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It’s Still Real to Me, Dammit! Performed Ontologies and Professional Wrestling
DRAFT: NOT INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION
Neal Hebert
Ph.D. Candidate (Theatre History), Louisiana State University
Jon Cogburn
Associate Professor (Philosophy), Louisiana State University
Current Draft
07/10/2015
On November 9, 1997, the 20,593 professional wrestling fans that packed Montreal’s Molson Centre—plus approximately another million fans watching around the globe on pay-per-view—gathered together to watch the World Wrestling Federation’s Survivor Series Pay Per View.[1]The majority of the show proceeded as expected with nothing amiss. Viewers sawthe standard progression of matches, improvised skits, and direct address monologues that jointly comprise the spectacle of contemporary professional wrestling. Sometimes the heroes prevailed against villainous adversity, and sometimes they failed to overcome the odds against them but nonetheless vowed revenge. Things changed, however, in the marquee match (or main event) of the show.The outcome of the fight between Canadian hero and reigning WWF Champion Bret “The Hitman” Hart and “The Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels would change professional wrestling forever. This event, later christened The Montreal Screwjob, would make explicit the implicit conditions of possibility for the instantiation of professional wrestling’s fictional ontology and in so doing radically alter that ontology.[2]
In what follows we argue that spectators of contemporary professional wrestling must keep track of two competing ontologies, which we label “work” and “shoot,” the former being the reality presupposed by the fictional elements of the performance of professional wrestling and the latter concerning the facets of the actual world that make the performance possible. As we will show, even prior to the Screwjob, anyone who knew that the outcomes of the matches were predetermined was forced to view a professional wrestling performance through these inconsistent lenses. But only after the Screwjob did aspects of the shoot ontology recursively nest within the work ontology. This leads to a new kind of incoherence in the work ontology itself, one arguably paradigmatic with respect to all of our postmodern interactions with reality. If this is correct, then professional wrestling is not just something of which one can develop a metaphysical account, but is rather metaphysics itself.
I. The Montreal Screwjob and Why it Matters
Viewers of the 1997 Survivor Series Pay Per View knew that Hart, despite spending more than a decade with Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, had been released from his WWF contract and would soon wrestle exclusively for the rival wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling.[3]Although less than a year beforeHart gave an emotional speech live on Monday Night Raw affirming that he had signed a WWF contract guaranteeing his employment for the next 20 years (with a rumored salary of $1.5 million per year as the downside guarantee), WWF chairman Vince McMahon released Hart from his contract because of the company’s inability to honor it given a lack of revenue.As such, Hart was allowed to enter negotiations with Eric Bischoff’s World Championship Wrestling and jump promotions without a non-compete clause—which meant Hart could immediately begin appearing on television for the rival wrestling company.
After receiving an offer of $2.5 million each year of guaranteed money from World Championship Wrestling, Hart gave his notice to the WWF while WWF champion. Hart was scheduled to become an active member of the WCW within a few weeks. During this time, the real-life promotional war between the WWF and WCW had caused numerous wrestlers to jump from one promotion to the other, and Hart was by far the highest profile performer to change companies since Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash signed with WCW several years earlier.[4] Other wrestlers who had switched promotions while holding championships had done storylines disgracing the belts, and WWF Chairman Vince McMahon reportedly feared Hart would do the same.[5] Thus, in the main event of Survivor Series 1997, McMahon colluded with referee Earl Hebner and Michaels to double-cross Hart during the match. When Michaels placed Hart in Hart’s own signature submission maneuver, the sharpshooter, McMahon signaled the ref to end the match prematurely, ensuring Hart’s defeat and guaranteeing that Hart would not leave the WWF as its heavyweight champion. Hart, furious and disbelieving, began destroying the ring, set, and cameras surrounding the ring to the crowd’s vocal approval. Before the pay per view went off the air, Hart spit in the face of WWF chairman Vince McMahon—who, at that time, was in WWF storylines only an announcer rather than an authority figure—and began tracing the initials “WCW” (for World Championship Wrestling) while standing in the WWF ring surrounded by the property he had just destroyed.
None of the above likely sounds particularlyunusual to most individuals casually familiar with professional wrestling—wrestling shows always have bad guys (“heels,” in wrestling’s carnie argot) cheating to defeat good guys (“babyfaces”). Unlike these other scripted incidents, however, the Montreal Screwjob was not part of the planned show’s storylines, nor was Hart aware of what would happen. Instead, the Screwjob—the most famous in-ring double-cross in professional wrestling history—was “real” life played out in-ring and onscreen. Unlike prior true double-crossings[6] where the public never figured out that something untoward happened, the actual double-cross behind the Montreal Screwjob was openly acknowledged on WWF television and became a key storyline after the incident. Its subsequent influence on the performance of professional wrestling is impossible to misinterpret, and the event’s later incorporation into storylines led to the WWF’s greatest successes in both attendance and ticket sales.
