The Undertaker: Explained

From 2008 to WrestleMania 33 in 2017 Taker’s character took on a Clint Eastwood glint, which began as people as people referred to him as the Last Outlaw and he put old enemies like Triple H and Shawn Michaels to bed.

But shifted into this roaming gunslinger character who would appear on the horizon as WrestleMania season rolled in – like the Man With No Name from Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns.

Or Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which inspired Leone, becoming a ronin, a masterless samurai who doles out his own form of unorthodox justice adhering to a mystifying moral code.

I prefer the western comparison though because not only was Taker the toughest guy in town helping others to grow their legend through these intense standoffs.

But he was also underneath the eyeliner and the pleather: a slice of Americana, look at the Badass character which was obviously an attempt to hew closer to the real Mr. Calloway and came out as this sort of semi-authentic American man from Texas at least passed through a pop-culture prism.

Whereas the gunslinger was all about American myth making:

Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture said that “ The western has always been the American epic. It’s exciting and violent and huge.”

Maybe wrestling is that story too: it’s exciting, violent and huge. 

Richard Aquila, the author of Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture said: 

“The western is flexible, that’s why it’s alive still,” and that classic westerns “celebrated American exceptionalism”. 

So the Undertaker’s story is a western. Here is this mysterious old timer who refuses to die and rides into town on his hog to put the upstart youth in their place before disappearing off into the desert again.

And what could be more American exceptional than a 6ft 10 inch tall man who defies all the pundits by putting on some of the best matches of his career at an age when others would be retired from the game.

And then still doing matches even when the returns were diminishing to say the least, you can’t win all the comparisons.

But the myth of the old west is not the only one Taker drew on throughout his career, you all know that, I’m obviously going to talk about all the supernatural stuff.

Because he died didn’t he?

• Explained
• Laurie Blake
• The Undertaker
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