The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mas Culture

The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture

Volume 2 / 2019

WITHIN WALLS– THE FICTIONAL AUDIENCE OF
PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
Aleksi Vauhkonen

Independent researcher, aleksi.valentin@gmail.com

Aleksi Vauhkonen

WITHIN WALLS– THE FICTIONAL AUDIENCE OF
PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
Aleksi Vauhkonen

1. Introduction
Let me begin with what could be a controversial statement to some: professional wrestling is themost successful form of live theater performance in the world. Multiple times a week, the worldwide industry leader WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) draws crowds in the thousands,
and often the melodrama of wrestling can fill even the largest stadiums. Meanwhile the Japanese
promotion NJPW (New Japan Pro Wrestling) has become so popular that it routinely runs
shows for English language audiences in America, Great Britain, and in Australia. Whereas
WWE and NJPW have weekly television shows and also stream their contents via video-on-demand services to international viewing audiences, the smaller local independent wrestling promotions are also thriving. Also, recently the upstart company All Elite Wrestling has acquired anational cable television deal in the United States, becoming a viable alternative in mainstream
professional wrestling to WWE. Indeed, wrestling is at an all-time high1, and it is no surprise. It
offers an immersive live experience and includes its audience like no other form of performance.
As a matter of fact, wrestling does not have a choice of including its audience, the audience isincluded organically, as I shall argue in this paper2.
Veijo Hietala calls professional wrestling “the apex of post-modern media sports”3. For
him televised sport has evolved into something that encompasses “fake sports” such as wrestling. Hietala states that professional wrestling turns upside down the fraudulent ideology oflegitimate sports, the rules, and the sportsmanship that are continuously broken in the name ofcompetition. Indeed, wrestling turns cheating into a spectacle: referees are often violently attacked, hairs are pulled, groins are kicked, and illegal weapons such as metal folding chairs are
swung. This is often the case with traditionally American good vs. evil wrestling battles that follow a three act formula: first the hero is proved to be a superior wrestler and athlete, then thevillain realizes this and cheats to get the advantage, and finally the hero either prevails and wins
or loses after a courageous fight against the odds.
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Within Walls - The Fictional Audience of Professional Wrestling

Hietala’s analysis of wrestling is an analysis of a sport, but most existing literature regards wrestling as a theatrical performance.4 It is hard to draw a line between the two as wrestling is predetermined and scripted but at the same time it clings to the notion that it is a sport
by utilizing conventional sports production aspects such as instant replays and sports commentary as narration. That is what makes wrestling hard to pin down as a genre of entertainment.
Even though professional wrestling may be marketed as sport in its largest and most important
medium, television, it is not regarded as sport by devout sports fans. It does not escape its “fakeness” by being post-modern as much as Veijo Hietala might claim. It is not embraced by people
who crave the competitive aspect of sports, those who live vicariously through their hometown
teams, or those who just need it to be “real” for it to make sense.
The conventions of spectator sports used in professional wrestling however activate thewrestling audience in a way that no other form of fiction does. Professional wrestling does haveits roots in legitimate combat sports, but today the wrestling audience understands what they
are in fact witnessing is a “fake sport” that exists solely in the fictional world of wrestling. Indeed,a fictional spectator sport requires a fictional spectator and thus I shall argue that the wrestlingaudience constitutes a fictional audience.
In this article I will attempt to give an explanation on the fictional world of professional
wrestling by referencing Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe5. Further, I will put forth
the notion that the professional wrestling audience is an entity inside said fictional world. I believe that this gives the professional wrestling audience power and the ability to become at times
even a radical element inside the product they are consuming.
2. What is a fictional world?
In J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan (1904) there is a scene where Peter turns to the audience andasks them to clap their hands if they believe in fairies in order to save the dying Tinkerbell. Presumably every single time the audience would then clap, and this would cue the actor playing
Tinkerbell to wake up. This, according to Susanne Langer6, is “disregard” of psychical distanceand to seek audience participation in this way is to deny that drama is art. Whether this loss of
distance is relevant in arguing if a play can be appreciated as an aesthetic object is up for debate,but it does raise an interesting dilemma about what can constitute a fictional world.
Imagining fictional truths is what makes fictional worlds 7 . As children play games of
make-believe, they include fictional truths into the real world. This is accomplished throughwhat Kendall Walton calls “props”. For example, if a child proposes to another that “the floor islava” and the two begin to climb on furniture to avoid getting burned, the floor becomes a propthat generates a fictional truth. The floor is a prop merely because the children explicitly make3

