Getting over : a study of the history, industry, performance art and cultural impact of American professional wrestling

Abstract

In the American tradition of using revisionist fiction to tell cultural myths, professional wrestling is a genre of performance that can be loosely described as “revisionist sport.” It tells the story of a fictional sporting league and the fictional figures therewithin. These fictional figures chase self-actualization through the glory, wealth, and validation promised by a professional championship in a dramatized version of the sport of catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The enactment of American cultural values and/or their rejection permeates the narratives of the style from formatting of the foundational match to weeks-long angles and years-long arcs. The central theme of the genre is the insecurity of each of the performers, and their reactions to it in their quest for self-actualization. Viennese psychoanalyst Alfred Adler is credited with first asserting that false bravado is an expression of internal insecurity, which means that the bombastic displays of hypermasculine chest-thumping in professional wrestling are expressive of massive internal fears of inferiority among the characters (Ma, 2015). Despite their fears, babyface-heroes seek to walk the righteous path in a corrupt world to chase their principled, morally upright, and apparently deserved self-actualization; villainous heels reject the noble path and take any unethical shortcut to achieve corrupted validation and immoral success. This ethical paradigm dominates much of the storytelling in this genre. Due to the unending episodic nature of the style, most characters see shifts in their ethical alignments as time goes by. Likewise, the cultural values enacted by professional wrestling evolve, and so too do the personal qualities of the heroes and villains. When a particular character captures a cultural moment, the industry is at its most successful. The ethical flexibility of the archetypal characters has allowed professional wrestling to be a consistent and prominent part of American culture from the late-19th century until now. During this period, thanks to its customer-driven ethical compass and the early adoption of evolving media technology, the performance art of professional wrestling has grown to be a nigh-ubiquitous part of American culture, permeating, and influencing the worlds of sports, entertainment, business, and politics.