But that’s just it: This a documentary about a current WWE wrestler, produced by WWE. That means you’ll be hearing a lot of the bizarre, cult-like lingo developed by Vince McMahon to describe the product he’s been selling for forty-plus years. For example, both the narration and multiple interview subjects, from Cody on down, use the sanitized word-salad phrase “sports entertainment” in place of “professional wrestling”; it’s a McMahon innovation you will never hear a human being not on WWE’s payroll say, unless they’re doing a bit.

Similarly, the adversity Cody faced during his initial WWE stint — bad gimmicks, bad ideas, writers and executives who refused to listen to him — is treated like some kind of natural phenomenon rather than the result of actual decisions made by people with names and addresses. The result is an onslaught of passive verbs that would make reporters about “police-involved shootings” blush, in which Cody is repeatedly fucked over by figures unknown.

But it’s a documentary’s job to make the unknown known, right? Like, when Cody says his demand to revert to “Cody Rhodes” from “Stardust” after his dad’s death “was met very much poorly” — met very much poorly by whom? Elsewhere, Brandy describes the situation that kept her husband down thusly: “Somebody said to somebody, ‘Not you.’” Who said it? To whom did they say it? Who are the somebodies? If “they” wouldn’t let Cody do what he wanted, who are “they”?

The answer, of course, is Vince McMahon himself, the man who for decade after decade has overseen WWE’s creative decisions on the most macro and micro of levels alike. The documentary treats this man like Zeus, a figure of might and legend who occasionally descends from his Stamford Olympus to bestow his blessings upon the worthy. Cody gets there eventually, but the years in which McMahon — who it’s widely believed bore a grudge against his one-time rival businessman Dusty Rhodes to the man’s dying day, even during the periods during which Dusty worked for WWE — kept him down are glossed over.

This is to say nothing of the well-documented series of incidents in which McMahon engaged in illicit sexual conduct with his own employees, then paid millions in hush money to cover it up. Or about how he “retired” when this news broke, then forced his way back into the company to oversee its sale to perhaps the only potential buyer willing to leave him in charge, Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor — which also owns UFC, run by the similarly politically reactionary and personally abusive Dana White. Or about his Succession-like power plays against his daughter Stephanie and her husband, former wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque, both of whom hold (or held, in Stephanie’s case) executive positions within the company. 

McMahon’s conduct (and of his years-long track record of creative bankruptcy; whatever juice the guy once had, it dried up 20 years ago) got me to swear off watching WWE shows unless and until he’s gone for good. Stand-up guy though he might be, the same cannot be said of Cody. All of this is worth exploring in a way an official WWE documentary can and would never do, yet it’s exactly this stuff that would make the doc worthwhile.  

I had a grand old time writing about American Nightmare: Becoming Cody Rhodes and the ways it both does and doesn’t escape WWE’s weird gravitational field for Decider.