Something’s bugging me about the way political happenings unfold these days. How do we—all of us who, during the past decade or so, have been baptized in the waters of public unreality—come to process passages of history which feel like heedless locomotion through plot points that make no sense? Take the last several months: An aging President loses control of his cognition on television, prompting questions about a coverup, and a national referendum on whether he should continue his pursuit of a second term. He surrenders the nomination, and a fresh surrogate steps in with choreographed speed. A different candidate, a former President (almost as old as the deposed one), chooses a running mate with the rhetoric of a cartoon Nazi: something about unwanted visitors abducting and ingesting pets. Somewhere in there, somebody tries to kill the former President and almost succeeds. And then somebody tries again.
We should be alarmed—beyond alarmed. But most of my friends grimace and then, after a rueful joke, move on to other topics. I wondered, watching “Mr. McMahon”—the new Netflix documentary miniseries about Vince McMahon, the crude, bombastic, devilishly clever impresario of World Wrestling Entertainment—whether the surreal story logic of professional wrestling had engulfed, for good, our feeling for plot, and, on a deep level, our understanding of how real life on the national stage should feel.
The series advertises itself as a close look at a big figure—McMahon, in all his muscular strangeness. And, indeed, in a potted way, we learn some biographical facts. McMahon’s father, Vince, Sr., was also a honcho in the world of pro wrestling, before this particularly American form of lowbrow “sports entertainment” went national. His World Wrestling Federation promotion was confined to the Northeast, part of a loose patchwork of territories kept within boundaries by a noninterventionist code of honor. If you lived in Louisiana and wanted to see a metal chair smashed over the head of a dizzy athlete, you’d do it at a local event, organized by a company headquartered close to home. In his early years, the younger McMahon didn’t know his father. He lived with his mother and stepfather, in poverty, and suffered abuse at their hands, both physical and sexual, apparently; he mentions being beaten up and alludes to incest. His way of coping was to just be grateful when the violence was over. He’d survived.
When he finally met his withholding father, he jumped eagerly into the business of wrestling, eventually buying his father out, then hastening to encroach on the other territories, stealing their wrestlers and staging events in their towns. “If you can’t compete with me—it’s America!” McMahon says, reminiscing grandly. “Tough!” The rude new businessman—acting a lot like the characters who strutted around the ring, garnering the rabid love of the crowd—upset a genteel arrangement and won big.
Beyond these moments, though, “Mr. McMahon” zooms out and presents a miniature history of professional wrestling—one that doubles as a harrowing history of storytelling in America. In the eighties, coming off the heels of the Iran hostage crisis, wrestling audiences thrilled to the clash between Hulk Hogan—an extreme American hero with the sheen and obvious power of a motorcycle engine, played, for almost a lifetime, by Terry Bollea—and a wrestler called the Iron Sheik. The Iron Sheik, whose real name was Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, was an Iranian American who portrayed his character with colorful xenophobic glee, sometimes speaking in a made-up gibberish meant to sound vaguely Middle Eastern. McMahon and his employees had a salt-of-the-earth understanding of their fans—these people just wanted to “let out their aggression while also watching a morality play,” the wrestler Bret Hart says. “Our business is no different than a play, a movie, books,” McMahon says.
But McMahon also used a sophisticated, if frequently racist, strategy of mirroring current events, doubling them in a form demotic enough to capture the attention of the beer-drinking crowd. It was good for business—“business” being McMahon’s favorite word, which he talks about the way some people talk about God—until it wasn’t. When the audiences got too bloodthirsty, McMahon dialled back the enmity between Hulk and the Iron Sheik. Missteps notwithstanding, McMahon turned wrestling into a true American pastime. Aretha Franklin once sang at “WrestleMania,” the W.W.E.’s answer to the Super Bowl. Andy Warhol shows up onscreen. “Oh, I’m speechless,” he says. “It’s just so exciting, I don’t know what to say.”
I thought about Donald Trump far more than I would have liked while watching “Mr. McMahon.” The association is obvious: Trump, like McMahon, is obsessed with generating attention-grabbing “heat,” has a habit of dismissively denying lawsuits—especially the sort that allege sexual assault—and continues to erect money and its pursuit as a kind of gilded god. As the series reminds us, Trump has also appeared on W.W.E. broadcasts, playing an even more brightly caricatured version of himself, a rich-asshole foil to the ultimate rich asshole, Mr. McMahon—Vince McMahon’s long-running character, perhaps the most well-developed “heel” (wrestling-speak for “villain”) in history.
I kept thinking back to July 13th, when Trump was shot at a Pennsylvania rally. By now, the episode is a montage: Trump crumples to the floor and is dragged away by Secret Service officers, who have arrived too late to stop the shooting but soon enough to cover the former President’s body. Blood leaks all over Trump’s head. For all anyone knows, there’s a shooter on the loose, but Trump exposes his face to the crowd, pumps a fist, imploring his followers to fight. Fight whom? At the moment, it didn’t matter. The “good guy” had been attacked.
If that surreal passage had taken place in a wrestling ring, we would have dismissed it as a “work”—the insider term for a fake job. In saner times, we’d still be talking about the attempted assassination; it would be the sole interpretive angle on the election under way, for good or ill. But these are not sane times. The rapid procession of domestic political absurdities—over which Trump continues to officiate like a McMahon-style circus master—and mind-shredding global catastrophes has made us punch-drunk, concussed like a wrestler whose head has bounced on the mat after taking flight off the top rope. Everything looks like a “work” when you’re this dizzy.
Another part of McMahon’s strategy is manic activity—fast movement from one crisis to another. Earlier this year, he resigned from the company he so gaudily built. A former staffer alleged that he’d sexually trafficked and assaulted her, forcing her into sexual scenarios with himself and some of his employees; he has denied this. Others, all along, have made similar claims, which he has also denied. McMahon’s a nasty guy and barely tries to hide it. He deceives his way through corporate battle. “You just have to throw things out there,” he says, evidently satisfied with his slimy tactics. (He stopped coöperating with the filmmakers after the sex-trafficking allegations against him were made public.)
The most popular period of W.W.E.’s history came in the late nineties and early two-thousands, during what’s called the Attitude Era. The matches were no longer between good guys and bad guys but between bad guys and worse guys. The first big hero of the moment was the beer-swilling, leather-wearing, foulmouthed Stone Cold Steve Austin, who appropriated a famous Bible verse for his own purposes. Here’s John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Here’s Austin 3:16, intoned by middle schoolers of my generation with devotional glee: “I just whipped your ass.” Maybe we’re living in America’s Attitude Era. Somebody, please, God, change the channel. ♦
