The Iron Claw — Memory of a Texas Childhood

I’m not going to be objective about this.

I was a teenager in the early ’80s in Dallas. The Von Erich family was everything to me and many of my family and friends. I don’t know what it was like for kids in the rest of the country — I don’t know if wrestling then had any sort of impact at all in, say, Dubuque — but I know that in North Texas the Von Erichs, the Fabulous Freebirds, Gentleman Chris Adams, The Iceman, Joe Leduc, Bruiser Brody: as far as cultural cache, these were the coins of the realm.

Filmed at the Sportatorium in Dallas and the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth, there was enough wrestling for two shows every weekend, the 90-minute Saturday Night Wrestling and the 60-minute syndicated World Class Championship Wrestling. We watched all of it. We read about it in the papers. We listened to wrestling stars interviewed on morning drive-time radio. We called each other on the phone and discussed the outcomes.

Inexplicably, we were unsure if it was fake or not.

So when I say that I sat, fascinated, by Sean Durkin’s admittedly odd fantasia on the history of the Von Erich family, The Iron Claw (2023), I can’t be trusted.

This film is an odd duck. Durkin’s narrative about the Von Erich dynasty — some of the most dynamic and, pound for pound, athletic performers to ever work in a wrestling ring — seems to deliberately shy away from spending time showing the brothers doing the thing that made them famous. While occasional stagings of key matches are thrown up onto the screen, rarely do we see more than a few seconds of them — a strange choice because those moments we do see are electric.

Neither is the film willing to explicitly lean into the family dynamic that seems at its core: father Fritz Von Erich’s drive to force his boys to win the championship belt that he was denied. Fritz’s dominance is clear from the onset, but we rarely see his voice raised or a hand lifted in violence. He has paved the road and he expects his sons to stay on it.

The film’s reticence, for most of the film, to show any of this explicitly or to lean into having a noticeable opinion about any single character, turns the experience into something unusual. Its seeming refusal to have a point of view, becomes its point of view.

This is all a strange mix for a wrestling story, a form of entertainment that allows for no shades of gray. In Texas in the ’80s, the Von Erichs were larger than life. They were the good guys, almost entirely. (I seem to recall Kerry turning into a heel briefly at one point. It never fit.) They flew around the ring like comic book characters. They had honor and nobility — at least that’s what we thought at the time.

Watching the rise of this family as a young boy was stirring. Watching their fall was almost unbearable.

Of the five brothers, three committed suicide (Mike, Kerry and Chris) and one died either of a severe intestinal issue or a drug overdose (David), depending on who’s version of the story you believe. Kerry, Chris and — probably — David were addicts. Mike had lived through a shoulder operation that had gone bad and left him in a coma and, when he came out of it, with brain damage.

On top of all that, the organization that Fritz had built, World Class Championship Wrestling, began to fail as more extreme, and better funded, national wresting shows began taking the public’s attention. Regional wrestling was dying and, with it, the legacy of the Von Erichs.

One can almost understand Durkin leaning back and letting this story tell itself; it is such a shocking contrast of highs and lows that too much of a push would render it as unbelievable, over-the-top, melodrama. (He does remove one brother, Chris, from the film entirely. It must’ve just seemed like too much.) Instead, the director lets us just live with the Von Erich family — the film never tipping its hand — warts and all. They are a family that does seem to love each other, with almost more affection between the brothers than a modern day audience can embrace comfortably, but they are also a dysfunctional unit.

Fritz puts his sons against each other by ranking them in order of favorite. Fritz and his wife, Doris, fall back on the rhetoric of toughness and individualism to explain away any responsibilities to even acknowledge emotional difficulties in their sons. No one in the family seems to think twice about giving up all sense of personal ambition for anything other than Fritz Von Erich’s uber-goal the second he asks them to do it.

Is it loyalty or is it absolute domination?

The Iron Claw only shows its cards at the very end and, until then, it stands aloof saying, “Here’s what happened and this is the outcome of those events. What do you think about that?”

And what do I think, I have to ask myself. The film is riveting and its documentary-like nature, carried by brilliantly unaffected performances from Zack Efron (Kevin Von Erich), Holt McCallany (Fritz Von Erich) and the rest of the cast, serves to leave the viewer feeling almost like a voyeur into something a little too personal. (I had wondered how Kevin, the surviving member of the family, felt about the film. Having been interviewed a number of times recently, he seems to like it.)

The family is a familiar one to anyone growing up in that area of the country at that period in time; excepting, of course, that they were superstars. What we see in the film is the outcome of being locked into a life without self-determination. For the brothers their destinies were not only wrapped up in their father’s dreams, but in the legend of who they were to the Texas public that loved them. Eventually, being unable to choose your life’s path — to even recognize that a choice is possible — is unsustainable and the Von Erich’s discovered that truth. The center could not hold and the more wobbly and unsure one’s orbit got before making the choice, the more radical that choice might be.

And the film refuses to even condemn those choices that are so radical as to involve self-harm.

“It’s just what happened,” it says. “What do you think about that?”

And here’s the other thing that I think. I grew up with heroes, local heroes. The Von Erich family, to my young mind, were somehow both down to earth AND larger than life. Heroes like that inspire aspiration. They bring hope. They tell us that we can achieve great things and follow our dreams, even if they were not allowed to follow theirs. They did some of that inspirational heavy lifting that only superheroes and wrestlers can do; the kind that isn’t subtle, but, at its best, defies cynicism. The Von Erichs gave us something fun and funny and noble and good, and with a little facility, we could use that to help make brave choices, embrace our own sense of self-determination, in our lives.

Thanks Von Erichs, for helping us do the thing that most of you never could.

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