Iron Clawing My Eyes Out

Sean Durkin's movie is #NotMyVonErichs

As a die-hard wrestling fan, I was quick to RSVP for the first L.A. screening of The Iron Claw, Sean Durkin's fictionalized biopic of the Von Erich family, the biggest names in Texas pro-wrestling maybe ever. (The Funks and the Guerreros might offer some competition, but that's it.) On the way out, an obviously enthused industry person excitedly asked me, “So, what did you think!?”

“I'm mixed,” I said.

“MIXED? How can you be mixed?”

“Because I know the real story, and among other things, they completely erased an entire brother.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know anything about that.”

Heavy embargoes were in place when I saw the movie. It's three (?) months later now, and it's out, and nearly everyone is loving it, including some of the people depicted in it. But I can't. It merely reaffirms my long-held belief that the only way to make a great pro-wrestling movie is a contemporaneous documentary. Anything else – Anything! – is subject to the natural characteristic of all involved in the show to spin, work the audience, and above all, protect the business itself. Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows is great because it was supposed to be documenting Bret Hart's career on top of WWE, and it inadvertently captured the end of it on camera. Beyond the Mat showed Mick Foley's family crying so hard at his taking a beating that he voluntarily toned down his style thereafter; the cameras also caught Jake the Snake smoking crack. But do a retrospective documentary like Lipstick and Dynamite, and you cannot expect the Fabulous Moolah to talk about her patterns of abuse, or what exactly the deal was with her and her roommate Mae Young. The Backyard, which scored an interview with Rob Van Dam to discuss its analysis of backyard wrestling, was legally forbidden to use RVD in promoting the film.

All of which is preamble to saying that Kevin Von Erich, in the WWE-produced documentary The Triumph and Tragedy of WCCW (available on Peacock), specifically refutes the notion that his father Fritz forced him and his brothers into the business, or that he was abusive. Kevin calls him a good man, on camera. The Iron Claw, which Kevin apparently liked – Zac Efron playing him is a compliment, after all – follows the exact narrative that he disavowed then. Both WWE and Durkin have separate agendas: the former to promote the product, the latter to craft a cinematic tragedy. But what about Kevin, who is, after all, a long-suffering survivor whose legacy both are capitalizing on?

I have a theory. But first, let's backtrack and make this all about me for a moment.

I first came to pro-wrestling as a fan in the '80s, when the UK's Big Daddy (think British Dusty Rhodes) had his own comic strip, and seeing him on TV was like a comic come to life. I was a little disillusioned to find out it was fixed, but I came to Hulk Hogan via The A-Team and Mr. T – young boys love muscular and strong heroes who are larger than life, or at least that has been my experience. When World Wrestling Federation shows came to Irish TV via the introduction of cable, they were like a shot of adrenaline (and other things) relative to British wrestling that still tried to make it look as realistic as boxing. Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were like superheroes, or Masters of the Universe figures come to life, and knowing it wasn't “sport” per se helped me love the over-the-top characters even more.

In Ireland, WWF was the only American wrestling. On my trips to America in the summer, I learned about the NWA, the Four Horsemen...and via wrestling magazines like Pro Wrestling Illustrated, about World Class in Texas and the Minnesota-based AWA. These territories came together to put on SuperClash III, pitting Kerry Von Erich against Jerry Lawler, and I learned all about it solely by reading. I also caught up on my history through the magazines, like Lawler's feud with Andy Kaufman, and the tragedies of Kerry and Kevin Von Erich's brothers David and Mike. Later, when I moved to the U.S. permanently, I caught up on World Class through reruns on ESPN. So when the time came for Kerry to actually join the WWF, it was like a friend making good. I mostly cheered for the bad guys, but I liked Ultimate Warrior for ending the insufferable reign of Hulk Hogan, and when Kerry arrived as the Texas Tornado, and teamed with Warrior, whom I vaguely knew he had a past with, I rooted for them both.

I was away in college when Kerry died of a self-inflicted gunshot. His was the second WWF superstar death I had cared about, after Andre the Giant not long before. I had a radio show at the time, and I played Kerry's WWF theme, segueing into Temple of the Dog's “Reach Down,” a tribute to the late grunge pioneer Andrew Wood. When Chris Cornell sang, “Carry back in my hand, to the promised land,” it sounded enough like “Kerry, back in my hand” to bring tears to my eyes. Reach down and pick the crowd up.

(Side note: I've always wanted to see a movie about the thematically linked tragedies of Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell, with Eddie Vedder as the Kevin Von Erich in that story. I'm not sure I want Sean Durkin to make it. Cameron Crowe, maybe.)

