RIP Windham Rotunda, 1987-2023
Discover more from Carl Beijer
I don’t write often about professional wrestling these days, but I would like to say a word or two about Windham Rotunda, better known as Bray Wyatt, who died yesterday at 36.
Rotunda was a daring, unique talent in an industry that is often notorious for cramming unique talents into homogenized corporate molds. If the WWE had had its way with him that likely would have been his fate as well. At the start of his career, the company cast him as one of a several mostly generic thugs in a faction called The Nexus:
If you’re unfamiliar with Rotunda, he’s the guy with closely trimmed facial hair wearing black boots, kneepads, tights, and a shirt with a yellow logo on it. The husky one in the camo hat. This was his whole gimmick: he was literally named Husky Harris.
He was also, by far, the most successful man in this picture despite having the body of your middle aged uncle who played football in high school and then let himself go. I don’t want to turn this post into a career retrospective, so suffice to say the gimmick didn’t work; Windham was soon demoted back to the company’s developmental roster, and that’s where the miracle happened. Somehow, he convinced the WWE to let him play a character he invented himself: Bray Wyatt.
A few things to notice about Rotunda’s performance here. First, this is a wild departure from the badass jock archetype that Husky Harris fell into, and that had dominated the WWE since the era of Stone Cold Steve Austin. Wyatt was bizarre and outlandish, an almost cartoonish Cajun cult leader; Rotunda’s genius was that he made this character work despite the cynical sensibilities of modern audiences.
This clip also showcases the reason why, though it’s much more subtle. In the middle of Wyatt’s speech, you may have noticed that the audience starts chanting “what” during every pause. This is another legacy of the Austin era, and demonstrates the exact kind of cynicism modern wrestlers deal with: the crowd is deliberately trying to disrupt his performance, to shake him out of character and maybe even lose his lines. It’s a tactic that even throws even the most polished wrestlers.
But Rotunda doesn’t just survive his audience — he completely routes them. And he does it through sheer charisma and commitment to his character. About a minute and a half in you can see him move from a preacher’s rhythm into a rambling cadence that gives him little time to think about his lines but denies the crowd a chance to break in; at two-and-a-half minutes in he pauses and they try to “what” him again, but he immediately laughs right over them. At this point the crowd seems to realize that they aren’t going to be able to roll him, and they start cheering; and by the end, he has them singing.
It has become a cliche among wrestling journalists to praise Rotunda for his creative and innovative storytelling and his endless capacity for reinvention: first as a Cajun cult leader, then as a demonic children’s show host, then as a horror movie monster, then, in his latest incarnation, as himself — but a man haunted by who he used to be. The praise is well-deserved, but Rotunda’s true genius, I think, was to take modern sophisticated audiences and get them to suspend their disbelief despite these fantastic, larger than life gimmicks. Every year his ambition grew, and every year he seemed to be testing himself: “Can I get them to buy into this?” It’s a testament to his audacity and imagination that even now, I can’t help but wonder if this is all part of another one of Windham Rotunda’s stories — and if any day now, he’ll make his shocking return.