Word: bruno
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...missing the point to call it a fake, to point out that the blood on Koloff's head came from a plastic pouch concealed in his trunks, or that the two wrestlers probably rehearsed for weeks the choreography of this championship bout. When Bruno delivers the flying drop kick or Koloff applies the Siberian sleeper hold, art and reality begin to merge, even for the Harvard cynics to my left and right...
...basic elements of professional wrestling. Second-rate actors like Man Mountain Mike (a quarter ton of lard) and Baron Scicluna use these elements to create a theater of fake violence and feigned pain. The crowd falls for it (the hungering suspension of disbelief), and when the greatest hero (Bruno) meets the most vicious villain (Koloff) their dissembling of pain and terror raises the crowd to levels of cruelty and desperation you don't find in any sport. In sports, the violence is sublimated to the greater purpose of wining goals and scoring points--even in hockey the fighting is incidental...
...mere brutality but a struggle between the forces of good and evil. The program for the match makes it easy to tell one from the other--all the bad guys are listed in the left-hand column. But the crowd already knows most of the wrestlers from television interviews--Bruno, of course, is earnest and modest on camera, while Koloff plays a sadistic braggart. In the ring, it is easy to tell the good from the bad by the wrestlers' techniques. Bad guys use strangleholds and foreign objects, while good guys generally fight clean...
...therefore is that the hero will have to resort to dirty tricks to gain a victory. The insidious effect of professional wrestling is not that it extolls brutality and violence, although it certainly does that, but that it promotes the abandoning of fairness and restraint to achieve personal ends. Bruno grinds the chain into Koloff's face, then strangles him against a turnbuckle--and a small man in front of me, sitting with his mother, wife, and children, shrieks with delight...
...Bruno is a popular champion because he refuses to take abuse lying down, because he fulfills the violent fantasies of his fans. He plays fair as long as he can, but when evil and the rules seem to conspire against him, when it seems he can't win any other way, he lashes out with his hands, or his feet, or the chain. The crowd identifies deeply with him. Seeing themselves threatened by unsympathetic laws, their their police handcuffed by the Suprem Court, their neighborhoods surrounded by hostile forces, the people in the crowd clamor for Bruno to rise from...