I was thrilled when my old friend Tim Kail of the Work of Wrestling podcast said he wanted to write another essay for the Spectacle of Excess. Tim and I were pioneers of blogging about wrestling as art (in our minds, at least!) in the mid twenty-teens, and he wrote another great piece about the virtue of spectacle for this blog way back then. This jumble of wrestling concepts and how we navigate them—entertainment, art, sports—has always just made me throw up my hands. I gave up and called it “sport-art”. Tim really did the work to take a stand here. Enjoy! -KF
Art and Entertainment are fundamentally opposed concepts. Yet they share space in the audience’s consciousness, and with good reason. Art, after all, can be entertaining (and one of its aims might be to entertain) and Entertainment requires a craftiness similar to Art. It would be useful, now, to describe the difference between Art and Entertainment without passing judgement on either. Let’s take for granted that both are viable human activities with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Art wants to engage your mind. It wants to activate the thoughtful part of your soul and raise you up to a higher level of consciousness. To understand a work of Art, in any medium, it’s best if you pay attention to it. Your focus, supported by your own personal history, lends itself to a richer experience of that work. By paying close attention, you’re able to see where your soul intersects with parts of that work of Art. Any messages, themes, or motifs will resonate more because they speak to a very important piece of your Self. Look away for a second, check your phone, type a Tweet, and you’ve lost it—the magic of that Art never happens if you’re not paying attention. Art demands something from its audience—their attention, intelligence, empathy, and openness—in a way Entertainment does not.
Art is never easy. It riles up parts of your thought-processes that you may not want riled. Ever heard someone say about a movie, “You have to be in the mood for it”? That statement, said another way, “It’s Art. In fact, it’s difficult Art and you have to be willing to engage with that sort of thing.”
In reading the above description of Art and what it does, you can likely infer what Entertainment does (or doesn’t). Entertainment, by design, is not mentally challenging. Look at your phone, you won’t miss much. Entertainment doesn’t have an intellectual agenda. You don’t have to work up “the mood” for it. It’s an accessible, efficient (hopefully), delivery mechanism for broad emotions and simplistic audience participation. If Entertainment has left its audience confused, it has failed miserably. Think fireworks. Most sitcoms. Michael Bay movies. The Real Housewives franchise along with most Bravo originals. Entertainment takes the baggage you’ve accumulated over the course of your turbulent day and encourages you to cast it aside. Sit down, rest, and know that everything is going to be okay.
And that’s especially where Art and Entertainment disagree. The former wants to shake you out of your apathy while the latter wants to soothe you into a calm stupor.
Now that we’ve sufficiently defined Art and Entertainment, let’s ask an important question:
What is Professional Wrestling? Is it Art, is it Entertainment, or is it both?
I’d like to tackle that last suggestion first. Professional wrestling is most definitely not both. And it’s not sometimes one and sometimes the other. It is too brash in its aims to be agnostic. It is loud and fierce at its core. Arguing that Wrestling “is both” is an easy way to sidestep making an intellectual commitment.
Before tackling the other two potentialities, perhaps it’s useful to address the thought some readers are certainly having: why are you differentiating between Art and Entertainment so strongly in the first place? Isn’t this a false dichotomy?
I’m arguing that these categories are fundamentally opposed because of the many differences between them, while simultaneously tackling an old “is it Art, is it Entertainment” debate. They are separate categories because those categories adequately describe them as separate things that exist. It is my desire to throw a wrinkle into this old debate, though. Where this argument has gone wrong in the past is in asserting one is less valid than the other. Usually, it goes that Art is “higher” than Entertainment and therefore better, thus forgetting that Art is for all (one of art’s core principals). Conversely, those who back Entertainment do so with a certain degree of pride in its “lowness”, therefore undervaluing the role Entertainment plays in lifting our spirits. The dichotomy isn’t false, it’s a recognition of reality. It’s the assertion that one is more essential than the other that’s incorrect. Put bluntly, it’s wrong to be a pretentious asshole, asserting one’s pleasure is superior to another’s. Wrestling fans, in particular, know the sting of that ridicule. Wrestling is fake, didn’t you know?
