How one of the most anticipated movies of the year grapples with wrestling’s dark core

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1991 comedy “Barton Fink,“ an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter is tasked with what his studio boss thinks is the easiest job on the whole lot: to hack together a crowd-pleasing “wrestling picture” on a tight turnaround deadline.

“What do you need, a map?” sneers another executive, but the fact is that Barton is lost: he doesn’t understand the appeal of “big men … in tights!” and he never will.

Ever the sociological jokesters, the Coens use wrestling in “Barton Fink” as both punchline and metaphor, suggesting that big-headed Barton is too alienated from both his body and the taste of “the common man” he claims so presumptuously to represent to understand the visceral appeal of a carnivalesque American art form.

Maybe he’s not pretentious enough: no less a brainiac than the French philosopher Roland Barthes once wrote that “wrestling presents man’s suffering with all of the amplifications of tragic masks,” drawing a bead on the sport’s unique integration of narrative contrivance and fleshy authenticity — an equation spelled out in the title of Robert Greene’s excellent 2011 indie-wrestling documentary “Fake it So Real.“

One wonders what Barthes — or Barton Fink — would have made of a movie like “The Iron Claw,” Sean Durkin’s new fact-based melodrama about the Texas-based Von Erich family, old-school wrestling royalty whose members — beginning with two-fisted patriarch-slash-promoter Fritz and extending to four ring-rat sons — dominated Texas in the 1970s and ’80s.

The sport was their lifeblood as well as a poison in their veins; the film immerses itself in the tragic particulars of the so-called “Von Erich Curse,” which claimed the lives of multiple sibling grapplers, each of whom was both defined and defeated in some way by their family’s legacy (at least three Von Erichs officially died by suicide).

The movie goes deeper than any previous big-budget feature into the abyss of exhaustion, machismo and self-abuse that swirls at the centre of the wrestling business; only Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 hit “The Wrestler,” featuring Mickey Rourke as a damaged veteran grappler running down the clock on the sport’s margins, comes close.

What’s fascinating is why there are ultimately so few movies about the pathos of professional wrestling. It may be that it’s hard to tell a genuine underdog story about fixed fights, or maybe wrestling-themed blockbusters seemed redundant after WWE boss Vincent McMahon hijacked Hollywood formulas to boost his own product back in the 1980s.

“The Iron Claw” is set during the so-called “territorial” era in which a series of promoters cultivated regionally specific fanbases, and its story is pressurized by the knowledge that McMahon’s nationally scaled organization is on the verge of raiding and then steamrolling its competitors.

The frontman for this hostile, corporately backed takeover was one Terry Bollea — a.k.a. Hulk Hogan — a towering, bleach-blond musclehead who embodied a very specific species of American exceptionalism: the kind that punched first and asked questions later.

Hogan famously showed up in 1982’s “Rocky III” as a bombastic villain whose winking obliteration of what wrestling insiders called “kayfabe” — the refusal to “expose” the business and its scripted, predetermined outcomes — made old-timers like the Von Erichs furious.

If the pious, milk-drinking, vitamin-taking Hogan was the perfect champion for the jingoistic, Reaganite ’80s, the beer-swilling rebel “Stone Cold” Steve Austin defined the ’90s, outselling his predecessor in terms of both tickets and T-shirts while (literally) flipping the bird at the idea of kayfabe. By continually picking fights with executive-class scion McMahon — who willingly took on the character of the bad-guy boss and played it to the hilt — Austin cleaved himself to the WWE’s blue-collar audience in a way that Barton Fink could have never imagined.

Around the same time, a handsome, charismatic rookie named Dwayne Johnson struck his own payload of smarmy alchemy in the character of “The Rock,” one perfectly contoured eyebrow raised in mock skepticism of the whole spectacle. And, unlike Hogan, whose post-“Rocky” movie career was a cautionary tale — or, for that matter, Austin, who was only larger than life in the ring — Johnson stormed showbiz with greater success than any of his peers since André the Giant (whose molasses-mouthed, monosyllabic performance in “The Princess Bride” remains justly beloved).

Since Johnson’s breakthrough, a few other wrestlers have become reliable screen presences, including John Cena, who excels at the kind of goofy self-deprecation Hogan always bungled, and Dave Bautista, a full-fledged member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe who also gave one of 2023’s most memorable performances as an apocalyptic prophet in M. Knight Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin.“

Playing a man who believes it’s the end of the world as he knows it — and also that there’s a way to stop the destruction before it starts — he’s at once imposing and disarming: he gives the impression of a warrior perpetually fighting himself to a draw. His acting brings to mind another great line from “Barton Fink,” which is that audiences “don’t want to see a guy wrestling his soul.”

Actually, depending on the guy, it doesn’t sound that bad.