Aleksi Vauhkonen

it so. By stating that the floor is lava and acting accordingly apprehensive to walk on it, theycreate a fictional world where it is a fictional truth that the floor is lava. Perhaps the children’s
mother is in the kitchen cooking and standing on the same floor. She is not standing in lava
because she is an entity outside said fictional world (until of course the children decide to include
the parent in the fictional world they are imagining).
Walton’s special definition of the “representational arts” is that they are fiction. According to Walton, performances such as theater are props specifically made for the purposes of being used in imagining fictional truths. These truths are implied through conventions of the given
genre. For example, it is automatically implied that during a stage production of Peter Pan, what
happens on stage is a prop for imagining fictional truths, such as that Wendy Darling is a 12year-old girl who lives in Bloomsbury, London. If a production of Peter Pan would break out on
a train platform during rush hour, it would be unclear to anyone unfamiliar with the play oranyone who would not be cued in to the performance by theatrical conventions that what ishappening is a prop for imagining the fictional world of Peter Pan.
So, what exactly happened with the case of Tinkerbell? The audience was first separate
from the fictional world of the play but for a brief moment the audience was merely engaged
with it. When most likely in every staging of the play Tinkerbell wakes up, the audience is once
again relegated to watching the play from the outside. Peter and Wendy do not fly back to London in front of an audience of people as the fictional world of Peter Pan in no way encompasses
an audience that could have any power within it. In theater the fourth wall can be broken time
to time, but the conventions of theater always rebuild it and the audience is left outside.
3. Professional wrestling as fiction
The genre of entertainment called professional wrestling portrays the fictional sport of professional wrestling. Therefore, the sport of professional wrestling happens exclusively inside a fictional world and a professional wrestling entertainment product is the prop that allows one toimagine said world. This fictional world is in fact quite uniform, as different professional wrestling products reference each other regularly. Especially as the industry leader WWE is referenced by independent promotions constantly as being the “big leagues” in the sport of wrestling.
One could even go as far as to say that all professional wrestling shares a fictional world as it is
the convention to regard it as such.
Professional wrestlers portray characters, but they are not commensurate to actors on
stage. For the most part, wrestlers only play one character for the duration of their careers andoften adopt that character in all public relations. For instance, in WWE Joseph Anoa’i portrays
the fictional character of Roman Reigns but in all wrestling related discourse the person is4Within Walls - The Fictional Audience of Professional Wrestlingalways referred to as Roman Reigns and not Joseph Anoa’i. One could compare this to a musician having a stage name, but a musician is not performing as a part of a fictional world. In
essence, Joseph Anoa’i has become Roman Reigns and Roman Reigns is very much like Joseph
Anoa’i. At the end of the day, wrestlers are amalgamations of themselves and their characters.
In the fictional sport of professional wrestling the wrestlers fight for money, revenge,
glory, respect, and most importantly championships. Championships in professional wrestlingare, of course, not won in legitimate sporting contests but are used as fictional story engines. A
championship is thus given to the character who is focused on and is currently being portrayed
as a winner. The performer who holds a championship title is in a prominent role, often meaningthat portraying a fictional champion generally corresponds to more money, prestige, and respectamong peers. When, for instance, Roman Reigns’ character wins a championship title, the character is a champion inside a fictional world, but the performer also holds the accolade of “being”
a champion rather than just “portraying” a champion. As mentioned above, wrestlers are regarded as amalgamations of the performer and the character, so the audience is cued to recognize the championship not only as a fictional accolade but as an actual real-world reward given
to the performer. This mentality seeps into the fictional world where the audience members legitimately want their favorite performers to portray winners, effectively making the championship a non-fiction entity inside a fictional world.
All the aforementioned aspects of the fictional world of professional wrestling are conventions of the genre that has its roots in legitimate combat sports. For instance, wrestling television programs do not have opening or closing credits like other fictional programming during
which the wrestlers’ or writers’ names could be revealed. Credits sequences would in a way createa psychical distance between the audience and the fictional world, a distance which according to
Susanne Langer is imperative for drama to be art. It is not the convention to create such distancein wrestling. Professional wrestling is also staged and filmed for television very much like asports program: it features instant replays of the more spectacular moments, sports commentary
as story narration, and other aspects of sports production. This cues the audience to regard it as
sport even though the audience is well aware of the fact that it is not a legitimate one. The conventions of the genre, or rather the lack of traditional conventions of fiction, create a confusing
reality where a new spectator can find it difficult to relate to professional wrestling. It appears
too fictional to be a sport and too much like a sport to be fiction.
Be that as it may, wrestling has its audience that seems to embrace these conventions.
Whereas theater holds a fourth wall that separates the audience from the fictional world, a fictional
sport such as wrestling has a fourth wall that holds the audience in. When this is established, it isof course imperative for the audience to perform inside the fictional world and play its part.
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Aleksi Vauhkonen

