Crasses et Voluptés

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IT IS NOT MUCH OF a stretch to say that in the 1980s and ’90s, our country became an amazing coast-to-coast theme park, open twenty-four hours. The boundaries between entertainment and the rest of life were definitively dismantled. America became addicted to the make-believe of drag—by which I mean everything from new buildings meant to look old or foreign to the geeks at Comic-Cons and Burning Mans dressing up as fictional beings. Casinos were suddenly ubiquitous. Celebrity-obsessed news media sprawled. Reality television was born.

And consider wrestling, the professional and fake kind, which suddenly became a huge, quintessentially American cultural phenomenon and business. To me, all professional sports exist adjacent to Fantasyland. Every NFL or NBA game is a televised adventure story, a narrative played out according to rules of strictly defined genre—but unscripted, the outcome unknown, entertaining spectacle and real life merged. The stars are as close to superheroes as reality has on offer.

Pro wrestling emerged during the entertainment boon times of the 1910s and ’20s, when it had to compete both with ascendant sports like baseball and boxing as well as with theater and now movies and radio. Pro wrestling split the difference between the two: real people in physical competition, but the characters and action and outcomes all extreme works of scripted and improvised fiction. During the 1930s, the sensible American public registered and rejected the phoniness, and pro wrestling went into decline.

It had a brief renaissance in the 1950s, thanks to the new medium of TV, which needed content, and all the networks started airing matches. California’s athletic commission officially agreed to keep pretending professional wrestling was real. If people preferred to believe an entertaining lie was true, that was their right as Americans. In 1957 matches were suddenly drawing Madison Square Garden’s biggest crowds for any events in years, and one night, as a pair of “hero” and “villain” wrestlers kept “fighting” after their match finished, audience members started fighting over the outcome. Five hundred New Yorkers rioted, throwing punches and bottles. “Many of the fans,” the Times incredulously reported, “believe the sport to be a true contest—of skill and strength.” But that seemed like the swan song; pro wrestling’s fakery was still a fundamental problem; it was a niche taste; as TV got flush and respectable, the networks moved on. During my youth in the 1960s and ’70s, pro wrestling was a ridiculous, low-rent artifact quickly headed, everybody figured, for oblivion.

Until the 1980s. Cable TV programming had arrived, even more shamelessly willing than broadcast TV had been to sell anything. And then the networks, feeling threatened by cable and because the free market totally ruled, abandoned their old qualms about presenting fantasy as reality and began broadcasting wrestling once again. The new laissez-faire economic era also permitted a de facto monopoly to form what became the World Wrestling Federation and then the WWE. The businessman in charge of the monopoly, Vince McMahon, had a brilliant insight, realizing that America’s Barnumesque strain had reasserted itself: fake versus real was no longer the point, because wrestling’s audience was now fully habituated, as one scholar of the realm has written, to “believing and disbelieving in what it sees at the same time.” And so during the 1980s, the WWF and other promoters were finally free to end the Big Lie. In the old days, wrestling always officially insisted it was real. Finally it could stop pretending, because “real” and “fake” were relative, because nobody really cared anymore.

In less than a decade, pro wrestling mushroomed from a business generating a few tens of millions to half a billion a year. The audience expanded beyond its old blue-collar yob niche to the middle classes, families, college kids. It was transgressive, a fun con. And the real and fictional parts of the wrestlers’ lives were now indiscriminately mixed and merged. In professional wrestling matches, any occasional, inevitable bit of unscripted authenticity was known as a shoot—old-time carnival lingo for when the gunsight on a shooting gallery’s rifle aimed accurately. The standard fakery of matches in pro wrestling was known as work, and in the 1980s WWF producers invented the worked shoot: as one historian (and fantasy novelist) explains, they started incorporating “the real events of wrestlers’ personal lives as part of the story…alcoholism, cheating relationships, childhood trauma and problems with the law are fused from reality into the fantasy.”

Is there a more apt metaphor for our recent cultural transformation?

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-year History

Kurt Andersen