Wrestling with Reality - The Simulation of Professional Wrestling in American Society

“It’s a sport without rules where nobody keeps score. There are no clear winners or losers, yet nobody seems to care. It’s a soap opera with a referee. A melodrama of mayhem, a controlled riot that pauses for commercials. They call it professional wrestling, but any resemblance to the sport is purely coincidental.”[i]

-Chris Mortensen (ESPN reporter)-

Wrestling with Reality

The Simulation of Professional Wrestling in American  Society

March 30^th 2008, Citrus Bowl, Orlando, Florida: WrestleMania 24. 74,635 screaming fans (and millions watching around the world) get up from their seats in unison. The Undertaker (“The Dead Man”, 7 foot, 305 pounds, hailing from Death Valley) slits his thumb down his heavily tattooed throat and every single fan in the building knows what is coming next: the “Tombstone Pile Driver.” He picks up his adversary, Edge (“The Rated R Superstar,” 6 foot 5, 240 pounds), and prepares to hit his “finishing move.” Undertaker hoists Edge on his shoulders, locks his hands around his back and crashes him head first into canvas, as the arena explodes. Announcer Michael Cole’s voice can be heard in the background: “No one has ever gotten up from that move!” The pin fall is academic, 1, 2, 3. “The Undertaker has done it again! 16-0 at WrestleMania, and once again Heavyweight Champion of the world!” Undertaker’s music plays, fireworks go off and the 74,635 spectators give a standing ovation. Their hero has beaten his nemesis, on the biggest show of the year, and all is well in the world. Until next week of course. Unfortunately, most European viewers will never experience this excitement. Most likely, they changed the channel after a few seconds, dismissing the spectacle while proclaiming: “it’s fake, you know. They already know who’s going to win.”

One issue immediately arises when observing professional wrestling (pro wrestling): do people, or more specifically, Americans, not feel that there is a problem with this situation? Pro-wrestling is a simulated sporting event that is treated as a real sporting event, that sells out enormous arenas, attracts millions of viewers and generates millions of dollars. Nowadays, everybody is in on the joke and yet the American wrestling fan chooses to suspend his disbelief anyway. Pro wrestling has shaped a situation for itself in which it balances between being “real” and being “fake:” It exists in a paradox of reality. The European observer is confused and perhaps even aggravated by the American indulgence in something so obviously “low brow” and “fake.” How can a scripted “sport” still fill arenas with millions of screaming fans and why do the American fans cheer the glaring stereotypes that the wrestlers portray? To the European, however, the answers to these questions might reveal that his feelings of superiority may have been unwarranted. This essay will seek to establish that, instead of a somewhat childish and primitive form of violent entertainment, professional wrestling is actually an extremely evolved simulation and that the “reality paradox” pro wrestling seems to pose to its European observers is a byproduct of the highly sophisticated state, dubbed “hyperreality” by cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, that American society finds itself in.  

The key to Baudrillard’s theory on hyperreality is the concept of simulation. Central in his theory is the idea that our social reality is construction: a “simulacrum,” or a symbolic order of value.[ii] In a traditional society words have a referential function in reality. “The signifier” refers to something in material reality, to “the signified.” According to Baudrillard, in an advanced society such as the United States, this system has collapsed, under pressure of, amongst other things, advertising. A “loss of referentials” has occurred. Signs get detached from their original meaning and start referring to created images that have no root in reality, but that are accepted as reality nonetheless. Advertisements are self-referential and traditional Marxist ideas, like “use value” and “production value,” are no longer relevant in this system. Brands have created a new kind of value for themselves, known as “sign value.” No longer is the value of a can of Coca Cola measured in the labor that was used to produce it, but the “sign value” it represents is what counts. It projects the image of a cool lifestyle, a way of life that you as a consumer want to be part of. It is defined by what is signified. In the United States this simulation has reached its highest form and Baudrillard described the country as “lacking any grounding in a “real” economy of value.”[iii] America has become the perfect simulacrum, a system of signs referring to signs, and has therefore become “beyond the real”. 

