Wrestling with the Movies: Hulk Hogan, Superman, The Exotico and The Ram

Gael García Bernal plays Cassandro, In Cassandro

By Harlan Jacobson – August 4, 2025

DD: The death of Hulk Hogan last week prompted our film Critic, Harlan Jacobson, to remember that when he was about 10, he saw a match at the Indianapolis State Fairgrounds between wrestling headliners Haystacks Calhoun and Dick the Bruiser. He picks up the story from there, with a shout out to offbeat wrestling movies you can catch up to this month. Harlan?

HJ: Doug, I’m not entirely sure what went down at that match—besides Dick the Bruiser, who went down and under when Haystacks Calhoun at 600 pounds ended the match almost immediately with an I’m Done With This splat. Or so I remember it. Chat GPT says there is no record of those two in a match other than in Detroit in 1959, when Dick the Bruiser won. Maybe I’ve remembered it wrong, and the two were on the same card, one opening for the other, and I conflated the matches, remembering ever since that they met and Haystacks flat out squashed Dick the Bruiser, and that whatever the fix was got unfixed. For headliners, it would’ve been odd or even unheard of that it ended so abruptly, especially at the State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, which was to wrestling what the Boston Garden was to basketball. Memory, it turns out, remains a servant of desire.

I do remember that no one back then wondered about the politics on race, gender, ethnicity, or economic circumstances of either Haystacks—you always thought you were on a first name basis with him–who at 600 lbs. might have been an empath about the people he flattened, or the Bruiser, who made his living not to be. All that was asked of them was that they go out and take the slings and arrows of audiences who needed somewhere to vent about all the stuff the 1950’s managerial class was getting that they were not–after they’d all fought and won the same war. Wrestlers then knew it was show business. Flying leaps ending on someone’s neck—show business. Eye gouge and a knee to the nose — show business. And that was before people in show business started to believe their own act was enough to bypass dog catcher and run for higher office.

Haystacks Calhoun and Dick the Bruiser

Wrestling purists say Hulk Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea and raised in Florida, was no pro. He was sloppy in his holds and moves, they said. This is like saying Sponge Bob Square Pants, or Eric Cartman, the kid with the raging Id on South Park, or Beavis and Butthead don’t move fluidly the way Bambi, Dumbo or Tramp do in Disney. From outside the ring it matters: it’s not war, it’s truck stop Kabuki. Hogan parlayed his persona into a white working-class hero in Rocky III in 1982 as Thunderlips, who takes down Sylvester Stallone in a Wrestler vs Boxer match. He made a couple more forgettable films before starring in a sex tape with his buddy’s wife infelicitously publicized by Gawker that resulted in the latter’s bankruptcy and his biggest payday: a $140 million judgement in an invasion of privacy lawsuit he won and settled for $31 million. Hogan blew past the art part of wrestling into the then deeper recesses of white resentment and made wrestling a bigger business than when he entered it as an expendable 50 years ago. And died just shy of 72 last week also in Florida on the front page of the NY Times. Okay, below the fold.

My late brother in Chicago knew a Jack of All Trades named Angel, originally from Mexico, who on weekends would drive up to Minneapolis or down to Indianapolis to wrestle as a heel, a bad guy who was fodder for someone whose career had gone better as a good guy and crowd favorite. He suggested to Angel that he show up in pink tights and play it gay to give the crowd what it really feared. I don’t know if Angel ever did that, but Gael Garcia Bernal played such a character, a nowhere runt wrestler out of El Paso created by Saúl Armendariz, who becomes an “exotico” by going pink and vaults to stardom on the Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling circuit, in Cassandro, a 2023 movie co-written and directed by Roger Ross Williams. Here his female trainer, Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) tells him where his destiny is:

Cassandro by Roger Ross Williams

When Saúl finally comes out as Cassandro, an “exotico,” he does it to be truthful to himself and to support his mother. The film isn’t Rocky, isn’t about an against-all-odds victory by body slam, but a contemporary twist on the sweet backstage melodrama.

In Darren Aronovsky’s 2008 film, The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, an aging wrestler who can’t catch a break in enforced retirement and returns to the ring with a time bomb for a heart. Robert Siegel wrote The Wrestler as the nihilist’s version of Rocky: Old guy meets a cute pole dancer (Marisa Tomei), and running out of options outside the ring plays out a losing hand inside it. With Rourke in the role, it felt like it wasn’t acting.

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler by Darren Aronovsky

Ram Robinson is what has always seemed true about Rourke: no brakes. He doesn’t know whether he will win or not, only that he’s going to fly and die trying.

I can’t think of a better way to wrestle with the dog days of August than a double bill of Cassandro and The Wrestler on Amazon Prime.

In theaters still is Superman, the latest version in the modern series begun back in 1978 directed by Richard Donner, that one with Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper, Glenn Ford and Trevor Howard—all gone now. I wrote the first story about the rise of the comic book superheroes in film as the banner headline in Variety in 1977, touching on its longing for the resurrection of a simple hero to restore law ‘n order. Maybe I forgot to see and say white Superhero, but it was a lot less nuanced than Star Wars, which preceded it by 18 months as a bridge between the resistance heroics of the 1960’s and the Reagan 1980’s. By Superman 1, and what would become the DC Multiverse, the day of the anti-hero was over. Things evolve: the current Superman, made by James Gunn and a team from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, strains with all its undernourished might to make the case for aliens. Superman is the ultimate alien, albeit a white guy from another planet – coming to the aid of an embattled, vaguely Indian country under attack by corporate techno-pirate Lex Luthor, refashioned from Elon Musk.

All of the action of this Superman is taken from wrestling, however, where the pratfalls and flying leaps are moves from the old Indianapolis ring given the super-zoomies of digital technology. This Superman is played by David Corenswet with a decidedly Gen Z latte look about him, as if he not Clark had the Starbucks Rewards Card on him. If Gunn meant to write Lois Lane as sassy, he overshot into annoying territory, then had makeup give Rachel Brosnahan ironed high school girl hair to make sure the film hit that market first. And by eliminating the cat-and-mouse secret identity between Superman/Clark Kent and Lois, the pair have been transformed from just post-adolescents longing for beauty and power to behind-the-scenes officers running Superman, the Corporation, having a PG-13 affair.

Watch the trailer for Superman on IMDB »

It was Jesse “The Body” Ventura, an ex-Navy Seal who became a pro wrestling star and went on to a less than star turn as a one-term governor of Minnesota in 1999, who set the stage for show business cartoons and political disrupters – as opposed to movie stars like Ronald Reagan – to actually take the White House. The Commentariat has had a 10-year run trying to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to his first audience, people who go to Vegas, play the slots, and catch a comedian. Whatever the deeper analysis about when and why nationalism flourishes, Trump borrowed — well in his case, make that stole— from two Vegas comedians: Don Rickles and the comedy of the outrageous insult, and Rodney “I Can’t Get No Respect” Dangerfield, to craft his political persona. No president ever spoke those common languages, which the first Trump voters recognized as their own.

I had forgotten about Hulk Hogan as the third leg of the Trump stool: a made-up act, gold bling hair, whatever he said didn’t matter so long as the fix was in and he landed with his knee on some nobody’s throat. That’s where we were in Trump Round One. In Round Two, which is where Hogan left the ring, the blood might not be wrestler’s ketchup.

And I’m HJ