Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 17

Macho Man Meets the Million
Dollar Man: Mayhem and
the Mythology of Pro-Wrestling
Televised American pro-wrestling in the late 1980s has not
changed much from the French wrestling of "second-rate halls” in
Paris that Roland Barthes analyzed thirty years earlier in
Mythologies. Wrestling is still a spectacle of excess which presents
synchronic snapshots of absolute powerlessness, defeat, and
humiliation. Wrestling’s gestures work as signs which have an
absolute clarity. Wrestling's gestures, like the gestures of Greek
theater, are in Barthes' words an "intelligible representation of
moral situations which are usually private."(l) Wrestling's
presentation of character through body type and costuming still
resembles Commedia del'Arte's use of the same techniques.
The fundamentals of wrestling are apparently unchanging, or
at least resistant to change, for they are essentially still what
Barthes identified: an exhibition of Suffering Defeat, Justice.(2)
Wrestling still thrives on quick, dramatic reversals and "triumphant
disorder" at the end of a fight. Rules can be broken for a deserved
punishment now just as then, or as announcer Vince McMann puts it,
"You have to fight fire with fire sometimes."(3) Burger King, sponsor
of the October, 1989 Saturday Night's Main Event, has a slightly
different version of this fundamental—rules can be broken for profit.
Their wrestling version of "have it your way" is "If you wanna give
people what they want, sometimes you gotta break the rules."
A nnouncer Jessie "the Body" Ventura, champion of the bad guys of
wrestling, has another version of this philosophy as he observes
about Tito Santana and Rick Martel, whose match ended in a double
disqualification, "You gotta remember something, McMann,
sportsmanship don’t mean nothing. It's who wins. That's what
counts." That Burger King and the bad guys of wrestling share the
same philosophy is apparently detrimental to neither.
The differences that Barthes found between American and
French wrestling in the 1950s no longer seem valid. Then, Barthes
defined American wrestling as a mythological fight between good