The Iron Claw (2023)

directed by Sean Durkin

Olivia Linnea Rogers

I cried so hard during the last 20 minutes of The Iron Claw that I had to hold my breath so my sobbing wouldn’t disturb the other cinemagoers. This, according to social media, was not an uncommon experience.

By the time I’d made it to my post-film pint I was rinsed and wringed out and frantically gathering my thoughts. Plagued, I was, by spandex visions, knee high lamé lace-up boots, short-short shorts and biceps big as boulders.

My boyfriend follows MMA, it’s the only sport that captures my attention. I can’t watch football or rugby, but MMA always engages me. Something about its simplicity feels authentic. Two bodies, one ring, whoever punches the hardest wins.

So, soaked with sweat and southern nostalgia, I had expected to enjoy The Iron Claw, but I didn’t expect to find it so stylistically generative. In the bang middle emotional climax of the film, the antagonist, so-called “Jet Flyin,’ Kiss Stealin,’ Son of a Gun” Ric Flair steps into the ring wearing a hot-pink feather-trimmed robe, cresting under his crystal blond Farrah Fawcett flick. The ludicrous, and incredible, looks kept coming, each in such a splendid fashion that I was dumbfoundedly shaking my head as if to say, “We used to be a real country.” (Although, I am not American and have never stepped foot in the country.) That fucking orange mesh shirt. Slick spandex in shiny jewel tones. Sweaty flowing locks. Smooth shaved shins. Steroid needles.

I was drawn to two things in The Iron Claw: the style, clearly, and, more incongruously, its depiction of masculinity. The Von Erich brothers are bastions of masculinity, but they are also, fundamentally, kind and sweet and emotional. I have quite a simple relationship with masculinity myself, in that I don’t really have one. So, I ended up consulting my trusted pal, and great writer on masculinity, James Baldwin, to try to understand why I felt such an affinity with the film and its representation of masculinity.

Although The Iron Claw’s fashion and themes of masculinity may seem unrelated, they are interlocked. At first glance, these hyper-feminine applications seem to act in opposition with the Von Erich brother’s hyper-masculinity. Things like: their collective notion of, and belief in, brotherhood; their careers, which are built on violence; appearance ideals based on muscle-building; and staying so strong for so long they commit suicide or die due to self-neglect. The reason the film resonated with me is exactly that it expressed and played with ideas of masculinity through style.

The costuming is time and place accurate, but also symbolic. The Von Erich brothers are encroached within a culture of, and bred on, hyper-masculinity. A masculinity that their father, Fritz, is the literal patriarch of. In his 1985 essay “Here Be Mountains,” James Baldwin writes that our parents are our first appraisers:

We all exist, after all, and crucially, in the eye of the beholder. We all react to and, to whatever extent, become what that eye sees. This judgement begins in the eyes of one’s parents.

The Iron Claw is set between the years of 1979 and the early 1990s. It’s representative of the exact culture from which Baldwin’s essay arises. The truth is that both the feminine and masculine elements of the Von Erich’s are equally performance. The brothers’ dutiful dedication to appearance confirms something they know and aren’t afraid to admit: that wrestling itself is partly a performance.

Although no longer choreographed to the extent we see displayed in The Iron Claw, professional wrestling still works to satisfy an audience—It’s scopophilic. Vicarious violence. Although it would be hard for any activity that takes place in the lowered middle of a room, surrounded by chairs angled for observation, not to be exhibitionist. Every commercial sport is a spectator sport. Wrestling feels much more so, because it is violent. And intimate. I don’t know what it’s like to do a slam-dunk. I don’t know how American football works. But I can approximate how amazing it would feel to punch someone in the face and, equally, how awful it would feel to be punched in the face.

During fight card UFC298, Mirab Dvilashili carried his opponent across the ring to “showboat,” as Joe Rogan’s commentary put it, to a front-row Mark Zuckerberg. He proceeded to chat with Zuckerberg while holding opponent Henry Cejudo in a headlock. After the fight, Dvilashili described Zuckerberg simply as his “supporter.” To state the obvious—it’s a modern colosseum. During fight card UFC278, Luke Rockhold, former Calvin Klein model, gruesomely smeared his dripping blood on opponent Paulo Costa, which one YouTube channel, Good Entertainment, poignantly set to Exile’s soft rock song “Kiss You All Over.”

I wanna kiss you all over
And over again
I wanna kiss you all over
Till the night closes in
Till the night closes in

Although these men are enacting real violence upon each other, just like we see the Von Erich brothers suffer and dole out real pain, they are also performing their violence. In the school of masculinity, to be bested physically is to be humiliated. The loser doesn’t just lose within the rules of the game, they lose in a very simple, human sense, while the watcher gets to vicariously live through the winner. Baldwin writes:

Violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after.

