To the shock of no one in America, the Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair press conference to promote the Australian tour ended in a scuffle, with Flair leaving a bloodied Hogan laying. Pretty basic stuff in the eyes of the jaded smart fan, yet for some reason this was a major news event in Australia, where it was taken at least moderately serious enough to make the nightly news, where they went back and forth over whether or not it was actually a legitimate fight. That’s kind of awesome.
Let’s face it, the “real†element of professional wrestling has been missing for some time now. Heck, most Monday nights, we’re treated to more comedy skits than actual pro-wrestling. Apparently, somewhere along the line the idea that because the fans know it’s just a show, there’s no need to act legitimate came into play. Now, I’m not saying that we need to go back to full blown kayfabe, with heels and faces sleeping in different hotels and riding in different cars and all that. That would be overkill. And can you imagine trying to kayfabe away Hornswoggle or the Boogeyman? Sure, the argument could me made that gimmicks like that wouldn’t exist in a kayfabe 2009 WWE, but before kayfabe died we were getting midget clowns, wrestling trashmen and hockey players, and Papa Shango. Oh, and this guy you might of heard of called the Undertaker. In fact, one of the reasons kayfabe even died out was because the cartoon nature of the gimmicks made it impossible to believe in.
For a gimmick like the Undertaker to survive in a post kayfabe era is rare, and a testament to the talents of the man behind the eye shadow. And obviously, it isn’t a necessary ingredient to a successful product. After all, the Attitude era pretty much took place without a single shred of actual kayfabe, while still allowing for Val Venis and the miraculous birth of a rubber hand. No, what I’m talking about is the idea that pro-wrestling is a work of theatre featuring a legitimate athletic activity.
Please note that I did not say a competition. There is no way that pro-wrestling could ever hold up the illusion of being a legitimate sporting event ever again. That “competition†aspect of the business needs to be part of the illusion. Which is fine. What I think would help, however, is a little more of the “is this or isn’t it†mood that the Flair/Hogan press conference created, even for just a hot minute. And I’m not talking about Vince Russo style “is this or isn’t itâ€, where everything is for real (but really fake)… except this! Which is fake (but really real, and by that I mean fake)! In his own way, Russo took the idea of breaking kayfabe and “shootingâ€, and made it as cartoonishly nonsensical as anything in the early 90s WWF.
Now that the post-Attitude era is quickly speeding towards similar cartoon territory, the public perception that Vince McMahon so desperately wants to make legitimate, is in danger of retreating in the exact opposite direction he wants it to go. Regardless of if the public perception is of a trashy violent fake sport or stupid children’s fake sport, it’s really the lack of realism prevents any upward momentum in the public eye. Not because pro-wrestling needs to be a real sport, but because it needs to be real theatre.
So how does that tie into kayfabe? The reason kayfabe worked for so long is because it was pure theatre. Theatre is meant to draw the live audience in, to make them forget that what they are seeing is fiction. The term most often used is “willing suspension of disbeliefâ€, a term that originated in the 1800s in regards to poetry and literature. In those times, the weight was on the artist to create something that would create a truth for the audience to believe in, but in modern times, more often than not, that weight has been put on the audiences shoulders. This has never been more apparent than in the world of professional wrestling. The loss of kayfabe has progressed so far that it’s now a loss of truth for the audience. These days, even when we get an angle or storyline that feels “realâ€, the next week we promptly get a follow up that drags us right back down to Toontown. Even in the Attitude era, there was at least a weekly consistency with the angles that had that “real†factor to them. But now it feels like that there is no sustained reality to believe in.
And that’s what was so great about the Hogan/Flair confrontation in Australia. In front of an intimate audience, they did a traditional wrestling angle, and played it completely, utterly real, without beating the idea that it was real into everyone’s head with a hammer. They kayfabed it. And their audience, despite knowing better, bought into it. Which is exactly what is supposed to happen.
Now if only it could happen more often for the audiences.
I’ll be skipping next week’s column due to Thanksgiving, but I’ll see you all the week after that.
Have a good one.
