@HerzogBooks is a reclusive member of the IWC who emerges occasionally to tweet as though notorious brooding German filmmaker Werner Herzog himself is commenting on WWE. He has his own fictitious Herzog-themed wrestling promotion, and does Herzog/wrestling mashups on YouTube that explore the more cinematic gestures of wrestling. I invited this curious character to The Spectacle of Excess for an interview to see if I could make sense of the whole cool thing. Andrea G: Your…
Author: Professor Kayla Fabienne
Dear Vince, Linda, Stephanie, and Shane, We are a team of writers who view wrestling as a legitimate form of theatre and write about it from literary, economic, political, and artistic angles. Our blog is inspired by “The World of Wrestling” by Roland Barthes, which we’re sure you must be familiar with. We are spearheading a unique niche in pop culture studies that we like to call “wrestling theory and criticism” and are shopping around…
If you follow this blog, you know I’ve been making a lazy, extremely unscientific study of the word “machka”, a seemingly humble Bulgarian word that has taken on a heightened significance as Rusev’s rallying cry and chief buzzword. My post a few months ago called On the Progress of Machka and Its Relevance in Wrestling Theory laid out a hodge-podge of graphs and whatnot to show what happened to traffic on this site’s posts about…
I noticed last night on Smackdown that at the end of the James Ellsworth/AJ Styles comedy match, Dean Ambrose was pointing menacingly at his package as a threat to AJ Styles. You can see it at the end of the clip in this here tweet: THAT'S RIGHT! @realellsworth has DEFEATED the @WWE World Champion @AJStylesOrg on #SDLive! @TheDeanAmbrose pic.twitter.com/46GCT7Mziv — WWE (@WWE) October 12, 2016 Their feud has been focused on the exchange of low blows,…
Dolph Ziggler cut a devastating promo on Smackdown this week, a monologue that made me cringe with guilt, that indicted us all for our callous indifference toward the hardworking eighties gimmick pretty boy. Ziggler got raw and real, characterizing wrestling as what it is in its ugliest form: a strange addiction, a pursuit that’s hard to quit, even when it’s become unhealthy and unproductive. His voice was unstable and veering into higher octaves as he…
You might have noticed I haven’t posted to this blog in like three months. AJ Styles has upended my theoretical stance on everything and thus, my affairs are a shambles. I’ve had to completely rebuild my worldview and it’s taken some time. I mean, I have been doing other things and not blogging, it’s true. Life has been on an extreme trajectory as of late. But in fact this hasn’t been writer’s block, I’ve written plenty,…
Image Credit: wwe.com Haters gonna hate, as the old adage goes. But I think it’s naive and kind of patronizing to get all shocked and judgmental when it’s revealed that a wrestler, even a supposedly upstanding one like Roman Reigns, violated WWE’s wellness policy, which is a euphemism for “probably took drugs.” Now, this wellness policy is apparently overly stringent when it comes to procedural compliance (which is well articulated here in an op-ed on turnheel.com) so it’s certainly possible that Reigns somehow ran…
Image Source: wwe.com For the few weeks in which the Ambrose Asylum replaced Chris Jericho’s Highlight Reel as the main roster’s centerpiece talkshow that can be depended upon to end in violence and the upending of furniture, we the people were treated to the strange spectacle of Dean Ambrose holding court with a microphone, a cardboard sign he wrote on with magic marker, and of all things, his potted plant named Mitch. A few weeks later and in…