Randy Orton is a preternaturally gifted in-ring WWE performer, and thanks to him, the most hyped match headed into Wrestlemania 36 is between Edge and Orton--two aging guys from the Ruthless Aggression Era.
What Orton does--and what very few performers do consistently--is allow his character to inform every aspect of his performance. So many wrestlers rely on their mic work to define their allegiance. Meanwhile, their physical, non-verbal actions are decidedly neutral; you can't tell whether the person is a good guy or a bad guy by the way he or she moves. But with Orton, the performance is seamless and all-encompassing. It's in everything he does, from the way he walks to the way he hits the ropes to the way he pauses before launching into a signature move.
He has spent the majority of his career as a heel; traditionally, it's the more difficult role to play, but it's also the character type Orton is most comfortable with. He elaborated on his reasoning during a 2008 interview with the Herald Sun:
"Being a babyface sucks, unless you’re 300 pounds like Batista, or a character everybody wants to see live, like The Undertaker, or Hulk Hogan, who has charisma... It’s easy for me to go out there and be a pr*ck on the show because it’s me times 10. And even though you probably don’t like me anyway, give me five minutes, and I’ll make you not like me more. Being a heel is fun. It comes so natural[ly]."
Orton has brought these considerable, natural talents to bear on his current angle with Edge, which began on the January 27 episode of Raw. The day prior at the Royal Rumble, Edge, who entered at #21 in the men's battle royal, wrestled for the first time in nine years. His entrance and the subsequent emotional reaction of the crowd will go down as one of the greatest moments in WWE history.
It's important to note that no one, least of all Edge, expected this to happen; at the time he was diagnosed in 2009, the message was dire: one errant bump, and Edge could end up in a wheelchair. Clearly, a convergence of modern medicine and luck have defied those odds. Still, we were told about the impossibility of this return so many times, that one couldn't help but think of the warnings against it.
So when Orton came out on Raw to congratulate Edge on his return, and then proceeded to bash him about the head, first with an RKO, and then with a hellacious Con-Chair-To, it was the sort of meta storyline that WWE excels at. They're giving voice to those nagging questions in the back of many fans' minds: Is this a good idea? At what cost is he coming back? What if his opponent doesn't protect him as carefully as he should?
WWE is addressing the elephant in the room by smashing it with a folding chair, and Orton is the perfect messenger to convey that discomfort. He has a longstanding, in-storyline history with Edge as the Rated-RKO tag team. He ascended to the top of the card around the same time Edge retired. And his heelish demeanor has been menacing, self-serious, and consistent over a 15-year period.
It's difficult to think of another wrestler who could have destroyed Edge and gotten the kind of reaction that Orton did. The man knew to take his time. Horror--good horror--is about the buildup to the violence, rather than the violence itself. By standing around admiring his handiwork, Orton prolonged the feeling of helpless dread. Everyone knew exactly what was coming and was powerless to stop it.
On the March 2 episode of Raw, Orton explained his actions to Beth Phoenix, who was on the show to give us a medical update on her husband's condition. Orton said he loves Edge like a brother--that by injuring him in the short term, he was saving him from a longer career where he would cripple himself, permanently this time. He suggested that Phoenix should be thankful to him--for sending her husband back into retirement, where he could be with his wife and kids again. He then blamed Phoenix for being an "enabler" before giving her an RKO for good measure.
The best characters are those with a basis in reality. And perhaps that's why Orton is so effective in his current persona. His prior "Apex Predator" persona was an antisocial loner and psychopath who didn't trust or care for anyone. But his current character is a more intimate, creepy type of crazy that's rooted in who Orton really is: a husband and father of two who's friends with Edge off-camera. In his character's mind, his only flaw is that he "loves" his friend too much--so much that he'll try to cripple him to save him.
It's deeply unsettling, contradictory logic, but it's also a contradiction that most wrestling fans struggle to reconcile. We pay money and invest emotion in watching these people beat each other, injure each other, and do long-term damage to each other. We care about these performers, but we also encourage them to bleed and throw themselves off ladders for our entertainment. And then, we also demand they do it "safely."
Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to take a piledriver. But the safest way to take a piledriver is to not take one in the first place. The fans are mad at Orton, but he gave them what they were paying for. Are they not entertained? In accusing Phoenix of complicity, Orton interrogates the audience's complicity as well.
Edge will appear on the March 9 episode of Raw, where he will respond to Orton for the first time. It's a fascinating, precarious contradiction; he needs to reassure a jittery audience that he's healthy enough for a match at Wrestlemania, But he also needs to promise that he will beat Orton into the ground, which will expose him to the very things that injured him the last time.
It's a balancing act, for sure. But it's a balancing act that he, Orton, and every WWE Superstar have been doing, implicitly, for their entire careers. That they're doing it explicitly is what makes us uncomfortable, but we've been an accomplice to it for years.