From the perspective of the philosophy of art, what is most significant about the profoundly postmodern moment of the Montreal Screwjob is that it is a paradigm example of how a practice can perform both its fictional storyline as well as the material pre-conditions that allow for that storyline’s performances. Professional wrestling is not unique in the extent to which propositions articulating the material preconditions can directly contradict the very storylines being performed. What is unique about post Montreal Screwjob professional wrestling is the extent to which viewers must be able to track this contradictory reality in order to follow the storylines themselves. Shockingly, this will entail that spectators must constantly balance two ontologies in order for professional wrestling to succeed as an artistic genre. We dub these competing ontologies the “shoot” (i.e., the reality of the performers behind the storylines) ontology and the “work” (i.e., the fictional account of what’s going on in storyline) ontology. This terminology is consistent with the carnie argot spoken by wrestlers since the turn of the century whenever wrestling insiders find themselves discussing the complex relationship between reality and story.
To appreciate professional wrestling in the wake of the Montreal Screwjob, an audience member, much like audiences of professional wrestling throughout the 20th century, must be able to grasp its identity and individuation conditions as in other arts. But unlike more traditional arts—be they pop art, mass art, or high art—post-Screwjob professional wrestling demands different paradigms of spectatorship that have been naturalized within audiences since 1997. After the Screwjob, every single performance of professional wrestling is intimately engaged in questioning, complicating, and reinscribing its identity conditions as it plays with audiences’ abilities to distinguish between reality, the scripted event, and the material and political forces shaping the writing of the scripts that govern the event in question. Where once wrestling was predetermined sport, since 1997 wrestling is and can only be meta-theatrical in performance.
We contend that the differing ontologies operative within professional wrestling have a meaningful impact on the types of spectatorships necessary to enjoy these performances. In this paper we will begin the task of providing an ontology of professional wrestling. Any such theory will be complicated by how spectatorship has changed in the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob given the way the Screwjob has redefined the genre-relevant norms of professional wrestling. Because of this sea-change we contend that any attempt to articulate the aesthetic ontologies of contemporary professional wrestling (identity and diversity) must be accompanied by a concomitant account of the competing ontologies that inform contemporary professional wrestling’s spectatorship.
II. Key Categories
Much of the way wrestlers and fans talk about the practice comes from the argot of 19th Century travelling carnivals, which often had simulated fights between an evil strongman and a carnival employee pretending to be a local who would defend the honor of the locale in which the carnival was performing. In carnival argot, a work is any performance or trick that constitutively involves the audience’s ignorance. Audience members who are fooled by the work (for example those who believe that the outcome of the staged fights are not predetermined) are known as marks. In contemporary professional wrestling performers are often called workers and the notion of a work is often contrasted with that of a shoot, where a shoot fight is non-scripted and without a pre-determined outcome.
At its most basic level, professional wrestling is a simulation of an athletic contest (specifically a fight) between at least two performers: the performers are referred to as wrestlers (or, in the case of the WWE alone, male performers are called “Superstars” and female performers are called “Divas”), while the simulation is commonly referred to as a match. Within each match wrestlers frequently subject each other to strikes using their feet, hands, and joints (such as elbows and knees), submission holds that appear to put performers’ limbs and joints under stress while nonetheless keeping an opponent’s face and body visible to audiences and cameras, and assorted other performed attacks, often referred to as “moves.” Wrestlers typically pull their strikes, feign submission holds’ lethality, and fall in such a way that the impact of their bodies on the canvas is evenly distributed throughout their body and thus less painful, but this is far from a painless event. While wrestlers minimize the damage done to each others’ bodies, no amount of care can prevent injuries from accruing given the nature of the performances on display.[7] These maneuvers are read as having a certain “meaning” in the match, largely determined by a move’s place within thefictional context of the match’s story.
One example of this would be a punch: in American professional wrestling since the mid-1990s, punching has been a “legal” maneuver and a staple of most professional wrestling matches. In All Japan Professional Wrestling’s 6/3/1994 match between Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa for the Triple Crown world championship, however, Kawada only punches Misawa after thirty minutes of wrestling.Although this move frequently begins any number of other matches, given the context of the championship match in Tokyo and the pride of both performers to win, the move meant something decidedly different than it would have had it opened the match. On that night and at that time, Kawada’s punch to Misawa—the only punch in the nearly 40 minute match—performed his desperation to hurt his opponent. It was only part of a sequence of strikes wherein Kawada used every offensive strike in his arsenal of maneuversto try to hurt his rival, and the crowd in the Tokyo Nippon Budokan grew so excited upon realizing that Kawada would risk an illegal strike to injure his opponent that the thousands of fans in attendance began stomping their feet on the concrete floor in appreciation.
