“Real” Life

What fans come to recognize and interact with as they “get in on the game” and move from “mark” to “smart,” is the play outside the play: first the signs of a hero or villain, then the inevitable failure of the representatives of authority in the ring to assure a fair fight and a just end, and finally that the true power lies in the hands of the promoter whose purchase of a wrestler includes the right to dictate his success or failure. For fans, not only are the stories that are told to them in the ongoing professional wrestling narratives drawn from life, life itself can be read through the structures and understandings that professional wrestling provides. The real contest is not between wrestlers, with whom fans identify, but between themselves as competing experts and, most important, between themselves as consumers and the guys with the money and power.

From Beefcake to Cheesecake

The presence of women in the arena—as “girl” wrestlers, managers, etc.—is bound up in conventionally eroticized ideas of female power, the sale of her performance conflated simultaneously with male desire to see two women “together” and with male desire to experience domination without danger. If the performances of male wrestlers may be seen to celebrate a range of masculine possibilities while affirming the essential “man” within, then it is possible to see that the performances of female wrestlers also serve to celebrate and affirm masculine ideals. The performance of the girl wrestler serves to legitimize the male wrestler’s performance both by taking the place of the “not-man” and by deflecting the event’s otherwise homoerotic energies onto herself. In doing exactly what the men do in performance, she also serves to bring to the surface the otherwise repressed sense of wrestling’s sensuousness and its sexual implications.

What the World Is Watching

More than a vulgar parody of “real” sport, professional wrestling is a sophisticated theatricalized representation of the transgressive, violent urges generally repressed in everyday life. More than a staged fight between representatives of good and evil, at its heart is a Rabelaisian carnival, an invitation to every participant to share in expressions of excess and to celebrate the desire for, if not the acting upon, transgression against whatever cultural values are perceived as dominant and/or oppressive in everyday life. More than an elaborate con game in which spectators are seduced into accepting the illusion of “real” violence, wrestling activates and authorizes its audiences, makes them complicit in the performance. Matches can be described in conventional dramatic terms that remain consistent whether in Madison Square Garden or Gleason’s Arena. Because the fight is fixed, the contest is for heat—for the fans’ attention—rather than for victory per se.

“Real” Wrestling

Professional wrestling is an unsporting sport, a theatrical entertainment that is not theatre. Its display of violence is less contest than ritualized encounter between opponents, replayed repeatedly over time for an exceptionally engaged audience. To watch wrestling and write about its performance is to attempt to come to terms with the significance of a highly popular performance practice as it intersects, exploits, and parodies the conventions of both sport and theatre. Rather than simply reflecting and reinforcing moral clichés, professional wrestling puts contradictory ideas into play, as with its audience it replays, reconfigures, and celebrates a range of performative possibilities. Beyond its spectacular elements, professional wrestling is an athletic performance practice, constructed around the display of the male body and a tradition of cooperative rather than competitive exchanges of apparent power between men as directed by the promoter. The fight is fixed, in the squared circle as in life.