Wrestling With Reality

When I first started this thing about 6 months ago someone read my bio and commented that they'd like to read an excerpt from my masters thesis. So here, for your reading pleasure, is the opening to Wrestling With Reality: Hyperreality Examined in the World Wrestling Federation. Please excuse any formatting glitches caused by going from a Word document to this format.

CHAPTER ONE

"I love the pageantry, the athleticism, the incredibly cheesy acting. I look at wrestling as theatre at its most base, and so do most of the fans. We know what’s going on. Is it sport? Is it entertainment? It’s both. It’s wrestling. Now let’s get something straight. I know wrestling is a show. But it’s not as fake as you think. Of course the moves of the match are predetermined and the violence is choreographed. However, the result of the violence is very real" (Blaustein 1999).

Introduction

Since the mid 1990s professional wrestling has experienced a dramatic increase in popularity. As wrestling has become more and more popular it has come to terms with its place in the entertainment industry. Gone are the days when professional wrestling claimed to be a legitimate sport. Gone are the days when professional wrestling even pretended to be a legitimate sport. When discussing the industry that he now dominates as the owner of both the World Wrestling Federation and the newly acquired World Championship Wrestling, Vince McMahon Jr. refers to wrestling as “sports entertainment.” As Sharon Mazer states in Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, professional wrestling is “a sport that is not, in the literal sense, sporting; a theatrical entertainment that is not theatre (1998 3).” So what is it?

In the world of professional wrestling few things are certain, but one thing that is known is that the outcomes of matches are predetermined. While many critics would say that wrestling is “fake,” most wrestling fans stay away from this word- they refer to wrestling as “staged.” In wrestling terminology planned or staged events are referred to as “works” and unplanned events are referred to as “shoots” or as “legit.” Precautions are taken to make matches as safe and as painless as possible for those involved. In much the same way that judo participants know how to fall to prevent injury, wrestlers know how to fall and land in order to minimize impact. What the staged nature of professional wrestling results in is cooperation between wrestlers to put on entertaining matches rather than physical competition between them. In order to put on a safe match the wrestlers must be willing to cooperate and trust each other (Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows 1998). Some critics ask why fans stay interested if they know the results are fixed. Simply put, the fans do not care if the outcome is planned. For one thing, the fans have no way of knowing what the result of the match is going to be. They can speculate as much as they want to, but there is no way to know for certain who the winner will be in most cases. Another popular defense that fans use to justify viewing a staged sport is that professional wrestling is no more staged than anything else on television (Adam Doucette, personal communication, June 2000). The world of professional wrestling is a fictional world with its own rules and its own characters. While many of the wrestlers use their real names, many of them adopt personas. Mark Calloway has been wrestling in the World Wrestling Federation under the name “The Undertaker” for almost five years. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin (whose real name is Steve Williams) was known by several other names before he adopted his current persona. Just as characters come and go on weekly sitcoms, wrestlers move between wrestling federations, adopting new personas as the situation requires. In this sense, they are no different from other actors. What sets wrestling apart from most other forms of television programming, however, is its unique mixture of planned and improvised events. For example, although the outcome of a match may be planned, the actual match itself is improvised. The wrestlers will try various combinations of moves based on crowd reaction (Jay 2000).
Occasionally things do not go according to plan and events deviate from the script. Reasons for accidents range from unexpected crowd reactions, legitimate wrestler injuries or a wrestler’s desire to improvise and see what happens. The wrestling industry uses fake injuries to further blur the line between what is planned and what is not. Doing this keeps the fans in suspense and keeps them guessing. Occasionally the wrestling industry is faced with very real, unplanned circumstances that they choose to deal with by incorporating them into their storylines. Again, this furthers adds to the confusion over what is planned and what is authentic. As a result there is an ever-present tension between what is constructed and what is not. It is this tension that adds to the suspense.

