Cagefight

“Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it.” ~Ringmaster

It's their world now. Hulk Hogan sued the old version of Gawker and he shut it down. Kane ran for Mayor of Knoxville, and he won. Jesse Ventura ran for Governor of Minnesota, and he won. A celebrity villain ran for President, and he won. And then Dwayne Johnson endorsed his opponent in the summer of 2020, and I watched the video on repeat, and I tried to talk about it, in daylight, stone-cold sober, which was a bad choice in retrospect. No, you don't understand, it's The Rock. Holy fuck, this is huge.

Abraham Josephine Riesman's Ringmaster (Atria Books) comes with a blunt subtitle – “Vince McMahon and the unmaking of America.” We know that wrestling has taken over entertainment all across the board: we know McMahon was instrumental in its rise as a beloved and reviled TV spectacle. We know. What the book delivers brilliantly is a roadmap to understand the repercussions of one man's ambition when it goes unchecked for decades. Zero downfall. It's the rise and the rise of the Old Boss' second son, from ringside announcer to business owner and eventual, perennial main character. Some guy who breaks people for fun while maintaining he's doing it for you.

And it's not just an American thing.

Wrestling conquers the world

WWE shows are reliably televised in hundreds of countries across the world. I watched Smackdown and Raw reruns on a Saturday morning in a city you've never been. The cafe at the end of the street doesn't play it anymore, though – a few regulars were giving the owner a hard time.

Professors, he calls them. They say it's all fake.

Another continent, another unmaking: the professor clientele tried to shame the owner for being a fool – a mark, in wrestling parlance – when he knew just what he was watching and why.

Sooner or later, every small-town bar in the world has screened a WWE match on a Saturday night; your choice to live with it or forget you ever heard the sentence the ultimate warrior after your summertime friends stretched it out, theeee uuultimate warriooor.

My relationship with professional wrestling is warped by the knowledge of what it became. Love the catchphrases and the masochism, mixed with the truckload of Daddy issues the McMahon years shoved front and center, hate being dragged down into the nonsense. The way it flattens language to accommodate the dullness of its children.

Heel turn

Wrestling establishes two main roles as the face (short for babyface), the designated good guy you root for, and the heel, to quote Riesman, “the one who seeks to get ahead through malice, who feeds off the hatred of the crowd, and who often gains the upper hand at the match’s end, breaking the hearts of all who want to see justice done.” Now we call ordinary people heels when they talk shit to get attention, heh-heh-heh. We talk about face/heel turns whenever someone appears to reveal their malevolent true nature. Kayfabe has become accepted shorthand for political theater, or manufactured conflict, creating the conditions for most men to adopt a vivid, self-defeating insistence that things are never quite as they seem and every social interaction is somehow rigged by all the people who participate in it equally.

Kind of a militant level of distrust there, bright boy, are you positive you don't have mental problems, bright boy? Oh, you do? Wow. Fascinating. What broke you, was it wrestling or was it anime. Sure as hell wasn't heroin. You don't have the guts.

As a line of work, wrestling used to attract random guys on the make, guys who'd grown up watching it, and a specific type of pre-broken person, male or female – poverty, no parents, lust for conflict, a deep-rooted ambiguity about one's actual willingness to yield at crunch time: a desire to be triumphant and to be put through the grinder for unstable wages and a low sense of self.

Some of us are wrestlers who don't wrestle.

McMahon’s media machine

It takes real mutability to endure in a ring like that. A shapeshifting mindset combined with objective physical strength and ideals of form that can change over time, so they do. (Just an example, but Hulk Hogan was elevated to champion status on grounds of body mass, not prowess.) Win or lose, wrestling gave its players a place on a stage and a niche of peers they could get along with, but if they worked with McMahon, they had to remain on his good side, no matter how many times they were being manipulated into accepting less than they agreed on.

Pro wrestling as McMahon remade it – down to the label of sports entertainment introduced in the mid-80s – asked performers to enter a revolving door of face/heel turns they were bound to never leave, with the added factor, they were expected to switch moral codes at any time the storyline dictated. You're a bad guy now, go tape a hundred promos in character.

The more the focus moved from the match to the hype – the Machine, all extravagant storylines, sizzle, and promo reels – the more important the build-up became in spite of the event itself. Performers end up believing they are what they say they are. Even a Method actor steps out of character once the work is finished. Not so fast, wrestler.

Dwayne Johnson is a global movie star; he plays good guys, came out unscathed from a staggering beast of a career killer, and has been perfecting an almost permanent public persona – the hard-working family man. Clean living, sound morals. He might have survived wrestling because he was a third-generation athlete. Before stepping under the WWE lights, he might have been taught the basics of adapting to different characters while protecting a small part of the truth at all cost.

Less fortunate individuals – everyone else, then – think they can work with the machine. They anticipate the pleasure of being broken only to land in a final molded shape that's more fitting – martyrdom, physical peak performance, heroics. There's a real fascination at play when the Machine glows: you can be someone. You can be the face, you can be the heel, you can be in a body and live through the out-of-body experience of being transformed on stage. Endurance performance at its highest.

Vince McMahon understood not everyone could be turned into a wrestler, but most people could be turned into the audience. So he set out to achieve exactly that, re-shaping the lucrative business he bought from his father into a grand theater of his own grievances.