4. The fictional audience of professional wrestling
So, it stands to reason that even a fictional spectator sport needs an audience. Admittedly, it
would make very little logical sense for a fictional professional wrestler to compete in front of a
crowd that is under the assumption that his or her fights are predetermined, choreographed,and fake. In other words: the professional wrestling audience must be a fictional entity. It follows
that a single audience member at a live wrestling show is simultaneously spectating a fictional
performance and a part of said performance. The audience, in essence, is performing whether
they want to or not. Thus, I argue that professional wrestling is a form of performance which has
historically and organically engulfed its audience as a fundamental element of the fictional world
it presents to them.
This performative aspect of the audience’s experience has grown as a byproduct of theage of television. WWE produces live events that are then filmed and distributed as televisioncontent. From the point of view of the television audience, the live crowd is an element of theshow. Most, if not all, audience members are aware that they are an element of the show. This
creates a unique situation where the professional wrestling audience is participating inside a
fictional world and thus, in Waltonian terms, inside a representational work of art.
When a fan buys a ticket to a televised WWE show, they know that in addition to getting
a show, they get to be a part of it. As WWE wants its television product to be as exciting as
possible, the live crowd is encouraged to perform, to make noise, and to convey a sense of frenzy
to the audience at home. Whereas in the past wrestling television programs were aimed to sell
the audience on the live experience, today WWE has been able to monetize the television audience directly: the live, physically present audience is an element of production rather than its
means. The paying customer has a job as a background actor, and in a way, WWE has a historyof exploiting its audience in order to make good television.
Televised professional wrestling indeed demands an active audience. A wrestling story
for the most part has a protagonist (in wrestling parlance “the babyface” or more simply “theface”) and an antagonist (in wrestling parlance “the heel”). The traditional dynamic of audience
participation in professional wrestling is such in which the face is cheered, and the heel is booed.
The audience, to this day, more often than not performs in a way that conveys the sense that theface has an implied home field advantage. This is the standard circumstance in the fictional
world of professional wrestling, as it fits the central story of the hero overcoming the odds infront of a supportive audience. It is also mostly a cathartic experience to members of the audience when they feel as if they have helped the morally upstanding face in defeating the villainous
heel. It should be noted, that a traditional face versus heel dynamic is in no way the only story
that can be told in wrestling, on which I shall elaborate at the end of this paper.
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The live audience reactions create a vital aural backdrop for the televised matches. As theaudience mostly acts in a rather predictable way, in which the wrestlers portraying faces arecheered and the wrestlers portraying heels are booed, it creates an unambiguous television product as well. However, whether an audience follows this exact dynamic or not (and many times itdoes not) it is always obliged to at least make noise. As any wrestling promoter would say: there
is nothing worse than a silent audience. This is true to the point that WWE has even taken up
the practice of adding audio of audience reactions to taped shows in order to convey the desired
atmosphere in the building.
As mentioned previously, professional wrestlers portray fictional characters, but thesecharacters are amalgamations of themselves and the characters created for them. For instance,
the fans for the most part recognize a wrestler’s journey from the independent scene (the minor
leagues) to the WWE (the big leagues). A wrestler is thus able to garner recognition among themost zealous fans as a kind of starving artist by toiling on the independents and honing one’s craft
before eventually earning the limelight. The Internet has made it fairly easy to follow the career of
an independent wrestler and knowledge of the independent scene has become a new kind of cultural currency. At the same time, for a few decades now WWE has had the practice of also training
