C.W.: The videos featured in this article contain graphic, although staged, violence and visible blood. Reader discretion is advised.
What is the most unbelievable thing you’ve ever seen? Simone Biles’ Yurchenko Double Pike Vault? Felix Baumgartner’s space jump? Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon?
These are all good choices and there’s an infinite amount of similarly impressive answers. For me, however, it’s an easy pick. It’s this YouTube video, unquestionably. If you do anything today, please watch it.
This gem is a product of the P.O.R. Wrestling (P.O.R. being an abbreviation for Prophets of Regret), an extension of P.O.R. Stunts. And yes, their videos are completely real. Scroll through their YouTube channel and you’ll find men slamming into plate glass with live fireworks, people being flung off of roofs into burning tables and this dude being hit by a car mid-match, full speed, with no padding. There are no tricks, no illusions, no safety equipment and no doctors at the sidelines ready to step in if things go wrong. Every setpiece is created in these folk’s backyard, solely using materials you could find at your local Home Depot. All this danger for less than 32,000 subscribers — a tiny number in today’s YouTube landscape.
There are a few responses to these videos. Some people are disgusted. To them, the danger inherent in putting on these matches crosses the line from dumb to downright irresponsible. These beliefs aren’t unfounded: A Vice documentary covering the crew detailed some of the horrific injuries that have resulted from pushing the envelope. On the other hand, some — like me — are enamored and charmed by this little group of Virginians’ sheer determination to put on the world’s most insane stunts, despite having no resources behind them. There’s an adorable clip from the same documentary where JJ, the founder of P.O.R., talks about how doing stunts has made him less afraid of the world. But there’s another, even more marginal, reaction only found in certain small communities captured in this Reddit thread on a P.O.R. Wrestling Video posted in r/SquaredCircle. r/SquaredCircle is, of course, Reddit’s largest community of professional wrestling enthusiasts. The comments read:
“Other than taking place in the vicinity of a wrestling ring this has nothing to do with wrestling. These people are setting the business back 30 years. When I tell people I’m into wrestling and they see shit like this it’s embarrassing.”
“Their YouTube page says ‘after years of innovating in the homegrown stunt scene’ Is that what they call backyard wrestling now?”
“Outlaw mudshow bullshit”
“Stupid, stupid, stupid”
For those out of the loop, professional wrestling is a staged form of fighting between larger-than-life characters utilizing pre-fabricated storylines. World Wrestling Entertainment — better known as WWE — has been the big dog in the professional wrestling world since the rise of cable television, and it’s still going strong today. That’s almost hard to believe: The rise of the sport occurred in a different era, one separate from today’s irony-poisoned media landscape. WWE wrestlers don’t make fun of themselves for being “fake,” but love their art, pushing their stories and their bodies past the traditional boundaries of sport and theater alike.
None of this explains why WWE fans detest “backyard wrestling.” P.O.R. isn’t taking away attention from WWE matches. Recent WWE Monday Night Raw programming reached more than two million live viewers, while the most popular archived P.O.R. Wrestling match ever only has one million views. Branding isn’t an issue either, P.O.R. is virtually unknown, while WWE is synonymous with the sport of professional wrestling. An easy culprit for the animosity is the extreme violence of P.O.R. compared to WWE. After all, WWE’s Monday Night Raw is rated TV-PG, while YouTube verifies you’re 18 before you can even watch most of the P.O.R. clips I’ve linked in this article. But this attitude doesn’t seem to be a consistent theme among the fanbase. Many are in favor of the network allowing more violent content and the safety of WWE stars has never been the corporation’s top priority. Despite their inherent scriptedness, these performances do not come without risk. Even ignoring extreme examples like wrestler Mick Foley losing his ear and Owen Hart falling to his death, WWE wrestlers routinely die young, with borderline-encouraged substance abuse and increased cardiovascular complications rampant among the company’s stars. All wrestling — whether it be “real” or “fake” — takes a huge toll on its performers.
The truth is, these two forms of staged wrestling have a lot in common. The source of antagonism from one to the other comes from the fundamentally different approaches each takes to performance art.
Because that’s what professional wrestling is, at its essence. There are countless arguments over whether or not the genre counts as a “sport,” considering each match’s predetermined outcome. But these conversations often follow a false conjecture that if considered a competitive sport, professional wrestling should be generally respected by the public, and, if not, it should not. WWE and P.O.R. are not competitive, but this does not mean that they and their athletes should not be respected for their efforts. Each match is a performance in the most literal sense: A practiced expression of movement precisely executed for an audience. Painters paint, writers write and professional wrestlers use violence to produce emotional responses from their audiences.
This is the key divergence between the two leagues. P.O.R. wants to shock you. Their matches continually up the ante with the level of danger each performer faces. The fact that there is no ambulance or safety gear on the premises is a part of the show, as is the homemade nature of their props and weapons; they want their viewers to feel that they are putting themselves in legitimate peril. And often, they are. It’s an intentional choice, and it’s effective.
WWE, on the other hand, wants to tell an effective story. Isn’t that why we love sports in the first place? Seeing a star athlete start from the bottom, work their way up throughout the course of a season and then beat a foe is the classic sports story; it’s half the reason we keep watching. It makes us feel good! WWE takes those narratives and boosts their potency up to ten, creating the most heroic heroes and most villainous villains the silver screen could conjure. And it’s compelling. When a fan of WWE sees a league like P.O.R. take the story out of their beloved form of performance, of course it comes off as a bastardization. To them, the professionalism of professional wrestling is absent, leaving nothing but a bunch of adrenaline junkies making fools out of themselves.
This is a debate we’ve seen before, but in another context: the horror genre. Films like “Saw”, ultra-violent and light on story, have been critically panned since their popularization. Story-driven horror films, on the other hand, have been marked by Oscar nominations and excellent Rotten Tomatoes scores. Are the narrative arcs and thematic material of the average Monday Night Raw episode equivalent to the films of Ari Aster and Jordan Peele? No. Of course not. But the concept of using violence to tell a story, versus using it to produce a visceral audience reaction, is a comparable throughline between the genres. This is not a new conversation.
So, are WWE fans right? Should we avert our eyes from P.O.R. videos? No. Absolutely not. Look at this guy driving a motorized wheelchair on fire into a kiddie pool. No man on Earth could keep me from this content. But we shouldn’t discount the care, artistry and talent that goes into creating every WWE match that reaches our television sets. If anything, we just now have even more performance art to choose from. How could we not be entertained?
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu
The post Are you not entertained? Professional wrestling and performance art appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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