#WWE

Professional Wrestling in the Digital Age

Dru Jeffries, Dru Jeffries

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253044938
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehgeschichte & -kritik

The millions of fans who watch World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) programs each year are well aware of their role in building the narrative of the sport. #WWE: Professional Wrestling in the Digital Age explores the intersections between media, technology, and fandom in WWE's contemporary programming and business practices. In the Reality Era of WWE (2011 to the present), wrestling narratives have increasingly drawn on real-life personalities and events that stretch beyond the story-world created and maintained by WWE. At the same time, the internet and fandom have a greater influence on the company than ever before. By examining various sites of struggle and negotiation between WWE executives and in-ring performers, between the product and its fans, and between the company and the rest of the wrestling industry, the contributors to this volume highlight the role of various media platforms in shaping and disseminating WWE narratives. Treating the company and its product not merely as sports entertainment, but also as a brand, an employer, a company, a content producer, and an object of fandom, #WWE conceptualizes the evolution of professional wrestling's most successful company in the digital era.

PART I

CORPORATE KAYFABE: WWE AS MEDIA EMPIRE

chapter one

WORLD BUILDING IN THE WWE UNIVERSE

Eero Laine

Just before the 2015 Academy Awards, WWE.com featured a number of parody movie posters containing WWE Superstars in made-up film roles under the banner “WWE Invades the Oscars.”¹ One of the imitation film posters was for Guardians of the WWE Universe, featuring wrestlers Stardust, Paige, Erick Rowan, El Torito, and, notably, Batista, who also starred as the character Drax in the Marvel film that the poster parodies, Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). In this simple doubling—Batista/Drax and WWE Universe/Marvel Cinematic Universe—WWE deftly underlined the collision of two fictional narrative worlds that occurred when Dave Bautista (known simply as Batista in WWE and described in the blurb of the faux poster as “a tattooed powerhouse”) painted over his heavily muscled, tattooed body to play an alien with a heavily muscled, tattooed body.² The poster, as it hinges on Bautista’s body, highlights a real and physical overlap between fictional universes. This chapter examines such moments when the fictional WWE Universe spills out of its diegetic bounds, focusing in particular on how WWE’s built media universe is shaped by its interactions with so-called real life in both deliberate and unintentional ways.

It might go without saying that many, many media universes exist—think Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, DC Comics, Marvel, Disney—wherein multitudes of smaller worlds, realities, timelines, and variations on characters shape narrative webs that stretch from print to screen and back again.³ Fictional characters reappear across multiple media (e.g., film, television, novels, comic books, video games) and are carefully protected, critiqued, and re-created by creators and fans alike. Such fictional universes, which are at times also referred to as worlds, are intentionally flexible, are changed over time, and are often adopted as cultural touchstones across generations of fans and consumers.

Increasingly, these fictional worlds pass through various media and offer multiple opportunities for fan engagement. Henry Jenkins refers to the phenomenon as “convergence culture,” which he describes as “a moment when fans are central to how culture operates.”⁴ Fictional worlds, previously considered to be created and owned by a central author or creative team, are now in part shaped and produced by those who consume them, and they quickly spiral beyond their original medium and genre. Matt Hills productively shifts the conversation to the many incongruent aspects of fandom, putting forward the idea that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work.”⁵ That is, fans do not act as isolated groups but rather operate within culture and through the fictional worlds they are so passionate about.

While Derek Johnson offers a corrective away from world building to “the significance of world sharing, where multiple communities of production share that process of construction in collaborative, but also ambivalently competitive ways,” he ultimately insists on his own model of franchising.⁶ He suggests that “there are limitations to a theory of franchise creativity based in world-building. Any storyteller arguably builds a world in establishing narrative settings, which suggests that world-building would not be a creative phenomenon exclusive to franchising. Furthermore, not all franchise exchanges occur within the production of fictional narratives, so theories of franchised creativity should not overestimate the significance of these narrative frames.”⁷ Johnson thus offers an expansive view that extends beyond the confines of discrete fictional worlds, instead emphasizing franchise creation, exchange, and marketing as the primary creative endeavors within convergence culture.

Jonathan Gray takes many of these insights further by situating the corporate owners that lie behind the creative teams within the same world as the fans and the narrative content itself. In his book Show Sold Separately, Gray writes that “as film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time-Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet none of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature.”⁸ He suggests that any “extended presence” of the filmic or televisual material must be read through their myriad ads, trailers, video games, and other paratextual material.⁹ That is, according to Gray, media and advertising work by “not simply telling us to buy such products or services, but by creating a life, character, and meaning for all manner of products and services.”¹⁰ Each of these perspectives examines the building of fictional worlds and the ways they begin to intervene into our own lived reality, whether through technological convergence, fan labor, the ability to spin off franchises, or the development of worlds through toys, promos, spoilers, and so on.

