Opiate Of The Masses

An emotionally scarred man prepares to confront his estranged brother. He has just learned that his sibling (whom he presumed had been killed in a house fire which claimed the lives of his parents) is in fact the offspring of an out-of-wedlock union between his mother and his boss. Days of Our Lives? Wrong.

A blue-collar type, tired of harassment at the hands of his tyrannical employer, takes him hostage at gunpoint and psychologically tortures him by forcing him to examine his own hollow soul. The newest Stephen King novel? Guess again. It's all just another run-of-the-mill instalment of the ongoing saga that is professional wrestling.

I can't even imagine the number of times I've been forced to defend my love of professional wrestling. As soon as the subject is broached, I'm greeted either with polite attempts to change the subject, or outright challenges. "Why? What's to like about that crap? You know it's fake." Of course I know it's fake. Even as a five-year-old, watching Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage duke it out from my best friend's basement (my well-intentioned parents forbade wrestling at home), I knew that all the punches were pulled, the outcomes predetermined, the proverbial dice loaded. Guess what: I didn't care.

Wrestling with social issues
Professional wrestling is a form of entertainment unlike any other. Part testosterone-soaked soap opera, part rock concert, part bastard son of the circus freakshow, wrestling has never sat comfortably within the category of sport. Wrestling is now referred to by insiders as "sports entertainment", a none-too-subtle acknowledgment of its "fake" nature. After years of masquerading as a perversion of true and noble competitive sport, professional wrestling has, so to speak, come out of the closet. Of course wrestling is fake, its owners and promoters now say. It's as fake as television, the theatre, novels, or any other form of entertainment. But can something as tawdry and shallow as professional wrestling be likened to the work of Shakespeare or Sophocles, or even comparatively "mature" 90s television?

Paul Budra, SFU English professor, argues that it can. Wrestlers experience the same emotions and situations that theater concerns itself with. Adversity, betrayal, the formation and destruction of friendships and romances, the heights of glory and falls from grace are all present within wrestling.

Budra, who has written extensively on the subject of professional wrestling, points to wrestling's exploitation of the social issues typically explored in more readily accepted forms of theater. Wrestling, as theatre, presents a series of stereotypical characters who reflect those social concerns and issues. Through matches and the presentation of characters' personalities in interviews and other out-of-the-ring antics, professional wrestling examines how we as a society feel about and react towards issues which confront us daily: race and gender issues, class-structure, and national identity.

In the past, international relations proved to be a gold mine for creating wrestling's archetypes. During the Cold War and the Iranian hostage crisis, Russian and Iranian characters were used by wrestling promotions as the epitome of evil. Wrestlers like Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik were made out to be villainous scourge, supposedly indicative of their home countries. They cheated and shouted anti-American slogans, inciting the crowds into righteous patriotic fury. By portraying foreigners as the scum of the earth, wrestling was able to exploit the prejudices of Western audiences, and create a simple morality play in which a person's character could easily be ascertained by their country of origin.

Sex in the ring
Wrestling has always been a male-dominated concept. Female wrestling has almost always been nothing more than a ploy to get scantily-clad women to roll about in the ring. Evening gown matches (in which competitors attempt to remove their opponents already revealing outfits) are common fare today. Yet according to Budra, beneath a seemingly simplistic world of alpha males and their submissive sex-objects lies a far more complex and intriguing battle of the sexes. In his Submission Hold: The Sexual Politics of Professional Wrestling, Budra draws attention to the homoerotic aspects of wrestling which are often joked about yet rarely seriously analyzed. He contends that there is an unspoken yet very real theme of innocent, chaste homosexual love to be found within wrestling. One of the major characteristics of a wrestler being a "good guy" or "bad guy" is the wrestler's stance on the chaste homoerotic bond which Budra says ties wrestlers together.

Besides the obvious connotations of semi-naked oil-drenched men grappling for dominance over one another, Budra draws attention to the phallic imagery of the objects various wrestlers fight with: Jim "Hacksaw" Duggan's two-by-four, the Big Boss Man's night stick, Jake Robert's snake. On a subtler level, there is the importance of loyalty between wrestlers. The formation of an alliance (usually cemented by a dramatic mid-ring handshake) between wrestlers carries certain expectations of commitment and trust. Wrestlers are expected to rush to the aid of their partners if they are faced with an unfair fight, for example, and failure to do so indicates an inability to keep up one's side of a two-way relationship.

In order to maintain the innocence of the proposed male bond, all homoeroticism must be buried in the physical contact involved in the match and the camaraderie displayed by wrestlers. Because of this, blatant homosexual tendencies are viewed in a negative light. Thus wrestlers such as Gorgeous George, Adrian Adonis or Goldust, whose homosexual characteristics are their main feature, must be presented as bad guys. By acting in a homosexual manner, such wrestlers endanger the chastity and secrecy of the homoerotic side of wrestling.

