Wrestlers: [Media Notes 109]

I was aware of professional wrestling when I was growing up. I watched a few matches on TV. I remember an especially colorful character who performed as Gorgeous George – and how hard John Barth worked in Giles Goatboy to play on that name with George’s Gorge – but I was never a fan. Still, ever since, professional wrestling has been somewhere out on the periphery of my radar screen. So, when Wrestlers came up on Netflix, I decided, “Why not?”

The show’s a seven-part documentary about Ohio Valley Wrestling, a second-tier professional wrestling league. It was enjoyable, a decent anthropological look at the sport. While centered on the ring, it tells us enough about life outside the ring to give us a sense of the people living their lives in a meaningful way. At times a felt a bit embarrassed at what some of the people, I’m thinking particularly about Hollyhood Haley J, said on camera. I’m not sure whether that’s just me or an aesthetic slip by the director, Greg Whiteley.

One way to look at the series is in terms of stories, the stories of the wrestlers and promotors themselves, and the stories that promotor Al Snow is developing for and through the wrestlers in the ring. The latter stories are directed at the fans. In what way are the fans invested in those stories? Snow believes they’re essential to the success of Ohio Valley Wrestling, which is struggling to develop and audience and turn a profit.

But it’s not clear what the fans think. My best guess is that professional wrestling exists in a liminal space where the difference between truth and fiction is dissolved in some notion of “authenticity.” If we want to think about that, then we should also think about the difference between movie stars and (mere) actors in the movie biz. Whatever reality is, it’s not stark black and/versus white.

Another way to approach Wrestling is to contrast that world is to contrast it with the high-tech fantasies of the future being spun-out through hopes and fears about AI (artificial reality) and VR (virtual reality). I can’t imagine a world in which fans would give up the blood, sweat, and tears of actual wrestling in favor of virtual matches. That’s not a world I’d want to live in.