When professional wrestler Mick Foley won the World Wrestling Entertainment World
Heavyweight Title on Monday Night RAW at the end of 1998, he became a heroic character in the realm of pro wrestling, then at its height of popularity on cable television. Many considered
Foley unusual as a heroic figure. His character blended masculine heroic qualities of tenacity, endurance, and hard work with characteristics not usually seen in the American hero: a need for communal acceptance, a desire for intellectual growth, and an unattractive aesthetic, with
Foley’s missing teeth, severed ear, unkempt hair, pear-shaped figure, and lack of the muscular definition usually expected in the wrestling hero.
Mick Foley is a paradox, as his character both embraces …show more content…
This variety makes the hero both less stable and harder to define (Browne “Hero with
2000 Faces” 92). Popular fictional characters, in particular, have become a focus for analyzing the modern American hero because the characters are generally communally defined and are not as easily demythologized as actual people because their lives are scripted (Rollin 23). Pro wrestling stars are particularly appropriate for this examination of fictional heroes because of the active presence of fans in the hero-making process. Wrestling fans directly influence the product through an open feedback process by performing their own acting roles at live events, the roles of ardent sports fans. Sociologist Robert E. Rinehart posits that this aspect of wrestling makes it an avant-garde sport by allowing the spectator to influence the action (67). The appropriation of a wrestling hero by a vast number of “authors” explains, in part, Gerald W. Morton and George
M. O’Brien’s contention that the wrestling hero is a complicated figure who cannot easily be generalized (141-153).
A growing body of scholarship has formed to analyze professional wrestling; however, this preliminary collection of work into wrestling’s close connection with American society, …show more content…
Semiotician
Roland Barthes claims that pro wrestling is “a spectacle of excess” (21) involving a symbolic show of suffering and justice through the hero’s struggle with the rule-breaking villain.
Sociologist Erving Goffman further identifies this spectacular element of wrestling’s central narrative, the hero’s appropriation of rule-breaking to retaliate against an opponent who has broken the agreement of a fair fight between the two. Goffman claims wrestling’s excitement comes through this breaking of the audience’s perceived frame of fair play in sports (418).
Anthropologist Jim Freedman defines this struggle between hero and villain as a metaphor for the struggle between the ideal of capitalism as a community of equal opportunity and the reality of capitalism as a lack of adherence to basic rules necessary for fair competition (71-73).
Literary critics Gerald Craven and Richard Moseley believe that wrestling should be examined as a performed literary text, evaluated not on wins and losses but instead on quality of performance (326). Sharon Mazer has continued this performance-studies approach to
Heavyweight Title on Monday Night RAW at the end of 1998, he became a heroic character in the realm of pro wrestling, then at its height of popularity on cable television. Many considered
Foley unusual as a heroic figure. His character blended masculine heroic qualities of tenacity, endurance, and hard work with characteristics not usually seen in the American hero: a need for communal acceptance, a desire for intellectual growth, and an unattractive aesthetic, with
Foley’s missing teeth, severed ear, unkempt hair, pear-shaped figure, and lack of the muscular definition usually expected in the wrestling hero.
Mick Foley is a paradox, as his character both embraces …show more content…
This variety makes the hero both less stable and harder to define (Browne “Hero with
2000 Faces” 92). Popular fictional characters, in particular, have become a focus for analyzing the modern American hero because the characters are generally communally defined and are not as easily demythologized as actual people because their lives are scripted (Rollin 23). Pro wrestling stars are particularly appropriate for this examination of fictional heroes because of the active presence of fans in the hero-making process. Wrestling fans directly influence the product through an open feedback process by performing their own acting roles at live events, the roles of ardent sports fans. Sociologist Robert E. Rinehart posits that this aspect of wrestling makes it an avant-garde sport by allowing the spectator to influence the action (67). The appropriation of a wrestling hero by a vast number of “authors” explains, in part, Gerald W. Morton and George
M. O’Brien’s contention that the wrestling hero is a complicated figure who cannot easily be generalized (141-153).
A growing body of scholarship has formed to analyze professional wrestling; however, this preliminary collection of work into wrestling’s close connection with American society, …show more content…
Semiotician
Roland Barthes claims that pro wrestling is “a spectacle of excess” (21) involving a symbolic show of suffering and justice through the hero’s struggle with the rule-breaking villain.
Sociologist Erving Goffman further identifies this spectacular element of wrestling’s central narrative, the hero’s appropriation of rule-breaking to retaliate against an opponent who has broken the agreement of a fair fight between the two. Goffman claims wrestling’s excitement comes through this breaking of the audience’s perceived frame of fair play in sports (418).
Anthropologist Jim Freedman defines this struggle between hero and villain as a metaphor for the struggle between the ideal of capitalism as a community of equal opportunity and the reality of capitalism as a lack of adherence to basic rules necessary for fair competition (71-73).
Literary critics Gerald Craven and Richard Moseley believe that wrestling should be examined as a performed literary text, evaluated not on wins and losses but instead on quality of performance (326). Sharon Mazer has continued this performance-studies approach to