It’s this “spectacle of excess” that brought me back to pro wrestling in my thirties. Like Barthes wrote, “What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.” The heart of pro wrestling is this grandiloquence, the “spectacle of excess,” the campy, the over-the-top. Both wrestler and audience are in on the joke. Yet, they cheer and boo as if the show is real. Audience members attend shows in arenas or bingo halls fully aware that the fighting is staged, the victors predetermined. Pro wrestling is a truly meta postmodern art form. Although Barthes is typically associated with structuralism, he zeroes in on the postmodern “grandiloquence” that has defined pro wrestling for decades. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of the ancient theatres.” Born in France in 1915, Barthes nails why pro wrestling has reached the outlandish heights of WrestleMania in his essay “The World of Wrestling” collected in his 1957 book Mythologies. Literary critic Roland Barthes once wrote, “The virtue of wrestling is the spectacle of excess. I didn’t expect to see any of them again. I dropped wrestling the same way I abandoned comic books and Pokémon. Salinger-pretentious teen totems-and suddenly Slipknot and frog splashes off the top turnbuckle weren’t cool. Despite the efforts of the Hardys, the product didn’t feel edgy anymore. But by the end of WrestleMania 2000 and its infamously lame McMahon in Every Corner match, I was ready to let pro wrestling go. Some credit this match for transforming the tables, ladders, and chairs stipulation into an art form, and although it had been done before, there’s enough death-defying spots here to make any jaded fan pause. If you’re looking for a quick hit of vintage Matt Hardy before his radical late-career transformation, begin here. I followed the Hardys through WrestleMania 2000 where they had a legendary triangle ladder match with the Dudley Boyz and Edge and Christian. They felt realer to me, like jobbers who through pure will of imagination had moonsaulted themselves into pay-per-view matches. I couldn’t imagine myself as redneck Steve Austin or demented Mick Foley, but I could project myself onto the Hardys. They dressed the way I wanted to in my buttoned-up Catholic school uniform, and it was easy picturing them listening to the same terrible bands I loved-Slipknot, Static-X, Powerman 5000. He and Jeff wore black shirts, crosses, and tent-sized JNCO jeans. In 1999, Matt Hardy was 25 but could pass for 18. And so were the Hardys, but in a different, more relatable way. They were power fantasies through and through. My favorite wrestlers before the Hardys were the Rock, Stone Cold, Mankind, Shawn Michaels, and the Undertaker, titans as far removed from my life as Spider-Man or Super Mario. Decked in neon pants and bandanas, the Hardys already possessed a high-flying moveset that popped the crowd, but it wasn’t until they were reborn as nu-metal/goth kids that they really struck a chord with fans.Īs a nerdy fourteen-year-old, I was captivated by their first major feud with Edge and Christian. He was repackaged and paired with his brother Jeff, both prodigies in the North Carolina indie scene, but this incarnation of the Hardy Boyz still didn’t connect with the audience. It says, ‘You may already be a loser,’” Jerry Lawler cackled before a brief encounter with Triple H. “Matt Hardy got a letter in the mail today from the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. Very few of the matches lasted longer than five minutes, and Hardy rarely if ever got his own theme music or any kind of characterization beyond the fact that he was destined to get squashed. In the mid-nineties, Matt Hardy debuted on Monday Night Raw jobbing for heels like Nikolai Volkoff and Crush. Now, I queue up The Final Deletion, Broken Matt Hardy’s over-the-top postmodern masterpiece. I used to pick random buried alive matches or maybe the time Big Boss Man broke into Big Show’s dad’s funeral and stole the coffin. After closing our tab, I decided to show Geoff something that would once and for all prove that no wrestling fan actually believed it was real. “Nobody thinks wrestling is real.” It’s a sentence I’ve said dozens of times, a sentence you’ve probably said too if you like pro wrestling and mention this to someone who didn’t grow up on the Undertaker, Kane, Giant Gonzalez, or David Arquette winning the WCW world title-gimmicks so absurd that nobody watching would question the reality of the fiction any more than they might wonder if Star Wars is real. Pro wrestling fans actually think that garbage’s real.” We were in a dive bar when Geoff said, “Pro wrestling? I hate pro wrestling.
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