The charms of professional wrestling — half Shakespeare, half steel-chair shots — may never be universally understood. Every adult fan of the sport has encountered those skeptics who cock their heads and ask, “You do know it’s fake, right?”
Well, sure, but that hasn’t stopped pro wrestling from inching closer and closer to the respectable mainstream. Last year, World Wrestling Entertainment announced a partnership with ESPN, leading to straight-faced wrestling coverage on “SportsCenter.” The biggest action star in the world, Dwayne Johnson, known as the Rock, got his start as an eyebrow-waggling wrestler. When the “Today” show needs a guest host, it enlists the WWE star John Cena to don a suit and crack jokes. No less an emblem of cultivated liberal intelligentsia than Jon Stewart recently hosted wrestling’s annual Summerslam, his first major gig since leaving “The Daily Show.” Wrestling may never be cool, but it is, at the very least, no longer seen as the exclusive province of the unwashed hoi polloi.
This is partly because the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling. (“WWE Raw” leads to “The Real World,” which leads to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” and so forth.) The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
It’s not just in entertainment, either. For a while, it became trendy to insist that the 2016 presidential election, with all its puffed chests and talk of penis size, seemed more like a wrestling pay-per-view event than a dignified clash of political minds. In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump was inducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.) Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words. (...)
What the WWE does care about is keeping control of the way people experience “wrestling” — preferably not as the disreputable carny spectacle it once was, but as a family-friendly, 21st-century entertainment. When recapping wrestling history, it can completely elide the messier incidents: the sex scandals, shady deaths, neglected injuries, drug abuse and more. The audience, meanwhile, knows what the WWE cares about, giving it enough knowledge of wrestling’s inner workings to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”). Parsing both those layers — the behavior and the meta-behavior, the story told and the story of why it’s being told that way — can be an entertainment in its own right, and speculating on creative decisions has long been a fascination for wrestling fans.
This is how a lot of fields work these days. The audiences and the creators labor alongside each other, building from both ends, to conceive a universe with its own logic: invented worlds that, however false they may be, nevertheless feel good and right and amusing to untangle. Consider the many ways of listening to the song “Sorry,” from Lemonade, in which Beyoncé takes shots at an unnamed woman referred to as “Becky with the good hair”: a person we’re led to believe is having a relationship with the singer’s husband. You can theorize about the real-world identity of “Becky with the good hair,” as the internet did. You can consider the context of the phrase (why “Becky”? why “good hair”?), as the internet did. You can think about why Beyoncé decided to make art suggesting that her real-life husband cheated on her. All of this will be more time-consuming, and thus be interpreted as more meaningful, than if she had said outright, “He did it.” (Or if we said, “It’s just a song.”)
The process of shaping a story by taking all these layers into account seems dangerously similar to what corporations do when they talk about “telling the story of our brand” — only as applied to real people and real events, instead of mascots and promotional stunts. On a spiritual level, it seems distasteful to imagine a living person as a piece being moved around on a narrative chessboard, his every move calculated to advance a maximally entertaining story line. But this is how it all too often works — whether plotted by the public figures themselves or by some canny handler (an adviser, a producer, a PR rep), everyone is looking to sculpt the narrative, to add just the right finishing touch.
So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts.
Well, sure, but that hasn’t stopped pro wrestling from inching closer and closer to the respectable mainstream. Last year, World Wrestling Entertainment announced a partnership with ESPN, leading to straight-faced wrestling coverage on “SportsCenter.” The biggest action star in the world, Dwayne Johnson, known as the Rock, got his start as an eyebrow-waggling wrestler. When the “Today” show needs a guest host, it enlists the WWE star John Cena to don a suit and crack jokes. No less an emblem of cultivated liberal intelligentsia than Jon Stewart recently hosted wrestling’s annual Summerslam, his first major gig since leaving “The Daily Show.” Wrestling may never be cool, but it is, at the very least, no longer seen as the exclusive province of the unwashed hoi polloi.This is partly because the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling. (“WWE Raw” leads to “The Real World,” which leads to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” and so forth.) The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
It’s not just in entertainment, either. For a while, it became trendy to insist that the 2016 presidential election, with all its puffed chests and talk of penis size, seemed more like a wrestling pay-per-view event than a dignified clash of political minds. In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump was inducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.) Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words. (...)
What the WWE does care about is keeping control of the way people experience “wrestling” — preferably not as the disreputable carny spectacle it once was, but as a family-friendly, 21st-century entertainment. When recapping wrestling history, it can completely elide the messier incidents: the sex scandals, shady deaths, neglected injuries, drug abuse and more. The audience, meanwhile, knows what the WWE cares about, giving it enough knowledge of wrestling’s inner workings to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”). Parsing both those layers — the behavior and the meta-behavior, the story told and the story of why it’s being told that way — can be an entertainment in its own right, and speculating on creative decisions has long been a fascination for wrestling fans.
This is how a lot of fields work these days. The audiences and the creators labor alongside each other, building from both ends, to conceive a universe with its own logic: invented worlds that, however false they may be, nevertheless feel good and right and amusing to untangle. Consider the many ways of listening to the song “Sorry,” from Lemonade, in which Beyoncé takes shots at an unnamed woman referred to as “Becky with the good hair”: a person we’re led to believe is having a relationship with the singer’s husband. You can theorize about the real-world identity of “Becky with the good hair,” as the internet did. You can consider the context of the phrase (why “Becky”? why “good hair”?), as the internet did. You can think about why Beyoncé decided to make art suggesting that her real-life husband cheated on her. All of this will be more time-consuming, and thus be interpreted as more meaningful, than if she had said outright, “He did it.” (Or if we said, “It’s just a song.”)
The process of shaping a story by taking all these layers into account seems dangerously similar to what corporations do when they talk about “telling the story of our brand” — only as applied to real people and real events, instead of mascots and promotional stunts. On a spiritual level, it seems distasteful to imagine a living person as a piece being moved around on a narrative chessboard, his every move calculated to advance a maximally entertaining story line. But this is how it all too often works — whether plotted by the public figures themselves or by some canny handler (an adviser, a producer, a PR rep), everyone is looking to sculpt the narrative, to add just the right finishing touch.
So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts.
by Jeremy Gordon, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
