On Wrestling
I’m currently in a vibe where I can’t watch contemporary dance. I mean dance that is self-referential: Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham showing bodies in abstraction. Like all abstract art, the material used to create it becomes the thing that’s expressed. This is a gross generalisation. Bausch’s Cafe Muller can’t be reduced to abstraction. Neither can Rothko Chapel when it’s read through the painter’s suicide. But I’m nodding towards a specific type within contemporary dance. I want to watch movement that’s in rhythm with existence, like Thailand’s Nora performers.
Theatre is currently suffering the same fate. I still love Sam Beckett but wrestling - its colour, its confrontation, its unabashedly camp working class dramatics - is the only thing I can watch.
I’ve been watching a lot of wrestling. I had read Barthe’s famous essay before, but now I have renewed appreciation for just how brilliant it is:
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
He goes on to argue that audiences are more concerned with the semiotic interplay of gestures-as-spectacle than whether or not wrestling is fake. I can’t help but think this ignores something key concerning how these gestures play out.
The recent Netflix documentary series Mr McMahon, which began filming shortly before the charges of sex trafficking and hush money were set against the promotor, does well to show the subject’s role in the history of mainstream wrestling without shying away from its endless scandals and lawsuits. In one of many interviews with Hulk Hogan, the former wrestling star recounts how a journalist grilled him about the sport’s veracity as his forehead was cut up from razor blades.
I don’t believe wrestling is fake anymore. Rather, the fictionally real (Hulk Hogan getting fake-punched in the forehead) is bolstered by the materially real (Hulk Hogan cutting his forehead with razors to show the real damage caused by him not really getting punched in the forehead).
On one hand, I want to say wrestling is no less fake than a novel you’ve read: you really were experiencing a novel, a constructed narrative. On the other hand, wrestlers used to cut themselves with razors to bleed in the ring.
Maybe this is the repulsion with wrestling, putting aside that it’s easy to dismiss 12 year old boys/the working classes/the camp. Wrestling reminds us just how constructed day-to-day life is. We really eat Big Macs in buildings with huge yellow logos. We really Like the most curated photos on social media. Wrestling - “Sports Entertainment” - formalises the gradient between what’s material and immaterial, that either one is contingent on the other. To return to Barthes: the sign itself functions with this level of complexity, giving me further reason to revisit Baudrillard after 10+ years.
The popular anxiety isn’t because wrestling is fake. It’s more that every other sport is unable to face the ways in which it is a fiction and, necessarily, this expands to all social interactions.
I may well return to this topic in the future, as I believe Sontag and Mike Kelley have something to say on the matter.