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ABSTRACT
Professional wrestling is a popular, global, performance phenomenon that is in many respects sport-like, but tends to be shunned by serious sports fans for its alleged ‘fakeness’. Yet its own fans often behave exactly like regular sports fans: getting caught up in the action, responding emotionally to the performances, and engaging in critical analysis of the competitive strategies and the turns of events. How does this alleged ‘fake sport’ engender such complex and deeply emotional appreciation? Here I provide an analysis of pro-wrestling that explains and emphasises its narrative, dramatic and fictional aspects, showing it to be a complex representational work that can be appreciated aesthetically and emotionally on a number of levels.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. By ‘pro-wrestling’ is meant the marketed, commercial, spectator phenomenon of professional show-wrestling, the most well-known version of which is probably the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) promotion. The WWE’s product will be what I have in mind here, though it should be noted that there are many other promotions and that pro-wrestling exists, in more or less the same form, in numerous countries.
2. For a quick verification of this, see the collection of images by the WWE of audience reactions to the moment when The Undertaker’s legendary 21-year streak was brought to an end at WrestleMania 30 in 2014. See: https://www.wwe.com/shows/wrestlemania/30/wwe-fans-react-to-undertakers-streak-ending-photos#fid-26303024 .
3. I take it that for something to count as ‘sport proper’ (to be a ‘real’ sport) it must necessarily involve genuine competition; while we might occasionally use the term ‘sport’ as a catch-all term for various sporting activities (e.g. training, jogging, and such like) to class something as ‘a sport’ requires that it be a rule-governed activity involving athletic or skilled competition.
4. For instance, shows on the WWE network streaming service always open with a ‘disclaimer’ statement that the wrestlers are ‘WWE characters’ that are ‘fictitious and do not reflect the personal lives of the actors portraying them’.
5. It must be noted that pro-wrestling is of course also a televised product, at the same time as being a live-arena product, and this duality of medium does imply two different kinds of audience experience. An analysis of the dual-product nature of pro-wrestling is of considerable interest in itself, but lies outside the scope of the present paper. In terms of the discussion in this section, the televised aspect does not rule out what is said here about the spectacular nature of pro-wrestling – the experience may be less communal when witnessed in the confines of one’s own home, but the spectacle and its themes can still be tapped into.
6. The essay is ostensibly about the world of Paris’ wrestling halls in the 1950s, but is just as applicable to the pro-wrestling of today.
7. A couple of examples illustrating this point: (i) 90s wrestler and rebellious regular-guy character Stone Cold Steve Austin’s enduring battles against the villainous authority figure, Chairman Vince McMahon, resonated with the blue-collar workers in the audience used to having to deal with an unsympathetic boss, or to being at the mercy of ‘The Man’ – in terms of audience uptake, it was one of the all-time most successful feuds; (ii) after being betrayed by his former ‘brother’ Seth Rollins in perhaps the greatest heel-turn in WWE history, Dean Ambrose’s next in-ring promo had him explicitly relating this feeling of betrayal to the audience members with the lines ‘history is full of people like you, Seth; everyone in this building knows somebody like you, Seth – the kind of guy that would stab his brother in the back’. Monday Night Raw episode 1098 6/9/2014 [my emphasis]. The audience loudly concurred.
8. Notwithstanding the existence of some avant-garde and postmodern theatre works that involve the audience – but these are generally the exception to the rule when it comes to the art form of theatre.
9. In fact, Walton (Citation2015, 75–83) also thinks engagement with genuine sports is a matter of the spectators playing games of make-believe, too. This account best explains why sports fans get so emotionally caught up in the fortunes of ‘their’ team, or competitor, when – in the grand scheme of things – none of it really matters. But while competitive spectator sports may share something with entertainment and show business in this respect, Walton correctly maintains that such sports are ‘not quite show business’, for the key reason that they are more akin to natural objects than works of art. Despite being products of human activity, competitive sports games do not have anything like a controlling author overseeing the action for dramatic purposes, and the players’ primary objective in their activity is to win the game or competition; any entertaining, show-like qualities are a by-product of the players’ competitive actions. This, again, is why pro-wrestling is a different kind of phenomenon to competitive sport.
10. It actually spreads further, of course – out of the arena and into the homes of those watching on television. Those who watch the product on television are no less caught up in the game of make-believe, though their games are mediated somewhat differently; they are also part of the work world too, since it is part of the representation of pro-wrestling that the events are televised and watched by millions at home.
11. For a discussion of interactivity and immersion, see Ryan (Citation1994).
12. As discussed by Ezell (Citation2017).
13. See Ryan (Citation1994, section 12): There is ‘a relative transparency of the medium. The reader or spectator looks through the work toward the reference world’.
14. One other kind of fictional medium in which we do see a high level of immersion and interactivity is, of course, video-gaming, and VR. See Ryan (Citation1994). Engagement with this fictional medium is usually a more solitary experience, though.