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Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (Peformance Studies) ReviewIn wrestling, the lariat or clothesline is a move in which a man is whipped from a standing position via a running straight arm to the throat, propelling him violently to the mat. It was both disappointing and strangely reassuring to find out, from Sharon Mazer's new book, that one of the very first skills a rookie wrestler is taught is the ability to "fall backwards, hitting the mat so it resonates loudly with his fall" precisely to effect this and related wrestling moves.The violent illusion of the lariat is lllustrative of what I think is one of Mazer's major points -namely that wrestling exchanges rely not only on the active co-operation of the wrestling opponent - to forward roll when he is supplexed, to crumple when he is hit, to stay down when he is booked to lose - but on the active complicity of the audience in the illusion of the real. As such. Mazer argues, wrestling is ultimately transgressive and subversive. That is, the wrestling performance reveals, by inference and extension, that society itself and its established protocols are a 'work' ( a social construction) that rely for their power on our complicity. Mazer wonders, but does not completely answer, why a wrestling audience would wish to be reminded of its own complicity in subjection. Perhaps, her book suggests, our willing subscription to the illusion of the wrestling performance is, in a very small way, the tangible proof of our larger individual freedom - to believe in social constructions/'works' or not to believe.
I bought Mazer's book as part of my background research for a biography I'm writing of the pro-wrestler Tom Zenk. After some months I am still having considerable difficulty differentiating between Zenk the performer and Zenk the virtuous, masculine figure of his ring persona. I had been running the line of a high quality performer denied justice by the bookers but have now come to the realization, courtesy of Mazer's book, that in promoting this line I am possibly 'marking out' to an well -established wrestling storyline. Here is Mazer -
"What fans come to recognize and interact with as they come inside the game is the play outside the play- first the signs of a hero [in my case Tom Zenk] or villain, then the inevitable failure of the representatives of authority in the ring to assure a fair fight and a just end, and finally that the true power lies not in the ring at all - but rather in the hands of the promoters whose purchase of a wrestler includes the right to dictate his success or failure. What is certain is not a Justice which is at last intelligible but an Injustice which is visible both in the dramaturgy of the performance and in the structure of the game itself, in the ongoing failure of authority to assert itself for the hero in the ring and in the success of the authority outside the ring, the promoter, as he dictates an outcome that negates the possibility of any real contest between men. It is not a fair fight, neither for the wrestlers in the ring nor for the wrestlers and the fans in relation to those in power." (Mazer, 1998: 153)
But here's the dilemma that illustrates the point about wrestling that Mazer makes so articulately in her book- the probablity that what I had taken to be real in the Tom Zenk story - the complete submission of the heroic ring figure to the power of the promoter - is itself both a 'work' (a fabrication) and a 'shoot' (the real thing). The point appears to be that it is both and it is neither. Once again, it is too simple to see a wrestler such as Zenk - or indeed any worker, inside the ring or out - as the heroic 'victim' of the unscrupulous authority of other men.The reader like me who thus begins the journey from 'mark' to 'smart' is not engaged in a transition from credulous outsider to cynical or ironic disbeliever. The knowledgeable wrestling fan or 'smark' - as the name suggests is both 'smart' to wrestling's storylines, yet still more completely a consciously credulous participant (or willingly complicit 'mark') in the wrestling performance - as Mazer notes, actively seeking to be 'marked out' - to be fooled into believing that the 'wrestler was injured for real, that the fan rushed the ring for real, that the promoters grip over the wrestlers and the matches will slip, that the fight will be more than play'.
The wrestling arena is thus a highly ambiguous space - for the period of the play at least. As such, it is a place that has been sanctioned by society for the unpacking and repacking of the normalizing discourses of masculinity, class, hierarchy, race, morality, etc. Mazer's discussion of the sexual ambiguities of pro-wrestling is particularly good. The heterosexual male gazing at the muscled bodied of the ring performer, confounds the prohibitions which 'normally' limit such a display to women and thus actively violates the protocols of masculinity - only to reaffirm them minutes later with the cry of 'faggot'. The wrestlers themselves present near naked male bodies that, in performance, touch and embrace, make a show of domination and submission that "resemble nothing so much as cliches of sexual engagement". - yet the routine discourse of wrestling is firecely heterosexual and heterosexist. In a memorable phrase Maxer captures the ambiguity when she writes - "To some degree a professional wrestler is always in drag, always enacting a parody of masculinity at the same time that he epitomizes it" (1998; 100)
Overall, this book - like the story of the lariat - is both revealing and strangely re-affirming. Wrestling has often been dismissed as the lower end of "popular culture" but Mazer 's book contributes to its revaluation as something more complex and much more profound. If, ultimately, wrestling - as something visceral rather than rational - evades all attempts at a 'pin', nonetheless Mazer's effort - her 'work' so to speak- is both highly believable and really quite credible.Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (Peformance Studies) Overview
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