Real Graps: Luchadores, Kaijus, and Wrestling As Folk Poetry
A sweeping essay on how lucha libre and puroresu turn wrestling into national myth for Mexico and post-war Japan, then carry that myth into 1950s and 60s popular cinema through Santo, Rikidōzan, and Godzilla.
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By Alonso Aguilar
The Terror of Mechagodzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1975)
Two titans grapple with each other. As they collide, they wreck everything that stands in the way of their mythic tussle. Their antagonism is larger than life, transcending earthly concerns. Each one of them embodies something universal. The massiveness of their figures and their incredible feats of physical strength are just the manifestation of a timeless push-and-pull between opposites: Darkness and Light. Good and Evil. Old and New. Man and God. This is the realm of legend.
“The Epic of Gilgamesh” is often cited as humanity’s oldest surviving piece of literature, an ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet dating from 2100 BC. The epic tells of the titular Gilgamesh, the despotic king of Uruk, who is challenged by Enkidu, a warrior of the gods, to a test of strength to determine the future of the kingdom. They wrestle, demolishing walls and destroying thresholds until one of them finally stands tall. In Greek myth, Zeus and Kronos do battle over their bloodline rivalry while exchanging blows at Mount Olympus's peak, with the pantheon of the gods at stake. In the Sanskrit epic of the ancient Indian “Mahabharata”, Krishna inspires Bhima to overcome King Jarasandha in a 14-day Mallayuddha match, with the latter’s throne on the line. The Persian epic poem of “Shahnameh” sees the tragic figures of Rustam and Sohrab on opposing sides of the battlefield, fighting each other without knowing their familial relationship until it is too late. Even the Christian Old Testament sees Jacob wrestling a mysterious stranger until dawn, whose divinity later is called into question.
Myriads of cosmologies, religions, and folk traditions stem from vivid accounts of martial arts prowess, the moments when sprawling battlelines assemble in a circle around two grandiloquent figures duking it out barehanded, with no escape other than outlasting and countering the other. As myths show, time works differently in a wrestling match, there’s no pragmatism to be found, as each strike and bodily contortion carries the weight of storytelling; empires rising and falling, cunning betrayals, the kernels of a society hanging from the ceiling over the squared circle.
The aesthetics of the wrestling display are the essence of its grammar, a combat form where dramaturgy takes central stage. How this is represented, however, is never uniform. It molds itself from the fabric of the community that withholds it. Like a type of folk poetry, wrestling’s eternal presence lies in its lack of ownership beyond collective embrace, finding ways to amplify or complement cultural identities.
Perhaps no two national traditions are as deeply intertwined to the idea of wrestling as a popular form as those of Mexico and Japan. Neither can attest to being the forefathers of this sportive performance art, as its genealogy was already a convoluted compilation of combat and circus spectacles. Both can, however, claim to have marked a cultural milestone in how seamlessly they constructed a national pastime out of intricate fighting choreographies and the atemporal tales of fighting spirits.
In Mexico, there’s no need for an introduction. The silhouette of the masked luchador is a national emblem, a communal activity only bested in numbers by the globalised mass appeal of fútbol. Even then, lucha libre feels closer, and more reachable, as it’s almost fully autochthonous. Its phenomenon started in the dawn of post-revolutionary Mexico, in grimy, backdoor gyms and any clandestine space one could surround with ropes. After all, its mecca to this day is a neighborhood venue, Arena México, turned into a national heritage through its messianic enmascarados and how they struck a chord with the rowdy local crowds. In Japan, the post-WWII project of national reconstruction saw something in former sumo fighters turning to “catch wrestling”, an amalgamation of tradition, and the advent of something modern and unexpected. The so-called economic miracle of technocratic advance saw a release valve for the population in the colossus fights at Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall, building from the pioneering work of Rikidozan’s Japanese Wrestling Association into the seminal branching out of his students in Antonio Inoki’s New Japan Pro-Wrestling and Giant Baba’s All Japan Pro Wrestling.
