Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows is one of the best documentaries about anything ever. It follows Bret “The Hitman” Hart’s last year in the WWF in 1997, as the promotion battles Ted Turner’s WCW in the ratings and the rise of antiheroes makes Hart’s status as wrestling’s number one good guy precarious. Like so many of my favorite documentaries, Wrestling with Shadows is about something narrow—vividly capturing a specific, strange moment in the history of professional wrestling—in a way that grasps towards the universal, telling a moving human story. Like so many of my favourite documentaries, I can’t believe how much the filmmakers totally lucked out in being there to capture this story. Yet Wrestling with Shadows tends to get slotted into the category “wrestling documentary” as a kind of ghetto. The assumption by wrestling fandom and the general public alike that it could only appeal to existing wrestling fans is self-fulfilling: Only wrestling fans end up watching it, proving that it could only appeal to existing wrestling fans.
I wrote about the amazing documentary Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows for Fanbyte! Read it here.
The Sundae 