Los Gringos Locos, or: doing anything to get heat

Last month, I rewatched Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, which was new to the Criterion Channel, for the first time since high school. When I was 16, I was deeply into cynical sci-fi dystopia, and Brazil, due to its being British and coming pre-packaged with the story of how its American distributor went to war with Gilliam over the final cut, felt revolutionary.

Brazil is, in fact, revolutionary, but upon rewatch I noted in my Letterboxd review that seeing it again “felt like re-reading a book I loved back when I hadn’t read very many books.” In other words, it wasn’t simply the amount of time that’d passed that changed my perception of the movie, but the number of films I’ve seen since and how my viewing habits have changed.

When I was 16 and renting DVDs from the local video store, I saw between 20-30 catalog movies a year. Then I went to college, got a Netflix rental account, began torrenting movies, started reading critics, and began my public life on the internet as a film critic, spending much of my free time at the three indie movie theaters Cincinnati boasted. There were years where I’d see 70-plus movies in the theaters, bolstered by an informal film group I put together to watch movies like Le Samouraï, Dolemite, and House, pulling whatever I could because I wanted to see everything.

This year, Brazil is one of 208 movies I’ve seen this year. It didn’t feel that special. How could it?

This is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that formative texts are not necessarily permanent go-tos, nor should they be. The first time I saw the double hair/double mask match between the Los Gringos Locos tandem of Eddy Guerrero and “Love Machine” Art Barr and Octagón and El Hijo del Santo was in 2005. It was the second match on the Cheating Death, Stealing Life DVD that had come out a year prior. Eddy had just passed and I had basically missed the last three years of the career of a wrestler I had loved from the moment I saw him in 1996, and WWE DVDs were really good when there was no obvious beef of ulterior motive, so I rented it. Then I bought it.

That documentary and its match selection was made with obvious love and care beyond the Seether and YJ Stinger bits, even lifting an odd AWA six man tag featuring Eddy’s older brothers and Cactus Jack out of relative obscurity for the sake of context. I guess you could call the double hair/double mask match from AAA and WCW’s co-promoted When Worlds Collide pay-per-view in WWE’s larger game of centering Guerrero’s redemption arc there, but at the time, and now, this was one of Eddy’s most critically acclaimed matches, and one of WWE’s deepest dives into the WCW tape archive to that point, so it was absolutely a draw.

I remember how thrilling that match felt, the month or two I watched everything on that DVD. It was so different from everything else, and not just because the rules of the match, and its resultant flow, were so different from anything I was accustomed to at that point. What struck me was how young Eddy seems in this match. This is due in large part to the kind of heel he was portraying here. In New Japan, he was playing generational rival to Tiger Mask. In WCW, he was so good at wrestling that his cheating was superfluous and insulting to his talent. (He was also hot, idgaf.) In WWE he was suave (and hot), a cheater, and a vengeful bastard.

All of those roles exude a kind of confidence that’s altogether different than the Eddy Guerrero and Art Barr Los Gringos Locos tandem. By comparison, they’re annoying, relying on Barr’s whiteness and Guerrero’s spurning his Mexican heritage to generate heat via racist gestures like miming swimming across the river to America.

This is one of the few instances where an overtly racist wrestling gimmick hasn’t made me cringe, probably due to the fact that it’s not an act for American audiences, who, in 1994, probably would have booed Los Gringos Locos, but only because they still regarded wrestlers emblazoned in the stars and bars of the Confederacy as potentially heroic babyfaces.

What’s crazy about watching this incredibly famous match this week is that I didn’t really come away with any new impressions of the match (which was fine — I hate the rules, which made me hate the pacing, but there’s enough cool stuff and pure emotion on the part of the audience, especially during the final fall, that I’d say it’s worth enduring its big issues and the book report style announcing of Chris Cruise and Mike Tenay) so much as I began to see the Guerrero/Barr act as the progenitor of the “say anything for heat” heel, which is one of my least favorite characters.

That’s nothing against Barr and Guerrero — they get their comeuppance, after all — but as the 1990s bleed on, you get an act like D-Generation X, who are so repugnant that Bret Hart calls them homophobic slurs to keep his heat as an otherwise stand-up Canadian heel. I haven’t seen a ton of Los Gringos Locos, but they are hopped up and intentionally offensive, like Shawn Michaels miming a fan sucking the world’s largest dick, or he and Triple H carrying signs that say “Uncle Tom 3:16” and vandalizing the black power miming Nation of Domination’s locker room with racial slurs as heels and, without Shawn as babyfaces, donning blackface to mock the same group.

I don’t know how closely anybody in the WWF was watching AAA at the time, even with their attempts at integrating AAA luchadors and minis into the usual proceedings later — between Eric Bischoff and Vince McMahon, Bischoff seemed like the bigger tape nerd — but DX feels a lot closer in kin to Los Gringos Locos than the Fabulous Freebirds. Only DX never got their comeuppance, to the point that WWE currently markets them as a feel good story of redemption for the majority of its members.

And then there’s Maxwell Jacob Friedman, who is basically that, but for the Twitter-age of “smart” fans who are mostly just simping for a perceived-Chad’s ability to get away with misogyny on a fairly large scale, to say nothing of how wide of a berth he’s been given to persecute the real life flaws and tragedies of his opponents while casting his setbacks as tragic by comparison.

I’ve never been much for Max’s schtick, but its been especially oppressive since his AEW return, when CM Punk left a power vacuum that he immediately filled. His promos are designed to be annoying and full of cheap shots, the worst of which are usually couched in shallow allusions to WWE that would be crushed if a certain executive quote tweeted one of his promos with the word “Nah.”

Like DX, I don’t think there is a real endgame for MJF, and unless something changes after this week’s meandering disaster of an exit for William Regal (MJF’s third reinvention since All Out in September), he’s going to keep pushing the giant dial that says “problematic” until the Bidding War of 2024 is between him and Tony instead of Tony and Nick.

All of this feels like something I want to bring up with Joseph, to see if he sees what I see, so I’ll stop the comparison there and say that none of this is Eddy and Art Barr’s fault. They do what they do, and the crowd wants to eat them alive for it, but first they have to endure the possibility that El Hijo del Santo and Octagón will lose their masks. The story told here is simple to the point of being eternal, but, like the movies I watched around the same time I saw this match for the first time, the shine has worn off due to my growth as a viewer, and due to the rechanneling of the vibe of its villains through less capable, more malevolent acts, then and now. Next time I reach for a pair of foreigners who found themselves bonded in Mexico, it’ll be Las Cachorras Orientales. Can’t beat the LCO, baby.

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If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Now I get to tell you that I relaunched my other Substack, Satan Laughing, with a microreview of the cake Jade Cargill celebrated her TBS Title reign with this week. Fanfyte fans rejoice.