Statement of Purpose

This thesis will examine how the professional wrestling industry, particularly the World Wrestling Federation, manages the tension between constructed and authentic events by combining the authenticity of sport with the scripted nature of melodrama. It will be argued that this tension requires careful rhetorical management by the World Wrestling Federation. It will also be argued that the WWF manages and exploits this tension in order to advance the spectacle of professional wrestling.
In order to explore how this tension is treated rhetorically, this thesis will discuss the nature of wrestling ‘reality’ and the character of key wrestling forms and conventions. Secondly, this thesis will explicate a case study that will be used to show how professional wrestling deals with a very real, unplanned situation. The case study used in this thesis will be the May 24, 1999, episode of WWF Raw, which aired the night after professional wrestler Owen Hart died in the ring during a live pay-per-view event. I argue that this case reveals the character of the tension between the “authentic” and the scripted, thereby disclosing the limits of the wrestling spectacle.
The professional wrestling industry knows that in order to please its fans it must keep them in suspense. The problem with this is that there are literally hundreds of Internet websites dedicated to figuring out what the next ‘big thing’ in wrestling is going to be. Therefore, the writers who are responsible for wrestling programming make a conscious effort to stay ahead of the Internet fans. If the Internet fans have managed to figure out an outcome ahead of time, that outcome may be changed in order to surprise them. A current example was the investigation into who ran over “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. In the fall of 1999 Austin took time off in order to have surgery on a nagging injury to his neck. Rather than say he was having surgery, the WWF decided to fake an injury to explain his absence. At a live pay-per-view event they made Austin the victim of a hit and run car accident in which Austin was hit by a car in the backstage area. When Austin returned to the WWF ten months later he has was consumed with finding out who hit him, or so the story goes. Over the course of several programs, such as WWF Raw and Smackdown!, Austin and the WWF commissioner at the time, Mick Foley, tried to figure out who the attacker was. This led to tremendous speculation on the Internet with every wrestling columnist contributing his or her own theories. Various clues had been given, but they were vague enough to allow for multiple theories about the attacker’s identity. Columnists openly stated that they expected to be surprised, although other fans claimed that all of the possibilities had been discussed (www.scoopswrestling.com). How could the WWF possibly surprise the fans? They did. While it cannot be proved that the WWF writers read the Internet speculation, it seems to be the only way they could have surprised all of the Internet columnists who make a living anticipating the next twist in the story.
The writers also use the Internet fans as a sounding board. If a particular storyline is not well-received by the Internet community, it may be altered or dropped altogether. You can be sure that if the current storyline involving the hit and run does not get good reviews on the Internet, it will be changed. Occasionally Jim Ross, who is one of the announcers and writers for the WWF, will mention Internet reports in his weekly newsletter, The Ross Report. Whether he is dispelling Internet rumours, or starting them, he definitely acknowledges the segment of the wrestling audience that loyally follows the wrestling industry through the Internet, which is relatively small but very vocal and influential (Isaacs, Wrestling Scoops, April 19, 2001).

As has been mentioned, professional wrestling is a blend of fact and fiction- constructed and improvised events. This interesting blend exists in order to involve the fans and keep them guessing. The line between what is constructed and what is legitimate is intentionally blurred. For example, in the days following the August 27, 2000 WWF SummerSlam pay-per-view event, the internet websites dedicated to following the WWF were filled with columns speculating on whether or not certain events were planned or spontaneous. Were they accidental or constructed? I took immense pleasure from the fact that because of what I had seen and heard during and after the event, I knew the answers to many of the questions being asked. I knew that Shane McMahon was not as hurt as the WWF claimed- I had seen him backstage laughing and talking on his cellular phone. I had seen Hunter Hearst Helmsley’s reaction when he injured Kurt Angle. I had seen Kurt Angle in the ambulance with an oxygen mask on, I had seen the looks on the faces of Helmsley and the officials as the table broke sooner than expected, resulting in a legitimate injury. And I reveled in all of it because I was “in the know”.

Literature Review: The Blind Leading the Blind

When one considers the numerous peaks in the popularity of professional wrestling over the last 75 years, it seems odd that the academic world has left this popular culture phenomenon alone. In fact, a quick review of the existing academic literature on the subject will only turn up two books, an essay, and a handful of journal articles, many of which are now outdated or poorly researched. The purpose of the next few pages is to highlight the prominent academic works on professional wrestling, both good and bad, with the aim of highlighting their strengths and their shortcomings.

The earliest written piece on what can be called modern professional wrestling is Roland Barthes’ “The World of Wrestling” found in his 1957 work, Mythologies. Although the piece takes the form of an essay rather than an academic article, “The World of Wrestling”, is probably the most often cited piece on the subject of professional wrestling. Barthes’ essay examines professional wrestling in France in the 1950s from a dramatic perspective, looking at it as a moral play. To Barthes, the most important aspect of a wrestling match was not whether a person won or lost, but whether or not justice was served and whether or not the characters properly played their roles: “The function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him” (17). In French wrestling the villain and the hero were clearly defined, allowing the audience to anticipate, and make sense of, the coming events. In a spectacle where passion is of the outmost importance, Barthes claims that, “it no longer matters if the passion is genuine or not…there is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private” (18). What is put on display is an exercise in suffering, defeat, and justice.

