Pro wrestling is a niche like no other, and it has been carved out with not a rusty spoon, but a colorful one, yet a spoon nonetheless. Like most other things on this earth, some like it and some don’t. Some take to it right away and some find it an acquired taste, while doubters and detractors line its outer perimeter like a lumberjack match. Every medium has critics, but those who criticize pro wrestling are seemingly more verbose and animated than most other things under the sun. Even pornography doesn’t invite this level of controversy, I feel.
However, with everything that goes on in our post-postmodern world, where the most ridiculous and frustrating things have happened to us lately in the 2020s, is the ‘worked’ nature of pro wrestling really a big deal when you consider the insanity of the real world? Even world politics now play by the same rules as pro wrestling — it always has.
I’d even argue that those who understand those rules and are not sickened by them are more well-equipped to understand what has been going on. Meanwhile, others keep bringing into power the demagogues who only speak of progress, but not enact it; they keep giving riches to those who dangle the power of the sun over them, then sell them a tiny smidgen of it and keep most of it and the people’s money to themselves.
Let’s look into why the metafictional world of pro wrestling is a refuge from the purgatory that is the real world — an Oasis in the Desert of the Real.
NOTE: I first started writing this way back in December 2019 as the third of a three-part primer on pro wrestling. That didn’t pan out and I’ve since published other posts on pro wrestling. I then dug this back up in August 2025 — almost six years later — and added new ideas I’ve learned since then.
This gets pretty long, over 6,500 words. I wrote this as a philosophy article first, so don’t expect it to be exciting like a pro wrestling match. Reader discretion is advised.
The Desert of the Real
The word ‘desert’ in philosophy refers to the condition of “being deserving of something,” which is taken from the common root word of both ‘desert’ and ‘deserve’ — the Old French word deservir. Also known as a moral desert to distinguish it from the biome and geographic feature, you can say it deserves to be watered. Good deeds should be rewarded and evil deeds should be punished. To water the moral desert is to serve justice.
The phrase The Desert of the Real was first coined by French philosopher Jacques Lacan as a state of encountering the Real — a dimension beyond language and symbols — which is inherently traumatic and not easily understood. When you say someone had a ‘bitter taste of reality’ due to some unfortunate incident, they’ve just encountered the Real. You can’t easily represent it with something else without referring to the event itself and its resulting trauma.
The most often-cited example of such an event is the 9/11 attacks. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek — a disciple of Lacan — discussed this in his 2002 book Welcome to the Desert of the Real. He echoes Lacan in the assertion that such a traumatic event exposes how fragile the symbols we surround ourselves with can be and forces us to confront what lies beyond them.
That our world is one or two bad breaks from completely falling apart.
Meanwhile, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a different interpretation of the phrase. To him, the Desert of the Real is a state of hyperreality where simulations are so widespread that it replaces the original reality. As he discussed in his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, representations of reality — images, symbols, simulations — have become more real than reality itself, leaving a ‘desert’ where people can’t distinguish reality from simulation.
Baudrillard’s desert is the inverse of Lacan’s.
Social media is a good example of such a desert. You don’t know whether the people you’re interacting with on Facebook or Twitter (or X) are being authentic with you or trolling you. Whatever people post on Instagram may seem perfect, but they’re not necessarily reflective of their real lives. The video essays about online drama on YouTube are mostly clickbait and exaggerations of real events that may not be real or even matter in the long term.
They all seem real, but you can’t trust them.
It was Baudrillard’s use of the phrase that the Wachowskis would pay homage to in the 1999 movie The Matrix, which depicted a world devastated by the war against the machines and humans have been put into a simulated reality. Baudrillard himself would disavow this interpretation of his work.
The Desert as Community in Isolation
We live in a desert where more and more people feel disconnected. Their only meaningful social interactions are through social media, which is in itself a desert. Their ability to interact with other people face to face in real life becomes less than adequate, to the point that even ordering at a fast food counter is an ordeal one may dread and must steel their resolve for.
Making friends becomes difficult unless they somehow encounter good people on online communities that aren’t there to either grief, groom, or scam others.
Having those guys who are letting off steam after a hard day to play shooters with isn’t that hard, but making genuine connections without meeting face to face is like digging a hole with a spoon. It’s technically possible, but it’s far from the best way to do it.
