Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 18

10 The Popular Culture Review and evil which was quasi-political in nature because the bad wrestler was usually identified as a "Red". French wrestling, on the other hand, was concerned with ethics, not politics.(4) The leading characters of French wrestling exhibited moral values or the lack thereof. The villain was asocial, used the rules for his own advantage, and was dangerous (to society) because he was inconsistent, unpredictable and, therefore, a constant threat because he could not be anticipated and, thus, thwarted and controlled. As always, I find Barthes' boundaries between ethics and politics rather illusory-one of his conjuring tricks. American wrestling is still a mythological fight between good and evil, but those qualities are exhibited on the same terms as French wrestling. It is no longer absolutely necessary for good to win, and the politics have shifted from the national scene to the homefront. While the characters portrayed by the wrestlers in the 1989 Main Event mythologize a partial history of America—for instance, Macho King as a representative of corrupt monarchy; Superfly Snuka as a representative of American individualism: "There is no king or queen over the Superfly Jimmy Snuka. I am my own man...a free man;" Zeus as a black slave owned by the Million Dollar Man, the ultimate capitalist;—the focus has shifted from defending capitalism and democracy to resisting an awareness of issues of class, gender and race. The signs of wrestling retain their "absolute clarity" only in the gestures within the ring. The match itself has become a smaller and less significant component of wrestling on t.v., while the wrestlers' boasts before and after the match-those speeches which recall both Miles Gloriosus and Twain's Child of Calamity [compare, for instance, the Child's "I put my hand on the sun's face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather—don't use the naked eye!"(5) to Rowdy Roddy Piper's "I don't know if you've ever caught me, but I'll be after you like a man headed for West Berlin, chump. You ain't never seen nothing like primetime, here. You've heard of Hurricane Hugo? I make Hurricane Hugo look like a summer breeze, baby. So check it out, Hot Rod's back and he's back to stay,"]—those boasts have swollen, as if on their own hot air, to fill the greater proportion of airtime, bringing with them all the distortions and ambiguity of language.