Theoretical Frontiers in Friday the 13th Fandom

The Friday the 13th movies get categorized as slashers, but the series can also be called a mystery. Due to accelerated filmmaking schedules and little concern for continuity between sequels, the Friday the 13th universe poses countless questions, many of which remain unanswered. How could Pamela Voorhees singlehandedly carry out an elaborate, one-night murder spree? Who (or what) comes out of the water at the end of the first movie? If it is Jason, how could he appear as a youth, given that his supposed death occurred two decades before? Did Jason witness his mother’s decapitation? More broadly, where does Jason get his power from and how does he recuperate so quickly? Why does Jason’s appearance change so drastically from movie to movie? These are just a few of the queries stimulating fan speculation. While fans have conjectured a host of answers to specific questions, no singular explanatory theory has emerged. Just as physicists work toward a Theory of Everything to provide an all-encompassing framework for the material universe, we Friday the 13th fanatics have clamored for a unified field theory to better understand our beloved franchise. This article aims to review the major advances in Friday the 13th fan theories and then analyze them so that we can move toward a Fan Theory of Everything.

The first hypothesis we have to treat is the Jason is a Deadite Theory, which explains Jason’s indefatigable capacity to recover from injury and death. It’s good to get this out of the way early. Attributed to Reddit user BARGOBLEN, this theory focuses upon references made in Jason Goes to Hell to the Necronomicon, a flesh-bound grimoire that plays a pivotal role in the Evil Dead films. In the Evil Dead franchise, the act of reading from the Necronomicon summons Kandarian demons that can possess human beings and turn them into Deadites. Jason Goes to Hell reveals that Pamela Voorhees experimented with black magic, utilizing the Necronomicon to resurrect her son. Through this lens, then, the original Friday the 13th film depicts not just murders but rather ritual killings at Camp Crystal Lake. The Deadite theory posits that Pamela’s beheading marked the final sacrifice needed to bring back Jason, prompting his return from the lake in the film’s denouement. The demonic possession also clarifies why Jason became so strong in subsequent films. By Part VI, when Jason gets resurrected via lightning bolt at the cemetery, he has become a full-blown Deadite under a Kandarian demon’s control. While Jason Goes to Hell director Adam Marcus has confirmed that he believes his movie references the very same Necronomicon from Evil Dead, he cannot speak for the Paramount-made Friday the 13th movies that preceded his contribution to the franchise. Many fans have rejected the retroactive Evil Dead-inflected reading of Jason, due in large part to debates about whether or not Jason Goes to Hell can be considered canon (an issue to which we will return).

The Friday the 13th fanbase has been more amenable to what can be thought of as The Accomplice Theory. This theory, sketched out in varied forms by Movie Timelines and your present author, among others, attempts to refine our understanding of how an elderly, diminutive woman such as Pamela Voorhees could perform the intricate and physically intensive murders in the original film. It’s doubtful Mrs. Voorhees could throw a young woman’s corpse through a window or force an arrow through a mattress and into Kevin Bacon’s neck. Accordingly, the Accomplice Theory postulates that Pamela had help from none other than Jason. After all, we can clearly see a man’s hands in several of the kill scenes (which belonged to special effects wizard Tom Savini or his assistant, Taso Stavrakis), giving every indication that the killer is going to be revealed as a male. We can then extrapolate to conclude that this man, Jason, is responsible for the corpse-tossing and the neck-stabbing, among other Herculean feats. This means that mother and son are working in cahoots, with Pamela obviously well-aware that her son survived the alleged drowning.

In my reading, this could suggest that Jason’s incident in the water in the 1950s may not have been especially serious. Nonetheless, the incident racked Pamela with guilt, and she lashed out by blaming the counselors for everything, unable to consider her own culpability in the ordeal. Conceivably, the near-death of her son in proximity to the sort of sex-play that saddled Pamela with a child that she appeared to be supporting on her own brought on a psychotic break. Going forward from the alleged drowning, it could easily have been that Jason was effectively dead to Pamela, and so she let him go off on his own. After the camp closed, she may have communed with Jason after he’d taken up residence in the woods, potentially even bringing along food and other necessities when her guilt surged. And so, when Camp Crystal Lake reopened, Pamela and Jason collaborated to cut a swath through the staff. But when Alice started fighting back and Jason realized his mother’s plan was falling apart, he retreated. After witnessing his mother’s death, Jason was now the one racked with guilt. His ambiguous feelings about his mother in their life together and his ambivalent reaction to the circumstances of her death could now be sublimated into killing interlopers on Crystal Lake territory.

Other fan theories have built upon the idea that Pamela couldn’t possibly be acting alone, including the Multiple Killers Theory. Now, of course, we know there are multiple killers in the Friday the 13th series, namely Pamela, Jason, and Part V’s Roy Burns. But this theory, spelled out by Rob Stewart of 411Mania, holds that “Jason” is literally multiple people, none of whom are the boy who drowned in Camp Crystal Lake. Stewart notes that in the first movie, when Annie hitches a ride to the camp, she does all the talking while the driver of the jeep, her eventual killer, stays silent. Given the movie’s ending, we assume that the driver must be Pamela Voorhees. But Stewart points out that, when we meet Pamela in the final reel, she’s extremely voluble and can’t stop talking about her fiendish plans. The person in the jeep, Stewart deduces, is an assistant who’s helping Pamela with the murders. The theory becomes more compelling vis-à-vis Part II, where we never get confirmation that the killer is Jason. Rather, Stewart contends that the counselors simply presume the killer to be Jason because they’ve been “wound up” by the campfire story told by their supervisor Paul early in the movie. Thus, Jason with the bag on his head could very well be, in Stewart’s estimation, Pamela’s jeep-driving accomplice from the original film. Having failed to save Pamela five years prior, this redheaded, overall-wearing man has been living in the woods with her severed head ever since. Boldly, Stewart goes on to argue that this individual is most certainly not the antagonist of Parts III and IV, as that killer has a more muscular body type and is bald. In Part III, when Chris has her flashback to being attacked by a mystery man in the woods two years before (whom she later recognizes as the killer), the attacker is also bald. Stewart deems it unlikely that a feral woodsman would change hairstyles so drastically and so often.