I’m not simply leading this to a conversation about how pro wrestling fosters a community since there are plenty of other communities around similar things. Sports, esports, music, and so on witness similar social phenomenon of people with a shared interest gathering in celebration of that thing. Therefore, there has to be more than just that.
I think what makes pro wrestling fandom different from most others is how the hyperreality of pro wrestling somehow blurs the line between fantasy and reality even outside the show and how it can pull people out of their own hyperrealities. There’s a magic to that.
What is Hyperreality?
I had ChatGPT explain hyperreality to me like I’m a five-year-old. It spit out a pretty interesting explanation.
Sure! Imagine you have a toy dinosaur, and you love playing with it. Now, think about a super-duper amazing picture of that dinosaur in a book or on a computer. The picture looks so real that it feels almost like the real dinosaur, even though it’s just a drawing or a pretend one.
Hyperreality is like when the picture or the pretend dinosaur feels just as important or even more exciting than the real toy. It’s when something that’s not real seems so real that it’s hard to tell the difference, and people start treating it like it’s real. So, hyperreality is like a super-duper real-seeming pretend thing!
Yes, I do use AI sometimes, although I prefer NotebookLM.
Hyperreality is a concept in philosophy that goes into how our modern world blurs the line between what’s real and what’s not, to the point where it becomes difficult to tell the difference.
If you have experienced arguing with a stranger or diving into a drama rabbit hole on social media, you’ve experienced the hyperreality that it inherently fosters due to the nature of human interactions in that format. Talking without being face to face or having to hear each other’s voices, only through text devoid of tone, body language, and immediate consequences.
Many would say social media has become the most toxic cesspit in the world because of this.
Through the past few decades, the Internet has made reality even more indistinguishable due to the speed and spontaneity it brought to human interaction and communication, which is unprecedented in human history. We’re able to interact with people halfway around the planet on a regular basis, and that has brought on both positive and negative effects upon civilization.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the social conditions it brought about throughout the world is another example of a hyperreality, catalyzed by the Internet and social media.
What is real? How do you define ‘real’?
Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality goes into the simulations and representations in contemporary society that we’ve become accustomed to. It’s called hyperreality because to many of us, it has become more real than even the physical world that we actually reside in.
The Changing Times
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the 1990s were an era seen as the closest humanity had ever been to achieving world peace. Thinkers like Francis Fukuyama even called it ‘the end of history’ to declare victory for democracy and neoliberalism over all other political systems and paradigms at the end of the 20th century to herald the coming of the new millennium with renewed spirit. It seemed like nothing could go wrong.
If the dropping of the atomic bomb can be considered the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, wherein humanity realized that everything they’ve built over thousands of years can be destroyed so easily, the September 11 attacks were the end of that period of boundless optimism. I had previously discussed postmodernism in this blog post about how Jordan Peterson is seemingly unable to understand it. Mind you, I don’t claim to fully understand it myself.
However, the 1990s were not truly peaceful. The Gulf War, the Rwandan genocide, and the Srebrenica massacre are some of the tragedies I can remember that occurred throughout that decade. I heard about them on cable news, but I was yet too young to understand their true implications. Now in 2025, we have the Gaza War and the Russo-Ukrainian War.
It was only later as an adult when I realized how much of a twilight zone the 1990s were and how it all led to the toppling of the World Trade Center, which I don’t believe to be an inside job.
The post-9/11 world faced a bleak outlook, with the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in between. Humanity was reminded of its fractures, and those rifts grew wider in the 2010s when China wished to no longer be quiet, Russia started getting desperate, and America suddenly decided that it no longer wanted to finish what it started.
And there was also this thing about an Islamic State and a gate about gamers.
Žižek used 9/11 as an example of a “return to the Real,” much like how Neo was brought from the Matrix to the Real World — a nightmarish hellscape. It was like that tragedy was a wake-up call for us, reminding us that the world wasn’t magically made a paradise just because the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Conflict didn’t just disappear. Nuclear weapons still exist, America has never been an all-benevolent entity, there are still grudges waiting to be settled, and there are always new reasons to be afraid and vigilant. Wake the fuck up.
Was It All Ever Real?
The idyllic 1990s was when we got grunge music, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the X-Games, Magic: The Gathering, Mortal Kombat, Beavis and Butthead, Celebrity Deathmatch, Ren and Stimpy, South Park, Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear, the killing of Tupac and Biggie, WWF/WWE’s Attitude Era, and the Monday Night Wars.