Image from the Dead Wrestler Database

This is a very long preface to my saying that Jeremy Allen White is not Kerry Von Erich to me. Not in looks, not in performance. Kerry, as a friend of mine from Dallas recently posted, was a god down there. He was their Hulk Hogan, but with sex appeal – jacked physique, square jaw, long rock-star hair with highlights. WWF head Vince McMahon never cared for his stars to have sex appeal until the steroid scandal forced him to pivot from Hogan to Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels; Fritz Von Erich may not have cared either, but his favorite son had it anyway.

In the movie, when all three brothers come to the ring, and Kerry is this short, weak-chinned, smallest of the group, it looks like a joke to anyone who was a Kerry fan. Kevin was the athletic one, the technical grappler and aerial jumper with a more streamlined body and an even more impossible square jaw. That last part aside, White and Efron maybe should have switched roles. I'm assured by fans of White that he's a great actor on The Bear, but he is not a great Kerry. Efron, wig aside, doesn't look or sound like Kevin either, but he at least embodies his humanity and regular-guy appeal, as much as anyone with a movie-star face like Efron can.

Fritz, on the other hand, is well cast, with Holt McCallany as the tough-as-nails dad who ran the promotion and made his boys stars and local heroes. What The Iron Claw, the movie, doesn't tell you, is where the iron claw, the hold, got its name. And according to the film, “Von Erich” was simply an old family name they all used as a ring name, sort of like Dolph Ziggler today. Emmm...not quite. Jack Adkisson took on the name “Fritz Von Erich” and named his hold the iron claw because his in-ring character was a literal Nazi. Perhaps Durkin felt that metaphor was too on the nose, even as the rest of his movie depicts Fritz as, more or less, the source of all toxic masculinity in wrestling.

I would like to see exactly how, in-storyline, or “kayfabe” as they say, the character Fritz Von Erich pivoted from Nazi to good ol' boy patriarch, while maintaining the Nazi-ish name and signature move. This is but one argument why the family story deserves a miniseries more than a movie, but a movie is what we have. Regardless of how it got spun, the spin worked. Fritz made World Class Championship Wrestling its own thing, and merchandised the hell out of his kids. Many great stars would get their start there, the most notable, perhaps, being the Ultimate Warrior, who was oddly dubbed the Dingo Warrior while he was there.

Fritz's youngest son, Jack Jr., died from an accidental drowning/electrocution, which undoubtedly, as the film depicts, drove him to raise his other kids to be tough and athletic. All became wrestlers, and all but Kevin met with tragedy. The first of those casualties, David, died of apparent enteritis on a tour of Japan, though there's some evidence of a possible drug overdose. After that, talk began of a Von Erich “curse,” and subsequent events only seemed to prove it more true.

The Iron Claw suggests that the actual “curse,” if there was one, was Fritz himself. Some kids respond well to being pushed; others (I raise my own hand here) collapse inward, seeing abuse where others might find tough love. Mike, who wanted to play his music, felt like a failure in his father's eyes for preferring music, and after suffering toxic shock syndrome that limited his physicality, even more so. Chris, the youngest brother whom the film erases completely, was born physically frail and simply didn't have the strength. Kerry's situation was different – he had it all as a wrestling superstar, but in real life, his marriage collapsed, his body suffered from addiction, and crushing depression put him over the edge after his WWF career ended. The movie suggests his father pressured him to win the WWF world title, something that was absolutely never going to happen against the more marketable Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan, along with Vince McMahon's bias against stars who'd made their name elsewhere.

Fritz in the movie comes across like a slave-driver, pushing all his boys, telling them they'll lose their spot if they blow even one opportunity, and insisting they put their careers before even family – at a family funeral, they are forbidden from crying. Durkin makes it look like everyone else in wrestling is more understanding than that, but frankly, his Fritz is only saying things that were true of the business as a whole. Vince McMahon, for example, is known to say “There's no such thing as sick!” and punish anyone who sneezes in his presence; he also infamously kept one show going after wrestler Owen Hart broke his neck and died on the undercard¹. Fritz may be spouting toxic masculinity, but like a drill instructor, everything he says is, ironically, to keep his boys surviving.

