One spell of unemployment ago, I chanced upon a documentary about the late Jim “Ultimate Warrior” Hellwig, one of the most memorable characters on the erstwhile World Wrestling Federation’s roster during its lucrative peak in the 1980s-1990s. Hellwig’s in-ring persona was a bizarre, hyperactive shaman-fighter who destroyed opponents in lightning-quick matches that often ended mere seconds after his ring entrance music had faded out (this is known as a “squash match” in industry jargon). He boasted an impenetrable wall of vascular muscles decorated in garish neon warpaint, and delivered snarling, clenched-teeth maledictions during interviews. His bellowed monologues, during which he once claimed to represent an “ultimate reality,” often digressed into hallucinogenic confessionals about interdimensional travel and communion with spirits of the dead, and are easily some of the weirdest, unintentionally funniest material consumed by American television audiences. They were also indicative of something deeper: with its appeals to an authentic state attainable by idealizing extreme experience, which itself was contrasted with a weird pseudo-reality originally co-created by literal ex-cons, professional wrestling is one of the most representative creative forms of our times.
Though the formula just mentioned applies to plenty of the cultural mainstream that pro wrestling careens in and out of, there has never exactly been a shortage of extremity idealization among marginal sectors of the arts. Among my friends in the more “serious” arts, many have publicly or privately expressed some appreciation for over-the-top gimmicks like that of the Ultimate Warrior, and I am certain a few of these also realized how close it comes, in attitude and execution, to the stage demeanor of some transgressive poet from the same era. Menacing snarls about “ultimate reality,” accompanying the general conviction that a constant, ever-intensifying extremity holds the key to understanding the innermost self, could have been voiced by prime Henry Rollins. Granted, pro wrestling is not the only entertainment to embrace such a conviction: this same message is implicit in nearly every popular competitive sport, plenty of which also act as theatrical representations of the “zero-sum game” of American socio-political life (i.e. “I can’t succeed in life unless you lose”). Wrestling is unique, though, in the way that it disrupts conventional norms of objective reality in order to impart these lessons.
Before tackling that issue in earnest, it might be unfair to invoke such an easy target as Rollins in order to point out some kinship between the carnival-esque world of “rasslin’” and the more institutionally approved arts. This is not really a controversial proposition: Roland Barthes was not entirely un-serious when drawing a direct line from respectable Greek tragedy to pro wrestling[i], and, in more recent years, accomplished musicians Bob Mould and Billy Corgan have taken on roles in the creative departments of major wrestling promotions (yes, the existence of a “creative department” does imply that these gladiatorial combats are faked, and we are certainly getting to that). Nor was the attitude that defines pro wrestling – one of constant self-intensification and truth-by-ordeal – ever absent from those poetic and artistic spirits who directly influenced the poetic travails of someone like a Rollins. Rimbaud demanded of like minds to do things such as “sleep on the pavement of unknown cities, without comforts, without cares” while Rilke, in his famed musing on the authentic self (Letters to a Young Poet), insisted that “we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us […] that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it”.[ii]
The drama writer Sharon Mazer provides one of the better synopses of pro wrestling’s appeal to more informed audiences, without denying the aspects of wrestling which repel the moral arbiters of the official art world:
Professional wrestling is frequently criticized as a crude, brutal sport that lacks even the honesty of competition. At its worst, a wrestling performance is an over simplistic display of male bravado and vulgar social clichés. But at its best, wrestling is a sophisticated theatrical representation of the violent urges repressed by the social code, of the transgressive impulses present in the most civilized of people.[iii]
Where the “vulgar social clichés” are concerned, yes, wrestling is particularly illustrative of the idea that only “extreme” experiences marked by physical and emotional duress are meaningful, authentic ones. On those moments where it does rise to an art form (and one that would be acknowledged as such even by the most pedantic of cultural theorists), it not only exposes this conceit in compelling or bizarrely funny ways, but also places a spotlight on the maddening dance between truth and falsehood that occurs when attempting to idealize extremity as the “authentic” mode of being. Here the concept of kayfabe makes its grand entrance to the ring.
Kayfabe, pro wrestling’s most distinct form of “creative falsehood”, is the foundation stone for the form’s interaction with its audiences. This industry term is a sort of “pig-Latin” insider code for “fake” derived from its origins in early 20th-century carnivals, and it is essentially an insider shorthand for the veil of secrecy which was to hide the pre-determined outcomes of public matches, and the supposed interpersonal conflicts which inspired each scripted match. You see, the pairings of combatants were, unlike the “legitimate” pro sports, never based solely in the pedestrian desire to be the best in the sport, but rather on the motivations injected into storylines or so-called “angles” concocted by a creative team of “bookers”: these could be just about every conceivable type of antagonism from romantic rivalries to labor disputes to struggles against manifestations of pure evil.