That was a transitional era when the world seemed ripe for a utopian age where everyone could hold hands and sing Kumbaya while watching wet t-shirt contests.
The looming threat of a Japanese superpower that was feared to overtake American hegemony throughout the 1980s got put to a screeching halt when the bubble popped in early 1992, and they’re still trying to get back what they lost over three decades later. The one thing that William Gibson got wrong when he wrote Neuromancer (1984) was that the future would be Japanese.
We would learn a decade or two later that it would likely be Chinese.
Before those planes hit those buildings, we were in a trance. Millennials like myself grew up during that era, when we were introduced to this thing called the Internet. We only started to understand what chain emails were and played PlayStation games with the help of GameFAQs when the world was given quite a shock.
While America had to be put on pause, one of the first entities that dared to press the play button to get things going again was WWE.
If you’re not American, you may be irritated by the fact that I’m using American history as a timeline for this, but do note that the US is the epicenter of pro wrestling. Some may argue that it’s actually Japan, but I’ve yet to be convinced that more people throughout the world recognize Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki than Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.
Hyperreality in Pro Wrestling
Taking all of that and using it as a lens to look at pro wrestling, we see how this crazy thing is a hyperreality in itself as well. It was one of the most hyperreal things ever in the 20th century. The personas, storylines, and even the action in the ring — as carefully constructed as they were spontaneous — would often take precedence over the “real” identities of the performers.
Even decades after their active careers, those performers are still recognized for their pro wrestling personas. While they may have personal lives separate from their careers, the records of their lives tend to be dominated by their pro wrestling identities. Once you’ve become a part of pro wrestling, it tends to take over your life in more ways than one, even if you do your best to separate your private life from it.
That can explain why a lot of Japanese pro wrestlers in particular (and celebrities in general) tend to be very guarded when it comes to their personal lives. Even the most famous among them tend to have sparse information on their Wikipedia pages.
As for the simulated violence of pro wrestling, while it can be the furthest thing from “real violence,” can nonetheless produce genuine emotional reactions from audiences. It’s even more of a thing when you watch a live show, where the sensation of watching wrestlers take big bumps on the mat makes for an even more visceral experience.
Kayfabe and the ‘F’ Word
Kayfabe, as it’s known through pro wrestling, is the blurry delineation between reality and fiction through both subterfuge and irony that can keep observers guessing which is which, especially with its depiction of human conflict. It’s the invisible fourth wall that transcends even that of other media as it exists in real time — it’s not crystalized like how it usually is in movies, television, comics, books, and so on.
The most important aspect of pro wrestling is performing in front of a live audience.
Various performers throughout the history of pro wrestling, as well as specific genres, have been skirting that fine line between the theater and realism of pro wrestling to draw even more of that emotional response from audiences while somehow making sure they don’t kill each other or themselves. After all, pro wrestling is supposed to be a livelihood, not just a snuff film.
Back in the day, believability was mostly reliant on people not being sure about whether it was real or not, and that kayfabe was maintained as the industry’s most guarded secret — like magic tricks. But such a secret takes too much care and coordination to keep under wraps. Over time, kayfabe became an open secret, and it turned out that the secret didn’t matter that much.
Pro wrestling matches don’t cause riots like they used to, but that’s a good thing.
Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to pro wrestling was the proliferation of kayfabe. It lifted the veil that had been draped over the product for many decades and gradually destigmatized what had previously been haunted and terrorized by the dreaded ‘F’ word — FAKE.
‘Kayfabe’ is pig Latin for ‘fake’.
A lot of people did or still do get turned off by the ‘fakeness’ of pro wrestling, but that has been going on since newspapers stopped reporting results of pro wrestling matches on their sports pages. It hadn’t been that big of a secret since the early 20th century. However, it did prove to be a more consistent money maker over time, which is the point of the business to begin with.
Knowledge of its scripted nature only proved to be a boon for pro wrestling as it created an audience for ‘smarks’ — committed pro wrestling fans who revel in knowing how the sausage is made. WWE, the biggest pro wrestling company in the world, hit its highest recorded valuation yet in mid to late 2023, and then merged with Endeavor, then the parent company of UFC.
They then fully merged with the UFC and became TKO — a monolith that looms over both pro wrestling and combat sports. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.
And now, they’re even spilling all the beans by releasing a whole series on their production process, which we pro wrestling fledglings will be studying for years.