Doubling down on his theory, Stewart goes so far as to suggest that we meet yet another “Jason” in Part VI, given that the gravedigger in that film is a bumbling alcoholic who could have mixed up the body of the real Jason with that of someone else. This resurrected corpse stays on as the killer for the rest of the Friday the 13th movies. Stewart then discusses Rennie’s flashback in Part VIII, when she recalls being thrown into Crystal Lake by Dr. McCulloch. Under the surface, she encounters a spectral child, and Stewart interprets this as an affirmation that Jason never left the lake in spirit or body. This incident, then, marks the first legitimate encounter with Jason throughout the series, in Stewart’s estimation. And how does Stewart fit Jason Goes to Hell into his framework? He avers that it’s a movie about Jason that has been made within the preexisting Friday the 13th universe.

The Elias Voorhees Theory also builds on the notion of an accomplice, labelling Pamela’s helpmate as Jason’s father. Elias Voorhees is first referenced in Jason Goes to Hell, and commentator Dustin Whitlock of Movieweb proposes that the man’s hands we see in the original Friday the 13th belong to him and not Jason. Elias undertakes another killing spree that spans Parts II through IV, continuing to exact the revenge that he and Pamela took in the first movie. This helps account for how the killer manages to find sole survivor Alice, navigate a route to her house (presumably by car), and kill her inconspicuously at the beginning of Part II. Whitlock submits that simple genetics explain the facial resemblance between Elias and Jason, with the asymmetrical features and hydrocephaly having been passed from father to son. While Pamela may have loved Elias regardless of his physiognomy, Whitlock acknowledges a darker possibility—that Jason may have been conceived by way of a sexual assault. Indeed, the attack described in Chris’s flashback in Part III carries strong overtones of attempted sexual violence, implying that Elias was a predator with what Whitlock calls a “pattern of behavior.”

Alternatively, Whitlock hypothesizes that Elias’s resemblance to Jason could also be accounted for by mask-making, with the father creating elaborate foam-latex disguises in order to perpetuate the myth of his son’s survival or return from the dead. The drastic alteration in the killer’s appearance between Part II and III, then, is little more than Elias changing masks. Whitlock points out that mask-making marks a recurrent theme in the series, what with Tommy Jarvis’s savant-like ability to create masks proving integral to the plot of Part IV. Whitlock also relies on the masking sub-theory to make sense of the more symmetrical look of “Jason”/Elias in Parts VI through VIII. Over the passage of time, he conjectures, the deceased killer’s flesh and the mask’s foam-latex would have decomposed in the grave, revealing Elia’s original symmetrical skull structure. Whatever the case, Whitlock insightfully encapsulates his Elias Voorhees Theory (and the Multiple Killers Theory) when he muses that “The plot of Part 5 is the plot of the franchise—that people accept the ghost story of Jason without questioning it.” The killer, though, was never Jason.

One of the most promising Friday the 13th fan theories has come to us from the pen of Chris Snellgrove of Giant Freakin Robot in late 2024. The Chaos Magic Theory, as I’m labelling it here, once again deals in the dark arts, though it moves out of the realm of Deadite Theory. Snellgrove postulates that Pamela Voorhees dabbled in black magic before the events of the first movie in hopes of resurrecting her son. This required sacrifices, and Pamela’s murder spree in the first film marked an attempt to complete the spell. However, Alice decapitated Pamela before she could kill her final victim and finish the rite. At this juncture, Snellgrove posits, the dark energies within Pamela’s body seeped into Crystal Lake and the surrounding area. Thus, Crystal Lake truly had a “Death Curse,” as Crazy Ralph would phrase it in the first two movies. The “chaotic magic,” as Snellgrove calls it, proceeded to bring Jason back not as a boy but as a monstrous man and rendered him indestructible in the process, enabling his subsequent resurrections. Snellgrove suggests that the lingering magic in the area could solve the mystery of why the surviving women in the first three films all experienced “dream visions” of being attacked by someone who was supposedly dead (youthful Jason, adult Jason, and Pamela Voorhees, respectively). Snellgrove also speculates that the restorative powers of the spell could be responsible for preserving Tina Shepherd’s father beneath Crystal Lake in Part VII even after he’d drowned due to prepubescent Tina’s violent telekinetic reaction to his spousal abuse. In that spirit, Snellgrove advances the notion that Tina’s psychic powers may have been enhanced by the echoes of Pamela Voorhees’ curse in the Crystal Lake area.

We are now in a position to evaluate the various circulating fan theories, selecting the most useful parts in order to move toward a Theory of Everything in Friday the 13th. First off, I think it’s undeniable that Pamela Voorhees had a male accomplice in the first movie, and that he was Jason. Alternatively, as per Whitlock, I suppose the participation of Elias could also make sense in Part I, III, or even II. Elias strikes me as a far more reasonable choice for the killer than a bunch of random psychopathic backwoodsmen operating in the same territory, as per Stewart’s rather outlandish theory. Still, Stewart’s assertion that Jason Goes to Hell is a fictional portrayal of Jason within the Friday the 13th universe stands as one of the most cogent explanations for the film’s place in the lore. And because Jason Goes to Hell is not, by that token (and by the judgement of many fans), in the Friday the 13th continuity, the fact that Elias only enters the franchise in a movie far afield from the canon makes it highly implausible that he’d be the killer in earlier installments.

Whatever the case, I think we can say for certain that the union between Elias and Pamela was not a happy or healthy one, having resulted from some kind of inauspicious or coercive liaison—either a shotgun wedding, paternal dereliction, or outright assault. Killer or not, Elias was probably a predator.

Finally, looking at Snellgrove’s work, I think we can accept that there is a cursed or magical quality to Crystal Lake. This does not necessarily involve black magic rituals or Necronomicon nonsense, but more likely connects to some kind of malevolence in the water and the surrounding land that predated the camp. Crystal Lake would seem to contain some sort of enchantment that awakens or augments specific capacities in particular people, both for bad and for good. This explains Jason’s ability to regenerate and resurrect, as well as Tina Shepherd’s enhanced psychic powers. More broadly, this would shed some light on why Crystal Lake seems to attract malefic events.

Thus, we can summarize our Fan Theory of Everything for Friday the 13th as follows: Pamela accomplished the Friday the 13th murders with help from her semi-unwanted son Jason, product of a toxic relationship with Elias. Five years later, Jason went on a multiday killing spree at Crystal Lake, rapidly recuperating thanks to the enchanted waters until he was definitively killed by Tommy Jarvis. The legend of Jason lived on, allowing Roy Burns to convince locals he was Jason. Then Tommy Jarvis resurrected Jason’s remains and, with help from some leftover Crystal Lake magic, Jason became an undead, unstoppable killing machine. He received some resistance from Tina Shepherd and her deceased father, each of whom were turbocharged by Crystal Lake magic, and he ultimately wound up in Manhattan. In the ensuing years, a movie came out called Jason Goes to Hell dramatizing the myth and exploits of Jason Voorhees. Oh, and then Jason was cryogenically frozen and reconstituted in outer space in the future.

