“Ever since I was a child, people said my family was cursed. Mom tried to protect us with God. Dad tried to protect us with wrestling.” That’s the thesis of The Iron Claw, muttered by Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) in a voiceover not five minutes into the film. Those three sentences were blasted over the trailer and on TikTok clips, this idea of a doomed family wrecked with tragedy. Some folks were familiar with the story—especially those of us with a grasp on wrestling history—and some folks weren’t. The latter found themselves inexplicably chuffed at the thought of Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson in a movie together—and shirtless with outdated mullets and wearing short-shorts, no less. The Iron Claw’s first official trailer hit back in October; White had already made yet another star turn in The Bear and was bound to sweep awards season. Most of us did the honorable thing and warned those not in the know without giving too much away: This movie will rip out your heart. You better be prepared.
Cinema is no stranger to tragedy. Often, it’s the only apt kind of destiny you can pair with comedy. Nathan Fielder has a miniature monologue in the recent finale of The Curse that touches on that, how sometimes even the most unimaginably inhumane and devastating things can be turned into a joke. But The Iron Claw, sadly, holds no space for such laughter. Sure, there’s a cute moment where the Von Erich brothers line dance to John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” There’s a scene where they sneak out so Mike (Stanley Simons) can play a gig with his band at a college party and Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) does an impressive handstand on a keg. But if you have ever fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about Fritz Von Erich’s (Holt McCallany) six sons, then you likely went into The Iron Claw with a crucial leg up—if you even drummed up the courage to go see it at all.
The Iron Claw is an inspired-by-a-true-story flick, not exactly a “based on a true story” one. There’s a difference, much of it having to do with how much truth actually makes it onto the screen. For the most part, the skeleton of the Von Erich’s story is portrayed fairly and accurately. Kevin gave the film his blessing and, in a world where Priscilla was admonished by the Elvis Presley estate, surely his assurance counts for something in this case? The SparkNotes version of the real story is a simple one to map: There were six Von Erich children, all of them but Kevin died tragically. In The Iron Claw, only five sons are included. Chris, the youngest, wasn’t written into the film because his inclusion (both as a character and his death by suicide) would have made the whole thing even sadder and hard to sit through. What does that say about the grim reality of the source material?
Over this last holiday break, I went home to stay with my parents. I was just coming out of a breakup and was determined to take it easy with my work life for about a week and not push myself so damn hard to write. Since leaving for college nearly eight years ago, I’ve never been the type of person who particularly enjoys returning home for any period of time. Graduating and then spending the first chunk of the pandemic in a bedroom across the hall from my parents was the final goodbye to ever liking it, if I’m being honest. It also doesn’t help that I’m voluntarily estranged from a large majority of my immediate family, a few of whom I have to see on holidays if I’m around. But having just left my relationship, I was legitimately looking forward to stepping out of my own world for seven days and getting to reconnect with the art of rotting in a bed three hours away from where I pay rent.
My first night home, I told my mom I was going to go see The Iron Claw alone on Christmas Eve and that my dad couldn’t know about it. My second night home, she let that nugget slip. He was delighted to hear I wanted to see the film, because he’d loved the Dark Side of the Ring episode about the Von Erichs and had been wanting to do the same. “Let’s go see it together this week,” he said. I hummed around it, claiming it was too heavy for me to watch with someone else. “We haven’t seen a movie together since Rocky Balboa, c’mon,” he pressed further. The deck was not stacked in my favor; how was I supposed to push back against that? 2006 was almost 20 years ago now, and doing this clearly meant a lot to him. So I agreed. When he walked out of the room, I pulled my mom aside.
“He cannot go see that movie,” I told her. “I’m sure he’ll forget about it,” she replied.
