Reality SmackDown: Andrew Hultkrans on wrestling with the truth.

What is there in the neon spandex, leather masks, pounding heavy metal and rap of wrestling that recalls Euripides or Sophocles--the horrible grief of Agave, the literal and metaphorical blindness of Oedipus?" asks Nicholas Sammond in his editor's introduction to Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, $24). "What is there indeed?" a reader unschooled in the NutraSweet science of costumed grappling might reply. "Very little," Sammond admits like a good sport. But his whole line of inquiry might still deserve a rhetorical pile driver if it hadn't been initiated by an eminence no less grise than Roland Barthes, who pinned down the classical dramatic structure of pro wrestling in his famous 1957 essay, "The World of Wrestling." Barthes's piece is reprinted here, followed by "interventions" into the squared circle from a disparate group: media- and cultural-studies professors, a former pro wrestler, and a Mexican novelist.

Like a team of blind scientists pawing the elephantine Andre the Giant, the contributors, predictably, arrive at a host of conclusions. Wrestling is interpreted variously as working-class masculine melodrama; an ontological arena in which reality itself is contested and redefined; a laughably translated morality play (writes Carlos Monsivais: "Evil boasts. Good despairs. Evil sends Good outside of their roped-off reality. Good returns with a serenity exempt from compassion. Man, short of days and sick of troubles, is exasperated: 'Kill him! Finish him off! Fuck him up! Destroy him! Tear the bastard's eyes out!'"). It is a metaphor for modern Mexican politics and a barrio activist's trope; the "return of a suppressed class conflict," undermining "the consuming middle-class family as the symbolic center of the social order"; pop sadomasochism; a cultural "monster" thumbing its snout at society; an embodiment of the ethics-free economic boom of the '90s; a kid's show that became a striptease. And it is the unlikely focus of an obsessive female fandom--an online demimonde generating homoerotic "slash" fiction, ratings of wrestler's asses ("Cold, Old, and Stale" to "Hot Cross Buns"), and fashion tips ("Don't wear a yellow singlet when you're hung like an acorn").

Each of these readings has some validity, and Steel Chair's contributors perform a good-faith service in rescuing this unfairly, if understandably, maligned "sports-entertainment" from the "garbage" realm of "pornography propaganda," as the prudish Parents Television Council put it in 1999. But outside of Sharon Mazer's essay, "'Real' Wrestling/'Real' Life," and a few asides elsewhere, nothing in Steel Chair addresses the real elephant in the ring: the uncanny parallels pro wrestling has with the reality-bending Bush administration and its enablers in mainstream punditry. The perennial critique of pro wrestling is, "Why should I be interested? It's all fixed, fake, isn't it?" And indeed, the industry has for decades referred to its fans as "marks," that is, suckers. Hard-core fans pride themselves on being "smart marks," or "smarts," able to distinguish between the scripted 99 percent of wrestling moments, known as "works," and those rare, hotly debated instances when reality breaks through, called "shoots." Shoots can be instances of actual injury (faked injuries are common), unscripted bursts of emotion, or tradecraft-revealing or off-message comments in interviews. The rigorous maintenance of wrestling's fabricated reality, or "kayfabe," has all-too-real effects on workers and fans. As the former grappler Laurence de Garis notes, "'Working' can almost become a worldview. Some professional wrestlers become so used to deception and manipulation that they are skeptical bordering on paranoid." And Mazer, a close observer and fan, claims that "smarts" internalize wrestling's message that "everything--wrestling, life, the whole shooting match--might really be a work." Mazer quotes former wrestler Clifton Jolley on the ontological ether at the core of wrestling: "The fans believe--and the 'rasslers do too. But you don't want to know about that. All you want is the answer to one question: Is 'rassling real? Did he really hit you? And the answer is: I know, but you don't know. The answer is: What do you mean by real?"

Compare Jolley's studied prevarication to this disturbing "shoot" from Ron Suskind's October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine profile of George W. Bush and his handlers:

  The [senior White House] aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were
  "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as
  people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
  discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about
  enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not
  the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an
  empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
  you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act
  again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
  that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you,
  all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

In one vertiginous, behind-the-curtain moment, Suskind has advanced from "mark" to "smart." But we should all be smarts by now. Certainly our era is not the first in which a government has attempted to create its own "reality" on top or in lieu of good old-fashioned real reality. But both wrestling and politics have come a long way from, as Barthes had it in 1957, "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." Indeed, the reality business has become increasingly complex. The semiotician did, however, have some eerily prophetic insights into our current geopolitical Super Slam, the "war on terror": "In America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the 'bad' wrestler always being supposed a Red)"; and "Wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture." Substitute terrorist for Red in the first and the war on terror for wrestling in the second, and Barthes's essay is no longer a historical curio.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Today it's nearly impossible to distinguish not only between works and shoots but also between marks and workers. The mainstream media's lapdog coverage of the Middle East in the months leading up to the Iraq war led those in the dwindling "reality-based community" to assume that our reporters and anchors had been "marking out" for some time. But in the past few months we've learned of at least six purported pundits who were actually performers on the White House payroll, as well as of the outre, WWF-worthy saga of James D. Guckert, "White House correspondent" for a GOP-supported "news" organ and real-life Hotmilitarystud.com gay escort. For close to a year, Guckert was regularly granted White House press credentials under the alias of Jeff Gannon, and strategically lobbed softball, agenda-enabling questions to Bush's press secretary or to the president himself. On January 26, "Gannon," after naming several Democratic pols seen as difficult by the administration, raised the unreality stakes to Lewis Carroll levels by asking Bush, "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" In wrestling parlance, this would translate as, "How are you going to work the smarts who ain't buying the kayfabe?" Politically speaking, though, the question is irrelevant, part of the kayfabe itself. There are enough marks in America today who believe the Good vs. Evil story line, believe Bush's "cowboy" gimmick, believe in the myth of a "hero" and a "warrior" who is neither; believe that Bush is, as Carlos Monsivais describes El Santo, Mexico's legendary masked wrestler, "the Torso of the Good at the juncture of the shadow of death ... the unreal and convincing hero of the hundreds of thousands who accept, in solidarity, the scenes and situations that he proposes."

Jules Dassin's 1950 film, Night and the City, depicts Richard Widmark as a London club tout attempting, for less than noble reasons, to promote classic Greco-Roman wrestling matches as a challenge to the pro-wrestling monopoly held by Kristo, an urbane, Euro version of the WWF's Vince McMahon. Kristo's father is the aging Greco-Roman champion Gregorius, who, disgusted by his son's sham version of the sport, naively agrees to help Widmark with his plans. After wrestling and beating Kristo's star, the Strangler, Gregorius is left near death. Before passing away, he tells Kristo, "My son, you do wrong. Greco-Roman is great art, great beauty. Must fight to keep." To which a present-day smart replies, "Reality also great art, great beauty."

Must fight to keep, indeed.

Andrew Hultkrans is the author of Forever Changes (Continuum 33 1/3, 2003). He is at work on a book about surveillance in America.

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