Much of what makes pro wrestling work is the suspension of disbelief. While detractors may scoff at that notion, you can take a look at their social media and see that they’re invested in something that more or less involves the same thing. Many of them may then counter by saying that sports is the farthest thing from fake.
Then again, matchfixing also happens in sports.
But with combat sports, they’re also not as real as they think they are. Manipulative matchmaking has pervaded in boxing and mixed martial arts for decades, so it’s not like fight promoters are not moving their pieces around much like pro wrestling does. It’s just that the latter has more control since they control the outcome and narrative of their matches.
That suspension of disbelief also pervades in other forms of media, perhaps even more strongly than in pro wrestling. People were also emotionally invested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, making Avengers: Endgame one of the highest-grossing films of all time. If you claim to not have marked out when Captain America picked up Mjolnir or when everyone assembled for the final battle, you’re definitely lying.
If you’re mad that I dropped that spoiler, that proves my point.
It actually doesn’t matter if something is real or fake. People really care about the fiction they consume — like Game of Thrones, which is why its eighth season is widely seen as a travesty.
Commodification of Authenticity
Baudrillard discusses how authenticity itself can be commodified in a hyperreal society. The blurred lines between the real people and their pro wrestling personas allow them to commodify their authenticity. The main irony of pro wrestling is that in order to make scripted characters work, they have to be authentic enough for the audience to buy into that character.
One of the greatest pro wrestling characters of all time is The Undertaker — a mortician who has undead magic powers and whose coming is signaled by a signature gong. It’s the corniest possible premise, yet it paved the way to one of the coolest, most beloved, and longest tenured characters in all of pro wrestling. A big part of that character’s success is the amount of work and dedication put into it by Mark Calaway, the man who embodied the character.
The Undertaker came about twelve years before the release of Warcraft III, which introduced the character of the Lich King — basically the Undertaker with a sword in a video game.
You can then take a look at other famous wrestling personas and see this commodification of authenticity in all of them. For instance, Dwayne Johnson became The Rock out of the frustration brought about by his previous character Rocky Maivia, which is a babyface amalgamation of his father Rocky Johnson and grandfather High Chief Peter Maivia.
Dwayne Johnson converted the negative energy of the audience chanting “Die Rocky Die” at him and turned it on them with what would become the best mic skills of his era. That turned him into one of the most popular pro wrestlers of the Attitude Era and all of pro wrestling history, which he then slowly converted into a successful Hollywood career.
Steve Austin evolved from a smiling, blonde-haired babyface to a pissed-off, bald-headed heel who turned babyface after inadvertently becoming an avatar for everyone who has ever been mad at their boss at work. A man who was fired by his previous boss for being too generic became the most profitable pro wrestler in history, with a whole era centered around him.
Perhaps the best thing to ever happen to Stone Cold Steve Austin was losing his hair.
And decades later, the same story repeated with Tetsuya Naito in New Japan Pro Wrestling, turning from the babyface Stardust Genius into the tweener El Ingobernable. It also happened to Roman Reigns, who was anointed the next main guy for WWE, but was faced with boos and jeers from the crowd. But after partnering with legendary manager Paul Heyman, he became the Tribal Chief, the head of his family who is as powerful as he is volatile.
While it’s understood that they all play characters in the ring, those roles aren’t taken off once they exit the ring — they continue to embody them. Actors get to leave roles behind, while pro wrestlers have no choice but to be seen as their in-ring personas even as they live their lives. Once a pro wrestler ‘goes over’, they’re likely stuck with them.
As much as pro wrestling is seen as ‘fake’, the reactions it gains when it makes things work are far from not genuine. I’ve discussed on this blog how this aspect of kayfabe is also evident in politics and the manipulation of mass media. The commodification of authenticity is now a fundamental principle in marketing. That principle helps sell products, get politicians elected into office, and pro wrestlers become the most heralded personalities in all of media.
An Oasis That Many Thought Was a Mirage
With all that said, what does the Desert of the Real deserve to be watered with?
Amid the desolation and insanity of the real world, there is an oasis up ahead — the spectacle of pro wrestling. The ring provides a space of myth and theater where monotony is momentarily destroyed and mundanity is overturned by pageantry and brutality. You need not daydream like you usually do as fantasy becomes reality right before your very eyes.