Admired and lusted over. I want to kiss you all over. Violence functions not just as physical force, but as humiliation. It is not erotic, but it may read erotic, as the alternate threat of masculine humiliation is homosexuality. The blood dripping on Paulo Costa is paralleled with the humiliation of being kissed. But through the act of violence, the perpetrator, Rockhold in this example, is absolved from any homosexual implication. As Baldwin says, “The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity.” One of Ric Flair’s many nicknames was Kiss Stealin’.

Baldwin describes the American ideal of masculinity to have developed and present in pairs:

This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white.

These pairs often function as dichotomies, where one realizes the standard of masculinity while the other fails, or pales in comparison. In The Iron Claw the opposing pairs are the brothers. The patriarch of the family, Fritz, says bluntly that he plays favorites with his sons. But this ranking, in his own way, is fair. It is not based on uncontrollable status like age, aura, or looks. It’s based on tenets of success. A success that is measured in masculinity. The brothers are told that they can easily ascend, and descend, in this ranking.

The mothers go-to line, which is repeated by Fritz in the final act, “You boys need to work this out between yourselves,” exemplifies how the responsibility of the dichotomy is placed on the participants of the dichotomy itself, not the manager or enactor of the dichotomy. And as dichotomies work, in the world of The Iron Claw it is not enough to be a tough guy—you must be the tough guy. The favorite. The highest ranking. The guy with the belt.

Baldwin continues, “It is virtually forbidden that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.” Now, this is the real tension of the film, imbued within Kevin, our protagonist. He has been taught to aspire to his father’s ideal of manhood, but he longs to evolve into the “real complexity of manhood.” To be a good father to his children, and a good husband to his wife.

Baldwin’s statement may seem paradoxical. Manhood is implicated within adulthood; the common phrase is to “man up” or “be a man,” but really “Being a Man” has nothing to do with being an adult, which is why these phrases can be exacted over children. They present manhood as an ideal, regardless of age, that in fact transcends age.

The gut-punching final scene of the film illustrates this paradox. Kevin cries while looking over his sons playing football. He longs for his brothers, but also the simplicity of childhood, of aspiring to an imagined manhood that can only exist before the complexities of adulthood take over. It is also why the most devastating moment of the film, for me, was when all the brothers, sans Kevin, reunite in the afterlife, and Kerry meets Jack Jr. Jack Jr. has avoided the complexities of adulthood by never growing up. He can live in the kingdom of childhood forever, juxtaposed with his older brothers who became victim to Fritz’s ideals of masculinity, leading to their early deaths.

This is all, subconsciously, present in wrestling, in The Iron Claw. “Here Be Dragons” was first printed in Playboy. These structures of thinking, and hierarchies of men, are not secrets. The Von Erichs are surrounded by structures of masculinity. Their lives are built on it.

Baldwin writes that one cannot gain love without risking humiliation:

It is virtually impossible to trust one’s human value without collaboration or corroboration of that eye—which is to say that no one can live without it. While it can keep humiliation at bay, it confirms the fact that humiliation is the central danger of one’s life. And since one cannot risk love without risking humiliation, love becomes impossible.

Masculinity operates on avoiding this humiliation which makes love possible. Instead, within the masculine ideal, a different kind of love spawns—the brotherly kind. Brotherly love can exist between brothers, but also between men who are not related, or related in non-sibling ways. Brotherly love, sibling love, is a profound and, of course, worthwhile love. But it cannot exist, in its simplest form, forever. Because childhood doesn’t last. Children grow up. They move out. One starts seeing one’s siblings twice a year. No longer every day, at the breakfast table. When Kevin says, “I used to be a brother,” imbued in that statement he is saying, “I used to be a child.” The film ends with Kevin choosing to lay down his father’s ideals of masculinity, the kingdom of childhood, and evolve into “the complexity of manhood” so that he can let love—love for his wife, love for his children—into his life. And don’t we all know exactly how painful it can be, to let down our old systems of belief, and to let love into our lives?

This is precisely why the film resonated with me so heavily. The death of childhood. The fleeting images of lives we cannot return to. The age-old lesson that to find happiness in the present, one has to let the past be the past. There is absolution in moving on. You just have to keep going. You have to.

And the mullets were incredible, of course.

Olivia Linnea Rogers is a Norwegian-British fiction and non-fiction writer. And poet if you’re lucky. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Queen Mary University of London. Her work has been featured, or is forthcoming with, Subtexts, Nowhere Girl Collective, Haloscope and Cringe Magazine. She can be found listening to folk music, watching horror films and wearing bellbottoms.