At a much earlier point in pro wrestling history, this kayfabe code would have been disastrous to breach. It is almost impossible to maintain such illusions anymore in the thick of the Information Age, though, and it may be hard for many to even imagine a world in which simplistic good-vs.-evil struggles between a gallant fan favorite (“babyface”) and unscrupulous villain (“heel”) existed, much less a world in which the wrestlers’ in-ring personae were pitched as being just a more violent condensation of the commitments they held outside of the ring. Yet the stage-managed kayfabe reality, which caused “heel” wrestlers to actually risk physical harm from zealous fans (particularly in die-hard markets like Memphis), was just replaced by newer varieties of creative deceit as soon as bookers detected audiences wising up.
On that note, bookers for the major promotions in more recent years have ambitiously demanded that audiences suspend disbelief more, not less, than they would have during the time in which kayfabe might have still been sustainable. Some of the scripted scenarios rise to “perversely funny” levels without much effort at all: Chris Hedges, for example, notes angles involving everything from implied necrophilia to an instance in which a female wrestler (a “diva” in the business) married the father of a rival who then “collapsed and died of a heart attack after marathon sex sessions on their honeymoon.”[iv] Elsewhere, upon cataloging the many crimes against good taste ladled out by the TNA Impact wrestling promotion, wrestling critics R.D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez land upon such absurd angles as the supposed machete slaying of veteran wrestler Scott Steiner, which was followed by the editing of his Wikipedia to reflect his “actually” being dead (after which the angle was unceremoniously dropped, with Steiner “back on TV a week later with no injuries whatsoever”).[v]
Wrestling promotions are surely not trying to completely divorce themselves from that special breed of true believer fan, otherwise known as the “mark,” who uncritically embraces these scenarios as real (and “mark” is another term held over from wrestling’s “carny” days, referring to challengers from the audience suckered into trying their luck against the house wrestlers). The emotional attachment that such fans bring to the table translates into easy pay-per-view and merchandise sales, and so a reliable industry strategy has been to cater to at least some hardcore aspect of “mark”-dom at any given time. Contrary to the belief of those who are not familiar with the inner workings of the business, “marks” have never been fully extinguished; new types of “mark”-ish behavior have just risen to fill in the voids left by paying adults who really thought that, say, Hulk Hogan’s victory over Nikolai Volkov would have some kind of impact on real-world U.S.-Soviet relations. Wrestling bookers did not take too much time learning how to deal with the so-called “smart marks” who, being avid readers of the internet “dirt sheets” that made no attempt to uphold the kayfabe pretense, felt themselves altogether immune to emotional manipulation. They found that even the “smart mark” might still fall for booker-fueled fictionalizations of the “backstage” drama, e.g. the belief that pro wrestlers value the attainment of in-ring prestige more than financial gain (a related “mark”-ism is that wrestlers’ charisma is the real talent which earns them the right to get booked for a championship title run; in truth these titles can change hands based on far more arbitrary criteria).
Wrestling bookers have occasionally proven adept at exploiting modern inclinations to view an event as authentic simply because it comes adorned in all the documentary-style, audio-visual rough edges and atmosphere of urgency that typify amateur footage of live, unfolding events. The classic example of this was the mid-‘90s angle in which the World Championship Wrestling [WCW] promotion was “invaded” by the “New World Order” faction whose black-and-white, glitchy video promos were made to look more like terrorist communiques than officially sanctioned industry product. To that end, the dream weavers of pro wrestling have several narrative tools to work with: the traditional “work” or scripted event, the “shoot” or event which happens outside the bounds of kayfabe, and, naturally, the deviously concocted “worked shoot”, a dizzy oscillation between on-script and out-of-character events which is now more or less the industry standard. The talent themselves have occasionally been bamboozled by this unstable reality: some of the landmark matches in the industry, like the “Montreal Screwjob” featuring Bret Michaels against Bret “The Hitman” Hart, were controversial swerves whose conclusion was reached without all parties being completely briefed on the outcome.