Those who doubt are made to believe. Those who usually shy from violence are somehow comforted with body slams and submission holds. It’s a theatrical escape from the brutality of the real world, with its own syncretic mythology formed by both participants and audience.
Unlike the real simulated violence of combat sports — where every knockout and broken bone is far from pretend — you can go home from a pro wrestling show content in the knowledge that most of the blows and slams you had just witnessed were mostly planned for.
Here are a few reasons why I say pro wrestling is an oasis.
Spontaneity and Immediacy
While many would put them up to stunts and choreographed fights like in action movies, they’re not exactly the same. You can throw a punch at your on-screen opponent in front of a camera for a film that can be at a distance with a certain camera angle to keep it safe, but you have no such luxury in a pro wrestling ring — you still have to make contact.
Those blows have to hit, those slams need sufficient impact, those holds should display enough tension — all worked within a somewhat slim margin of error. The only difference between a ‘worked’ move and a ‘shoot’ one is just giving it a bit more and aiming for weak spots. You put a bit more snap into a worked punch, it hits for real; you put a bit more muscle to a slam, it hurts for real; you tighten up a hold a bit more, it can snap a joint or put the receiver to sleep.
Action movies are an orchestra; pro wrestling is jazz.
What most don’t understand about pro wrestling matches is that while most of them are pre-planned, those plans are usually drawn up just before the show. Those plans are subject to Murphy’s law — what can go wrong will likely go wrong. If a movie fight goes wrong, the director yells cut and you get to do another take. If a pro wrestling match goes wrong, the show does not stop. There are no timeouts in pro wrestling.
Some of the very best matches were entirely ‘called’ in the ring — improvised on the spot.
This is Shinsuke Nakamura’s debut in NXT, the so-called top-tier development brand of WWE. His opponent was Sami Zayn, a touted talent who had been wrestling there for a good while. They had never met in person and talked before this match.
The very first time Sami Zayn and Shinsuke Nakamura saw each other in the flesh was here.
It was later revealed that the whole match was ‘called’ — improvised live by both men.
Such a phenomenon is not that rare in pro wrestling. Some of the greatest moments in the squared circle are spur-of-the-moment decisions-turned-spontaneous action before a live audience. As I mentioned, the most important aspect of pro wrestling is that the show is live.
While other forms of entertainment like music, theater, and standup comedy are also done live, they have a stricter adherence to their pre-production plans. Perhaps you can say the second closest to pro wrestling when it comes to improvisation — the first being freestyle jazz — is standup comedy. However, unless jazz and standup comedy actually involve physical violence, then pro wrestling stands on its own in that regard.
But an artform cannot stand on its difficulty and risks in execution alone.
Living Mythology
Pro wrestling is myth-making — syncretic narratives written and performed in real time, which are then added on either immediately after or somewhere down the line. These heroes and villains morph and mutate before our very eyes, responding to the crowd the same way living organisms pass on their best traits to ensure the survival of their species, but potentially at a much faster rate — only bacteria are faster.
A pro wrestler’s career is a process of natural selection, responding to the whims of a fickle audience. They read the crowd for whatever they do that ‘goes over’ — a desired reaction. Babyfaces want cheers, heels want boos, neither can make the crowd do either with brute force. The worst reaction a pro wrestler can ever get is dead silence.
The soundtrack to an unsuccessful pro wrestler’s career is crickets.
Mythologies throughout history were created not with deliberate thought right off the bat, but through a ‘game of telephone’ across time. They were disparate stories with similar themes that were then tied together by shared culture, religion, and/or history. We now see similar things with rumors that turn into urban legends, online metafiction, and memes.
Pro wrestling stories aren’t exactly done like this as it does follow a more top-down process, but whatever comes next then has a bottom-up process with how the audience responds to what’s presented to them. If they don’t like what they see and the show still proceeds as planned, the result may not be that good as the story loses the crowd.
You can plan storylines in advance, but you must be ready to revise or throw it in the trash at any time. The audience decides what they like and what they don’t for they’re the entire reason why you’re going through the trouble in the first place. If you want to write stories exactly as you wish, you should write novels or fanfiction instead.
Although in some instances, proceeding as planned is the best direction, despite negative reception. You then drop them the twist and reward their patience.
What truly makes it mythology is how the stories keep being told for as long as the wrestlers get on with their lives and careers. Long-term storytelling is a thing in this medium, wherein a narrative can be referenced and continued even years after it first started. Movies, shows, video games, plays, songs, and so on end right then and there.
