The Backyard, Paul Hough’s documentary about backyard wrestling, screened last Friday and Saturday as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival.

Capturing backyard wrestlers at their un-edited best everywhere, from California to upstate New York to England, Hough certainly leaves no barbwire bat or trashcan lid unturned in his search. Yet sometime between when the joy of watching the first match fades and the subsequent matches make you start wincing and turning from the screen, one simply asks, “Why?”

Not really why backyard wrestling exists–more like why this documentary exists. True, it is intriguing and thorough, but after the 10th guy walks away from a match with wounds from fluorescent light tubes, thumb tacks, road signs and flaming, barbwire-covered everything, and says “I do this cause I love it,” you get to the point and you don’t care. Even this film makes it seem as though most kids are doing something else.

One has to ask himself: why would a filmmaker put all this time into a film without some intention to simply mock his subject? There are a few sincere looks as to why people do this but the results are just pathetic. Two brothers in Arizona do things like throw each other into a pit full of broken light bulbs, covered with a flaming board of barbed wire because one of the brothers always beat the other one and now the two find solace reliving their youth through these matches.

But none of this is really Hough’s fault, he’s just taking a look at it. Whether the results are dynamite doesn’t seem to matter–you still keep watching it. It’s just sad to see kids who think they can prove their resolve in the backyard and make it to the pros, who have been so taken by the thrill of the show that they see it as art–and not art as in it requires skill, art as in they devote their lives to it.

Then again, as quite a few parents say, there are worse things kids could be doing.