Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 18
10
The Popular Culture Review
and evil which was quasi-political in nature because the bad wrestler
was usually identified as a "Red". French wrestling, on the other
hand, was concerned with ethics, not politics.(4) The leading
characters of French wrestling exhibited moral values or the lack
thereof. The villain was asocial, used the rules for his own
advantage, and was dangerous (to society) because he was
inconsistent, unpredictable and, therefore, a constant threat because
he could not be anticipated and, thus, thwarted and controlled.
As always, I find Barthes' boundaries between ethics and
politics rather illusory-one of his conjuring tricks. American
wrestling is still a mythological fight between good and evil, but
those qualities are exhibited on the same terms as French wrestling.
It is no longer absolutely necessary for good to win, and the politics
have shifted from the national scene to the homefront. While the
characters portrayed by the wrestlers in the 1989 Main Event
mythologize a partial history of America—for instance, Macho King
as a representative of corrupt monarchy; Superfly Snuka as a
representative of American individualism: "There is no king or queen
over the Superfly Jimmy Snuka. I am my own man...a free man;" Zeus
as a black slave owned by the Million Dollar Man, the ultimate
capitalist;—the focus has shifted from defending capitalism and
democracy to resisting an awareness of issues of class, gender and race.
The signs of wrestling retain their "absolute clarity" only in
the gestures within the ring. The match itself has become a smaller
and less significant component of wrestling on t.v., while the
wrestlers' boasts before and after the match-those speeches which
recall both Miles Gloriosus and Twain's Child of Calamity [compare,
for instance, the Child's "I put my hand on the sun's face and make it
night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the
seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me
through leather—don't use the naked eye!"(5) to Rowdy Roddy
Piper's "I don't know if you've ever caught me, but I'll be after you
like a man headed for West Berlin, chump. You ain't never seen
nothing like primetime, here. You've heard of Hurricane Hugo? I
make Hurricane Hugo look like a summer breeze, baby. So check it
out, Hot Rod's back and he's back to stay,"]—those boasts have
swollen, as if on their own hot air, to fill the greater proportion of
airtime, bringing with them all the distortions and ambiguity of
language.