Then they get sequels over a decade later that tend to disappoint.
But with pro wrestling, you can never know when a story truly ends. After a feud reaches what seems to be a conclusion, something else can happen — either they ally against a common foe, they run it back years later, or the ‘loser’ somehow gets a moral victory that prolongs the rivalry. There’s also a tendency for a hero to turn villain and vice versa, which can make things more interesting if executed well. Sometimes, both happen at the same time.
When planning and execution line up with people’s expectations, that elevates pro wrestlers from being mere mortals to demigods. Early in the career of Roman Reigns, he barely had a character and he was given drivel on the mic. But when Paul Heyman came into the picture, the Bloodline storyline came to be and Roman went from hated and ridiculous to the Head of the Table — the One Tribal Chief. Nowadays, WWE fans can never imagine him as overlooked.
All of those stories of heroes and villains, tyrants and usurpers, knights and jesters, are told through ritualized combat. Pro wrestling continues the tradition of the morality play, pitting good against evil, the oppressed against their oppressors, the heralded against the maligned. The monomyth — the hero’s journey — unfolds in real time inside and outside of the ring.
A hero does not become so without the struggles of defeating foes and overcoming challenges.
You can follow a pro wrestler’s journey practically in real time. The rise and dominance of Rhea Ripley is being documented as we speak. The turnaround of Dominik Mysterio from cringey face to one of the best heels in the business happened right before our very eyes. The greatness of top card talent like Seth Rollins, Cody Rhodes, and CM Punk are all over the Internet.
These stories can be either watched in real time or marathoned in retrospect, and they have been summarized in wikis and video highlights. The same way a newbie can turn into a fan from reading wikis on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40,000, or even Naruto or One Piece — titles and franchises in fiction — can also be done with pro wrestling.
But the difference is that there’s a chance you can meet these greats in the flesh.
Pure Emotion
It’s a wonder how people act offended by the scripted nature of pro wrestling, but they don’t express the same sentiment when it comes to things that are actually pulling the wool over their eyes. The government that misspends their tax money, the workplace that exploits their labor, the school that strips their children of their individuality, and their society that forces them to put on masks to face the world as they’re supposed to and not as their true selves.
Much of the media landscape these days is full of irony and detachment. Despite having more engagement and interaction due to social media and livestreams, there’s still a visible fourth wall separating the performers and the audience. No matter how high fidelity your screen and audio output are, you’re not actually there in the physical reality to experience it.
But even if you’re at a live performance, whether it’s a concert or a theater play, the stage still serves a separation.
Perhaps the one genre that goes even further than pro wrestling is standup comedy. It also has its own kayfabe — comedy itself — that helps it walk the fine line between comedy and reality. The audience can heckle the performer, and the comedians can fire back. However, the range of emotions you may derive from a standup comedy show is limited — from laughter to anger.
Meanwhile, pro wrestling has a wider variety of emotions involved. You can have laughter, tension, anger, happiness, and even sadness all featured in one show. There are very few limits to the emotions that pro wrestling can evoke, especially since there’s such a blurry line between mere performance and real life among pro wrestlers.
For instance, as of this writing, I had recently called a retirement match. There was genuine sadness in the ending of a career as the performer wrestled in front of a live crowd for the last time. The tears were far from scripted — they were shed as a farewell to a stage in his life where he chased his passion while his body still could.
And the audience joins in on that emotion communally, like a ritual. That brings that mythology to life, wherein the heroes and villains are made not with empty words, but with substantial cheers, boos, and chants. Each and every person in their seats forms one organism, with its own mind and consciousness. The emotions they feel and express are multiplied in roars and gasps, and the performers then reciprocate and work off of them.
Suspension of Disbelief
No matter how intricately planned a storyline is, no matter how well-prepared a show is, no matter how invested the performers are, everything is for naught if there is no suspension of disbelief — the magic that’s powered by kayfabe.
If the performers don’t actually believe in what they’re doing, that what they do actually hurts and that they’re really fighting out there, then that lack of faith in themselves and their craft will bleed into their matches. The audience, in turn, will not believe in what they’re seeing.
If there is no contact, no impact, and no feedback, then there’s nothing to believe in.
