The HR-ification of Life, As Told Through Pro Wrestling
It's like we can't hit each other at work anymore.
Every now and then, The Middlebrow will stray into the world of professional wrestling, a narrative form of simulated combat that… well, come on. It’s a live comic book with super-humans pretending to fight each other in conflicts that are often motivated by porn movie-style plots and that end with people crashing through tables, getting knocked off of ladders or falling off of ladders onto people lying on tables that are then crashed through.
Very roughly, professional wrestling in the United States started as a carnival attraction and has since turned into a streaming juggernaut and special event arena show business with global reach and many billions in revenue. It evolved from a network of locally owned and operated promotions into an industry controlled by large, multinational public and private companies. It has always existed on the fringe of polite society but that fringe has grown ever smaller as corporations and their values have grown larger.
Put another way — pro wrestlers and the people who worked with or around them used to exist a bit outside of society’s boundaries. They did drugs, got into fights, cheated each other out of money, paid in cash so the government couldn’t trace it. They wrecked hotel rooms and got into car accidents. A bunch of roughnecks and athletes who couldn’t make a living any other way, they often settled differences about pretend violence with real kicks, chokes and punches.
In 2022, in a wrestling promotion called All Elite Wrestling, run by Jacksonville Jaguar owner Tony Khan, son of billionaire automotive parts manufacturer Shad Khan, two wrestlers had a disagreement.
One of them, Jack Perry, son of the late actor Luke Perry, is new to wrestling. The other, CM Punk, is a veteran who has performed around the world for decades and a trained mixed martial arts fighter. Khan had asked Punk to help the younger talent along, and even given Punk real-life authority over one of his handful of television programs that AEW produces for various Turner-branded outlets.
Perry had an idea — he wanted to use real glass, as opposed to safe and breakable sugar glass, in a fight scene. Punk said no because real glass is dangerous and the audience can’t tell the difference anyway. To Punk, there’s no point risking an injury that could result in limb amputation for something nobody watching will even care about. To Perry, Punk was an old man stifling his creativity.
Perry used real glass in the segment despite Punk telling him not to. When Punk confronted him, Perry mouthes off. Punk shoved Perry, smacked him, and put him in a chokehold for a few seconds before other talents broke them up. Punk, pissed off, then yelled as owner Khan, who through his lawyers later claimed to have “feared for his life,” as a way of breaking Punk’s contract and firing him.
Two years later, with Punk working for the much larger WWE, Khan decided to air backstage footage of the confrontation on one of his television programs. In the context of wrestling, this seemed an odd choice.
Punk had told the story many times, including on a popular podcast. The story has never changed. Remember how I said wrestlers used to fight backstage all the time? Well, those incidents were generally concealed from the public, to keep audience illusions from being ruined. Decades ago, one promoter had a rule that if wrestlers got into fights with civilians in public, he could look the other way… unless they lost, in which case they were fired.
Well, times have changed. Khan must have figured the footage would temporarily increase his viewership, and it did, but that could not have been his reasoning. People tuned into AEW to see a talent who had not worked there in two years. Those people would not tune in again.
So, why did Khan show the footage? To make Perry a star. Now this got me thinking that maybe the footage would show something other than what Punk said. If Perry had landed a lucky punch on Punk, or slipped out of the choke, or backed Punk off or in some way asserted himself, that might make a star out of Perry, right? I mean, this is a show about men fighting in their underwear, after all.
Well, no. The footage showed that exactly what Punk said it would. Which should sink Perry as a wrestler, or at least create a problem. Yes, wrestlers are performing a tough guy act, but nobody ever wanted to see John Wayne or Sean Connery get beat up in real life — only Michael Douglas can pull that off. It kills the mystique. Or, it would have, once.
Turns out that a segment of wrestling fans has rallied around Perry and here’s why: they view Punk as somebody who had supervisory authority who should not have hit a subordinate. I am serious. Perry, who was suspended after the fracas, while Punk was fired, is being brought back as “The Scapegoat” and some of the fans are buying it. Punk is a bully and that is somehow, in the context of wrestling, which is all about who can be the biggest bully, a bad thing.
It used to be that wrestling fans loved outlaws and wanted to believe that the anti-authority and anti-corporate characters they see in the shows are just amped up versions of real life rebels. But now, at least some of the audience wants to know that the performers have read the employee handbook and conform to its edicts.
A writer friend, Oliver Bateman, has called this “The HR-ification” of life. This happens when we start to assume that the rules that govern behavior in offices should apply everywhere that people make a living, from backstage at a professional wrestling show to comedy clubs and even purposefully edgy burlesque joints. The problem with this isn’t that people should be able to go to work without being beaten or harassed but that almost all spaces are professional spaces these days and all societies need places where the polite rules don’t necessarily apply.
In wrestling’s rougher and less professional years, everybody involved in the Punk/Perry fight would have kept quiet about it, mostly for Perry’s sake, because nobody was going to rally behind his victimhood.
Very postmodern. Too many levels to think about without getting a headache. What's real and what's not? I've often thought pro wrestling was more honest than, say, the NFL, because at least everyone knows it's a made-up presentation. After all, there's nothing "real" about pro football-- it also is well-regulated concocted entertainment; a made-up game.
I was once part of a writers group heavily influenced by WWE. We considered ourselves performance artists-- would crash readings and do street theater. (Some of us had done street poetry.) For us it was acting-- we never pushed it too far-- but people took it seriously. Oh well. I still believe a few WWE tactics could be utilized in the literary game (I plan to start an interview podcast in that vein), because whatever's being done now by writers-- the same-old bookstore readings attended by ten people-- isn't working.