Now, one can obviously make the argument that the boys needed him to be a compassionate parent rather than a coach. Certainly Mike and the deleted Chris might be alive if they'd been raised to feel they could do anything, and not just the one thing. But that's on the business as much as it is on Fritz, who was 100% a product of that business. You won't see it put that way in a movie if you want the cooperation of any active wrestlers, and this movie has a few, like MJF in an Easter egg shot as the fake Von Erich cousin Lance, and Chavo Guerrero Jr as the Original Sheik. (Any reviewer that says he's playing the Iron Sheik forfeits the right to look like they know anything about wrestling.) Chavo also put the actors through their wrestling paces; as a fellow survivor of a once-great wrestling family, he's not likely to be part of anything that attacks the business as a whole.

The need to make Fritz the total villain goes so far as to change real-life events to make him look worse. In the movie, Kevin wants to sell the wrestling company to make money his family can live on; Fritz tells him he'll never be welcome in his family house again if he does that. In actuality, Fritz sold the company, against the wishes of Kevin, who bought it back and tried to revive it. Fritz was also the one to find Kerry's body; the movie has him ignoring all warning signs as Kevin, who knows what's up, finds him first. Kerry's last words were apparently, “Dad, I love you,” which does not match Durkin's account at all.

Kevin now says that Efron accurately portrays his emotional struggle against his father, having previously said his father was a good dad and not abusive. People can change, as can the way they recall things and interpret them later in life. But in making Kevin the straight-up babyface and Fritz a total shitheel, to use wrestling terminology, Durkin has himself arguably a great main event, but a less great “true story.” Indeed, the movie opens with the key phrase “Inspired by” a true story, rather than “based on.” People are going to take it as truth anyway if they don't know otherwise, especially when it ends with onscreen titles giving out actual facts, like the Von Erichs joining the WWE Hall of Fame.

Durkin positions himself as a knowledgeable fan, and certainly, Fritz's throwaway line about Kerry's former partner “Hellwig” is a laugh line only Ultimate Warrior fans will get. He's cast pretty decent lookalikes for Harley Race and the Freebirds, though they don't get much screen time. Aaron Dean Eisenberg's Ric Flair gets big laughs from a casual audience who may not know the Von Erichs, but have certainly seen Flair on reality TV, or car commercials, or whatever. Eisenberg does the mannerisms enough to be recognizable, with, I think, one flaw. Like Tom Hanks when he plays anyone famous, Eisenberg uses a Southern accent as his base. Flair is indeed billed as hailing from North Carolina, but as any fan could tell you, and Durkin should have affirmed, Flair's underlying accent is 100% Minne-SOAHHHH-da².

Still, the real Flair approves, just as the real Kevin Von Erich apparently does. I don't buy for a moment that Kevin got so mad in their match that he went off script and got disqualified for it, as the movie implies. What could have happened is Flair testing him in the ring with a couple of non-fake, hard hits; when that happens, a wrestler is expected to deliver “receipts” (an equal amount of hard hits in return), and call it even. That probably happened. And Durkin probably didn't want to spend too much time going into it.

While we're fact-checking, Kerry also didn't lose his foot the same night he won the NWA world title. Nor did he become a wrestler after the 1980 Olympics fell through; he made his ring debut two years prior. Dramatic license, sure...again, a miniseries depicting all this in order would perhaps be the better medium. But we have to review the movie at hand.

Durkin has made a drama about a traumatized family, and the damage nothing but tough love can do. What he has not made, in my mind, is a Von Erich family biopic. These are characters serving a story he wants to tell, rather than a story that serves the complicated characters as they were. More specifics might have muddied the point, but it's those little details that make that world interesting, at least to me. The year's other wrestling biopic, Cassandro, has a similar problem – the New Yorker article that inspired it is far more interesting and quirky than the oversimplified “closeted hero” arc of the movie, but it muddies the morality play.

Does that take make me a toxic fan? I feel some sense of emotional ownership, though I am owed nothing. The Von Erichs control their own narrative, and Kevin can and should approve what he likes. If this allows him to revive old family merchandise and provide for his kids, that's great. If it gives him catharsis, even better. I'd like to see his review of the movie, knowing all the while that there's probably some agreement in selling his life rights that he won't disparage those who bought them, or the business it depicts.

This, however, is my review. And these don't feel like the Von Erichs I remember.

1. Editor’s Note: This was 1999’s Over the Edge pay per view event. WWE did not release a replay video of the event until 2014 and have removed all references to the accident and death from the event. It is available for streaming on Peacock.

2. Editor’s Note: Screenwriter Joe Russo (not the Avengers Joe Russo) wrote on X-Twitter that the Ric Flair impersonation took him out of the film and shared a real Flair promo for contrast.