their own wrestlers from the very start of their career. This allows them to create characters andmold performers to fit their needs. However, these characters do not have the reputation of the
independent stars that at least in the eyes of some fans have created their own fame. This forms
an interesting dichotomy between WWE created company guys and the “Internet darlings”. This
dynamic seeps into the fictional world that professional wrestling presents through its audience.
This creates the potential for a performer to debut on WWE television without any credibility in the eyes of the “smart fans”8, the most zealous fans that are consumed by wrestling minutia. These fans could be called wrestling geeks but they do have some power as taste makers. One
wrestler that had no prior wrestling experience before WWE was Roman Reigns, whose character
was introduced as a part of a heel group called The Shield by the side of two former independentstars: Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins. The Shield was a successful act but after the group disbanded it became abundantly clear that Reigns was the wrestler WWE higher ups saw as the biggest star and the franchise character of the company going forward. Very soon the “smart fans”
realized this and the backlash Reigns got was unprecedented. Reigns has primarily portrayed aface for his entire solo career since 2014, but the audiences have not accepted him as such. First
started by a few “smart crowds” at bigger shows, the majority of all live crowds started to boo
Reigns. Be that as it may, this has not stopped WWE from promoting Reigns as one of their mostprominent heroes. WWE production also started to mute booing crowds and to cut negative crowd
reactions in post-production as well as confiscating anti-Reigns signs brought into shows by fans.
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The reception that Reigns gets from live audiences goes against the fictional truths of
WWE where Reigns is a hero that should be looked up to, not booed. In the case of Reigns
though, WWE has started to manipulate the part of the fictional world created by the crowd
reactions for him. From some crowds Reigns has even garnered the dreaded chant “You can’t
wrestle!” which is essentially a loud and clear indictment on Reigns’ ability to entertain his audience and not his characters’ ability to wrestle and win matches in the fictional world of WWE.
For all intents and purposes Reigns is a hard worker and a talented wrestler, but the narrative
for his character was not created in the fictional world but instead in the fact that the “smart
crowds” have not accepted him. To them Reigns represents industry created pop music thatlacks true artistic merit earned toiling on the independents. Essentially, it became trendy andcool to hate Roman Reigns.
On the other hand, when a wrestler gains a following among the taste makers, the wrestler can essentially arrive in WWE already a star in the eyes of the fans and the credibility awrestler gleans on the independent circuit rarely ever dissipates. For instance, when Kevin Owens debuted on WWE after performing on the indies for over a decade, he was already a star in
the eyes of the fans, garnering an enormous ovation from the live crowd. Before that night wasover though, Owens had turned heel and become a vile, opportunistic character who figuratively
stabbed his friend in the back in order to further his own career. To this day, Owens is greetedby live audiences by mostly cheers instead of boos even though the character has very little redeeming qualities. This can be accounted to the audience’s appreciation of Owens’ charisma andability to the extent that it does not matter whether Owens portrays a heel. In addition to this,Owens’ independent past is a factor, effectively making him a former starving artist and thus agenuine rag to riches story. It is hard to boo an underdog. Thus, Kevin Owens’ character is a purevillain that gets cheered by audiences, and this often creates a rather surreal situation in thefictional world of WWE.
Only recently has Roman Reigns gained some traction as a face in the eyes of the fans.
This happened more or less because of a real-life tragedy befalling Joseph Anoa’i as he was diagnosed with leukemia in the fall of 2018. The fans were of course sympathetic of his struggle
and as he made his announcement on live television the crowd was respectable and unified incheers and applause. Remarkably, after only 6 months Reigns made his return to television andthe fans had not forgotten. Reigns has since been almost universally cheered. It took a strange
and tragic turn of events for Reigns to turn the corner, and it shows that a mere fictional storyof struggle and perseverance is not enough for the wrestling audience anymore.