By the 1950s, wrestling was a phenomenon in both countries, and it rapidly found its way into another popular art form – this time on the silver screen. The pairing of wrestling and cinema seemed a flawless match from the beginning, as both forms of expression shared a common history of traveling funfair attractions during the heyday of vaudeville. Both were shunned and neglected as lower forms of entertainment. Both were eclectic mixtures of dance, acrobatics, drama, and comedy – sometimes all at the same time. Ironically, cinema was the eventual perpetrator of the demise of the vaudeville acts, stealing both its attention and its class of performers, and projecting their images in giant theaters all around the world at the pace of 24 frames per second. Still, early wrestling’s astounding feats never really vanished from the collective unconscious, stealthily making their way back up, and trading the three-piece suits for more ornate customs and more muscular performers.
Rivaled only by the rhythmic thrust of kung fu and the mythical scope of wuxia melee fighting, wrestling positioned itself as an inherently cinematic combat sport, with move sets and techniques conceived around the idea of getting a pop out of the audience. Detached from the sacred ring enclosure, wrestling films work as believable extensions of popular genre cinemas, with their stylized stunts and acrobatics, and which at the end of the day share with it the same guiding principle: to get a primal reaction out of the spectator. Mexican and Japanese studio output from the 1950s demonstrates an understanding of this, although, just as with their own wrestling history, they took different pathways to arrive at an established national form.
In Mexico, the banner of cinema’s “Edad Dorada” (Golden Age) tends to be a contentious subject that, depending on who you ask, encompasses the artful melodramas of Emilio Fernandez and Julio Bracho, the noirish sensibility of Roberto Gavaldón, and occasionally, the more risqué and salacious approach of an Alberto Gout. As the quintessential “low brow” expression of mexicanidad, or popular Mexican identity, wresting films weren’t a part of the idealised iconographies of revolutionary enthusiasm and maleante stylishness. Lucha libre was an underbelly, something not far from clandestine cock fights and santería, a sensationalist trope to be frowned upon. Still, its hold on public interest was simply undeniable.
Low-end melodramas like Chano Urueta’s La bestia magnifica (1953) and, famously, Joselito Rodríguez’s Huracán Ramírez (1953), began to incorporate the wrestling milieu, in one form or another. Other films shared this exploratory curiosity towards las luchas, like Urueta’s own 12-part serial Los tigres del ring (1957), Tito Davinson’s La furia del ring (1961), and René Cardona’s Las lobas del ring (1965). As their titles can attest, the fact that these works showcased the wrestling ring was part of their novel appeal, positioning the sport as a taboo subject, keeping it at a distance, and treating it with the same kind of exoticism as pulp adventures did with their uncharted, foreign lands.
Most of these narratives dealt with confrontations with match-fixing, usually in favor of the rudos or “heels”, and in no instance was the legitimacy of the matches called into question, with the técnicos or “face wrestlers” themselves aligning with authorities to disarticulate nefarious schemes. This format found success, as soon enough, the psychotronic forms most cult cinema aficionados associate with the luchador films as a subgenre began to insinuate themselves: Increasingly outrageous plots, a frenetic pace, longer fighting scenes, baroque editing, et cetera. Rapidly, the backstage corridors of the arena and the ring itself were too small a setting to contain these larger-than-life urban gladiators, and the scope of their significance to the everyday person simply burst over into more transcendental affairs. As the initial narration of Los tigres del ring solemnly puts it: “This is wrestling. A noble sport, full of contrasts, that throughout the centuries, from Ancient Greece and Rome, just like many other uplifting athletic practices, has filled with glory those who have renounced evil and claimed advancement for the human race”.
In the luchador genre, there’s no concept of “kayfabe”, the idea that they present a staged and artificial performance as truthful. The fiction of these folk heroes is upheld within and beyond the two out of three falls match stipulation. Their masks never come off. Their unbreakable submissions and high-powered strikes are fully devoted to safekeeping a perception of communal well-being, even while in street clothes. The first forays beyond strictly “ring narratives” came in somewhat grounded pulp schemes of private detectives against criminal gangs, with the luchador as an ally – a masked vigilante standing for law and order, a trend started by René Cardona’s El enmascarado de plata (1954), and followed by Rafael Baledón’s La sombra vengadora series (1955-1956), which steadily moved the genre into more outrageous territory.
