“Why do you like pro wrestling?”
I’ve been a wrestling-enjoyer for a decade and a half, and in that time I’ve received that question countless times. It’s an interesting question because it can be emphasized in a few different ways:
“Why do you like pro wrestling?” For what reason could anyone possibly enjoy that crap?
“Why do you like pro wrestling?” Don’t you know that you’re supposed to hate it?
“Why do you like pro wrestling?” Shouldn’t you like something more normal?
Those questions are interesting, but the most interesting one to me is:
“Why do you like pro wrestling?” You’re a thoughtful guy. You seem smart. You say intelligent things from time to time. Why would someone like you have such a massive blind spot in his intelligence as to enjoy garbage like this?
This constant question no longer irritates me, but it still interests me. When I was 13ish, I wrote a sort of proto-blog post and posted it on Newgrounds.com, which is a site for user-submitted flash games and movies. The gist of it was that pro wrestling was interesting and cool. I wrote it mostly out of frustration at the number of people who told me it was in fact fake and gay.
13-year-old me didn’t see it as fake or gay, and neither does the 27-year-old me writing this. It’s the opposite: to me, no scripted media is more effective in its ability to immerse. J.R.R Tolkien once said that the main goal of any creative is to first create a “secondary world”, and then to seamlessly transport the reader from their actual environment to that secondary world. Scripted entertainment always comes down to getting the audience to forget, no matter how momentarily, that what they’re seeing or hearing never actually happened. It’s bullshit fake crap, and we all love it enough to base huge chunks of our lives around it.
Now that I’m twice as old and slightly better at writing, I decided to take another crack at the same topic. This post is meant to answer the rather broad question of “why would a thoughtful person1 like professional wrestling?” Thoughtful carries a lot of water there, because the stereotype of wrestling fans is that of what Scott Alexander would call Red Tribers.
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.
He doesn’t mention pro wrestling, but he may as well have. Disliking pro wrestling is a signal from the Blue Tribe, hated arch-enemies of the Reds who must constantly signal to the other Blue Tribers that they are not Red (just as Red Tribers must constantly signal they aren’t those disgusting Blues.)
This signal is so deeply ingrained that I don’t think most people even realize it. It’s comfortable in the pantheon of Things You Aren’t Supposed To Like, along with non-mainstream anime and David Foster Wallace and Ayn Rand and ponies… while being less understood than any of those things. Ask someone, “why do you hate Ayn Rand” and they’ll have no shortage of answers, although depending on the person they may mostly be opinions they parrot from others. Ask someone, “why do you hate pro wrestling” and you’ll probably just get “it’s fake.”
But you’re a thoughtful sort, right? You have brains and a discerning palate, and your taste in blogs is exceptional. I’m proceeding off the notion that your only opinion on wrestling is vague distaste, or confusion as to its enduring popularity. Maybe you feel more warmly, but the good news is that you still can probably get something out of this article series.
Pro wrestling is a unique form of entertainment. There are no transferable products. It scratches itches no comparable media can scratch.
All media contains a relationship between the creator and the audience. Most media has it as a one-way pipeline: a director and crew make a movie, you watch the movie, it’s over. Sure, you can send the director a letter or a gift or a pipe bomb in the hopes of changing his future films, but the present movie-making is simply inflicted (with a neutral connotation) upon you.Live entertainment makes this relationship more intimate: let’s take a play. You are there in the flesh, your energy is now part of the show… except a good play attendee is meant to sit in rapt silence until the curtain drops. Sure, you’re there, but you’re barely interacting any more than you would watching the play on video. Live theater has its appeals, but increased interactivity isn’t one of them.
Now what if I told you about a form of theater where the audience was encouraged to participate? Where performers frequently entered the crowd to interact directly with the audience, where the crowd was encouraged to loudly make their feelings known on every character and event, where characters will engage with the audience and even specific audience members directly to literally bring them into the story? Sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it? You’re no longer just bystander or observer, you’re a participant. You are part of the show as you watch it, a minor supporting character in a far grander narrative.Professional Wrestling’s roots run as deep as any art form's.
You know who liked this concept? Oh just William fucking Shakespeare. Elizabethan Theater saw the audience loudly insult, throw things, even physically assault the performers. Now that’s what I call give-and-take between creators and audience.
Yes, that’s right. I am out here claiming without a shred of irony that pro wrestling is more Shakespearean than actual performances of Shakespeare. At least, it’s a hell of a lot closer to what Shakespeare looked like when it was performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime.Shakespeare has a lot of beautiful poetry but the stories themselves are really raw: revenge, betrayal, greed and ambition, love twisting to hate, pathos pathos pathos. Shakespeare is good because Shakespeare can make you feel something, even though it’s 500 years old.
Elizabethan theater was in turn heavily inspired by the great comedies and tragedies of Athens during the Hellenic Golden Age. Those plays come off as real classy today, but even at the time they were seen as broad or even vulgar in their attempts to make broader social points or just for comedy. It goes Sophocles - Shakespeare - Stone Cold Steve Austin. I’m only barely kidding.
These older forms of theater have little to do with the modern shape of theater, but they heavily resemble pro wrestling, which also cares primarily about making you feel something. The stories are almost always raw and broad and pathos-driven, with the greatness coming from the beautiful poetry of the promos (it depends on promotion but people talking into microphones might make up as much as 50% of a wrestling show) and the physical poetry of the actual match. And if you allow it to, it can do this really, really well - especially if you’re there in the flesh, enmeshed in the emotions of thousands of other viewer-participants, moved by the rhythm of the performers as you move them in turn.You can learn a lot about other things by learning about pro wrestling.
My mission statement for this blog is to explore how culture informs media informs culture. Artists make art informed by the tensions of that particular moment in time, and if it can pick up even a little bit of steam that art will in turn leave a fingerprint on the culture. Then another piece of art is made, influenced by the slightly-changed culture. On and on. You know this.
Because of the heavy give-and-take discussed above, this relationship is prominently on display in wrestling. Culture changes and wrestling changes with it. Want to understand another country better? Check out how they consume their wrestling. You’ll learn fabulous and bizarre things, like the massive popularity in 1980s Israel of the Von Erich family - whose paterfamilias Fritz played a Nazi character when he was active decades prior. Like how the father of Japanese pro wrestling, Rikidozan, had to hide that he was actually Korean because he wanted to become a symbol of Japanese national pride during their post-war identity crisis. Like how wrestling’s largest live crowd ever came from a show held in… North Korea, where the audience was forced to attend by the North Korean government.Fascinating trivia aside, wrestling serves as a wonderful cultural bellwether. At its heart, wrestling has always been a morality play. That means that the storylines and characters invariably serve as a lens on the attitudes and industrial psychology of the entire audience. I wasn’t alive in the 1970s or 80s, but I have learned a great deal about American culture and how it changed in that time by learning about the history of wrestling in that transitional period.
I don’t have an ending, except that wrestling is cool. I love the colorful entrances. I love the promos which can range from enthralling to hilarious to chilling pieces of performance art. I love how it sometimes looks like a real-life video game or anime. I love that I can show it to people who have never watched it before and, in almost every case, they find something to like about it. I love it as social lubricant and background noise. It’s an entertainment chameleon, and while I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t like it, I’m just saying that it gets a bad rap from a lot of people.
Throughout this article I’ve been quite general. This is a big and vague subject. I intend to continue this series with looks at specific wrestlers.
A person like myself, who has frequently been accused of being thoughtful by people who buy into my charlatanism.
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