News culture “Did you know it was even worse in real life?”, this film about this disastrous drama starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White has softened the horror of reality
When adapting a true story for the cinema, it is sometimes difficult to fit everything in. In fact, it is impossible to recreate an entire life on screen and sometimes choices have to be made. That is what Sean Durkin has done for his latest film, which will be released in 2023.
A film inspired by true events
The Iron Claw is a film by Sean Durkin released in 2023. It tells the true story of the Adkisson wrestling family, better known as Von Erich. It was his father who made him famous through the wrestling matches in which he participated between 1953 and 1982. He wears several belts, including that of the AWA heavyweight class. A passion for this sport that is not only practiced in competitions since he became president of several wrestling organizations and contributed to the reconstruction of the sport in Japan. There he is known as The Iron Clawa pseudonym given to him in reference to his catch.
That is why Fritz von Erich maintains his passion for wrestling and passes it on to his children, who all become wrestlers at some point in their lives. Except for his first son, Mike, who drowned at the age of six. A first disaster for the family, which is not the only one portrayed in the film. There we find the death of David Von Erich, who died at the age of 26 from the effects of enteritis. Kerry and Mike, Fritz’s fourth and fifth children respectively, also suffer accidents. The first has a motorcycle accident and loses his right leg. He tries to continue his career but becomes addicted to painkillers. He ended his life in 1993. The second suffered brain damage after an operation following food poisoning. Then he disappeared in 1987.
Events that are therefore told in the film The Iron Claw and participated in the legend of the Adkisson family curse. And yet it is one child of the family who was left out of the film and could have affected the emotional impact of the feature film.
There was another brother
Actually, The Iron Claw Chris does not mention Von Erich. He is the last son of Fritz and Doris. Unlike Kevin, whose portrait in the film is that of the “big brother”, Chris regains what we could call the fate of the youngest. He looks with great admiration at his brothers’ achievements in wrestling and wants to do the same. But because he is asthmatic, small in stature, and has a body whose bones break easily, Chris doesn’t have the career he dreamed of.. After Mike’s disappearance, he falls into a depression, a depression that is made worse by his repeated injuries. He shoots himself in the head and, despite his brother Kevin’s efforts to take him to the hospital, he dies there. In 1991, he was 21 years old.
In addition to this tragedy, other events were ignored for “The Iron Claw”. It is the user @lizzyflanagan_ who summarizes it on the social network. We remember in particular the desire to kill themselves with a gun that occurred to Fritz and Kévin at a certain moment. To explain Chris’s absence from the screen, director Sean Durkin explained the following to Los Angeles Time:
Chris had been working on the plot for five years. When you’re trying to make a film, at some point you have to be clear about it and say, “These are characters on a page, and this is a film, and there’s no way to fully capture a person’s life in a film.” You have to make difficult choices to get to something true, or representative, or emotional, that reflects the core of the journey you want to tell within that family.
Sean Durkin therefore tells the life of Adkisson from the perspective of Kévin, Fritz’s second child and the only one still alive today.
