Let's get ready to rumble, or Culture Studies post #2

Fifty years ago Roland Barthes wrote the following:

In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

In the twenty-first century, wrestling remains largely the same. The three-hour spectacle I witnessed tonight at a local sports bar upheld the proud traditions which Barthes innumerates. There were all the right elements--the proud champion, the man of the people, radiant in his victory, only to be viciously waylaid by the evil powers-that-be in the event's final moments (these crimes to be remedied in upcoming events--tune in next week!); the dastardly foreigners (in this case Canadians and Latinos), they of the unnecessary boot scrapes and secret eye gouges; the up-and-coming youngster, thankful to the crowd; the consummate showman, playing off the audience's every desire to see justice meted out to humbled wrongdoers. The audience ate up this formula--the crowd of mostly thirty-something, jersey-clad men was almost universal in its praise and blame of the spandex-bedecked "sports entertainers" on the two jumbo-screen TVs. The demos had its demands met; the Colosseum spectatores, once removed from the faux-gladiatorial violence, had every downturned thumb accounted for.

At the same time, we are living in a new era of wrestling consumption. The two gentlemen I attended the event with were "in on the joke." While occasionally wowed by the athletic prowess onscreen, they were more interested in booking decisions and the backstage politics of the sport than seeing their favorite walk away victorious. Influenced by books, magazines, TV specials, and internet sites, which have worked to chip away at the reality/fantasy willful suspension of disbelief of wrestling, we provided meta-commentary to what is supposed to be a purely emotive experience. One senses a bit of this jaded know-how in the live arena audience as well; fans are less likely to cheer or boo any particular wrestler absolutely. The knowledge that it is all fake, that merit resides in the ability of a wrestler to "play the game" effectively, makes one less interested in motifs of "Good vs. Evil" and more in those of "Good (hard-working) vs. Bad (sloppy)." Yet we were there nonetheless, immersing ourselves in, if not the outcomes of the struggles, then the rules of the spectacle.

This hollow participation rings true in other aspects of our information-saturated existence. Everyone knows the protest will not sway the actions of the government; yet not to make a show of our opposition is bad sport, it is proof of infidelity to our team. Similarly, our vote is everything; it is our democratic birthright, the one play we must contribute to the game to be good participatory players. Yet it can also become an empty gesture, an annual slaughtered calf to make up for a year of laziness and resignation. Hence "vote or die," when we are killing ourselves as citizens during the remaining eleven months and thirty days. I begin to understand at this point the radical's conception of the Real; anything to break through the predetermined choices handed to us on a daily basis and to touch something which is not a mind-forg'd manacle.

But this report would not be complete without a brief run-down of some of the gems I heard tonight.

• At one point in the Pay-Per-View, a tag team of "brothers" was fighting a tag-team of "Latinos" (one was actually black). Before the match started, one of the brothers said on the mic, "We're gonna show you that blood is thicker than mud, you punk bitches." The mud races get their due.
• Another team featured no Middle-Easterners, yet the manager said that he was out to "crush the infidels" and called one of his wrestlers his "weapon of mass destruction." Mm-hmm.
• There is nothing more amusing than watching the world's most homoerotic sport and hearing the crowd trying to decide which wrestler is "gayer."
• On the flipside of the political spectrum, one wrestler was mad at another because the latter was filming the former in his home. This "invasion of his privacy" was "completely unwarranted"--a populist argument against the NSA/FISA debacle? Very interesting.