Image Credit: Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Alterations were made by adding the Hubble Telescope Imagery as the backdrop.

(This article originally appeared on Medium on June 13, 2025)

Bibliography/Further Reading

Brooks, Nicholas. “A Friday the 13th Theory Ties Jason Voorhees’ Powers to The Evil Dead.” CBR. URL: https://www.cbr.com/friday-13th-theory-jason-voorhees-powers-evil-dead/

Snellgrove, Chris. “Killer New Friday the 13th Theory Explains Everything In The Franchise.” Giant Freakin Robot. URL: Killer New Friday the 13th Theory Explains Everything In The Franchise | GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT

Stewart, Rob. “Friday The 13th And The Multiple Jasons Theory.” 411Mania. URL: Friday The 13th And The Multiple Jasons Theory | 411MANIA

Whitlock, Dustin. “Friday the 13th: Why Jason Voorhees May Actually Not be the Killer in the Slasher Horror Franchise.” Movieweb. URL: Friday the 13th: Why Jason Voorhees May Actually Not be the Killer in the Slasher Horror Franchise

Jason Voorhees Saved My Social Life

As a child in the 80s and 90s, I had a clear-cut vision of what adulthood was. Adults read big books written by towering intellects. They watched sophisticated cinema made by auteurs. They discussed complex ideas and social issues over dinner and drinks, drifting between politics, history, and literature. They looked for intellectual challenges and sought self-betterment, a profusion of novel experiences and imaginings perpetually broadening their frame of reference. Adult potential was boundless.

Then I became an adult, and I must confess I was a little disappointed.

In social situations, I met people in their thirties who read young adult fiction, if they read at all. Their shelves were filled with Ninja Turtles and GI Joe action figures, not books. Their notion of “cinema” consisted entirely of superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Transformers. George Lucas and Michael Bay were their “auteurs.”

Video games were all-important, too, with Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, and Street Fighter factoring heavily into dinner-party discussions. Pokémon came up frequently in several friend groups, and not just those composed of self-identifying geeks.

When groups ruminated at gatherings, they did so over plot points of the Star Wars sequel trilogy (The Rise of Skywalker prompted particularly passionate debate). The most burning social issue I ever heard discussed involved supposedly “woke” casting decisions in the latest iterations of the aforementioned intellectual properties. With respect to new experiences, my friends and acquaintances were content with perpetual reboots, reimaginings, and requels of their childhood favorites.

In short, everyone had franchises they fancied and licensed characters they loved. In any given friend group, these IPs became nothing less than totemic for most members. One could always find the “Ninja Turtles Guy” or the “Hermione Granger Gal”; the “Street Fighter Dude” and the “Pokémon Moll” were never too far away. They could all talk breathlessly about their beloved franchise, ever able to share new thoughts and speculations about prospective reboots while lamenting previous ones.

Many people my age couldn’t be held down to one license. Instead, they had multiple totems to which they gave their love and devotion. Their discussions drifted seamlessly between Avengers and Star Wars and Turtles and Final Fantasy XIV. The references disoriented me, and I felt like I was drowning. Virtually everyone identified with a diverse array of licenses. The associated imagery decorated their phones, clothing, and key rings. Licensed baubles and tchotchkes dangled from numerous parts of their person. They bought stuffies of Mario and Sonic and Pikachu for their offspring and for themselves. For Halloween, they sent their children as the cutest IPs and dressed themselves and their spouses as complementary characters.

I, meanwhile, had IP envy.

It seemed like everyone had their licensed-character familiars except for me. In social situations, conversation would make its inevitable turn to these cherished franchises, and I could only stammer. I’d seen Star Wars and thought it was okay, but I couldn’t discourse on it. I’d played with Ninja Turtles as a child but had forgotten the principal characters’ names. I enjoyed a few rounds of Street Fighter on occasion but had few cogitations on the technical nuances of the gameplay system. I was wholly uninterested in pursuing Pokémon in public as a grown man, and that made me feel like a weirdo.

In the meantime, I watched these fans of manifold licenses advance in their careers, buy houses, and beget children, becoming productive members of society. Yet I was on the outside looking in. I was still trying to make a life by reading big books about non-licensed, original characters and thinking through social issues unrelated to the casting of Hollywood blockbusters. I had nothing tangible to show for it. All told, I was lost in a naive and outmoded vision of adulthood from my childhood.

At the nethermost depths of my gloom, I made a desperate attempt to turn my gaze backward, seeking to dredge up my childhood. Consigned to twisted bedding, I tossed and turned from noon to night, never sleeping, trying to scry into the murky waters of my ancient past. My childhood, I found, had sunk too far away and was fathomless, so I could not pull it back to the surface.

I could, however, see faint traces of my adolescence in the middle depths, and in subsequent reminiscences upon my pubescence, hope reemerged. The fog of past decades parted, and an image rose up from below.

Shooting from the deep came a hockey mask.

Jason Voorhees had come to save me.

As a teenager, I loved the Friday the 13th films. Their promise of violence and brief nudity had consistently captivated my attention. The lakeside setting made for an instant vacation. The teenage party atmosphere spoke to a more promising social configuration (certainly more entertaining than the adult milieu). Rewatching these films as a grown-up, I realized I had not only uncovered an aquifer of nostalgia, but I had found what I needed most: a totemic license of my own.

From that point on, social gatherings became coming-out parties for me, in that I’d advertise myself as a Friday the 13th fan. In my Friday the 13th hoodie, hat, and custom-made sweatpants, I was loud and proud. Going forward, all the Ninja Turtle Guys and Pokémon Molls would know that I was the Friday the 13th Guru. In mixed company, I would reverently take my turn confessing my fanaticism. With that breathlessness of the true fan, I would speculate about potential sequels and castigate entries of the series I found off-putting (e.g. Parts 8 and X). I would fluently spew all manner of Friday the 13th minutiae (or “lore”, as we fans so loftily refer to it), ranging from kill counts in each entry to trivia about filming locations and production schedules. Then I would yield back and make way for the next person so that they could testify to their own personal license-bound experiences. This is socialization.