In America this situation has evolved to its highest possible form, it is a society in the “most advanced state of simulation.”[iv] America, Baudrillard mentions, is “the desert of the real … (one is) delivered from all depth there- a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points.”[v] The country has become a world made of signs and the meaning of these signs all depend on each other. This hyperreality, as Baudrillard calls it, “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."[vi] The concept of simulation goes a long way to explain the aforementioned question of why many American do not feel the phenomenon of pro wrestling is problematic. All one looks for in hyperreality is simulation; there no longer is a “reality.” “The real is hyperrealized. Neither realized, nor idealized: but hyperealized. The hyperreal is abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption.”[vii] 

In Fabricating the Absolute Fake Jaap Kooijman expands on this notion by explaining that “Baudrillard’s hyperreality is not the opposite of reality but a continuous simulation that creates the real as just another sign in a chain of signs which endlessly refer to each other.”[viii] In this line of thought pro wrestling can be seen as the ultimate sign that has lost its relation to the signified. It is a series of actions that might refer to the idea of an actual wrestling match, but that has nothing to do with what these matches used to be. A punch thrown by a pro wrestler refers to the action of actually hitting someone. The blood that flows is real, but the injury causing it is not. Just like a photograph in a newspaper, wrestling creates an image that has “all its attributes intact except for a fixed relation to what it represents.”[ix]

This paradoxical nature of the phenomenon of  pro wrestling, that poses the problem for the European viewers, stems from the very form the sport presents itself in. Over the course of a century wrestling experienced such a transformation, from the original classical sport into its current incarnation, perhaps best identified as “sports entertainment,” making current pro wrestling almost completely unrecognizable from its original form.[x] Sharon Mazer explains that “at its most elemental, professional wrestling is simply two men engaged in a spectacle of violent  conflict. A series of challenges communicate the histories of the combatants and legitimize or delegitimize each individual’s position in relation to the other’s. The wrestlers present themselves as larger-than-life figures from a comic-book like world.”[xi] Matches are fought out in the ring, and are highly choreographed affairs and the storylines are often a simplistic representation of social situations.[xii] When discussing pro wrestling it is obviously the clash between what is real and fake that creates the controversy surrounding the topic. 

In the essay “ “Real” Wrestling/ “Real” Life” Sharon Mazer describes this interaction and claims that “the pleasure for wrestlers and spectators alike may be found in the expressive tension between the spontaneous and the rehearsed, in the anticipation of , and acute desire for, the moment when the real breaks through the pretended.” Mazer compares the viewing of a pro wrestling match to watching a theatrical or musical performance, in that “spectator and performer alike are in a position to enjoy the distancing effect that comes with knowing the formal aspects of the performance at the same time as they look for the moment when knowledge (or consciousness) is suspended, penetrated by the rush of something far more urgent and demanding that artifice.”[xiii] In this respect pro wrestling seems to fit into the same category as watching a play or movie, where often suspending disbelief is a key factor in the enjoyment of the spectator. Yet, in pro wrestling, there is real danger involved as Mazer argues that “the line between demonstrated violence and actual physical harm is strongly marked in the performance.”[xiv] “At its worst,” Mazer claims, “a wrestling performance is an over simplistic display of male bravado and vulgar social clichés. But at its best, wrestling is a sophisticated theatricalized representation of the violent urges repressed by social code, of the transgressive impulses present in the most civilized of people.”[xv] Pro wrestling, she concludes, is not accepted as a legitimate sport, nor can it be considered legitimate theatre. It “intersects, exploits, and, finally, parodies both forms of entertainment.”[xvi]

            Pro wrestling’s refusal to be identified, combined with the aforementioned notion that pro wrestling is in fact the ultimate sign that lost its signifier, opens up the way to accepting the “so called sport” as an extremely evolved simulation in hyperreality. For pro wrestling is, on every level, a simulated affair. At a first glance, one would have a hard time spotting the “fake” nature of pro wrestling,  as  World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) programming and live shows mimic a real sports broadcast in every way. In no way is it acknowledged that the fighting is scripted. There is no stepping outside of the fiction. Story segments are told in breaking news formats or in interview segments. The commentators are as shocked and surprised as the viewer is by latest heinous act by the “bad guys” and are constantly interrupted by seemingly unplanned occurrences.[xvii] A wrestling match in itself is evidently a simulation in its very core, with every punch, kick, “suplex” or  submission referring to the “idea” the viewer has of these moves.