On March 14th, 1985—or on March 15th, 1985, according to the death certificate—my dad’s only brother killed himself on their parents’ patio. I’ve written about my uncle’s death before, but in fragments with limited information. By the time it happened, both of my grandparents were dead and my dad was gone too far into his own alcoholism to provide any valuable context without turning into a blubbering mess. But on December 22nd, 2023, my dad and I had the breakthrough we’d always deserved. I usually emotionally blackout when he gets teary around me. I don’t like the way my dad cries; it’s ugly and inconsolable and, even at 25, I don’t know how to reckon with that. Do any of us, though, really? Seeing your dad weep is like sitting through sex-ed: uncomfortable but likely necessary for human development.
Truth be told, I’d grown tired of not knowing the whole story. For years and years, I’d felt some sort of spiritual, genetic kinship to my uncle—be it through his dedication to music, or flirtations with outlaw figures and their own cosmic rebellions, or the very plainspoken truth that neither of us could swallow pills as adults and both of us were pretty badly behaved students in high school. One time, after getting suspended for probably the 10th time freshman year, my dad told me I was going to end up like his brother in that familiar tone equally full of disappointment and fear. It doesn’t help that I’m nothing like my dad, at least not in any substantial way. We both like sports, rock ‘n’ roll and acting like we know everything. But emotionally, tangibly, we have nothing but a name and an inherent birthright of obligated love between us. When you can see parts of yourself in vignettes of somebody who has long been dead and buried, your mind can’t help but wander—and sometimes you have no choice but to let it.
So, my dad and I finally had the talk we needed to have. I won’t go into the messy details for you, for the sake of keeping some things between me and him sacred. But for the longest time, I tried so very hard to better understand what it was about that night—beyond the incurable suffering of losing your brother—that hurt my dad so badly.
The combination of seeing your brother’s brains scattered on the wall and floor of your own home, having to drive hours out of state to tell your own working father that his eldest son shot himself, and witnessing such an act of tragedy break your mother’s heart is a recipe for a life of grief. You can’t avoid whatever is meant to come next. And for all of the reasons that my dad is a mean guy who’s pissed good parts of his life away into a drink, I think I finally know why he’s so broken—or, at the very least, I have a better idea of why he has always been so scared of what life might bestow upon his only child, and what it means to be unable to control any of it. And, thankfully, he did forget about going to see The Iron Claw until I was already about to return home to Columbus.
“We’ll watch it on my birthday,” I told him. “It’ll probably be on streaming by then.” “Okay, that sounds good,” he replied.
Kevin, Kerry, David and Mike are the four Von Erichs we meet. Their eldest brother, Jack Jr., died at age six by stepping on a trailer tongue, getting electrocuted, falling face-first into a snow puddle and drowning in 1959, when Kevin wasn’t even two years old and David was still months shy of turning one. David is the first brother to die in the film, when he passes away off screen while traveling in Japan for a string of wrestling bouts. The cause of death was acute enteritis, and that’s the story The Iron Claw sticks with, but popular culture figures (in wrestling and beyond) have debated whether or not he overdosed, and have posited that a wrestler named Bruiser Brody covered it up before the authorities arrived.
After Kerry wins a coin toss with Kevin and gets to take David’s place in the NWA World Heavyweight Championship against Ric Flair, he gets into a motorcycle accident soon after and loses his foot (both things happen in real life, but two years apart). Mike is tapped to take his place in the ring alongside Kevin—as Fritz has hopes that Hollywood’s youngest Von Erich can also be a surefire replacement for David.
But Mike doesn’t want to be a wrestler, he wants to be a musician—something his father once was, but gave up in the name of sports holding more profitability. What’s most devastating is that Kevin, David and Kerry all want that for Mike, too, despite their father’s pressures about the family business remaining strong in number.
But, by this point, audiences are very much clued into the imaginary clause: These brothers don’t get to choose their destiny. When Kerry is mere weeks away from participating in the 1980 Summer Olympics, President Jimmy Carter announces that the United States will be boycotting the events in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. He returns to his family’s ranch and, in no time, is christened into the wrestling world by his father. The successful tag team of Kevin and David quickly became a trio always in contention for the Six-Man Tag Team Championship belt.