The first media push he secured – a three-page feature in Parade Magazine, 1983 – was all about making wrestling cool. It had been televised since the 1950s, it turned profits, but it wasn't cool. Pop star Cyndi Lauper casting “Captain” Lou Albano as the greaseball father in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun created the premise for Cyndi Lauper to be a regular guest star in the WWE storylines, and full MTV crossover events were meant to introduce the art form to a younger, hip crowd.

In a few years, the man went from courting mass-market media to capture a desirable audience to turning the media into the enemy—his own and, by default, the audience's.

The businessman as entertainer

Of course, whatever Vince McMahon achieved as a businessman has been eclipsed by the fact he created an oversized character for himself, getting into situations and positioning “Mr. McMahon” at the very core of multiple storylines as an ultimate heel. He channeled real issues raised by wrestling fans and performers, giving the crowd permission to hate him, asshole asshole asshole, thus making sure his place was cemented in the present and future of the form.

He told you he was the villain while insisting he was playing a character not based on him at all; if anything, his authentic mindset had inspired several “common man” types he'd pretend to fight. Like Stone Cold Steve Austin. The exasperated working-class dude who defies his callous corporate boss, only for the rivalry to get amplified in a loop that never ends.

“From 2001 onward, all major developments in the art form were either made by, in mimicry of, or in rebellion against Vince. […] It was like a movie industry in which there was only one major studio, which only made movies made by one director, who always played a role in his own films.”

Near impossible to tell just why McMahon wanted to become a character in the first place. Isn't it better to rule behind the scenes? Totally fair to assume he got the audience addicted to the higher stakes he craved, and his own desires, well. The audience paid the price for those.

Creations survive their creators in subtle ways sometimes. For years I thought of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as a famous wrestler who'd been the absolute star of John Carpenter's They Live – the hero no one believes! “either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can!” – but I had zero awareness of his work as a longtime heel. Casting him in the Everyman role had been a neat subversion on Carpenter's part. Creations have a way of finding a new audience, the same as out-of-context fragments are allowed to escape their original playground. The Ultimate Warrior taping an apology video he can't finish, dipping in and out of character, lost, mad.

There was never a Golden Age to return to; still, Eighties wrestling truly reverberated with many cultural moments in the production and consumption of media: MTV, cable, porn getting a new shelf life due to video, the need for cheap children's programming. Over time, it borrowed from soap operas and blended everything into the soon-to-be omnipresent reality TV frame. Stakes! Plot twists! Reveals!, several detours in the apocalyptic.

When promoters used to divide an audience in two categories – the mark, who buys into the illusion, and the smart, who's wise to most tricks – the Nineties saw the gradual emergence of a third category, the smark, someone “deeply knowledgeable about the realities of wrestling, but still capable of wild excitement about the art form and constantly trying to dig for the truth beneath wrestling’s lies.”

The blurring into reality TV might have accelerated this development. It's all fake, but it moves fast, and it's all over. Wrestlers can become solid actors if they haven't been shattered beyond repair. Cut to a number of preventable situations, steroid abuse, and murder-suicides. Terrible tragedy. Cut to funeral, cut to memorial tributes for the killer, nothing changes.

A shocking amount of interview subjects still speak highly of Vince McMahon, often right after they accuse him of betrayal.

What can we call this: shame-based loyalty? A false belief there's no other place for you, now that you've been ruined?

Few experiences on Earth bleed into such a bunker mentality. Not even pornography, whose closeness to wrestling lies not so much in the realities of a demanding line of body work where lines get blurred but in the borrowed nostalgia of the everything was better before (x) happened. Same old-timer industry and fandom yearning for a past, real or imaginary, where the people loved the job and the action was authentic, same grudging awareness that fast money and spectacle took over altering the landscape in the irrevocable fashion of now now now.

Even without the instant reach the Internet provided – wrestling aficionados got on Usenet faster than most – the wrestling mindset took over any online community where there was clout to be gained from humiliating strangers. A social network that's currently making the news for the swift ban-unban of journalists fully functioned as a WWE arena, with no referees and a malicious twist: anyone could become the heel, by accident, on the grounds of having said the thing. Which thing? Irrelevant. It's mass retaliation times, babe.

Some folks have tried to turn themselves into online heels. Results are mixed as to the profitability of the endeavor.

Towards the end of a supremely nostalgia-free book, Riesman drives a grim point home: most Millennial men have grown up with '90s wrestling. “I learned about earnest artifice, about the blurry line between good and evil in this world, about how people can change their moral valences on a dime. What’s more, I learned how society wanted boys to be.” Adding on that, most Millennial men and women were raised under the glare of VH1's Behind the Music, a serial biography format predicated on talented performers screwing up, being betrayed, both, usually both, and then dragging themselves on camera in various levels of earned, brittle wisdom and bleary comeback mode. Raise your hand, who wanted to experience fame first and who was fine with just going down the destruction tunnel.

The biggest non-wrestling moment Ringmaster brings to mind is the infamous Chris Holmes pool clip from The Decline of Western Civilization part II. Ostensibly a filmed interview for a documentary about glam metal, it feels far more like a promo cut for an eternal storyline, with Holmes cast in the role of the consummate young heel – hot, destructive and self-pitying, deluded and proud of his lurid stardom at once, welcoming hate. Embracing it, in fact. Fuck me? Fuck you. Fight fight fight fight fight.