The appeal of lucha libre

I've been thinking recently about fundamentally why I enjoy lucha so much, when I had burned out on WWF (as it was then called) in the mid-1990s, and given that I find myself struggling to branch out much beyond the boundaries of Mexico, even as lucha's influence grows. Part of that is the time requirement to follow more promotions, but even so, I've been trying to put my finger on the difference in the way that I perceive lucha from every other style, and it goes beyond the difference in language.

There is something different about the ethos of lucha libre. It specializes in the outright fantastical, leaving aside any qualms about venturing into the crazy, the cartoonish, the grotesque, and yet paradoxically in a way that seems to come naturally. Lucha is a major part of Mexican culture, and Mexico has always had a unique cultural fascination with the dead and the afterlife, such that characters like Santo, Satánico, and myriad characters based on calaveras – ornately decorated skulls – seem to fit in here.

From here, since we're already solidly in the realm of the supernatural, it's not too much of a jump to everyone's favorite undead arm-breaking ninja skeleton sadist (Penta el Zero M). And while we're dealing with the utterly surreal, let's throw in a time-traveling insane spaceman (Aerostar), any number of dragon-based characters, every mythology that you can think of, and even some characters cavalierly lifted out of cartoons and video games (any number of sets of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). It's as if lucha is a gigantic crossroads for different planes of the imagination. At least for me, the further detached from reality we become, the more immersive it is. The prevalence of the mask certainly helps with this immersion, removing even more of the human element.

Other styles of professional wrestling borrow liberally from fantasy, of course, but nowhere is it nearly as pervasive as in lucha. Mexico has been riding that bet, as it were, for a long time. I'm certainly not the first person, nor the most eloquent, to point out lucha's fascination with over-the-top, unreal characters, nor will I be the last. If that were the extent of my thoughts, I wouldn't have been writing this.

Fortunately for me, the theme of detachment from reality continues on in the action itself. The mentality of innovative luchadors has been to explore – and extend! – the boundaries of what is physically possible, relegating to the background questions of sensibility. The goal is usually to provide a spectacle of the barely feasible – be it submission holds that look extremely difficult to apply and to escape from, multiple-springboard dives that defy plausibility, or fast sequences of counters that display outright prescience of what the opponent is going to do next. At its core, lucha revels in the spectacle and the showmanship above the nominal objective of merely winning. Yes, this makes it seem like a video game at times, pushing it even further down the road of fantasy, and it's all the more endearingly breathtaking for that reason. It's a wonderful escape from reality.

Except when it's not.

You see, as much as lucha relishes in its uniquely engrossing fantasy world, it also loves to breach the fourth wall. Or at times do away with it altogether. Those insults a rudo yells at you? Real. More importantly, those crazy dives? Also very real. In fact, you better be prepared to vacate your seat. Especially in most smaller venues, which may not have any semblance of an audience barrier. That luchador who wants to grab your seat for a weapon? Also suddenly real. Your standing up for the rest of the match is also a fact, by the way. And because you had been immersed so deeply into the realm of imagination, the snap back to reality is all the more forcefully stark. It's precisely this dichotomy that exists in such a raw, unfiltered form in lucha that I find most appealing.

It may seem a bit childish to be so drawn into the fantasy part of the equation past the age of about, oh, maybe six. But at times, the distinction between reality and story is not so much a defined fourth wall as I've presented it in the above examples, but more of a delicate blur, such that you're not really sure where the boundary is.

As an example, I remember vividly the aftermath of the Atlantis vs. Último Guerrero mask match at CMLL Aniversario 81. Going into the match, I was not emotionally invested in either luchador, but the ending was an emotional experience. To this day, I'm not sure how to break down how much of that emotion came directly from the result of the match itself, given that mask losses are indeed weighty events, and how much came from the raw energy of the atmosphere: the mere sight of 17,000 people, in part crying and in part singing along with Atlantis's theme, which mentions crying; the reverberations of the sound system's bass through the old floors of Arena México; the dumbfoundedness at seeing 100- and 200-peso bills floating through the air down to the ring area. In terms of crowd energy, it felt as real as any traditional sports event. Perhaps appropriately so, again given the ingraining of lucha into Mexican culture. Lucha is still very, very real to a lot of people, especially that night in Colonia Doctores in Mexico City.

There are humans behind the characters, too, and they will occasionally turn the fourth wall into an amorphous mess of nothing in utterly surreal ways. I've written about my personal experience with Night Claw at length, and you should read that anecdote if you want to know how my brain was more or less rewired at Última Lucha 2. That's not the only example that I can cite: We went to a Lucha Libre Boom show in 2015, and Silver King Jr. mysteriously and instantly recognized us on his way to the ring, much to @RobViper's hilarious confusion; it turns out that this instance of Silver King Jr. was a friend much better known under a different gimmick.

The operative word in that last sentence, by which the fourth wall momentarily vanished, is "friend". And perhaps with that word, we can now swing the pendulum firmly back to the reality side. For as much as I can expound on the appeal of lucha itself, its most lasting and most life-changing effects for me have been to induce me to travel to many places that I would not have visited otherwise, and to introduce me to entirely new social circles – including, amazingly, my wife and her great family, as well as innumerable friends in Mexico. Of such importance are these friendships that my last trip to Mexico City was made not so much to see shows (although we did see a couple) but to make sure that my wife and I saw a bunch of friends whom we hadn't seen in a while.

I knew that I wanted to write this piece about the appeal of lucha, but I wasn't sure exactly in which direction I'd end up going, because I had many scattered thoughts to organize. I started off talking about characters in lucha matches and wandered off into talking about our friends.

It's funny how lucha works, and I don't mean a storyline work.

At least not exclusively. Not after Aniversario 81.