Truth be told, few of my friends and acquaintances had ever screened a Friday the 13th movie. If they had, it was probably watched ironically. Understandably, the Friday the 13th films struck them as rather quaint and unsophisticated compared to the billion-dollar box office bonanzas for which they live. But now I at least had something they could begin to understand — an obsession with a recognizable IP — and so I was no longer a social zero. I could now float confidently on the periphery of their friend-groups. Jason was my life-raft.

It didn’t matter that most of my acquaintances were too preoccupied with Marvel movies and Star Wars sequelae to hear what I was saying. Nor did it matter that their attention would quickly shift when I gave unsolicited descriptions of Tom Savini’s gore effects in Parts I and IV. I could nevertheless sense that the fellow Millennials I met at parties were starting to respect me, because I too had a license that I loved and lived for. Surely, they could perceive that I was as dedicated to Friday the 13th and Jason as they were to Pokémon and Pikachu or Marvel and Deadpool or any number of other prime licenses, and they could appreciate that. We were all in this overdetermined IP morass together, after all. Finally, they could see me as a true adult in their Millennial mold.

After all that, I still read big books, but now it’s the stately Crystal Lake Memories volume, supplemented by the hard-to-find novelizations of the early Friday the 13th movies. I even bought up Berkley Books’ line of young adult Friday the 13th novels from the 90s. I have cleared my bookshelves of Updike and Sartre to make room for Jason figurines from each episode in their original boxes, not to mention a trio of his Funko Pops (hockey-masked, baghead, and 8-Bit versions). Altogether, they form a household shrine, giving praise to Jason’s salvational powers in the social realm.

Now, fellow middle-class Millennials can come to my place and feel at ease knowing that they are in the home of one of their own. Soon, I may be able to host my own parties, with my guests resting assured they will be swaddled in the comfortable clutter of overpriced licensed memorabilia. Though they may not watch the Friday the 13th movies, they will be soothed by the presence of the IP, even if it is a less familiar one. While the hockey-masked killer Jason may be intimidating to those uninitiated to the franchise, he’s a lot less threatening than the possibility of encountering new and original ideas.

The Author, ready for a night on the town

So if you find yourself adrift in the Millennial experience of pop culture, and you are still trying to take consolation in philosophy, literature, and cinema, here is my advice: rediscover a franchise from your childhood and go all in. Put down the books and the art films and pick up every product bearing your beloved childhood license. And once you’ve done that, find another franchise, and then another, always diving deeper and deeper therein. Each one will anchor you more securely in the zeitgeist. Soon enough, you’ll be fully submerged in nostalgia for your childhood, making you a full-fledged Millennial adult.

[This article originally appeared on Medium.com.]

Alex Israel: Art as Lorem Ipsum

"gettyimages", by J.A. Gosham,
depicting Alex Israel.

Alex Israel’s exhibition “Fins” just recently ended on July 28 at the Gagosian gallery in Rome. “Fins” features an installation of sleek plastic surfboard fins presented as sculptures. The fin imagery evokes a rather rudimentary cross-lingual pun on the French “end” referencing the “Finish Fetish” that typified 1960s Southern California artwork in which artists (among them Judy Chicago) used industrial processes and materials such as fiberglass and resin to create glossy finishes for their abstract art. 

As an added bonus, Isreal has garnished the installation with text written by ChatGPT and other large-language model programs. ChatGPT even wrote his press release. Herein, Isreal (or rather ChatGPT) commented that “A.I. has become a medium in and of itself. By using A.I. to generate the press release, I’m commenting on the intersection between technology, art, and media.”

Seriously, this is all it takes to make it in art? All I need is some scrounged-up surfboard pieces and some text from ChatGPT? I really don’t want to sound like a philistine here, as I much prefer conceptual art to Marvel movies, but I’m not especially impressed by what Israel brings to the table. I can handle the surfboard fins, but the utilization of ChatGPT as if it’s some profound commentary isn’t very inspiring. The cheap pun on “fin” offends my sensibilities almost as much as the use of AI for generating the text. All told, Israel seems like the fine art equivalent of Lorem Ipsum. Regardless, his work graces the permanent collections of MOMA and the Guggenheim. Regardless, “Fins” caught plenty of buzz and brought in a sophisticated, well-dressed audience.

I don’t think it’s unfair to call Israel’s artistic ability into question. He’s also dipped his toe into filmmaking. His first and only film, 2017’s SPF-18, centres upon a host of surfing teenagers, one of whom is debating between art school and a life of surfing. Apparently, these effete existential debates didn’t resonate with the viewing masses, as the film boasts a 3.3 rating on IMDB. One IMDB reviewer writes “I'm pretty sure this movie was written by a 13 year old girl with rich parents who could bank roll [sic] the entire thing.” This comment is partly in error, as SPF-18's co-writers, one of whom is Israel, are both grown men. However, the reviewer tenders a tenable hypothesis about how this picture got made—namely, that its creator came from wealth. Packed with scenic locations, a gorgeous cast, and celebrity cameos from Pamela Anderson and Keanu Reeves, SPF-18 took resources, no matter how bad it is. Those same resources also powered “Fins.” The secret, then, to Israel’s success and international appeal in the art world would appear to be assets, along with a dose of beauty and expensive clothing, rather than talent of any sort.

If I'm being honest, I'm willing to bet I've got more artistry in my little finger than Alex Israel has in his entire trim, fit body. In the time it takes Alex Israel to get out of bed and prepare avocado toast, I've probably had more legitimately creative thoughts than he has in a year.  But because I'm flabby, shabbily dressed, and don't have rich parents, most or all of my works will never be seen by more than a few semi-interested friends in my hometown on the plains. If I was better dressed and moneyed, all I'd have to do is hoard surfboard fins and hit up ChatGPT, and I'd be an internationally successful artist. No wonder so many people in the backwater where I live dismiss art (not that the studio-wrought, IP-driven drivel they prefer in movies is much better). It really goes to show how much “fine art” and “aesthetic sensibilities” are intertwined with wealth and a vision of upper-classness.

But I don’t think art necessarily takes money for everyone, or at least not a ton of money. Give me $5000 dollars—hell, $1000 dollars—and I could make a film that gets at least a 4 on IMDB. Fin.

In Defense of Tubi

Tubi or not Tubi? That is not the question, as that is the kind of referential, pun-driven “wit” that has ruined comedy in the internet age. Regardless of this article's inane intro, some readers might still be wondering if the Tubi TV app is worth downloading. The answer is yes—if you like to watch trash with ads intermixed.

That is not an attempt at acerbic wit or irony. Rather, I am earnestly recommending Tubi to people who like movies and TV that are so bad they are good . . . or just bad.