The WWE Universe should fit neatly into such academic narratives, and it often does—but not perfectly. This chapter thus takes up the matter of building the WWE Universe through particular worlds that often serve both a charitable function and a means of expanding the WWE brand. After an overview of the importance of the live event in professional wrestling, I will examine WWE’s military outreach and annual Tribute to the Troops show as a primary example of the WWE Universe rubbing against the real world. I use this example to explain the ways that the WWE Universe extends its presence on a global scale through charitable events. However, these separate worlds do not always add up to a coherent universe. In the final section of this chapter, I examine those moments when worlds collide—for instance, when a performer is punished for their character’s unpatriotic actions, when outreach to one group conflicts with other business interests, or when heel characters support an altruistic charity awareness campaign. Rather than disrupt the continuity of the fiction, I argue that such moments actually serve to further ground the WWE Universe in our own world. To a greater extent than with comparable fictional worlds that exist only on screens and paper, rather than as a series of live performances, spillages between the WWE Universe and the real world effectively blur the lines between story and business, fiction and life, thereby reinforcing rather than undermining the credibility of the WWE storyworld.

BODY BUILDING/WORLD BUILDING

Though often associated with new media and technologies that readily support sharing, modification, and duplication, the roots of the now seemingly ubiquitous concept of sprawling fictional universes can actually be traced back much further. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the term world building was used as early as 1900 in reference to theatrical entertainment: “Those great epochal dramas . . . appeared to our fathers to be majestic monitors and memorials of world-building and fate-defying individualities.”¹¹ The “great epochal dramas” referenced in this context are classics of the stage presented “as if history had come down to us on stupendous stepping-stones—Caesar, Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Macbeth, Richard, Napoleon”—and those who created the dramatic worlds for them to rule.¹² We can look to theatrical performance—especially in the nineteenth century with its serial dramas and melodramas, popular characters that appear in different plays, and recurring motifs—as a sort of world building that might prefigure contemporary discussions of integrated media properties. Indeed, Marvin Carlson describes the ghostly aspects of theater as a way of reading the entire theatrical apparatus as a sort of continuous creative machinery—or “memory machine,” as he puts it—that builds, adapts, and adopts fictional worlds with each performance.¹³

In many ways, then, professional wrestling in general and the WWE Universe in particular are merely embracing their origins in late nineteenth-century carnivals and athletic shows, where the fictive world of apparently competitive sport was created and re-created in each new performance site. That is to say, WWE builds on this long history, but with a twist: WWE creates hybrid entertainment that is based in live, popular theater and is circulated globally by other media. While camera tricks, special effects, and computer-generated graphics are employed to augment and insulate the filmed performer’s body, the bodies of wrestlers very clearly exist, and their performances occur without any mediated safety net: there are no retakes, stunt doubles, or postproduction effects.¹⁴ As I have argued elsewhere with Broderick Chow, this real-life danger grounds the wrestlers in our world (and is also affirmed by the rigorous and often exhausting work and travel schedule of professional wrestlers, as well as by fans through applause and admiration for high-risk maneuvers) as wrestlers “labour through a performance of pain, which is frequently made apparent in their bruised, bloody and broken bodies.”¹⁵ The performance of professional wrestling is literally imprinted on the wrestlers’ bodies insofar as the actions of their characters have material effects on the wrestlers themselves.¹⁶

This relationship works in the other direction as well, as the bodies of the wrestlers very clearly also inhabit a sprawling narrative universe—the WWE Universe—that manifests in various mediated forms, including cartoons, television shows, media interviews, comic books, social media accounts, commercials, merchandise, and movies. To return to the example that opened this chapter, Dave Bautista can be Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy (the comic book, film series, etc.) and can take part in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but as an actor, Bautista stops inhabiting the character of Drax when the cameras stop rolling. There is much less, however, that separates Bautista, the actor, from Batista, the WWE Superstar. Through wrestlers’ bodies and their necessarily live performances, the fictional WWE Universe is—strangely yet necessarily—also our own universe.

THE WWE UNIVERSE

The concept of the WWE Universe is quite simple: it refers to anything that is connected to WWE performances, including both fans and physical spaces. Announcers frequently mention it during televised matches when they prompt “the WWE Universe” to discuss the matches on social media. Similarly, when wrestlers find themselves on the other side of the barricades that surround the ring, announcers exclaim that the fight has made its way “into the WWE Universe.” The WWE Universe therefore encompasses the ring and all of the space surrounding the ring, including the fans who actively support and create the WWE brand by interacting with it on social media, television, films, and advertising, as well as b...