How The New Daniel Bryan Is Elevating EVERYTHING In WWE

Elevating each person with whom he interacts, Bryan has also elevated the role of the pure heel. In WWE, backwards as it is, the closest route to the cheer is by way of the boo. The danger, usually, is that any sort of edge is cutting enough to open up a heel character to an audience otherwise disconnected from the indistinct babyfaces of WWE television. This is not the case with the New Daniel Bryan: the message, while vital, is delivered with both holier-than-thou undercurrent and genuinely apoplectic conviction. It’s not so much that Bryan is better than us; he can’t not be, because we to him are synonymous with the garbage we throw to a ruined earth. We are garbage.

So is WWE, from a critical acclaim perspective—but the New Daniel Bryan is such a genius creation that, by extension, the SmackDown brand has been elevated to a stratosphere shared by NXT and New Japan Pro Wrestling.

Watch, again, the “Daniel Bryan interview everyone is talking about”. Bryan doesn’t overbearingly deliver his message with a loathsome smugness; he positively rages against us all, and by proxy Mike Rome and Cathy Kelly. You’ll notice that his hand is always shaped with his finger pointing outwards. Where he once pointed to the sky, showing us all how far we can soar if we fight for our dreams, he now aims that finger directly at us, prodding us in our chests, making us feel self-loathing in our complicity about the dying state of the planet we inhabit.

Bryan is elevating our social conscience, but because we are bound to ignore it—how many animals did we eat this week, how many aerosols did we use to groom ourselves, how many products did we buy encased in plastic?—we project our self-loathing back on to him.

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