Fernando Méndez, of El Vampiro fame, made Ladrón de cadáveres (both 1957), perhaps the first encounter of Gótico Mexicano’s noirish and expressionist leanings with the schlockier luchador camp. In that film, former and current wrestlers join forces to stop a mad scientist digging up and reanimating the bodies of their fellow tradesmen to create a mindless army of uber-powerful henchmen. Somehow this is still somewhat linked to sci-fi verisimilitude, at least in a genre that will soon feature covens of witches, Aztec mummies, vampires, time travel, and extraterrestrial beings. The procedural scenes of private investigators following crumbs of clues and finding their way through nonsensical plotlines progressively gave more and more leeway to the exhilarating quests of their spandex-wearing sidekicks, which themselves tended to include a healthy dose of brawling action. It took a couple of years, but with Federico Curiel’s Neutrón el enmascarado negro (1962) and Benito Alazraki’s Santo contra los zombies (1961), enmascarados finally began to star in their own feature films.
No luchador managed to fill the silver screen in the same way Santo did. He had already become a cult figure in Arena México during the 1940s, and fully canonised as a superhero in comic books throughout the 1950s. The sight of his stocky physique and immortally elegant mask design were synonymous with truth and justice, shining bastions of light for a society that saw him as one of their own, the prime moral shepherd that could guide the flock towards its utmost wellbeing. After all, this was the time of a rapid and violent transition in Mexican society, from rural life and agrarian economies to the globalised ethos of the urban and industrial models, which naturally came with some rough edges: inequality, displacement, marginalization, loss of identity… What Santo and other luchador films had that no other kind of imported escapism did was a sense of belonging to the audiences. The same sweaty hunks fighting on Friday nights were now up on the big screen, spearing goons to save the world. Those movies were not much more nuanced than the spectacles found at the arenas, as the whole subgenre had been consumed by wrestling logic by the time Santo clobbered his first undead creature with a clothesline.
The masked luchador transcended banal allegiances and was now an avatar of an ideal of Mexican values, a metaphysical enforcer of Good, who existed beyond earthly desires. As a result, there is rarely a dramatic arc to be found in luchador films. Just like stumbling into a wrestling arena, context comes to the spectator intuitively. The babyface heroes always take the higher ground, respecting the noble art of wrestling and using its power for the greater good. At the same time, the heels – the antagonists – see wrestling as a means to an end, a weapon that facilitates greed, lust, and all kinds of machiavellian impulses. They are simultaneously cowardly and vicious, only striking when they have the upper hand. When Santo, Blue Demon, or Mil Máscaras confront their rival du jour, what is at stake is far more than the well-being of their own loved ones, or even the society they are devoted to protecting. They are also fighting for the integrity of the sport itself.
This being Mexico, it is no coincidence that Santo’s whole presentation is heavily indebted to Catholicism, a literal saintly patron of Lucha as an extension of Mexicanidad, or at least, the romanticised version of what it meant at the time. The menace of ghouls, monsters, and warlocks was presented first and foremost as spiritual, a corruption of the core tenet that is Faith, which takes us back to those primordial collisions of ancient myth. Rarely did a luchador have any sort of psychological characterisation beyond their might and unimpeachable moral values, with their ring gear and stage gimmick simply a rotating veneer of diversity. Their presence in popular Mexican films is innately and purely archetypical, and their personal life was fully detached and hidden from their iconic stature. Precisely because of that, these figures became an extension of national folklore, their wrestling deeds absorbing into the fabric of collective mythmaking.