The most important physical action in pro wrestling is the bump — the impact on the mat. As briefly mentioned before, the bump is the pro wrestler’s main tool for creating suspension of disbelief. Whenever a pro wrestler falls onto the canvas and makes that distinctive thud, the shockwave goes through the viewer’s chest and shakes their mind awake.
It makes them doubt their own judgment and ask themselves, “I thought this is supposed to be fake? Why did that look like it actually hurt?”
The live viewing experience is the purest form. When you watch pro wrestling on television, direct-to-home video, or the Internet, you see motion graphics, hear commentary, and watch additional segments to provide additional context and retain your attention. But when you’re right there, you only get whatever happens in the ring because all the other bells and whistles are not necessary.
You only need to see the action, hear the bumps, and feel the tension.
Soon enough, you find yourself following every move and anticipating what comes next. Those who continue to doubt will close their hearts and minds to it like how bypassers shut off beggars to not give them loose change or solicitors to not give attention to potential scams. However, if you come in with an open heart and mind to see what it’s all about, you’ll have fun.
That’s all it is in the end — entertainment. No one is getting fooled because we already know what it is. You’re getting exactly what you paid money for.
Catharsis
This is the water that wets the sand and lets flowers bloom in this desert — catharsis.
That’s what the isolated pockets of humanity truly need — catharsis — and places to converge in order to experience it in unison. However, that catharsis cannot only be outright savage to the point of being overwhelming. It must be as guilt-free as possible.
A good pro wrestling show allows you to experience catharsis without having to be concerned for the safety of both the performers and themselves.
A pro wrestling show goes bad when something goes wrong, like an accident or when a rogue performer ‘goes into business for themselves’.
When things go out of hand, you get unnecessary incidents like this.
You’ll have to watch this clip on YouTube as it’s understandably age-restricted. Be warned that it’s graphically violent and resulted in grievous injuries. Fortunately, the victim of this incident made a recovery.
Pro wrestlers are educated in the craft and fielded to confirm that their psychology is compatible with the endeavor, both inside and outside the ring. Unfortunately, not everyone seems to be able to comprehend the delicate lines of kayfabe that make this medium as great as it is.
We wouldn’t let someone untrained in medicine to perform surgery; we shouldn’t let people untrained in pro wrestling to get in the ring — the ring is sacred.
When WWE puts up those advisories of “Don’t try this at home,” it’s not just a deterrent to avoid liabilities, but it inadvertently serves as a signboard for those who are foolhardy enough and so deep into pro wrestling that they still try it, even when they’re told not to.
That gave rise to the 2000s ‘super indie’ era of North American pro wrestling, where promotions like Ring of Honor, Chikara, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, and Combat Zone Wrestling came up from the ashes of World Championship Wrestling, Extreme Championship Wrestling, and everyone else who were crushed under the boot of World Wrestling Entertainment.
The Attitude Era and the Ruthless Aggression eras are still reminisced with rose-tinted glasses to this day for good reason — it was great entertainment for teenage millennials who grew up during the transitional period of the 90s and early 2000s.
It was also perhaps the last time pro wrestling was able to purely skirt the fine line of kayfabe and be seen as ‘harmless’ entertainment. Social media hammered the final nail on the coffin of ‘pure’ kayfabe, while the deaths of Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit woke the public up to the dangers of the field as a livelihood.
And yet, to this day, pro wrestling continues to serve as catharsis, albeit with greater audience participation through fevered online discussions about storylines and bookings, as well as inspiring more brave souls than ever to chase their pro wrestling dreams — like we have been for over ten years as of this writing.
It’s no longer exactly the same form of catharsis as before, but it’s catharsis nonetheless. It’s their escape from the harsh realities of this world — their Oasis in the Desert of the Real.
Conclusion
Once again, I didn’t write this to help convince the skeptical, placate the offended, or even preach to the choir. Pro wrestling is its own thing, and I believe it can stand on its own merits. It’s in a pretty good and interesting place as of this writing.
Meanwhile, I recommend that you watch the 2018 documentary series Fighting in the Age of Loneliness by Secret Base, which chronicles the history of mixed martial arts and how it coincided with everything else going on in the 20th century during its development. It’s my main inspiration behind connecting pro wrestling with society and culture at large in these blog posts.
It also can shed a bit of light into the spectacle of combat sports and how it’s necessary to get people to watch people beat the crap out of each other. Pro wrestling follows — and has perfected — that formula. It all goes back to pro wrestling.
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