When the massive and massively pissed off Brock Lesnar stepped into the ring last Sunday night, for the main event of World Wresting Entertainment’s (W.W.E.) Extreme Rules fight card, an unsmiling spectator sitting at ringside stood up and unfurled a sign saying “LEGITIMACY HAS RETURNED.” To the mostly male fans across the wrestling world—a corporate kingdom spanning a hundred and forty-five countries and whose flagship show, “Monday Night Raw,” attracts a regular U.S. audience more than four times greater than that of Mad Men—the meaning of this sign was perfectly clear.
For the rest of us, there’s Roland Barthes. The world of scripted wrestling, wrote Barthes, “is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler’s gesture needs no anecdote… in order to appear true.” This is a useful generalization of wrestling’s stage aesthetic, in which the enactment of Suffering, Injustice or Male Pride lost or regained is fully articulated in every masklike grimace and gesticulation. But the allure of the W.W.E. is in fact something more than that: here the pantomime is animated precisely by anecdote, backstory, a specific dramatic context. The W.W.E. employs a team of writers who carefully craft that season’s story arc, its personas and plots, around slowly deepening rivalries and alliances between the fighters. There are good guys (“faces”), bad guys (“heels”), and guys in the middle. Costuming, characterization, televised locker-room gossip, and of course the fight action itself are all carefully choreographed. Improvisations and slipups, like unintended injuries, are written into the script after the fact.
Sorting out what is really “real,” like an actual contract dispute, and what is a scripted stunt, or a mere accident of live television, is all fodder for the rumor mill that gives the show its weekly narrative momentum as it builds towards the major events of the season, pay-per-view shows like spring’s WrestleMania. In the W.W.E., the action in the ring functions like sex scenes in TV soap operas—physical confrontation is only the axis point of a larger narrative that is more preoccupied with power relationships. These dramas invariably playact the thwarted aspirations of American dudehood.
Brock Lesnar isn’t new to this particular stage. He rose to stardom in the mid-aughts by becoming the W.W.E.’s youngest champ, a prickly favorite of his many fans. But he had bigger goals: to play in professional football (he almost made it) and to fight in the U.F.C., the Mixed Martial Arts league. Contrary to the expectations of many observers, Lesnar was able to make the difficult transition to the U.F.C., where the blood is real and the results, barring corruption, are unscripted. (The slogan of the U.F.C. is “As real as it gets.”) For almost two years, Lesnar held the title of U.F.C. champion. It seems that nagging injuries may have finally ended his run in competitive sports, and landed him back in the wacky world of wrasslin’. Returning does not seem to have been his plan. The W.W.E.’s current storyline for Lesnar, of a hideously angry, mid-career champ who returns to the league believing that he’s the only authentic fighter in a world of imposters and clowns isn’t just a gimmick cooked up by the writers. It speaks to Lesnar’s actual situation. It also makes for wicked good TV.
Which brings us back to the Extreme Rules main event on April 29th in Chicago. This fight—against headliner John Cena—was to mark Lesnar’s return, and it had been hotly anticipated. Cena, one of the league’s most popular stars, had been treading water as a post-champion and would benefit from a big fight against a bona-fide villain. The league was billing Lesnar as an ogre with rabies, a textbook heel, a natural role for a volatile guy whose head alone seems to weigh two hundred pounds. But Lesnar was an ogre on a mission. In a promo interview, screened on the arena jumbotron minutes before he made his grand entrance, Lesnar spoke plainly. “I’m not a superstar,” he said. “I’m an ass-kicker. There isn’t anyone in the W.W.E., past or present, who has the accolades that I’ve got. Why did I come back to the W.W.E.? This isn’t a feel-good moment. This isn’t, ‘Oh, I missed coming through the curtain,’ or, ‘I missed all the fans.’ At the end of the day, I don’t care about anybody but Brock Lesnar. For me, this is strictly business. We need a guy to legitimize this company. And Brock Lesnar’s that guy…”
Lesnar’s pre-fight braggadocio epitomizes the W.W.E.’s clever way of toying with fact and fiction. Like all comedy, wrestling bombast works partly because it deals with recognizable truths. Lesnar’s return to the W.W.E. is indeed about “business,” specifically about siphoning off some of the U.F.C.’s growing appeal, infusing the world of scripted wrestling with some bloody verisimilitude. No matter how much success the W.W.E. enjoys, the league, which survives on a steady diet of stunts and steroids, harbors an unshakeable inferiority complex with competitive blood sports like boxing and, especially, the U.F.C. Outside of the league, the W.W.E.’s mostly adult fans are typically ridiculed as puerile dupes, worthy of pity or scorn for buying into such silliness. For some reason, anyway, the rhetoric of “legitimacy,” which is absent from most competitive sports, is a perennial preoccupation of the W.W.E. Lesnar’s background allows the company to play up the authenticity angle. As the league’s general manager put it, the U.F.C. champ is to be “the new face of the W.W.E.”