Perhaps most notably, Tubi boasts an excellent lineup of bad horror movies. Here you can find classics such as The Hills Have Eyes and the Rob Zombie movies, most notably House of 1000 Corpses. There is no shortage of obscure slashers, such as Slaughter High, Final Exam, House on Sorority Row, The Mutilator, and Don't Go in the Woods. There's also a cornucopia of exploitation horror—that is, the real nasty and relentless grindhouse fare such as Nightmare (a.k.a. Nightmare in a Damaged Brain) and the seminal gore films of Herschell Gordon Lewis such as 2000 Maniacs. And while Tubi features hundreds of crappy independent horror films made in the last few years, including unwatchable fare like Don’t F*** in the Woods, there are also some gems. Check out, for instance, Terrifier and tell me that Art the Clown isn't more terrifying than Pennywise and Captain Spaulding combined. All told, Tubi is a crash-course in horror and exploitation.

Tubi must also be praised for its junky science-fiction. Crappy schlock classics such as The Astro Zombies, War Beneath the Earth, and Battle of the Planets can all be found here, among hundreds of others.

For years, many of the aforementioned films were nigh impossible to find on Blu-Ray or even DVD, and so a person like me would find themselves searching YouTube for bootlegs. Sometimes people like me even had to resort to downloading illegally from seedy sites like Rarelust. But not anymore, now that I've found Tubi.

For the non-horror and sci-fi fan, there's a lot of other compelling material on Tubi that could never go mainstream. Take, for instance, Pro Gay Wrestling, a non-heteronormative wrestling federation. I love the idea and a lot of the storylines—most notably the heel wrestler who swears he's not gay—but a lot of the quality of the wrestling itself is subpar. There's also a healthy serving of obscure cartoons from yesteryear. Any JEM fans among our readers? If so, you've got a date with nostalgia on Tubi.

Tubi lets you have all of this for free, but there is, of course, an ostensible catch. Tubi has ads interlarded within the programming, and this has been enough to make consumers look askance at this service. After all, it's just classier to pay for Netflix, Paramount, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus and not watch ads, right? Ads are so prole. Or are they? There are only three or four commercial breaks in any given Tubi movie, far fewer than on conventional television. Moreover, these commercials don't run as long as on television, meaning they're relatively unobtrusive. This may not eliminate the nightmare kaleidoscope of a typical commercial break completely, but it can at least mitigate the horror by making it less kaleidoscopic. That said, it's still a bit jarring to be watching Art the Clown bisect a buxom naked blonde woman with a bandsaw and then have Tubi cut to a commercial for Barbie-licensed Little People.

In many ways, Tubi is upstream from the paid services. In fact, Tubi seems to be capable of setting new trends. Just recently, Netflix has offered cheaper subscription tiers that feature some advertising. While Netflix might have “better” programming (“better” meaning overcooked dialogue and labyrinthine, recursive plots, in the view of the average middle-class viewer), Tubi still has a lock on cost-free streaming. Given the sad state of the economy and its attendant skyrocketing inflation, I think we're going to need more services like Tubi. Tubi is the food bank of entertainment.

(This image is property of 20th Century Fox, while the Tubi corporate logo is property of Tubi, Inc.
These properties are used here strictly for purposes of parody.)

As a schlock and horror fan, I give Tubi my highest recommendation. Tubi is the place to watch old horror and exploitation and sci-fi. You can call me a shill, but does someone really qualify for that moniker when no money has been exchanged? Sure, Tubi is trashy and quintessentially lower-middle class. It's not a prestige subscription by any stretch. And “Tubi and chill” just doesn't sound nearly as sexy. But it's free, and all it will cost you is time. So while it might be embarrassing to introduce Tubi to your friends, what with their sleek, voluptuous Netflix and Disney Plus subscriptions, just remember—they're the ones paying for services rendered.

"59 Chrystie Street" Revisited

The Beastie Boys' 1989 LP Paul's Boutique is arguably the finest hip-hop album ever made. A triumph of psychedelic sampling, it transcends hip-hop and can even be considered among the greatest records of all-time, regardless of genre. But Paul's Boutique is not perfect. It possesses one incontestable blemish within its final track, the 9-part song suite “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” namely the first ninth, “59 Chrystie Street.” This segment is titled for the location of the prime Manhattan rehearsal space the Beastie Boys used during their early years, but its lyrical content describes something much more provocative. The track's aggressive, jejune sexuality would seem to hearken back to the frat-boyish aesthetic of the Beastie Boys' first album, Licensed to Ill, delving even lower than that album managed to stoop with some readily apparent misogyny (and perhaps even homophobia and transphobia). But if we allow our critical gaze to venture deeper into the cut, looking past its juvenile lyrics and into the very texture of its samples, we can argue that “59 Chrystie Street” is, if not as virtuosic as the rest of the album, at least defensible. It may even expound a vision of male sexuality that's rather profound.

Before diving deeper, it is necessary to detail the surface-level defects of “59 Chrystie Street.” We see these on full display in the first half of its lyrical content (the words in parentheses marking accompanying vocal samples), where the speaker or speakers manoeuvre a paramour into their home and/or rehearsal space:

There's a girl over there (aw yeah)

With long brown hair (aw yeah)

I took her to the place

I threw the mattress in her face

So already we ostensibly have a potential sexual partner being physically assaulted with a mattress (or, alternatively, being thrown down onto a mattress), possibly by all three members of the Beastie Boys, as they all participate in the rapping. The gang rap continues with its second half, a description of the mounting sexual encounter:

Took off her shirt (fresh)

Took off her bra

Took off her pants (fresh)

You know what I saw (wick, wick, whack)

The beat abruptly gives way to Adam Horovitz's braying laughter, and, with that, “59 Chrystie Street” concludes. What did the speaker (or speakers) see? In his 2006 analysis of Paul's Boutique for the 33 1/3 chapbook series, Dan LeRoy hypothesizes that the song “suggests a 'Lola'-esque encounter with a groupie.” By this reading, the speaker(s) saw a penis. If this is indeed the case, the track's narrative would seem to betoken transphobia. However, the bare-bone lyrics offer little confirmation as to the presence of the penis. We are left to project our own discriminations onto the big reveal, marking the track as cynically vague. Since all we have are feminine pronouns, your present author deems it just as tenable to assert that the speaker saw a vagina (as we'll see below). All we can say for sure is that “59 Chrystie Street” is an obtuse, nursery-rhyme rap about rough and impersonal sexuality. If the sexual conquest in question is a woman, then we can say the track is more than a bit misogynous, if not homo- or transphobic as per Dan LeRoy's penis reading.