8Within Walls - The Fictional Audience of Professional Wrestling

5. Conclusions
It is safe to say that professional wrestling presents a special kind of fictional world where fictional characters cannot be separated from the performers and where championships are notmere story engines but also career achievements. It is also such a world that has historically andorganically engulfed its audience as a fundamental element of itself. The clapping of the audience of Peter Pan might have woken up Tinkerbell, but a theater audience does not have power
inside the fictional world they are consuming. I argue that the professional wrestling audiencehas such power as it is in fact a fictional entity. It also exercises its power regularly, whether or
not its motives could be criticized as being at times egotistic and vague.
For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière 9 , being a spectator is inherently a badthing. Firstly, viewing for Rancière is the opposite of knowing as the spectator is held in a placeof ignorance from the production of the image. Secondly, viewing is the opposite of acting as the
spectator remains passive. The viewer is therefore robbed of both the capacity to know and thepower to act. Rancière believes that theater is inherently evil as it prohibits knowledge and action. Theater is the third term standing in between the artist and the viewer blocking the formation of a true community, a community of active power. This community is one that does nottolerate theatrical mediation. However, for Rancière theater is potentially an exemplary community form. It encapsulates the ideal of a living community that occupies the same place andtime as opposed to forms that utilize the distance of representation. More so than other forms,
theater in a way has the potential to bridge the gap between the artist and the audience.
Obviously, one can easily imagine a play where the fourth wall is continuously broken.
Peter Pan does this and improvisational theater takes audience suggestions. However, the fourthwall is broken if and only if the artist allows it. The artist merely gifts the audience a taste of
power and only by the artist’s terms. True knowledge is not transferred, and participation is only
temporary and trivial. Theater indeed does not allow a situation where the relationship between
the artist and the audience is flipped upside down. Rancière states that what is needed then is a“new theater”: a theater where those in attendance are able glean knowledge as opposed to being
merely exposed to images, but also a theater where those in attendance are able to act as opposed
to being passive voyeurs. This would essentially be a theater without spectators but with a knowing, acting community audience. The “new theater” would be the ultimate realm of what he calls“the unpredictable subject”.
According to Roland Barthes wrestling is a spectacle10. However, it seems that wrestling
does not leave its viewers as passive and disinterested voyeurs. As we have learned, wrestlinghas organically and historically engulfed its audience as a part of its fictional world. Wrestling is
unique theater because it presents a fictional sport. Actual sports do not have fourth walls, but
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wrestling can be said to have a fourth wall that traps the audience in. Outside the walls the audience has no agency, but when invited in the audience can act. In theater the audience is robbedof its abilities to act and know, but wrestling is built upon the notion that the artwork – the third
term – is diminished to the point where the audience has power to act, and even become a radical
element inside the fictional world. In Waltonian terms the wrestling audience is acting inside arepresentational work of art.
I do not claim that professional wrestling is the exemplary form of culture that alreadyrealizes the potentials of the Rancièrian unpredictable subject. This is partly because wrestling isoften extremely violent. It is not the goal of this paper to build an apology for aestheticized violence, but I feel that it is imperative to bring this up if the aesthetic values of wrestling are to be
defended. Existing literature on wrestling depicts the art as paint by numbers, a violent soap opera
that lacks subtlety and that offers very little seedbed for analysis beyond wrestling being a theatrical spectacle of excess.11 Wrestling is often celebrated as a simple morality play but it seldom isinvestigated as other than curiosity. Perhaps this is because of its violent nature. Violence is deplorable in real life, so what aesthetic value is there in a form that depicts a world this ugly?12
It might come as a shock to someone with only cursory knowledge of wrestling, that thegenre is not inherently violent. One could even argue that it is less brutal than most legitimate
professional combat sports such as mixed martial arts of boxing. Two performers can put on an
enthralling match within the traditional rules of wrestling where neither resort to any overtly crueltactics. A match can tell the story of sibling rivalry, student pitted against the teacher, or veteranversus rookie. A match does not have to have an obvious villain and an obvious hero. A wrestling
match is not necessarily a simple morality play but instead it can dwell in the shades of grey. By
this I mean that wrestling has potentials of storytelling that are yet to be investigated properly.13
Wrestling matches by themselves are also abundant with meaning that is often left unexplored in literature on the subject. Matches consist of wrestling maneuvers that are rich withlore. While some moves have evolved from rarity to common place, some are almost sacred andto be used only in the most extreme of situations. Wrestling characters overcome their weaknesses and build their strengths in the span of their careers. Rivalries can build without even aword spoken between two performers, just with exchanged wins and losses, championship opportunities awarded to one and withheld from the other. These elements of the genre are analyzed profusely by wrestling fans online but overlooked when discussing wrestling as a relevant
form of culture. It is of course tempting to explain wrestling in simplified terms and compare it
to forms such as theater, but indeed there are components that make wrestling very unique.
That is all to say that there is potential in wrestling: both in terms of a field of research
but also as a petri dish of audience agency. Perhaps professional wrestling offers a recipe of10

