A big welcome to guest contributor Sawyer Paul, who has laid out a thoughtful theory of a not so straightforward question: what exactly is it that makes professional wrestling “good”? Sawyer’s piece gets at the core of what we’re trying to do here at Spectacle of Excess, and that’s to clarify and celebrate the artistry of this pretend sport. So a big thanks to Sawyer (and all the other recent guest contributors) for the help keeping…
Tag: Mick Foley
I am increasingly taken with Bray Wyatt. Those other two Wyatt’s still function as little more than cultural stereotypes, especially the one who wears the creepy sheep mask. The sheep mask, the red flannel shirt with the cut-off sleeves, the dingy brown work jumpsuit, the red ZZ Top beard and the generally greasy veneer: these are all indicators of characters we have been programmed to disdain. We know without being told they are from the…
I know exactly when professional wrestling evolved into text for me. It was a late summer evening in the mid-nineties at a WWF house show in Indianapolis with one of my college professors, who was prepping a pop culture course called “Good and Evil in Professional Wrestling.” He saw wrestling for its literary goodness – a stadium spectacle rich in metaphor and conflict allegory, a coming together of archetypes rooted in the deeper traditions of…