V for Very Obvious Emotional Manipulation

Barthes was, for me, a bit of hit and miss. While I did not respond to ‘The Face of Garbo’ with the same enthusiasm as some of my colleagues, I found two essays to be very resonant: ‘The World of Wrestling’ and ‘The Blue Blood Cruise’. It seemed that the world of French wrestling is very similar to modern American professional wrestling—pageantry and artificial drama over any semblance of pugilistic skill—and I do confess being one of the people who disdains wrestling as a sport and assumes that most of the people who are enthusiasts are idiots who don’t realize it’s staged. I hang my head in shame at the Barthes. Whether all spectators are cognizant of the moral drama being played out in front of them is still something I question, but realizing that wrestling has more in common with a morality play than a sporting event completely changes the nature of the beast and I begin to see its purpose in modern society. Really, the summary of the idea can be found on page 18: “In both [wrestling and theatre], what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.” So what does this mean? By viewing a wrestling match, we as audience engage with the wrestlers, asking them to project their internal struggles for us to witness, for they are also our internal struggles, and in enacting them before us, purge us through acts of catharsis. Do we yearn for a world where good and evil are so clearly defined as to be determined by the color of someone’s cape? Definitely. Do we truly feel that there is some sort of justice in the world when watching it be pantomimed in the ring? Possibly. Are we so purged of emotion by the end of the match and full of the false sense of righteousness that comes with watching justice be meted out that we accept the true injustices of the world because our complacency has been purchased through spectacle? Sadly so. “What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” Life is so much simpler under these circumstances!

Amy and I went to see ‘V for Vendetta’ in theaters. I thought it was pretty awesome and under the auspices of the Bush administration, it felt very relevant and satisfying. I felt righteous, happy and emotionally… voided afterwards. I asked her what she thought of it and she was troubled. She said that the catharsis engendered in the audience watching it is extremely detrimental for the development and mobilization of legitimate social change and people would walk out of that theater feeling that their righteousness and sympathetic emotion from watching the film was somehow equivalent to actually taking action. As usual, she was right and reading this essay on ‘The World of Wrestling’ called that particular exchange to mind in a way I never would have expected.