WWE Monday Night Raw is one of the longest running TV shows – ever. WWE Wrestlemania can amass a live audience of around 100,000 admirers. WWE hosts over 500 events a year, each of them heavily visited and valued. WWE is all fake and scripted and make-believe. And yet… It is the most victorious form of Theatre of Cruelty that we know in our contemporary culture.
Yes, pro-wrestling is not for everyone. And yes, World Wrestling Entertainment is only a small fraction of this pro-wrestling world. And also yes, it can be tacky, taken as terrible trickery, and treated as nothing than trendy, tenacious, troublesome treachery. But no, one cannot underestimate its cultural significance.
The most often fabricated criticism against WWE (and other pro-wrestling firms) is that is all fake. Scripted. Make-believe. Why would anyone want to watch a “sport” event in which the question of who is the winner is already worked out?
However, the scripted nature of WWE is its biggest strength.
WWE is not a sport event. WWE is theatre. WWE is a theatre show with highly skilled actors, that create their own world through weekly performances with a live audience, and is built heavily on the strengths of catharsis and ritual. And where one uses the words ‘theatre’, ‘catharsis’, and ‘ritual’ in one sentence, one summons the ghost of Antonin Henri Joseph Artaud.
Artaud was born at the turn of the 20th century and he had the unsatisfied urge to create something new; or rather to return to the old. The realistic theatre of his time resolutely revolted him. Theatre, according to Artaud, had to wake up its audience. Nerves and heart. And in order to do this theatre had to assault the senses of the audience. Theatre of Cruelty was born.
Cruelty here is not necessarily to be taken in the literal sense. Cruelty is the physical practice of provoking shock in the spectator in order to wake them up to the reality of life. Theatre of Cruelty is an embodied kind of theatre defying the significance of text. Through the physical suffering of the performer, the audience experiences catharsis. Through a cruel kind of theatre they can purge their negative emotions.
So how exactly is one of the most avant-garde kinds of theatre connected to the seemingly cold and commercial and capitalistic product that is WWE?
WWE is the contemporary expression of Theatre of Cruelty. Its weekly performances are a callback to the gladiator fights of Roman times. It is ritualistic in its violence and storytelling. Make no mistake: despite of its scripted nature, all the stunts, suffering and striking catastrophes are real.
Mick Foley taking a faceplant full of thumbtacks? Real. Mick Foley being choked slammed through a steel cage? Real. And, since Mick Foley is a true creature of catharsis and takes the craft of physical cruelty to a whole other level, let’s legitimize his courage once again; Foley being speared into a table consumed in flames? You guessed it – real.
The scripted nature of WWE makes all of these stunts possible.
Moreover, the scripted nature of WWE provides the audience with catharsis. Catharsis - that little idea that through art one experiences their own ‘negative’ emotions and can purge these emotions to feel renewed again. It one of the reasons why theatre was so important for the ancient Greeks. And one of the reasons why Artaud wanted to renew the theatre of his times.
And it is the reason why it feels so great when Daniel Bryan defeated not only actual human-snake-man Randy Orton, but also the gargantuan guardian of the galaxy Baptista.
The stories in WWE are fake. The victories of the faces and the humiliation of the heels are all scripted. Yet, the extraordinary emotion of excitement when your wished-for wrestler wins a match is no make-believe. These are carefully crafted storylines, created behind the stages. They are crafted to let the audience feel all these strong emotions and purge them.
WWE is nowhere close to realistic. For it has to transcend psychological realism in order to create a colossal sense of catharsis in the spectator. The matches, and the everything around them, are dense and dramatic and dynamic and dazzling and disorientating. They are draining. It supposed to wake up the audience. Nerves and heart.
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