yet another superhero (or at least a super-antihero).

Meanwhile, in another universe, Dave Bautista, who once dominated the ring as the wrestling character Batista, is set to reprise his role as Drax the Destroyer in Marvel’s next Guardians of the Galaxy picture. John Cena has been playing the lead in HBO Max’s dark comedy Peacemaker, based on a Charlton Comics superhero that DC bought.

PLAGUE PROOF

Mind and Body

How the Black Death changed our immune systems

The fourteenth century was a rough time to be alive. Not so much because of the time itself but because of what was happening: the Black Death. Arguably the deadliest pandemic in human history, the Black Death descended from an ancient bubonic plague that ravaged Rome in the mid-6th century and lingered throughout the centuries by mutating into a form more virulent to humans.

The plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which istransmitted by infected fleas to rats. The second pandemic of the plague exacted a heavy toll, killing an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the world’s population. It also left an indelible mark on its survivors and their descendants, it turns out — an evolutionary struggle encoded deep within our DNA.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a group of researchers has found that the Black Death may have shaped the human immune system, specifically by favoring (inadvertently, of course) survivors with robust genes that protected against the vicious germ. Over 600 years later, these Black Death-proof immune genes still circulate within us and may have repercussions today in the 21st century.

Look!

Science

The Pillars of Creation, revisited

Twenty-seven years after the Hubble Space Telescope captured one of its most iconic images, the James Webb Space Telescope went back for a fresh look.

This week, NASA released a new JWST snapshot of the Pillars of Creation, glowing with more detail than ever before. While the billowing stakes of cosmic dust are easy to recognize, JWST fills in a lot of starry details that are invisible in Hubble’s original image.

Located in the Eagle Nebula, this region of sky is a massive star nursery. Some stars are still forming within those towers, while others are beginning to emerge from their dusty cocoons.

As the young stars grow, they sometimes shoot out bursts of matter. You can see these bursts at the edges of the pillars, marked by wavy lines.

Take a closer look

Review

Gear

Amazon's Fire 8 HD+ has one feature that every tablet should have

The reasons for buying an Amazon tablet are as specific as those tablets are limited.

You can’t buy a Fire 8 HD+ and expect to get the same experience you would on an iPad, and at this point, Amazon seems completely comfortable with that.

What’s interesting then, is that even though the Fire 8 HD+ is still the perfect vehicle for delivering the various benefits of an Amazon Prime membership, it's also ever so slightly inching its way to being a proper tablet.

In comparison to the new entry-level Fire 7 tablet from earlier this year, the Fire 8 HD+ doesn’t do that much more, but it feels better, and the subtle improvements Amazon’s made to the insides of the tablet make more of a difference than I expected.

Read our review

Review

Gaming

Gotham Knights will make you wish you were playing the Arkham games

After unleashing a flurry of punches and kicks upon the giant assassin twice my size, I was almost out of breath from mashing the square button so many times.

But somehow, his health bar had barely moved.

I kept going, clobbered through a heavy shield, activated my Beatdown ability, and struck him several times with my baton. An eternity later, my foe finally went down. Excruciating and unsatisfying, this fight against the Gladiator Talon is the most memorable moment in Gotham Knights for all the wrong reasons.

WB Games Montréal’s Gotham Knights is an open-world action RPG in which you play as Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood, with the ability to switch between them freely. Bruce Wayne is dead, so without Batman around, it’s up to this cast of heroes to protect Gotham City. While the game’s premise is intriguing and the overall presentation breathtaking, it’s ruined by combat so bland and repetitive that you'll wish this were a TV show you could just watch instead.

Meanwhile...

Inside the space start-up that plans to fling satellites to orbit

Understand the world through 8 images captured this week

Google's new solution for green bubbles? Make iPhone messages worse

‘Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’ delivers the series' most impressive open world yet

Today in history: The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in New York City October 21, 1959.

Song of the day: "Smell what The Rock is cooking"

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💥 How wrestling laid the blueprint for superhero movies

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💥 The writers behind the most iconic deaths in superhero history reveal their secrets

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