When Mike badly busts up his shoulder in a match and needs to have surgery to repair it, he goes into toxic shock during the procedure and slips into a coma that, inevitably, leaves him with brain damage. Fritz wants his son back in the ring, which leads to a particularly devastating conversation between Mike and his mother Doris (Maura Tierney), where he says “I’m scared, Ma. Everybody wants me to be David, but I can’t replace him.” Soon, Mike downs a bottle of sleeping pills and elects to die in a field on the Von Erich’s ranch. My father, crying in a reclining chair, composed himself briefly and let out a heartbreaking truth. “Your uncle was always your mamaw’s favorite,” he said to me. “He was her first-born.” Having never been a brother, I don’t know what it’s like to be second in your mother’s eyes. But I imagine it’s one of the worst feelings in the world, especially if your sibling dies and you’re still lesser. “Well, he was her favorite until you came along,” Dad continued.
Kerry eventually commits suicide, too, after returning to the ring and enduring years of pain and drug use amid major success and adoration. When it all becomes too much to bear, he calls Kevin from a motel room someplace somewhere else and tells him as much. The way Jeremy Allen White does this moment is particularly devastating, and the way he delivers this line to Efron: “I’m fucking cursed, I want to die. It’s in me now, it’s got a hold of me.” He hangs up the phone, returns to Denton and shoots himself in the chest under a tree in his parents’ yard. Kevin finds him soon after, electing to, after nearly choking their father to death for not taking care of Kerry (“You boys need to work it out yourselves,” he told Kerry over the phone), pick his brother up, carry him into the house, place him on the kitchen table and cry over his limp, bloody body.
This is the saddest death for me, because it shows just how paralyzed by fear Kevin is that he couldn’t save his family—or maybe he was paralyzed by confusion over why he was spared. We do get that moment, where Kerry is in a boat paddling out to the dock where his brothers are waiting for him. He sets down the coin with tails up, a nod that it’s Kevin’s time to be great, and embraces David, Mike and Jack Jr. in, quite possibly, the most gut-wrenching scene from a 2023 film altogether. I’m an only child. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a brother, or any sibling, for that matter. But I’ve had a front-row ticket to seeing what that kind of thing can do to somebody you’ve loved for 25 years.
Before The Iron Claw was even announced—and long before I ever knew who the Von Erichs were—I thought the Mitchell family was cursed. I still do. I can chart the tragedy back as far as nearly 70 years ago, when my papaw and his best friend got into a car crash. Papaw came out alive, but his friend’s head split open and he died instantly. From what I know, we weren’t cast beneath a darkness because we changed our name like Fritz Von Erich had. No, it felt more like the Mitchells had one too many run-ins with cosmic misfortune. Around the time I was born, my mamaw was so sick she almost didn’t make it. My parents say me coming into the world saved her, literally. I don’t know about all of that, but human will is a marvelous thing sometimes. I don’t remember why, but she had a giant hole in her stomach for the first three, maybe four, years of my life. I’d peek through the bedroom doorway and watch Papaw replace her bandages, peering into a bloody, mass of blackness that I now understand was where my mamaw’s guts were.
But I didn’t really start believing in a curse until 2016, when Mamaw caught pneumonia on my 18th birthday, went into the hospital the next morning and never came home. This lasted nearly four full months, as she bounced between general care, a rehabilitation center and then, for good, ICU. She spent more than a month on a ventilator by the end of it, her living will preventing Dad or Papaw from pulling the plug. I don’t think either of them ever wanted to, to be honest. I remember the Cleveland Cavaliers winning the NBA Finals on June 19th, as Mamaw was 15 minutes down the road with a tube down her throat. My dad sobbed and sobbed, crying out that he wanted two things to happen—for the Cavs to win and for his mother to show signs of progress. Only one of those things happened. I went to the drive-in the night before she died, coming home after midnight and collapsing into bed—only to be awoken by my mom at the crack of dawn, after the hospital called my dad to tell him that Mamaw had pulled the ventilator tube out of her throat and probably didn’t have long. Mom told me to stay home and sleep. I later found out that Mamaw died while my parents, Papaw and Aunt Carolyn were in the parking lot of the hospital.