In Japan, the embrace of puroresu heroes in film wasn’t quite as seamless, as the combat spectacle itself was essentially imported out of necessity. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, charitable societies tried to sponsor fundraising events to deal with the war’s aftermath and the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In those events, wrestling appeared as one of the carnivalesque attractions on offer. Local judokas and sumo wrestlers were employed to headline these novel events, but the decades-long endemic resignification that happened in Mexico couldn’t be replicated overnight in Japan. There were no neighborhood arenas hosting family nights, and no relationships with the figures that appeared in the ring, as their personas lacked the semiotic power of the over the top luchadores.
The spiritual scars of war, however, were deeply felt in puroresu. Seeing their own in the ring began to carry weight once Japanese wrestlers were put against international visitors. A 1954 match between legendary Rikidōzan and tag partner Kimura Masahiko against Canadian team the Sharpe Brothers became a milestone moment. They won. Rikidōzan in particular gained notoriety by defeating foreign wrestlers. In the eyes of the spectators, this was perhaps the only public expression of Japan standing against Westerners that was available to them, a sort of collective post-war catharsis that indulged a self-sanctioned desire. Television broadcasts wasted no time putting Rikidōzan on screen, who like Santo, was a flawless babyface who was cheered for against the cheating antics of dirty heels (mostly American). Unlike Santo, Rikidōzan had an erratic public persona, a much more layered character with problematic traits related to drinking and gambling that made tabloids headlines and, to some, put an asterisk on his standing as a role-model.
Ironically, by being a more approachable and human type of folk hero, Rikidōzan perhaps wasn’t as suited for the iconic needs of post-war Japan. He starred in dozens of lighthearted and mostly forgotten films during the 1950s, usually playing himself. While his legacy in the ring makes him one of the most relevant figures in the history of wrestling, his timeless aura didn’t cause the same shockwaves when it moved to the medium of film. As opposed to luchadores, Rikidōzan’s appearance in movies was almost self-referential, inserting him into narratives that, while acknowledging his combat background, did not fully embrace his kayfabe mythology or the logic of wrestling itself.
Transferring the squared circle milieu of wrestling to the dramaturgy of films was never a matter of finding ways to frame the action in the ring, or having the same characters and moves that riled up audiences in the arena now up on screen. Each art form deals with dynamic approximations of the artistic trompe l'oeil, eroding in distinct ways the audience’s sense of disbelief through texture, positioning of the performers, and moody suggestion. The two cultural languages developed their own particular methods, with the aforementioned vaudevillian spirit and theatrical overtness much more present in wrestling’s DNA than in most cinematic forms after the arrival of synchronized sound. Generally, a facade of realism and respectability dominated the status quo of moving images in the public sphere, with the more outlandish and sensationalist mannerisms of pulp tradition culturally relegated to the lesser domains of genre. And precisely in the broad strokes and archetypical construction of genre did wrestling and cinema find a middle ground, a return to the unrestrained register of the epic form.
Puroresu didn’t develop a cinematic subgenre in its image like lucha libre did. However, its spirit did find its way into the thrust of Japanese popular cinema in unexpected ways. In 1954, around the same time that Rikidōzan started to gain traction as a national emblem, Toho Studio put out in the world what would become one of Japan’s definitive cultural exports – Honda Ishirō’s original Gojira (1954). More a cataclysmic event than a character, Gojira, and the whole kaiju subgenre that would be built in its image, was an embodiment of the same post-war anxieties and sense of catharsis that saw the initial rise of puroresu. Gojira and those kin that would follow were originally framed as antagonist forces against mankind, negligent in their catastrophic indifference, and portrayed as fear-inducing entities whose horror came less by their imposing physical presence and more by their indecipherable, inherently alien motivations. The doom-laden tone of the first Gojira suggests the creature is an embodiment of collective trauma; here the radioactive monster served mainly symbolic and climactic purposes, taken from the same kind of well of epistemic characterization from which mythmaking draws.