And yet, peeling back the layers, more can be said about “59 Chrystie Street.” Certainly, a song is not just its lyrics. And the musical bedrock of “59 Chrystie Street”, like every track on Paul's Boutique, consists of a complexly woven skein of samples. What makes the segment salvageable, or perhaps something even better, is its thunderous drum sample. The track's unrelenting drums are those of a tribe in Burundi. The recording was originally made in 1967 by anthropologists Michel Vuylsteke and Charles Duvelle during their fieldwork in East Africa. Together, twenty-five male drummers can be heard on the recording. This particular anthropological recording would appear on a number of European and American compositions to follow, including Joni Mitchell's “Jungle Line” and “Burundi Black” by French composer Michel Bernholc (a Caucasian who really played up the “darkest Africa” angle, making for an album that hasn't aged especially well).

The predominance of this drumming turns “59 Chrystie Street” from a brainless sex rap into an incantation, of sorts, that's almost orphic in its outlook. The song possesses a certain ethnographic quality, not just in terms of 80s NYC hookup culture, but far beyond that, reaching eastward and touching on a kind of experience that's trans-societal and even transcendent. In the Burundi drumming, we have a form of musical expression that much of the American and European audience may very well consider “primitive” and “primal.” It will arouse, on some level, their stereotypes, projections, and fears regarding “darkest Africa” (as it apparently did for Monsieur Bernholc). It will evoke wild visions of an “uncivilized” country and continent (if the average Euro-American can even discern the two with regard to “Africa”). But these racist assumptions are immediately subverted, because the title of the song places the activity on a street in Manhattan, the putative capital of the developed world. The description of this all-American sexual encounter is undergirded by the forceful tribal drum. In effect, the track has collapsed the notionally insurmountable cultural distance between stereotypical “darkest Africa” and the presumptive center of Western civilization. And what has closed this cultural gap? It is the primal pull of the sexual encounter with a female—the desire for a vision of the vagina. This desire unites every male musician, no matter where on the globe he may be, whether he is a drummer in Burundi or a white rapper in late-80s NYC. (It may also apply to lesbians, though the choice of the sample and the lyrics in the present case would seem to foreground male sexuality.) For it is this vision of the vulva that stirs the Burundi drummer to beat his drum and compels the rapper to steal his drum samples. The persistent thud of male sexuality pounds on in both groups of men alike.

In seeing the vagina, all straight men are rendered one. We are all united in the vaginal gaze. Agape, we regard the vulva with thundering awe. We are gazing, after all, upon what Samuel L. Jackson rightly called “the holiest of holies.” Both the Burundi drummer and the white rapper shudder with Rudolph Otto's mysterium tremendum fascinans as they stare into that coral-petaled, vertical maw. And the vulva stares unblinkingly back at us, because it is not just a mouth, but also an eye. To be seen this way, this is what we drum for. The vulva may see and know us, but even if we can know it in a Biblical/carnal sense, can we truly know it? And so, Adam Horovitz's final line in the song echoes in our ear, sounding more and more like a question with each repetition. You know what I saw...? Does any man truly know what he saw after he sees the vagina? These are the questions that render all straight men throughout the world as a brotherhood. Fitting then, that the song should conclude here. For to snatch a glimpse—to glimpse a snatch—is to end the song—the ever-throbbing beat of male sexuality—and this vision is most likely what happens, your present author posits, at the end of “59 Chrystie Street.” The beat promptly stops, because the vision has been consummated. But the song suite is not over—it's never over, in fact—and the beat resumes anew, and the record plays on loop.

Thus, through its unabashed male sexuality undergirded by the Burundi drum, “59 Chrystie Street” has effectively overturned longstanding stereotypes about “darkest Africa.” The track has made a subtle testimony to the oneness of the human race—or the male race, at least—vis-à-vis the vadge, a vision quest, of sorts, that will forever quirt a man onward, regardless of his continent. For this reason, “59 Chrystie Street” shouldn't be considered an outright blemish on the nigh-perfect Paul's Boutique, but rather a mere peccadillo that, upon closer listening, is far from irredeemable. “59 Chrystie Street” is built on numinously fertile grounds.

Bea Priestley: An Appreciation

[B]osom heaving, her eyes flashing [...] [s]he was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous. [...] Her rich black hair, black as a Stygian night, fell in rippling burnished clusters [...] Her dark eyes burned [...]. She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.

- Robert E. Howard

1.

You likely haven't heard of her, yet you know her already. You want to have known her. She's that girl with the Kool-Aid-colored hair smoking cigarettes at the school's rear entrance.

She is Queen of the Black Coast and beyond. Robert E. Howard couldn't have conjured a more consummate vamp, not in his most vivid, virginal reverie, not in his spiciest of stories. The epigraph above does her little justice. H. Rider Haggard could have done little more to comprise her, though with his sorceress Ayesha—the eponymous “She” from his famed novel—he draws nearer.

She hails from Wellington, NZ, by way of London. She bills herself the "Top Gaijin." At its most euphemistic, “Gaijin” translates from Japanese as "foreigner." At its most xenophobic, "Gaijin" can be rendered "outsider" or "alien." She is outside, yes, but also far above.

Her signature finish is the electric chair suplex. She calls it the "Queen's Landing," and with good cause. One of the most ascendant male wrestlers in the world is her male suitor, and she and he seem apt heirs apparent for wrestling royalty.

The "She" in question is Bea Priestley, grossly underappreciated wrestler for whom I am now about to attempt an appreciation.

2.

You might mock professional wrestling, and you are mostly justified in doing so. The wrestling you've glimpsed briefly and dismissed, perhaps while flipping channels, is all defined by some measure of compromise. There is little compromise in Bea Priestley.

She's all flailing mop and tomboyish stomps, each unpitying boot a flash of checkerboard patterns and leopard-skin prints. She has a swashbuckling swagger, jaw perpetually working with an insouciance, her sneer painted in greenish-black under jagged bangs. Without fail, that sneer gives way to a pout so pronounced it's nearly jejune. In between it all, she freely dispenses her middle-finger with arm held out at full span.

I saw her holler "fuck off" at a male fan who wolf-whistled as she exuviated her entrance robe. With that, I fell hard into her fandom.

3.

I think a lot about Bea Priestley's bumps. They have such force and gravity. They are unrelenting. They paralyze the gaze. Her bumps inspire. Her bumps titillate. Her bumps look so painful, yet they ease my pain.

