A Thing of Beauty and a Joy Forever

By Crispin Sartwell

Professional wrestling is the most profound and characteristic art form of our culture.

Perhaps when you want to show what a deep and soulful person you are, you head for the museum to gawk at daubs of paint or to the opera to marinate yourself in the death howls of sopranos. Me, I just turn on the tube and catch "WWF Raw" or "WCW Monday Nitro."

Wrestling now dominates our media and our culture. The highest-rated cable show is "WWF Raw is War." Wrestling has just in the last couple of weeks gone prime time on broadcast network. The hottest politician in America is Jesse Ventura. These are all hopeful signs.

Like Greek tragedy, pro wrestling provides a perfectly comprehensible spectacle of suffering. In Greek tragedy, a great man is brought low, often because, deluded by overwhelming pride, he can't see the fate that awaits him. Everything proceeds as it inevitably must; everything is destined; nothing is left up to chance. The audience achieves what Aristotle called "a catharsis of pity and fear" that can only come in a reconciliation with the inevitable.

All of this is true of pro wrestling as well. A pro wrestling match is always a strict application of destiny; everything follows inevitably from the character of the wrestlers involved. When the Rock pauses after clotheslining Stone Cold Steve Austin in order to exult to the crowd, turning his back on his noble opponent, it is his pride that will bring him down. And no one could argue that Stone Cold is not a great man: ever seen him chug a beer?

The crowd screams its satisfaction; it feels purified of its negative emotions; it goes home having achieved a kind of reconciliation to the universe itself.

Like all great drama, the wrestling match often ends with bodies strewn around the stage, as the crowd and the cameras focus with unbelievable duration and intensity on the deepest, most public humiliation, or on a victory over insurmountable odds that signals transcendence. As the Undertaker inflicts slow, inexorable damage on the beautiful Shawn Michaels, we see the future that awaits us all. Life will snap suplex all of us in the long run, even the strongest and loveliest of us. Life will smash a chair across each of our backs. Life will bash our heads into the turnbuckle of fate.

People will still telling you that pro wrestling isn't "real," as if that were news. I'm surprised that Anderson hasn't done us all the service of informing us that the Titanic is not really going to sink tonight in your VCR, and suggesting that the movie's box office take is proof of human gullibility. Believe it or not, the stuff described in the works of Jane Austen did not really happen. Don't try skinny-dipping among Monet's water lilies. Othello doesn't really smother Desdemona every night and twice on Sunday.

This question of what is "real" is an interesting one. Certainly, four-hundred-pound guys are really lifting up three-hundred-pound guys and lobbing them out of the ring. On the other hand, as everyone who watches pro wrestling knows, the matches follow certain scripts and the outcome is known beforehand to those who compose these scripts. The point is just to have the right script.

That's why this thing is art, not sport. And there are true masters of the drama in pro wrestling: Rick Flair, the ultimate bastard with the incredible line of patter; Randy "Macho Man" Savage, who always ends up crucified on the ropes like Jesus; The Dog-Faced Gremlin, Rick Steiner, who despite his severely limited intellect is always trying to do the right thing; Public Enemy, a tag-team of white guys who are laboring under the delusion that they're black.

These are masters of their craft, cultural icons. Pro wrestling is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.