In the second film, Oda Motoyoshi’s Godzilla Raids Again (Gojira no Gyakushū, 1955), we find as seminal and groundbreaking an image as the first film’s sequence of Gojira slowly emerging from the ocean: a battle of monsters, a mammoth collision in which Gojira finds an equal in Anguirus, another ancient reptile awakened by mankind’s industrial meddling. The visceral impact of seeing these two titanic figures square off opened a pandora’s box for kaiju cinema. Despite it being framed as two feral creatures in a primal duel that was beyond human comprehension, Gojira did already have the benefit of familiarity. Gojira was also a victim of nuclear holocaust, a living manifestation of societal scars. No matter how menacing in silhouette, Gojira had a melancholic aura that surrounded him, a kind of reluctant violence that was born out of necessity and survival instead of maliciousness or ill intention.
Gojira’s relationship with combat was noble, and so, as with Rikidōzan’s initial booking as a heel, a public fondness began to build organically, and audiences rallied around the creature. When faced against a foe, he became a symbol of Japan as a whole. Like Santo, Gojira became a form of national conscience standing against all kinds of schemes that put the reconstructing nation in jeopardy, from cynical corporate greed, as in Honda’s King Kong vs. Godzilla (Kingu Kongu tai Gojira, 1962) and Mothra vs. Godzilla (Mosura tai Gojira, 1964), through to colonial subversion in Invasion of Astro-Monster (Kaijū Dai-sensō, 1965) and Fukuda Jun’s Godzilla vs. Gigan (Chikyū Kōgeki Meirei Gojira tai Gaigan, 1972), and all the way to careless militarism in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (Gojira Ebira Mosura Nankai no Dai-kettō, 1966) and Terror of Mechagodzilla (Mekagojira no Gyakushū, 1975).
King Kong vs. Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1962)
Ontological opposition was resolved through increasingly stylised combat sequences, with each figure’s whole schtick understood by the audience through their superficial presentation and the specific way in which they fought. When faced with a noble adversary like King Kong, Gojira engaged in a no-holds-barred contest of primal brutality. Against the anarchic bloodthirst of Ghidora, Gojira teams up with Rodan and Mothra in a handicap, “Can they coexist?” team-up for the greater good. In another, former foe Anguirus becomes the most coordinated of tag partners, including intricate dual moves, to take out the heelish syndicate of Ghidorah and Gigan. By 1973’s tokusatsu mecha matchup Godzilla vs. Megalon (Gojira tai Megaro), Gojira even ceremoniously shakes hands with partner Jet Jaguar after taking out Gigan and Megalon. There’s a code of honor to be followed, just like when entering the rings of wrestling’s meccas.
The same kind of outlandish rogues’ gallery and kaleidoscopic plot structures became the norm for late Showa Era kaiju and ‘60s and ‘70s luchador films alike. Suits and masks had the unenviable position of having to up the ante time and again, some more effectively than others. They did so while working within the tried and tested economical storytelling of the squared circle at its purest – an almost pictorial way of expressing contraposition in the way bodies contort over each other. These tales were unequivocally a part of industrial capitalist reproduction, with their rushed outputs and erratic quality control. And yet, at least during this period of post-war existential uncertainty and national reconstruction, they seemed to transcend those characteristics and genuinely exist as popular expressions: reclaimed, repurposed, and resignified without an ounce of whatever cynical intent came from the studio structures.
These are the type of narratives in which, at times, an enthusiastic and incredulous plot description eclipses the nature of the material. In retelling, different stories are melded together or just enough hyperbole is added to make someone who heard or saw the same thing question themselves. It’s oral history at its purest. Just like the film’s inner logic and transfixing grooves, and the unfaltering charisma of the figures that inhabit them, it’s all about the affect built through repetition. It’s cheering everytime the mad scientist is suplexed by an enmascardo or booing whenever the evil astro lizard deceivingly one-ups the local embodiment of hope, despite knowing deep down that the outcome is never in question. These proper names- Santo, Blue Demon, Neutrón, Gojira, Mothra, Gamera- become value statements, not only for the kind of film, but for the sensations deeply associated with them, where the mere suggestion of something deeply familiar being framed differently, reignites the sense of wonder as if it was seeing for the same time. This is the realm of legend.
Originally published in Outskirts Nº3 in July 2025. The print issue can be ordered at our online shop.