Within Walls - The Fictional Audience of Professional Wrestlingparticipation through the fictional integration of its audience that eventually will help create aform that realizes some of Rancière’s utopian goals of the “new theater”. Until then, wrestlingfans are quite happy to be the sole partakers in this unique process of participation.

1

For instance, just recently WWE’s stock price reported record highs after the company received a new lucrative televisiondeal. <http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/17/news/companies/wwe-raw-smackdown-tv/index.html>
2 This paper is based on my master’s thesis “You can’t wrestle!” – Professional Wrestling as Participatory Fiction (Univer-sity of Helsinki, 2018).
3 Hietala, Veijo 2003. Painii myyttien kanssa – urheilu modernissa ja postmodernissa

mediakulttuurissa. Lähikuva I/2003.
4 See e.g. Chow B., Laine E., Warden C. (ed.) 2017. Performance and professional wrestling. Oxford UK, Routledge.
5 Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-believe. Cambridge MA USA/London UK, Harvard University Press.
6 Langer, Susanne 1953. Feeling and form. New York City NY USA, Charles Scribner’s Sons. Page 319.
7 It is not relevant to this article to discuss the possibility of fictional worlds. One should merely take the stance that there

are in fact such things as fictional worlds that have the characteristic of not existing. Walton for instance does not givefictional worlds further ontological statuses.
8 Originally, “smart fan” meant a fan that was aware of the fact that wrestling matches had fixed outcomes. Now though it

refers to more dedicated wrestling fans as opposed to ones that are casual television viewers.
9 Rancière, Jacques 2011. The Emancipated Spectator. London UK, Verso
10 Barthes, Roland 2005 [1957]. The World of Wrestling. In Sammond, Nicholas (ed.) 2005. Steel chair to the head (pp.

23-32). Durham NC USA, Duke University Press.
11 Barthes called wrestling a spectacle of excess. Wrestling was also explained in a simplified manner by Henry Jenkins III

in “Never trust a snake”: WWF as a masculine melodrama. (In Sammond, Nicholas (ed.) 2005. Steel chair to the head(pp. 33-66)). Durham NC USA, Duke University Press.)
12 A very good examination on the subject of aestheticized violence is Henry Bacon’s Väkivallan lumo (2010. Helsinki, Like

Kustannus Oy).
13 While finilizing this paper I came across Lisa Jones’ article All caught up in the kayfabe: understanding and appreciatingpro-wrestling (Journal of the philosophy of sport. 2019, vol. 46, no. 2, 276–291). Jones makes several same points as my2018 published thesis and is also to my knowledge the only other professional wrestling related work that cites Walton’s
theory of fictional worlds.

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