The general state of confusion created by the “worked shoot” approach to ambiguous truthfulness has had other tragicomic results, like the time controversial show producer Eric Bischoff tore up the evening’s script live on his first public appearance with the TNA promotion (as the story goes, the evening’s players actually needed this script to understand what was required of their characters, leading to a farcical situation in which security staff attempted to salvage the torn pieces from the studio audience). Ultimately, the scripting entities themselves were not impervious to becoming “marks for themselves”, and on a promotion-wide scale at that. As the one-time innovative WCW promotion was breathing its last as an independent entity (it was folded into Vince McMahon’s near-monopolistic WWE in the year 2000, purchased for pennies on the dollar), many of the brand’s performers allegedly perceived this state of affairs as a “work” being perpetrated upon them rather than a series of events grounded in indisputable financial realities. As WCW chroniclers R.D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez relate:
This makes little sense to those outside of wrestling, but a stunning number of performers within WCW, despite having read news stories about how their show was being canceled, thought this was just another big con, and that everything else was going to turn out right in the end […] the only reason those wrestlers finally came to understand that they weren’t being worked is because they stopped receiving paychecks.[vi]
It’s interesting to view such situations in light of contemporaneous audience attitudes during what would have been full immersion in the post-modern “end of history”; a time of supposedly greater skepticism towards grand geo-political narratives and a greater acceptance of moral ambiguity in interpersonal relations. As we now know, an era of apparently universal distrust in consensus realities was not truly that, and people as a whole were no less susceptible to being conned by operators with the self-serving skill set of an old-time carny: the grip of authenticity on the public psyche was, appropriately enough, as firm as one of the pro grappler’s choke holds, with such a condition being desired even in events historically based on mass deception.
In the fertile post-modern soil of anxiety and uncertainty, the belief in continual intensity and extremity as the road to authenticity could truly come into its own. Even among the “smart mark” wrestling fanbase there was always a general appreciation for the fact that the performers would face down the possibility of real crippling injuries, real side effects of grueling tour schedules, etc., however phony the storylines that demanded this physical and psychic toll. This became especially evident in the mid-‘90s when a Philadelphia-based promotion called Extreme Championship Wrestling earned a wild-eyed cult following, clearly following the grand tradition of scripted matches but nonetheless positioning itself as the endurance-testing, “hardcore” alternative to the rival brands of fakery to be found in the WCW and WWE. The ECW may best be remembered by fans of those promotions as the proving ground for later superstars like the death-defying Mick Foley, but for its own fanatical audience, it truly was an “ultimate reality” of barbed wire, fire, gushing blood, hard falls onto thumbtack-covered mats, duels with flaming 2 x 4s and other undeniably real hazards. Emotional abuse was not out of the picture either; with players like Tammy Lynn Sytch being called upon to relay true, sordid details of drug addictions and general abject living in order to develop their characters.
Pro wrestling’s recent history is not a linear one leading from the morally unambiguous, family-oriented content of the 1980s to a more cynical surge of extremity in the following decades: there have in fact been some sabbaticals and reversals, including attempts to push relatively clean-cut and kid-friendly babyface stars like John Cena as perennial “main eventers”. Throughout its many different iterations, and its wild leaps from breathtaking idiocy to showcases of admittedly stunning technical skill and charisma, pro wrestling has never lost the core value that qualifies it as an art form: it is a particular lie that reveals a more general truth; in this case the truth that the idealization of “authenticity” is itself a dead end for human creativity.
Sometimes this lesson has been scripted, but in other instances it has been learned in a way that was, sadly, not part of a “work” at all, and in these cases the struggle to reach one’s true, authentic inner self via ever-increasing intensity led to premature death. I speak here of pro wrestling’s well-documented embrace of “ultimate” physical enhancement via anabolic steroids. Any lingering suspicions on the steroid issue were also revitalized, and perhaps made into a permanent fixture of discussions around the ethics of the wrestling business, when the 2007 suicide of wrestler Chris Benoit (directly following the double murder of his wife and child) was posited as being the direct result of steroid abuse: the post-mortem toxicology report on Benoit revealed a 59:1 ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in the wrestler’s body, which can be compared to an “acceptable” level of 4:1 for other varieties of professional athlete. The Benoit tragedy is as clear a condemnation of the “extremity as authenticity” ethic that one could imagine: that which was meant as a blueprint for self-actualization accelerated the death of a performer still regularly spoken of as one of the form’s technical geniuses. The factors largely believed to have fueled Benoit’s demise, particularly the synthetic so-called “cocktail of death” designed to develop an imposing physical frame at an unnatural speed, were not isolated to him either. In fact, Benoit’s admitted best friend in the industry, Eddie Guerrero, adopted a similar drug regimen and preceded him in death by two years, with some commentators arguing that both took this path in response to industry demands (Guerrero and Benoit, though both beneath 6 feet in height and not possessing the massive bulk of the main event performers, would have been considered physically exceptional in almost any other arena than that of pro wrestling).
As such tragic examples show, too often the quest for “ultimate reality” ends in the un-reality of oblivion.
[i] See Barthes, R. (1987). Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang.
[ii] Rilke, R.M. (2011). Letters to a Young Poet & The Letter from the Young Worker. Trans. / Ed. Charlie Louth. London / New York: Penguin Classics.
[iii] Mazer, S. (1990). “The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling.” TDR, (34):4, pp. 96-122.
[iv] Hedges, C. (2009). Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books / Perseus Books.
[v] Reynolds, R.D. & Alvarez, B. (2014). The Death of WCW (10th Anniversary Edition). Toronto: ECW Press.
[vi] Ibid.