Barthes points out that wrestling in France in the 1950s differed from wrestling in the United States. According to Barthes, American wrestling is rooted in the battle between Good and Evil, usually in a political context. In France wrestling was more of a moral, relativistic ethical drama. The ethics in this situation were based on the character of the individual, not where they were from. It had more to do with how a wrestler acted in a given situation. What makes Barthes’ essay useful for the purposes of this project is that North American wrestling has become more like the French wrestling of the 1950s. With the absence of great political enemies, wrestling promoters have had to find new ways to determine the goodness or the badness of a wrestler, and these new methods of polarization are often rooted in personal ethics.

Jeffrey J. Mondak’s 1989 article “The Politics of Professional Wrestling” in The Journal of Popular Culture examines the various villains that wrestling promoters have used during the industry’s peaks in popularity (which he states were in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s). While this is a thorough longitudinal examination of the history of wrestling villains, it will be argued in this project that the trend toward using foreign enemies as wrestling villains ended in the mid 1990s as wrestling regained popularity. It is worth noting that Mondak only cites one other academic source on professional wrestling. The rest of his material regarding wrestling comes from magazine and newspaper reports. Mondak’s overall conclusion is that wrestling should be viewed with great apprehension due to its tendency to support xenophobic foreign policies and its vilification of ethnic minorities. While these findings are reasonably supported, I believe that the professional wrestling industry has moved away from these themes for the most part. In fact, the country that has been vilified by American wrestling federations over the last three years has been Canada, which is obviously not a real threat to the United States in any way. So while Mondak’s study is useful, it shows a need to update the existing literature.

John W. Campbell’s more recent article, “Professional Wrestling: Why the Bad Guy Wins” in The Journal of American Culture (1996) looks at some similar themes. Campbell grounds his analysis in Barthes, Bahktin and Fiske as he examines the role of the sign in professional wrestling. He also relies on Mondak’s article for a description of wrestling villains. After reviewing Mondak Campbell examines the villains that have appeared since Mondak’s article was published. This article marks the shift that wrestling promoters made, moving from foreign political enemies to domestic enemies, the enemies of society. Campbell claims that the reason the bad guy wins so often in professional wrestling is that many of the fans are “low income workers, welfare recipients and immigrants” (132). These people find it easier to relate to the disenfranchised villain than to the hero. There are a few problems with this claim. First, if the fans sided with the villain, he would cease to be the villain and become the hero. This is exactly what happened with the character of Stone Cold Steve Austin in the late 1990s. Another problem with Campbell’s claim is that he based it on an article written in 1983, 13 years prior to his article. Since that time the professional wrestling fan base has changed dramatically, calling the validity of Campbell’s claim into question (Campbell 1996).

The first half of Campbell’s article is useful in understanding the symbolic nature of wrestling. It also does a nice job of bringing several academic theorists into the picture in order to make sense of wrestling. However, by the time Campbell starts his analysis, he has abandoned the theorists and has started basing his conclusions on one outdated article- Jim Freedman’s “Will the Sheik Use His Blinding Fireball? The Ideology of Professional Wrestling” (1983). Freedman’s article is extremely narrow in focus and addresses the role that live professional wrestling events play in the lives of blue-collar workers in a small southern Ontario industrial town. Campbell also makes the brash claim that “fans need not spend any intellectual energy making sense of wrestling” (128). I disagree. While it may not be necessary for fans to spend much intellectual energy as they watch wrestling, many fans choose to. This cognitive work is evident anytime one visits a live wrestling event and listens to the people in the stands talk about what is going on in front of them. They put a lot of time into thinking about what is going on. The casual viewer may not think about wrestling very much, but the fan does.