Back to the question at hand: what is Professional Wrestling? Is it an Art that yearns to make you think, feel, and ascend or is it an Entertainment that aims to please and pacify?
Professional Wrestling is an art, through and through.
It’s an incredibly complex play, with a blend of acrobatics, dance, poetry, and improvisational theatre thrown into the mix. The smile that Pro-Wrestling puts on a face is not the result of something simple or safe. Wrestlers are daring artists who risk injuries like muscle-tears and paralysis, defying gravity in the name of Narrative. Risk is a cornerstone of any Art, but in Pro-Wrestling it’s always a requirement. There’s no escaping the demand Wrestling places on the body, the sort typically reserved for contact sports. Even bad Wrestling is dangerous—in fact, more. Not that physical danger increases the Artyness of Wrestling. Stunts aren’t necessarily Art, but Pro-Wrestling often features dangerous stunt work. The difference between a motorcycle leaping over fifteen flaming cars and a Wrestler falling from a ladder and crashing through a table is Narrative. A Wrestler takes the same risk as any Artist, daring to show a bit of themselves through story, but a Wrestler is unique in the fact that they must willingly cause damage to their body to tell that story. It’s important to always keep that in mind. In that notion is some of the respect Pro-Wrestling doesn’t get but sorely deserves.
There’s a difference between the Art of what Wrestlers do in the ring and what promotions do with their presentations, however. And this gets us to the discussion about Vince McMahon’s term for the medium: “Sports Entertainment”.
Among diehard wrestling fans, Sports Entertainment is a dirty word. It’s come to embody WWE’s style of presentation, booking practices, match construction, and “in-ring working style”. I contend that WWE is not Entertainment (no matter how hard it tries), despite the word being in its name. WWE is an Art, it just happens to be bad Art fairly often nowadays. That badness is erroneously labelled “Sports Entertainment” when the term Sports Entertainment should be viewed as a genre within a larger Artistic framework. Think of Sports Entertainment as science fiction, fantasy, drama, or comedy under the heading FILM.
Works in those genres can be good or bad, but they’re equally Art. WWE certainly leans toward being simple Entertainment, but many of its characters, its matches, and its recent premium live events are so emblematic of Wrestling’s Artistry that it cannot escape the “Art” label, even if it wanted to.
AEW is also Art, developing a new genre that’s part WWE, part WCW, and part New Japan Pro-Wrestling. AEW Dynamite and Rampage are reliably good television shows because of their consistent focus upon the evolution of individual characters and the relationships those characters have with each other and the audience. The act of Wrestling is a means of expressing the inner life of these characters. Take, for example, Orange Cassidy.
Orange is Modern Wrestling Art personified. He’s a self-aware character, subverting expectations and tenets of the Art with his very existence. He is quite possibly the most complex Wrestler of his time. He is able to playfully mock and undermine the macho, super athletic precedent established by past Pro-Wrestling and his present peers (a version of wrestling modern fans love), while simultaneously rallying the crowd behind his unexpectedly fiery comebacks (a traditional babyface method). His denim attire and aviator sunglasses lampoon our traditional ideas of cool, but his performance is so captivating that the irony of his attire and mannerisms circles back to sincere coolness. A Pro-Wrestling like this is not asking the audience to switch their brain off, it’s demanding they do the exact opposite.
Each of these promotions and genres represents the spectrum of Pro-Wrestling’s artistic power and versatility. It is a medium dedicated, above all, to eliciting a Pop (reaction) from the audience. The tenor of the reaction it is searching for is often nuanced, members of the crowd cheering while others boo and still more hang in the liminal space between knowing and not knowing. This Moment of Pop is the transubstantiation of Pro-Wrestling, where the action in the ring becomes real in the observers’ mind and they’re driven to react with absolute certainty. Only an Art, precise in its brush strokes, could draw out such emotion.
Entertainment is good. Necessary, in fact.
But it’s not concerned with making you a believer.
Professional Wrestling, on the other hand, wants you to believe with the entirety of your soul.
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