I once saw a bump of Bea's where her head was caught up in a chair and then the face she was facing kicked her stiffly sans abandon (see below). I once saw Bea Priestley take multiple head-bumps, including two Tower Hacker Bombs, in a match against Kagetsu in Japan. The internet saw her take an inter-gender kick to the face from Ricochet. Bea Priestley deals in pain so expertly, log-rolling on the canvass, shag of hair roiling, gripping her brain-pan in both palms, selling the hallowed rear-blow-to-head bump.

I watch her bumps and I ache for Bea Priestley. Can't the majority audience, the common public, see what Bea's putting herself through? Can't the talent scouts see what they're missing out on? I ask these questions like these matches aren't widely available on YouTube, like they don't have hundreds of thousands of views. Hundreds of those views are mine, as I can't take my eyes off her bumps.

At this juncture, I should clarify for the non-wrestling fan that, in the wrestling business, "bumps" refer to choreographed landings.

4.

Bea's breakout bout, arguably, was her Last Woman Standing match in which she faced Nixon Newell for the WCPW Women's Championship. You may know Newell as "Tegan Nox," her moniker in NXT, WWE's "gold brand."

Newell, playing the face, came out sweet and enthusiastic and insipid. Newell's given middle-name is Rhiannon, so we must assume that the "Nixon" in her ring name is a Stevie Nicks homage. Any kindred linkage with Nicks, even tangential and/or unconscious, solidifies "crowd-pleaser" status. And Bea quickly established herself as the heartless challenger to the Gold Dust Woman.

Bea Priestley did not merely play the heel; rather, she epitomized it. She entered as the sour-faced silicone Valkyrie, in kick-pad boots and a carapace-like bikini that looked très impractical for pro wrestling.

Of course, Bea and Newell did not wrestle in any conventional sense. From the outset of the match, Bea wielded a kendo stick as liberally as she did her middle finger, dealing out many a thwack to the fawn-faced Newell.

The eroticized nature of the beating was never lost on the mostly male crowd or on Bea. At one point, Bea took the liberty of licking Newell across the face before slapping her with an open palm. The homology drawn by these consecutive indignities was virtuosic, both the tongue and the slap like unto a paintbrush across Newell's face.

Bea would eventually bring steel chairs into the ring in the promise of a massive, maleficent spot to finish the match. She would be hoisted by her own petard. Newell grabbed back the momentum and German-suplexed Bea onto the chair. It was this chair into which Bea's head was fed, and here (all kayfabe aside) where Bea laid dutifully on her cheek such that Newell could curb-stomp her ala Seth Rollins and then, only then, veritably Pillmanize Bea Priestley via an unprotected kick to the face. How many male wrestlers would take that bump?

Of course, the referee's count climbed to ten and Nixon Newell was the winner. She would go on to NXT, to be given her new name, and to flounder in the gears of the WWE machine, one among many gold dust women who would have their illusions shattered by that corporate entity and its capricious septuagenarian overlord, that reverse-alchemist who unfailingly makes lead from gold.

But Bea Priestley's name, by contrast, became elemental and immutable from that evening onward.

5.

I like Bea Priestley because she is not easy to like. She is a challenge. There is an offensive quality inhering within her. At times, her in-ring work verges upon appearing unworkable. In each gesture, she betrays some measure of disdain for the pageantry surrounding the pseudo-sport of wrestling itself.

She gives no indication of caring what the fans think. It is as if we the fans were chewing gum to be gnashed and spat out (or perhaps, once thoroughly chewed, placed in an opponent’s mouth, a tactic Bea used to intensify a camel clutch in one of her battles with Newell).

Unsurprisingly, Bea Priestley turned down an early WWE contract offer. Bea Priestley is not clay to be shaped. But alas—and, surprisingly—even the relatively progressive shores of All Elite Wrestling couldn't keep her moored. She was too talented and too jaded for WWE—that goes without saying—but even AEW, a company built on being the alternative, could not fully apprehend her acumen. For it must be said that AEW, for all the good it has done, is built in no small measure on fan-service. Bea Priestley is not there to render services for the fans.

Bea Priestley's talent is not in her promos. (She sounds one-half Valley Girl, one-half Cockney bootblack, and tends to get caught up in cursing.) And though her in-ring work is solid, this is not the locus of her talent, either. Her talent is her presence. A buxom woman with green lipstick is going to strut down the ramp with a wide and manly swagger, as if making way for comically large testes, and then is going to work stiff. Just ask brittle Britt Baker, whose skull fell victim to Bea Priestley’s rumbustious boot. (I say this not to take anything away from Dr. Baker, whose recent "Lights Out" match with Thunder Rosa marked a tidal shift for women's wrestling.)

Bea Priestley does not map on to any recognizable wrestling archetype. She is indeed Top Gaijin, but not just in Japan. She is an outlander in any federation or confederacy. She is a feral, strong-style mercenary in a milieu of fake fights.

Bea Priestley could be a female Bruiser Brody. This is both high praise and a death warrant.

6.

When grown men wax literary about female celebrities, the reader can safely presume the male author is having some sort of sexual fantasies about said celebrity women. Indeed, Norman Mailer wrote an entire volume about a decades-dead Marilyn Monroe that was rather frank in its sexual reveries.

Vis-à-vis Bea Priestley, this is not the case for me. Rather, in my fantasies, I call to mind a world in which Bea Priestley and I are, like, acquaintances at best. I spend a lot of our time together fawning over the high spots and head-drops in her matches. She is not forthcoming with chitchat, but she mostly talks about how busy it is being on the road in four continents, and about the challenges of maintaining a romantic relationship within the business. Sometimes, I mention my own dating woes—the lack of dates one presumes of men who write lovingly about female celebrities—and Bea Priestley sneers and says "well then try getting your fat fucking arse to a gym."

"Oh, Bea," I then say. (And this is also a Norman Mailer reference; cf. Mailer: His Life and Times, p. 72. The first of Mailer's six wives (a) was also named Bea and (b) was also foul-mouthed.)

To make this fantasy world even remotely plausible, in it I am necessarily employed in the pro-wrestling industry. I picture I am Bea Priestley's manager, my hit-or-miss articulateness subbing in for her mediocre mic skills. I berate her scheduled opponent, and then she finishes the pre-match segment by berating me. I refer to her as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. The commentators speculate as to our relationship, the persistent question in this fantasy world being: am I Bea Priestley's gimp? It's obvious to everyone this relationship can't possibly be romantic, and would still be obvious even if she wasn't involved with Will Ospreay.

