Professional Wrestling

There is something terribly wrong with being labeled an intellectual at an early age. I was labeled such myself when I was young because I was less boisterous and more inward than a lot of the other boys. I really didn’t like to roughhouse or play football as much, but I did like books and comic books and movies and other more sedentary pursuits. I couldn’t tell you who was quarterbacking what team, but I could tell you where the key was to the Fortress of Solitude, and I knew the difference between “weather” and “whether.” Plus, I wore glasses.

But there is something terribly wrong with this label, because, like all labels that ever existed, it is very limiting. If I ever did want to throw the baseball around, which I honestly did sometimes, I would get funny stares from people. This isn’t your thing, these reproachful looks would say. Go read a book. And it cut both ways, as well. Later in life, I would be handed things like a collection of Doonesbury or a tape of some Woody Allen movie with the expectation that, since these things are more introspective and intellectual by nature, that I would really like them. I didn’t. I pretended to, but I didn’t. I found them completely dull.

In fact, it is an ironic truth I found a lot of things of a supposed intellectual bent to be completely dull. Cut to my days as a film student, where I was all geeked up about movies like Star Wars and Die Hard, but everyone else was wearing black, smoking clove cigarretes, and watching The 400 Blows or The Bicycle Thief some other dour European classic. I appreciated these films, mind you, but I did not like them as much at the time because they were presented in that context as medicine to be swallowed, not as art to be enjoyed. I and my enthusiasm for the whiz-bangery of pop culture seemed out of place in film school. In one year, I had changed my major to English, which I liked better, but still there was an air, an almost poisonous air, of refined pretension and ostentation which I found tedious. This expectation of pretension that came along with being a supposed intellectual was exactly what I did not like.

It really was a pain when I became a big fan of professional wrestling in the 90s, because there is nothing more anti-intellectual than wrestling, or so I was told over and over again by people who would sniff at me for liking something so rough and unrefined. Yet I knew that wrestling, while not exactly Shakespeare, was nevertheless a kind of art form, in that it had a structure and aesthetic that was, in its own way, as refined and complex as any other storytelling structure. Sure, it didn’t inspire the gentle emotions of a Keats poem, but it had its own burly and explosive emotions it wanted to get across, the more primal emotions of triumph and conquest. Sure, wrestling characters lacked the subtlety and nuance of the Hamlets and the Jane Eyres of our inner imagination, but these characters were nonetheless thoughtfully created and integrated into a storytelling scenario that made absolute logical sense. So when Stone Cold Steve Austin rode to the ring in a beer truck to douse his boss Vince McMahon with stale beer, or Mankind joined forces with The Rock to form a tag team, it was part of a vast storytelling structure, even if it was a simplistic and violent structure. The characters and their actions made sense, and they progressed the larger story forward.

So, when people would tell me that wrestling wasn’t real, I thought that they were missing the point. It is real in the sense that all stories are real. They are a created reality of the mind, a mental playpen that we can visit filled with characters that we can play with like toys, just like any other kind of story. Why was I supposed to look down on wrestling just because it was not quiet and introspective like I was? Do I have only one dimension available to me? Did I have to at all times be the vanguard of intellect and intelligence?

I think the problem here is that wrestling is art in its own way, but you have to know how to “read” it the right way. When you read a novel, you expect a certain set of artistic and storytelling traits. You look for things like the symbolism of the characters, or the irony of situations, or even the words and structure of sentences. And this is the way it should be. (Remember, I was an English major, and today I teach English.) But if you were to apply these literary expectations to wrestling, it cannot help but come up short, or at least seem to.

Wrestling, however, has its own artistic traits, and some of them require the same attention to detail. For example, wrestling always had a wonderful sense of juxtaposition. In the examples I mentioned above from my favorite era of wrestling, you had Stone Cold Steve Austin, the chaotic, almost amoral antihero, versus Vince McMahon, the overbearing and repressive corporate boss. In that era as well, you had Mankind, a hairy, disheveled manchild/psychopath joining forces with The Rock, an impossibly slick and savvy metrosexual. It is a simple trick, but it works here like it works anywhere else. (Go read Moby-Dick and look at the odd friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg for much the same dynamic.)

Wrestling also had a wonderful sense of timing. A good match was like a good story. You had to have a beginning state of affairs, and then there is conflict, and then a resolution. It is Freytag’s Pyramid at its simplest. But even simple stories need a good sense of timing, and this is wrestling’s great strength as a storytelling medium. It is not enough to have large men beating on each other in a ring. A good match needs momentum. It needs the right things to happen at the right time. It needs what wrestlers call “ring psychology” to get us involved in the story, otherwise everything falls flat. Just watch the simple drama of any good tag team match, where the battered opponent tries to make it to the corner to tag in his fresh parter, or watch the reaction of the crowd whenever a wrestler is pinned and manages to kick out right before the three count. They are simple tricks to snare our emotional involvement, but literature and art have their own tricks that do much the same thing, so are they ultimately any different?

The fact that wrestling’s stories are told primarily through physical actions and not words does not mean that they are without intellect; it just means that they work differently. I am constantly amazed when people do not get this fact. I see it happen all the time, though. I see it with the Oscars, where they never seem to nominate anything that feels like an actual movie, as if they are ashamed of movies; everything that wins feels like a novel and not a movie, as if movies need to be literate in the same way as books. Well, film is an art, and it is its own art with its own rules, just like every other art form, and I enjoy those rules, and hence I enjoy film on its own terms. Wrestling is also an art, and it has its own rules as well, and those that understand these rules can enjoy wrestling for what it is, while those that are waiting for it to become a Virginia Woolf novel will no doubt stay unimpressed.

Copyright 2013 Brian Stacy Sweat