More proof for the homoerotic bond can be seen in the female "managers" of wrestlers. Almost invariably, the wrestlers who are accompanied to the ring by women are seen as bad guys. These men have spurned the non-sexual love of their lockermates for blatantly erotic female love. Examples of this can be seen in bad guy wrestlers Marc Mero and Jeff Jarrett, and their respective managers, Sable and Debra.

A cultural renaissance Wrestling is experiencing a renaissance. Wrestling's current popularity has eclipsed that of the period often seen as its peak: the mid-80s, when Hulkamania was sweeping North America, Russians were still viable stock villains, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura (current governor of Minnesota) was just another one of the guys in the locker room, nothing more. For evidence of this trend one need only look at the revenue professional wrestling is generating: there are ten hours of professional wrestling airing weekly in prime-time slots. Pay-per-view and live ticket sales are at all-time highs. Wrestlers crop up weekly on sitcoms and talk shows. And, let's face it, you can hardly walk through the local shopping mall anymore without seeing somebody wearing an "Austin 3:16" shirt, or being told by some crotch-chopping pre-adolescent to "suck it!"

While some of the constructed notions about the morality and social attitudes of wrestling still seem to hold up, such as its blatant fear of homosexuality and the vilification of those who associate with women, other tenets of wrestling are beginning to disappear and shift in an attempt by promoters to expand wrestling's audience, and to continue to shock and surprise.

As evidenced by the disdain with which wrestling is treated by the media, it's easy to dismiss wrestling as nothing more than a rudimentary morality play. Hulks of men slugging it out, one playing the attractive, upright hero whilst the villain uses every dirty trick in the book, in vain, to vanquish his foe.

While this may have held true in the past, the timeless theme of good and evil in wrestling has been slipping for some time. Things have changed since the days of the Hulkster and Andre the Giant. Today we've got porn stars, pimps, devil-worshippers, even (shudder) country music stars among the clean-cut heroes and foreign devils - the two archetypes which are rapidly disappearing from wrestling's rosters. Believe it or not, of all the characters mentioned above, only the country music star is being promoted as a bad guy.

The heroes
The two most popular current wrestlers are "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Rocky "The Rock" Maivia. As with all wrestlers, their rise to popularity has had next to nothing to do with any actual athletic ability and everything to do with the personae they present. Stone Cold entered his career in the World Wrestling Federation as a bad guy. He cheated, was foul-mouthed, and mocked the fans. Despite this, he quickly became immensely popular, and soon received more fan support than his good guy opponents. Austin has retained his boorish personality, yet now plays the working man's hero: blue-collar, unsophisticated, and not willing to take any abuse from his employer. In fact, the dominant rivalry in the World Wrestling Federation for the past two years was not even between two wrestlers, but between Stone Cold and the owner of the WWF, Vince McMahon. By watching an Everyman beat up his boss, wrestling fans get to live out a sort of vicarious class-warfare. As Jim Freedman observes in his book, Drawing Heat, "The fans are the subordinates of society, the blue collar victims of the bold prerogatives patricians take. What they see inside the ring is what they talk about in unemployment lines, men drunk on conquest living on the loss of others."

If Stone Cold is wrestling's working-boy-done-good then The Rock is its aristocratic snob. The Rock is everthing Stone Cold is not: fashionable, a megalomaniac (all wrestlers are braggarts out of necessity, but The Rock has turned egoism into an art), rich and proud of it. Like Stone Cold, The Rock began his current incarnation as a bad guy before turning into a fan favourite. Unlike Stone Cold, The Rock has not had to alter his gimmick one iota. He still flaunts his trendy wardrobe, uses all means necessary to win matches, and goes so far as to call the fans "trailer park trash". Despite these characteristics, which would have placed him among the most hated wrestlers ten years ago, The Rock is hugely popular.

Postmodern wrestling
Professional wrestling is rapidly changing from being simply a low-brow form of moral theater for the masses in which good and evil clash, with good eventually triumphing. Instead it is becoming a showcase for increasingly bizarre, extreme, and morally ambiguous personalities. Wrestling fans have become self-aware; they realize that wrestling makes deliberate attempts at appealing to their base emotional instincts, and are now simply content to cheer any wrestler who puts on a good show, regardless of the moral alignment of that show. It doesn't matter whether the winner of the match fits typical moral expectations of "good" or "evil": what matters is how many times he cracked his opponent's skull with a chair, or how amusing his pre-match interview was.

About one year ago I attended a live WWF event at GM Place entitled "Rock Bottom." As far as WWF material goes it was pretty standard: the vampire fought the schizophrenic who "hears voices." The leather-masked masochist jammed his hand deep down The Rock's throat in an attempt to force him to submit. The undead demon (my personal favourite) was buried alive compliments of Stone Cold, a bulldozer, and two tons of dirt.

As I left the arena I tried to examine what I'd just seen. Was it further proof (as some would allege) of the downward spiraling of our society's moral fiber? Post-modern proletarian theater? A subversive championing of the working man's suppressed gay desires? Or was it just a bunch of guys in tights with big muscles and girls with implants being cheered on by easily amused hordes of the culturally-inept? I honestly don't know, but I can say this: it was one hell of a show.

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