But first Lesnar had to beat up one of the current faces of the W.W.E., John Cena, a man who looks like he could be Lesnar’s cooler and more socially adept younger brother. Given his U.F.C. cred and the hype surrounding his return, Lesnar was clearly favored to win. Around the league, it was considered a fait accompli. In an unusually bloody fight, which included a disturbing variety of blunt metal objects, Lesnar, clad in his U.F.C. fight gloves, thoroughly kicked the hell out of Cena. After a systematically tenderizing his opponent’s limbs and face, M.M.A.-style, Lesnar used a metal chain, W.W.E.-style, to hang Cena to the ring post by his ankles and abuse him like punching bag. But, by sheer (scripted) will and luck, and the sly use of that same metal chain, Cena pinned Lesnar and earned the win.
After the match, a battered Cena lingered in the ring, holding a mic, and addressed the crowd with his best wounded-but-handsome, victorious-but-humble delivery. He praised his fans, praised his opponent’s fans, praised the city of Chicago, pardoned his enemies, and took an elegiac view of his role in history. Having withstood Lesnar’s monstrous onslaught and emerged a mensch, albeit one with a bloody head and busted arm, Cena had earned the grudging respect of the crowd and of the fractious wrestling twittersphere.
With this unexpected result—no doubt, a temporary one—and Cena’s impressive post-match monologue, the W.W.E. flipped its own script. In Cena’s victory speech, the W.W.E.’s writers seem to be poking out their heads and saying, “Sure, this Lesnar guy can draw blood and break your arm like a true professional—but is that all he can do?” Here was the W.W.E.’s defense of its aesthetic: it isn’t fake, it’s fiction. It tells a story, and delivers an alternative to the pointless barbarism of real blood sports. The return of Lesnar, the writers seem to be saying, doesn’t confer legitimacy on wrestling because wrestling doesn’t need it. Perhaps this is the W.W.E.’s small revenge against its returning star who, after all, once abandoned the league so that he might pursue a more “serious” career in “real” sports.
Later, it was reported that after the fight, as Cena spoke to the audience, Lesnar threw a furious tantrum in the locker room, which is to say he laid waste to it, cursing madly and threatening lives. Apparently, Cena wasn’t supposed to have addressed the crowd; he was supposed to be carried out of the arena in a stretcher. Cena was apparently improvising and milking his victory by playing to the crowd—and Lesnar was thrown into a volcanic rage. Unless, of course, his anger about the breaking of the supposed script was itself the script. In the endlessly shifting world of W.W.E.’s performance art, there simply is no telling.
In wrestling, anyway, the true drama happens the next day, when the fighters process the action together by slandering each other and moaning about who’s super mad at whom and who’s big-time friends with whom. Lesnar and Cena (with his arm in a sling) appeared on “Monday Night Raw,” in Dayton, Ohio, to air their grievances and position themselves for the next fight. True to the prevailing atmosphere of employment anxiety, the talk among all of the fighters—carefully scripted, of course, by the show’s writers—surrounded the question of jobs. Cena and Lesnar took turns appearing in the ring to discuss their prospects with their bosses, two men in designer suits (who also happen to be wrestlers).
Neither meeting went well. Lesnar, furious about various perceived breaches of contract, in fact attacked one of these executives, the W.W.E.’s chief operating officer—a sleazebag named Triple H—and broke his arm. He was then escorted out of the arena by security, and the TV announcer feverishly called on the company to fire him. (Since then, Lesnar has not been seen. Last night, on the most recent episode of “Monday Night Raw,” Lesnar dispatched a hotheaded man calling himself a lawyer to announce that “his client” was “sick of the usual corporate B.S.” and was resigning from the company—but this is clearly a stunt. Stay tuned.)
Cena’s meeting was worse. At center ring, he confronted the W.W.E.’s general manager for bringing the plague of Lesnarism into the league and callously tossing him aside. “You are a shortsighted corporate jackass,” Cena told his boss before an arena of ecstatically screaming Ohioans. Just then, the general manager—in his fancy suit and all—blindsided Cena with an elbow jab and proceeded to beat him, stomping grotesquely on his freshly injured arm as the panicked TV announcer shouted, “Someone has got to do something about this! Has the whole world gone crazy?” Turns out the general manager himself is Cena’s next opponent.
The beginnings of an internal corporate revolt are being enacted in the W.W.E.’s arenas. At stake is a company and jobs and the vulnerable male egos attached to them. Brock Lesnar’s return has not signalled the return of legitimacy but, as he promised, has wrought “utter friggin’ chaos.” There are good guys and bad guys—and there are worse guys, in suits. The alliances will be complex. For the working-stiff fighters, the goal isn’t necessarily victory but survival. No man’s job or pride is secure. The W.W.E. understands the heart of its American male audience and, as usual, gives them a brightly lit stage on which to work out some very real conflicts.
Photograph: courtesy W.W.E.