            The simulated nature of the wrestling matches, however, does not merely stop at the choreography of the moves. It can also be observed in the back stories provided to the wrestlers. Besides the fictional character they portray, they also get awarded fictional achievements. A wrestler can be a first time world champion, enjoying an year long undefeated streak, despite being a loser the month before, or be a marketed as a successful “blue chipper,” even though being under contract for WWE for years under a different moniker. All accomplishments are fabricated, but marketed and accepted as a real “accomplishment” nonetheless, thus creating a simulation of an accomplished athlete. Like America itself, pro wrestling has “all the signs of culture, history and identity. Yet if one looks closely, these qualities are nowhere to be found.”[xviii] Furthermore, there is an entire entourage present at ringside who only seem to have jobs in the context of the simulated match. There is a timekeeper, keeping no time, an enforcer, to keep rowdy situations under fictional control, and of course, the main suspect: the referee, who admonishes the rules of the fictional contest, conveniently missing the cheating tactics of the bad guy and getting knocked out by the merest accidental blow to the back. 

            And, finally, the largest part of the simulation are the enormous crowds of spectators themselves. For while they may realize they are observing a choreographed contest, their responses to the signs that are presented to them are completely genuine. They cheer when the crowd favorite wins, they boo the referee when he makes a bad call and will buy another ticket to see the bad guys finally get his comeuppance. The public is as much a part of the simulation as the wrestling show itself is. There is actually no dividing line between the two. In America, we learned from Baudrillard, “cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic. The break between the two…does not exist: life is cinema.”[xix] Pro wrestling is merely another “continuous simulation that creates the real as just another sign in a chain of signs which endlessly refer to each other.”[xx]  

            We see now that the paradox a European might observe in pro wrestling is actually present in the very fabric of American society. Kooijman, delving into Baudrillard’s theory again, points out the paradoxical ways of the United States, in the fact that America is ‘Utopia Achieved.” In America, the impossible is made possible, because of the fictional nature of the country.[xxi] In his book America Baudrillard explains: “(America) is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too.”[xxii] It is therefore that America is “beyond the real.” In America this situation has evolved to its highest possible form, it is a society in the “most advanced state of simulation.”[xxiii] And it is in this situation that we find the break between the European and the American point of view. “It may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum- that of the immanence and material transcription of all values..”[xxiv] 

            Since America itself is the “perfect simulacrum,” it does not matter that wrestling is “fake.” It is merely a simulation in another simulation. And Americans do not find fault in this as they, Baudrillard argues, “have no sense of simulation” because they are “themselves simulations in its most developed state.”[xxv] It is this rift between America’s modernity and Europe that creates our different approaches to something such as pro wrestling. “There isn’t just a gap between us,” says Baudrillard, “but a whole chasm of modernity. You are born modern, you do not become so.”[xxvi] Europe simply lacks the sophistication needed to accept a simulation of American proportions and will therefore be forever unable to see why the “reality paradox” of pro wrestling is simply nonexistent for an American. We, Baudrillard notes, “merely imitate them, parody them with a fifty-year time lag, and we are not even successful at that. We do not have either the spirit or the audacity for what might be called the zero degree of culture, the power of unculture.”[xxvii]