Family members die all the time. People die. That’s just how this goes, you know? But when you’re a kid, they don’t ever prepare you for the really hard parts of death. I suppose that is because grief is fluid and shapeless. Good luck planning for it, because it’ll eat you alive regardless. My mamaw had been sick, to some degree, for most of my life. Whether it was the hole in her stomach or the pneumonia that eventually killed her, the fact that she lived to be 81 and to be alive and conscious when I graduated high school was enough. It really was. To this day, my mom insists that, around 1997, they were sure she they’d lost her. But she pulled through. She was always pulling through.
Over the course of the next 12 months, my two remaining grandparents—Papaw and my mom’s mom—would die, too, each in a way more unfathomably tragic than the last. For more than seven years, I’d watched my grandma slowly succumb to dementia after she developed a severe case of malnutrition from getting dentures. She’d already forgotten all of us, really, by the fall of 2016 when she fell and shattered her pelvis. But the pure shock of the accident completely ruined whatever parts of her mind still managed to perform basic human functions. In turn, she stopped eating completely, slowly killing herself, unknowingly, through starvation because her body just simply couldn’t remember how to eat. There’s something poetic or ironic in there, about how the thing that gave her dementia in the first place is the thing that finally killed her. Watching a loved one—who also happens to be your best friend—die slowly over the better part of a decade is supposed to be the easy way, because you’re given ample time to come to terms with it. But that’s a lie. You can never prepare for it.
Papaw was the last to go. After Mamaw died, I feared he would have a Johnny Cash type of ending and go out with a broken heart. In some ways, I think he did. In early 2017, he was diagnosed with Stage 2 lung cancer. After undergoing two rounds of chemo, he called it a day and opted to let the disease take him when it wanted. The doctors gave him six months to a year once he quit radiation. He didn’t even get to that mark when it was all said and done, instead spending his final few weeks in hospice care in his own bed, going through intervals of copious morphine doses to help ease him into death in the most painless way possible. I lived next to this man my entire life, but I couldn’t bring myself to go into his bedroom to say goodbye. After his death, my parents would eventually move into that house and that bedroom would become mine. I found some incense cones recently that smell just like he did, a combination of some sage-based cologne and the worn-off scent of garage floor grease and gasoline.
Somehow, though, all of that loss seemed to circle back to my uncle. After Papaw passed, my dad said he was angry at his brother for leaving him to care for their dying parents alone. It was the first time while I was alive that I witnessed what I’d long assumed was true, that my dad blamed my uncle for the insurmountable weight of grief distributed onto the rest of us. I imagine it wasn’t always like that, though. After my failed suicide attempt when I was 17, it was my dad who cleaned my bloody wounds with a quiet and gentle care while my mom hastily and emotionally wondered if I needed to be committed to the local county psych-ward. I forget about that a lot, but not intentionally. These days, I need it more than ever, this portrait of a father taking care of his child at, perhaps, the lowest point of their life so far.
But then my grandparents died and their son had to tend to their ugly and unmerciful final moments by himself. He was an only child not by choice, carrying out a hard, thankless act that he likely, once upon a time, imagined he’d probably do with his brother at his side. And I guess, deep down, it’d be unfair to say that him being pissed and vindictive that he was dealt an astronomically more painful hand wasn’t right. It’s why I don’t want him to watch The Iron Claw. But that night before Christmas, he gave me the four words I think I’ve always, deep down, really, really needed to hear him say. “I’ve forgiven my brother,” he said, through intervals of very laborious and disgusting crying—after telling me, from start to finish, everything that happened the night my uncle took his own life. Like I said, I’ll save you the details. Do I feel like I know my uncle better now? I don’t think so, to be honest. That’s the way it goes, though. Even life-shattering answers can’t erase the mystery. But, I do know who he was the night he became nothing at all. And I suppose one night out of 29 years is better than none. I suppose.