So far the literature that has been reviewed has been rooted in semiotics and linguistics and the spectacle. Michael Ball takes a slightly different approach by grounding his book, Professional Wrestling as Ritual Drama in American Popular Culture, (1990) in the anthropological literature on ritual. Rather than relying on a few samples take from magazines (like Campbell and Mondak tend to do), Ball analyzed 54.5 hours of televised wrestling programs and attended eight live wrestling events hosted by the World Wrestling Federation over the course of one year. Using the ritual theories of Victor Turner, Erving Goffman and Mary Jo Deegan, Ball attempts to provide a comprehensive view of professional wrestling. Some of the themes Ball examines are the history of professional wrestling, the demographic breakdown of the audience, the stereotypes that are used and promoted in wrestling and the ideologies promoted by professional wrestling-- which he states are often the ideologies of the dominant upper-class society. As a result, the hero is usually traditional, conservative, patriotic and white (159). Ball also examines the symbolic nature of many of the rituals performed in wrestling, as well as the nature of fan interactivity.
Overall, Ball’s analysis is very thorough and well grounded in rigorous academic theory. But Ball admits that the weaknesses of his study are based on the limits of his regional sample, the ever-changing nature of wrestling, and his ability to only observe events from cheaper seats, limiting his perspective as he observed audience reactions. Ball highlights many of the issues presented by professional wrestling. However, as he notes, and as I have noted earlier, professional wrestling is a quickly changing form of entertainment. By the time an article is published, the examples used in it have probably become outdated and obsolete. Unlike Mondak and Campbell’s articles though, Ball’s book is grounded in concepts (such as racial stereotypes, gender roles and class roles), not examples, and many of the concepts he examines are still applicable, even though the examples have changed.

One of the biggest problems with the academic literature reviewed up to this point is that is indeed written by academics. None of them seem to be fans of professional wrestling, and few of them seem to have any respect for it as a form of entertainment. As such they are outsiders analyzing a subject to which they have little exposure. Ball does an excellent job trying to stay objective, but he still comes across as an outsider. This ‘outside perspective’ tends to simplify professional wrestling and ignore what entices fans to watch it on a consistent basis. Enter Sharon Mazer.

Sharon Mazer is a wrestling fan and author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (1998). While taking a break from writing on medieval theatre, Mazer stumbled across professional wrestling and fell in love with it. She then applied much of what she had learned studying theatre to wrestling. Mazer’s book is distinctly different from the others in that it is an ethnographic study. Mazer ventured into the male dominated world of professional wrestling and observed a group of aspiring wrestlers as they worked out at a local gym over the course of two years. Over time she became a member of the group and gained acceptance, which allowed her to gain a better understanding of how the wrestlers themselves view their livelihood. Mazer also relies on internet forums, email correspondence, popular wrestling magazines, and academic sources for support. Mazer’s perspective is one of a fan, and of a person who has seen the inside of the very secretive wrestling industry. She examines how wrestling means, not just what it means. Some of the many themes discussed by Mazer are wrestling terminology (which is a major part of the wrestling subculture), the wrestling subculture itself, the role of women in wrestling (both as valets and wrestlers), and the role of the fan in professional wrestling. This last section is of particular relevance to this project since it is concerned with how fans create meaning in professional wrestling and how they deal with the wrestling’s constructed reality. This chapter gets at the heart of why I have chosen to devote an entire thesis to this subject. It is the only discussion that I have encountered that takes the fan’s perspective into account in a serious way. As such, this chapter will be referred to often within my thesis as I explore the world and character of professional wrestling.

If you would like to read more let me know. If for some reason a search angine led you to this page and you would like to cite me feel free to do so. I will happily provide the necessary information.

Comments

hi there. found you on a search for essays on wrestling. I remember, a million (say, 15) years ago that I had a Rhetoric class, and we read an article about professional wrestling. It might have been ROland Barthes, but I can't confirm (nor deny) this. Perhaps you can site some more references for me, to ease my curious mind. The essay in question had something in it about the dance of the giants, and the performance aspects of big-time wrestling...email at above. thanks.

[Sam Ford]

I am trying to locate Michelle, who posted on the board earlier this year, but she doesn't answer e-mails. Anyone have any ideas? I am working on compiling a collection of pro wrestling academic work.

[michelle]

Ben,
My name is Michelle and I am a student at Mills College currently working on my thesis. I would really like to read the rest of your thesis and would like citation information. My thesis involves the social construction of masculinity using content and text analysis from the Professional Wrestling world for data. I am running into the same difficulty as you finding current quality literature. Could you help me out?

[Jodi]

You're such a tease. I still can't believe that someone of your intellectual prowess wrote a thesis on wrestling ... you should be solving the problems of the world, my friend. Or at least planning my wedding ... now there's a thesis topic ...

[Ben]

Janice- I don't recall if Koko was mentoned or not. It's been a while.

Liam- just releasing the findings wouldn't be any fun, would it? Should I post the next section?

[Liam Steele]

Wow.

what were your findings?

[Janice]

Way to go, Ben! I've been wanting to read a bit of this for a while. One question - did Ball make any mention of Coco BeWare as a hero in the 1980's, as he is neither traditional, coservative, or white? Just curious.