In the end we can see that the paradox that pro wrestling creates for us Europeans is legitimized by the theory of hyperreality. Pro wrestling refuses to commit to one genre, but continues to balance between several genres and denies its viewers a definitive answer to its nature. In a society that is a “perfect simulacrum,” pro wrestling is another sign in a chain of signs which endlessly refer to each other.”[xxviii] It is a simulation in its most extreme form, from the wrestler to the commentators to the entire audience watching. America, Baudrillard argues, has attained a state in which the questions of “real” and “fake” is not relevant, as is the case in pro wrestling. It simply is an extreme simulation in a simulated world. It is neither a sport, nor entertainment, but that does not matter. To Americans, the wrestling ring is not a dubious, paradoxical place, but rather a venue where “all participants are actively present and ultimately victorious in claiming a visible place in an otherwise complex and confusing world.”[xxix] And we, as Europeans will be forever unable to accept this, living outside of the American simulation and lacking “the power of unculture” [xxx] needed to lose oneself in the spectacle that is the simulated world of professional wrestling.

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[i] Patrice A. Oppliger, Wrestling and Hypermasculinity (Jefferson: McFarland & Co Inc, 2003), 1.

[ii] Andrew M Koch, and Rick Elmore, “Simulation and Symbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillard’s Augmentation of Marx’s Theory of Value,” Politics & Policy 34.3 (2006), 558.

[iii] Koch, and Elmore, “Simulation and Symbolic Exchange,” 568.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), 124.

[vi] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 6.

[vii] Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social and Other Essays (New York: Semiotexte, 1983), 84.

[viii] Jaap Kooijman, Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 70-71.

[ix] Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 209.

[x] Oppliger, Wrestling and Hypermasculinity, 9.

[xi] Sharon Mazer, “The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling,” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 34, no. 4 (Winter 1990), 97.

[xii] Jeffrey J. Mondak, “The Politics of Professional Wrestling,” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 23 (1989), 139-149.

[xiii] Sharon Mazer, “ “Real” Wrestling / “Real” Life” in Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, ed. Nicolas Sammond  (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 68.

[xiv] Mazer, “The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling,” 108.

[xv] Ibid., 97.

[xvi] Ibid., 98.

[xvii]Nicholas Sammond, “Squaring the Family Circle: WWF Smackdown Assaults the Social Body,” in Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, ed. Nicolas Sammond, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 134-136.

[xviii] Koch, and Elmore, “Simulation and Symbolic Exchange,” 568

[xix] Baudrillard, America, 101.

[xx] Kooijman, Fabricating the Absolute Fake, 70-71.

[xxi] Ibid., 71.

[xxii] Baudrillard, America, 28.

[xxiii] Koch and Elmore, “Simulation and Symbolic Exchange,” 568.

[xxiv] Baudrillard, America, 28-29.

[xxv] Ibid., 28-29.

[xxvi] Ibid., 73.

[xxvii] Ibid., 78.

[xxviii] Jaap Kooijman, Fabricating the Absolute Fake, 70-71.

[xxix] Mazer, “The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling,” 120.

[xxx] Baudrillard, America, 78.

Bibliography

• Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988.
• Baudrillard,  Jean. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social and Other Essays. New York: Semiotexte, 1983.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1995.
• Koch, Andrew M, and Rick Elmore. “Simulation and Symbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillard’s Augmentation of Marx’s Theory of Value.” Politics & Policy. 34.3 (2006): 556-575.
• Kooijman, Jaap. Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.
• Mazer, Sharon. “The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling.” TDR: The Drama Review. Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter 1990): 96-122.
• Mazer, Sharon. “ “Real” Wrestling / “Real” Life.” In Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, edited by Nicolas Sammond, 67-87. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Mondak, Jeffrey J. “The Politics of Professional Wrestling.” Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 23 (1989): 139-149.
• Oppliger, Patrice A. Wrestling and Hypermasculinity. Jefferson: McFarland & Co Inc, 2003.
• Sammond, Nicholas. “Squaring the Family Circle: WWF Smackdown Assaults the Social Body.” In Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. Edited by Nicolas Sammond, 132-166.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.