7.

If you want to see the future of wrestling and romantic relationships, you must watch Bea Priestley versus Will Ospreay. A boyfriend vs. girlfriend match may smack of exploitative fluff, for this was certainly the precedent set by WWE in less progressive times (cf., for instance, Marc Mero vs. Sable). Some may dismiss Priestley vs. Ospreay as desperate content creation from the early COVID-19 era. But it is not to be dismissed. It is arguably a five-star match.

Priestley takes to the ring with ratty Kool-Aid colored pig-tails swishing, a bad-ass Raggedy Ann in laced tights and a halter top. Ospreay has more flash and gasconade. But Bea Priestley slaps that gasconade off Ospreay's face early on with many a resounding shoot-style strike, and the beau quickly sheds his self-assured smile.

In due course, Priestley takes a resounding slap to the chest. Ospreay begins to assert his size advantage, playing to every conservative’s expectations.

But then Priestley turns the tides with what is possibly the best DDT ever executed onto the ring apron—the hardest part of the ring (if you ignore the posts). As her male suitor staggers to his feet on the ringside mats, Priestley follows up with a double foot-stomp to the back. Flying from the turnbuckle to the outside, she looks every bit Belît, Howard's "wildest she-devil unhanged." Yet her exit route leaves her with no choice but to take an excruciating back bump on the floor. After this, moaning and almost in tears with pain, she manages to get her boyfriend back in the ring to score a near-fall.

Of course, Ospreay charges back, and soon enough he's hooked Bea's arms and secured her shaggy mop between his legs so as to presage the Storm Breaker, his A-level finisher. And then, even after all the beating she has taken, Bea counters the Storm Breaker into a Code Red. And then when Ospreay goes to his other A-level finisher, the Os-Cutter, Bea counters with a bottom-rope-aided German suplex. This is all fantastic.

So now Ospreay has to resort to his A+ finisher, his top-tier signature move, the rarely seen "Hidden Blade." It is only after he succeeds with this glorified knife-edge chop that he is able to execute the Storm Breaker and score the pinfall. The Storm Breaker—that double underhook corkscrew neckbreaker—strikes me now as the truest consummation of a relationship.

The match could be five-stars. It loses at least a half-star, however, for Ospreay's male-gazing contemplation of Priestley’s felled, face-down body, and his subsequent consideration of grabbing some sweet. Thankfully, he thinks better of it, but even the mere ideation of a goosing takes the match down a notch.

Yet the match we have just watched cannot be reduced to a mere gazing and enumerating of stars. What we have witnessed obviates words, attesting to what is really the most transcendent intercourse: to meet your significant other in a choreographed fight. This is what a romantic relationship should culminate in. The goal of coupling is not a happy, long-lived marriage or, I don't know, a quasi-mystical sexual encounter. Rather, it is a worked, twenty-plus minute battle, and a strong-style fight at that.

This is love. And due to a raging plague, no one got to see it live.

8.

I've thought a lot about women I've loved or could have loved, and I've dreamed of strong-style bouts with them. Would I put them over? How would I get myself over? Would they put me over? How would I bump for them? Would I let them roll me up in the highest of high-stack pinfalls? Even if you don't let them beat you, you must make your lover look good.

9.

There are several female celebrities I greatly admire. These include Lana Del Rey, Stevie Nicks, Serena Grandi (Italian b-movie luminary, FYI), and, what the hell, we'll throw Amanda Seyfried in there too. I've considered writing long-form pieces about all of these people (with the exception of Seyfried), but in the end I chose to write about Bea Priestley. Why? Because I imagined—as all people who write about people they admire but will never meet must—the person being written about somehow actually reading the work. 

In the above cases, there is the possibility, admittedly slim, that the person in question could like what I wrote about them. But Bea Priestley is the outlier. There's not going to be some personalized tweet about how "you're so sweet." Bea Priestley does not give a fuck what I think and would appear to be wholly incapable of ever giving a fuck what I think. All of my above praises would matter no more to her than that male-gazing Britisher who wolf-whistled at her lissome body as she bared it. 

And I admire that complete disdain for the fan. Because the fan is ultimately a spectator partaking in something altogether lower than watching or observing or gazing. They watch with empty-headed expectation of being entertained. This is, for lack of a better term, "spectation." Fans are defined by their maniacal commitment to observing exalted others in this way. That Bea Priestley hates this makes me like her all the more. 

Because I hate being a fan of anything or anyone. It pains me that, as someone who believes that what he thinks is worth writing down, I would even consider writing about any of the aforementioned celebrities. Their talents do not make them exalted or transcendent. Our worship for the marketing of their talents is what keeps them afloat, and this worship makes us so irredeemably common, insofar as we would accept such a low standard for transcendence. 

Bea Priestley's thesis, if she has one, is almost an argument against spectating itself. This, to my mind, makes her wrestling's perfect heel.

10.

That is Bea, that is Belît. The name bewilders you and so you dismiss it, you forget it.

I whisper that name like a prayer, while I pray that Bea Priestley will not be the female Bruiser Brody, that she will not end up as wrestling's Marilyn Monroe. I pray that all her bumps will land true, and that her stingers, when they happen, will heal and feeling will return even fuller than before. I pray that one day some promotion will see that there is something generational, something elemental, something eternal in Bea Priestley. I pray that you will all see this much, and feeling will return to you, too.

Rumor has it that Bea Priestley is headed to NXT, that most palatable tentacle of WWE. Specifically, she'll be in NXT UK, a tameless outlander shoehorned back into her ostensible home. When I hear this, I feel that strange mix of exultation and envy one experiences when a friend has some success. I also feel sorry for her. Because I doubt that WWE can ever truly know Bea Priestley.* Indeed, that feeling she embodies is so subtle, so rarefied, I fear that the WWE creative team cannot fathom it, let alone capture it in the ring.

I mean that feeling that high school's over, and school’s out forever, but still you know She is still there, still smoking at the rear entrance, and that She always will be. You don't know her, but you realize in time that you want more than anything to have known her.

---

Footnotes:

*Update, July 4, 2021: As could be expected, WWE has rebranded Bea Priestley, settling upon the name "Blair Davenport." While certainly maintaining the Britishness of Priestley's given name, WWE Creative has erred on the side of posh British rather than the hard-bitten British of the original. It's some consolation, I suppose, that the last syllable of "Davenport" does maintain Priestley's littoral associations (e.g. her mastery of the "Japanese Ocean" suplex). Still, I personally find that something is lost when someone submits themselves to a pseudonym.