Why GLOW lit up my weekend
“I felt I was back in my body. I was using it for me. It doesn’t belong to Mark or Randy.” That’s Debbie Eagan aka Laura Morgan of Paradise Cove, a daytime drama, talking about how wrestling liberated her from her husband’s demands for sex and her baby’s urgent needs for milk.
If the year has so far belonged to The Handmaid’s Tale, well then I have to say you ain’t seen nothing yet. For after the Hulu hit adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel comes The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) on Netflix, a complete curve ball or should I say a Lebanese Cannonball or an Incan Giant Power Bomb (the wrestling analogies are infectious).
GLOW captures the early days of women’s wrestling and assembles a rag tag bunch of no hope actresses, stunt doubles and one daytime soap star who was written out of her show after a year spent in coma and another in a wheelchair. And does it fly! It sails through the air like one of those gorgeous ladies landing on another gorgeous lady before a frenetic live audience cheering and booing in an equal giddy measure.
Women standing up for each other, facing fear in the face, yes, yes, it all sounds very noble. Especially if the ensemble cast looks as if it has been sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. All coloured people. So there’s Beirut, played by Indian American Sunita Mani, Junkchain played by Pam Grier look alike Sydell Noelle and the sweetest faced Machu Pichhu played by Britney Young.
They’re like the rejects and outcasts of society who have nowhere to go but up. Especially Ruth Wilder played gorgeously by Alison Brie, the fast-talking serious actress down on her luck who really really needs a job, even if it is wearing a leotard and pretending to be wrestling other women. Brie is small and impish, like a little terrier who refuses to back off.
She holds the show together especially after she chances upon her wrestling alter ego, Zoya the Destroyer, who will fight the all American Liberty Belle, played by Laura Morgan (Beth Gilpin). Their match-up is the highlight of the semi-scripted wrestling show. It’s the eighties so Russia is Soviet Union, the bad guy, Ronald Reagan is alive and communism is evil.
Zoya the Destroya’s mission is to vanquish the all-American way of life of capitalism, motherhood and apple pie. Brie takes the research for the role a little too seriously and spends time drinking vodka with a very sullen and dour Russian hotel concierge (what is it about the Russians and their comeback on American TV? Fargo Season 3 anyone? I guess we can thank Donald Trump for that).
The ten part mini-series is funny, tender, serious and silly all at the same time. For the women actors playing wrestlers, the ring is freedom square. It’s where they get to wear glittery costumes, strut their stuff, invent dialogue as they go along, and be the masters of their own bodies.
Husbands can come and go (most usually go), babies can be said to be boring (yes, and it’s not considered sacrilege) and men can be called jerks. The women can fight with each other, in real and on screen. But they can also be there for each other when most needed, dry each other’s tears, celebrate birthdays, catch each other when they fall (literally and metaphorically).
All this without getting sappy is quite an achievement. And if there’s objectifying, it’s with full consent: the Cold War has never looked hotter than on Zoya the Destroya, Liberty Belle is like Grace Kelly on steroids. But it’s equal opportunity objectification—as their director, played with sardonic elegance by Marc Maron says, You don’t talk much, you don’t make mistakes, use your mouth for pleasure.’’
And that’s advice for the men. For anyone who has ever felt a misfit in a sea of shiny people, who has ever felt the misery of trying to fit in, who thinks they deserve attention, GLOW should be your poison of choice. Who is told their “ass is too fat by a man who simultaneously trying to grope it” or that she has to read the secretary’s part where she gets to interrupt the boss with ‘’a message from the wife on line two’’.
Be a Greek Goddess of rage or the woman who will eat stars and stripes for breakfast, or who will howl at the imaginary moon or will be the Britannica, the beauty and the brain who write a rap. Be whoever you want to be, just Glow.