Frequently, a match occurs before a live audience, although this is not necessarily true of all matches.[8] Often, these performances involve at least one other performer who simulates officiating the fictional athletic contest by enforcing its (sometimes) nebulously-defined rules: the referee.[9]Matches rarely occur in isolation when they are performed. Although single matches might have been put on as a complete performance early in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when championship matches could last for up to four hours, presently companies produce a slate of matches that are jointly labeled a card: audiences buy tickets to see a group of matches performed by a single producing entity.[10]
The producing entity is understood to be a company or “promotion” by audiences; performers are signed exclusively to a given promotion, and their matches can almost always only be seen on shows that are produced by a given promotion. This promotion—whether through a single storyline writer (called “booker” in wrestling’s carnie argot) or through an entire writing team dedicated to this purpose—determines a wrestling company’s creative direction.This means that the situations that lead to matches, the results of the matches, and the characters portrayed by the performers in matches are all predetermined or fictions created by the promotion (either singly or in improvisational collaboration between a promotion and a talent). The booker or writing team decides which wrestlers are champions, whether matches are championship matches (matches where championships can change hands), and why any number of wrestlers are wrestling each other rather than anyone else (“feuding,” commonly, although in prior eras performers engaged in a long-term program would refer to this phenomenon as being “married” to each other).
Although a given card might have eight matches, each of those matches is—on a well-booked show—expected to serve a different role. An opening match is frequently designed to excite a given crowd.Sometimes it does this through acrobatic maneuvers; sometimes it does this through the pace at which the wrestlers do maneuvers; or sometimes it does this by showcasing a fan-favorite wrestler. Using our eight match show as a hypothetical example, subsequent matches would feature virtuous wrestlers (“babyfaces”) in contests against evil (“heel”) wrestlers. After the opening match, the show will “slow down” by featuring slower-paced, less exciting matches to avoid exhausting the crowd. After the opener, subsequent matches should consistently crescendo until the final match of the evening to ensure that the main event match receives the strongest reaction.
The above, of course, is only part of the story. While it certainly accounts for much of the content of a given evening of professional wrestling, it does not account for all of the things one sees at a live event or on television. The wrestlers’ entrances to the arena, irrespective of whether one is discussing their arrival to wrestle a match or to simply appear before a crowd, are also an integral part of professional wrestling: music, masculinist/feminist posturing, pyrotechnics, and dance are all synthesized into the short performances that accompany wrestlers’ appearances on stage. Moreover, sometimes wrestlers appear in the ring within which matches are contested or appear before the crowd at the spot where they enter the arena with a microphone: rather than engaging in a physical contest, the wrestlers perform direct address monologues to the crowd or verbally duel a future opponent (wrestling’s carnie argot dubs the act of performing a monologue or an improvised scene “cutting a promo”). Shows frequently supplement the matches with improvised skits between multiple wrestlers (either backstage or in the ring), advertisements for wrestling-related merchandise (such as replica championship belts, apparel, or DVDs of past wrestling events/matches), video packages that summarize prior storylines, and assorted other things. Given all of the above, it becomes possible for someone to say that they watched wrestling for three hours despite their being, perhaps, only a few minutes of actual wrestling within the context of a match (or matches).[11]
III. Two Ontologies
When analytic philosophers attempt to provide an ontology[12] of some genre of art they are trying to isolate the features of entities that make them instances of categories relevant to that genre. Isolating such features typically requires answering three questions: (1) individuation (what qualities differentiate entities of the relevant kind from each other and entities of other kinds?), (2) persistence (in virtue of what quality or qualities are entities of the relevant kind self-identical over time?), and (3) normativity (in virtue of what quality or qualities are different objects better and worse instances of the relevant kinds?).
While these clearly do not exhaust all of the philosophical questions one can and should ask about various artworks, proponents of the centrality of ontology think that these questions are fundamental: answering other questions will be parasitic on answering the above three questions. For example, consider the debauched immoralist who claims that movies that celebrate cruelty should be aesthetically cherished in virtue of the fact that these movies celebrate cruelty. An ethicist responding to this will do a much better job if she is familiar with the genre relevant properties of movies. Are films really the kind of thing that celebrate or encourage character traits such as cruelty? Is it even possible for a film to have this kind of property? Assuming that there is a subgenre of films that manage to do this, what differentiates instances of those films from other kinds of films? These simply are questions of type (1) and (2). Finally, addressing type (3) questions will give us insight into the genre’s aesthetic successes and failures. Answering these questions will not automatically determine where we should stand on issues of moralism and immoralism (or whether we should take a stand at all), but (in addition to clarity about a bevy of ontological issues about human beings more generally) they are prerequisites for the debate to get started.[13]