My mom told me something a few years ago that I still think about often, how my dad’s grudge with his brother’s suicide exists because he is upset he’ll never get to see his brother in Heaven. Now, I’ve never seen him step into a church for anything other than a funeral. But he believes in God enough to hope and dream of seeing his loved ones again, someday. In The Iron Claw, there’s a shot of Kerry Von Erich’s suicide note, which features the line “Tonight I walk with my brothers,” and that turns into the scene of him—in the afterlife—reuniting with David, Mike and Jack once again. I think this is the scene that would break my dad if he ever saw it, as it’s a personification of a dream he still has. But, maybe, it would give him hope, too, that the idea of an afterlife includes everyone we love, no matter how they get there.
I don’t know how my dad would or will react to the infamous line that Kevin utters at the film’s end: “I used to be a brother.” That’s the moment across the board that has hurt the most people—TikTok comment sections certainly suggest as much—but I haven’t seen any feedback from folks who’ve lost siblings. I imagine seeing parts of your life exist in the stories of others can be difficult and grievous for anyone, but, knowing how hard it is for my dad to imagine seeing my uncle again, I think we’d lose him before that final scene even comes near. The coldness of Fritz and his apathy towards the deaths and suffering of his own kin would have once triggered something deeply, profoundly brutal within my soul, because—for so long—I couldn’t understand why I never heard Papaw speak once of his eldest son around me. I had chalked it up to it being just another component of the toxic masculinity in the Mitchell bloodline. But, a few weeks ago, I found out he’d had a complete nervous breakdown a few months after my uncle’s death and was out of work for weeks. He had to undergo serious counseling to come back from it. For so long, I thought I was the first person in my family to be in therapy. I was happy to be proven wrong.
The Mitchell curse is still going, if you’re wondering. I had a phone call with my great aunt a month ago, the night after another cousin died. “We’ve lost nine people in seven years,” she said. She’s right, and I know it’s weighing heavily on her now more than ever—as she’s watched all of her siblings die, just as my dad has watched his sibling and all of the cousins in his generation die, too. Suicide, sudden heart failure, stroke, pneumonia, cancer, suicide again. It’s all there, etched into our destinies. Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering what will get me, if anything will get me, whether or not it’s already inside me. I think it was when I was 17, but I don’t know if it’s gone yet or not.
The difference between my family and the Von Erichs is a matter of visibility. People told them they were cursed. I am left in silence, assuming I am nothing but and not hearing otherwise. You see, I’m the last Mitchell in my bloodline. After my dad dies, it’ll just be me until I have a kid of my own—if I have a kid of my own. I have two cousins left, but they don’t share this name anymore or never did. If the curse comes and gets me, this family will be nothing but names on graves or an essay in the Paste archives. We don’t have a famous wrestling maneuver, but maybe they’ll make a movie about us and somebody with the same trauma as me will go see it, and feel lighter for doing so. Maybe they’ll see it with their dad and they can both be free. I hope that happens. Maybe I’ll get there, too.
I’m not much of a spiritual person, at least not in any denominational way. But my family is, to varying degrees. I call my aunt from time to time, and she always says that God is watching over me. Lately, that’s become a much easier sentence to listen to, if only because she believes it. But they said that about the Von Erichs, too. The Iron Claw is a hard watch in that regard, as it often positions tragedy as something worth overcoming or avoiding if you believe in your savior hard enough. “Did you go see your movie?” my mom texted me a few weeks back. “Yes, I don’t think Dad should see it,” I replied. I watched it in a theater that was far too crowded for a movie I knew I was going to ugly cry at the end of, but I came out of it healed, somehow. Now, I’m not saying I believe in God now or that my dad would get the same kind of complete feeling from watching The Iron Claw. Far from it, probably. But I’ve started to hope that he does get his wish. I hope that he, one day, gets to walk with his brother once more. If that happens, then maybe there was never really a curse at all.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.