2010

WRESTLING

4.2.1: A SPECTACLE OF EXCESS
“The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess ... Even hidden in the most squalid parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”^85

4.2.2: WHAT MATTERS IS WHAT [THE PUBLIC] SEES
“Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle ... The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so ... what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”^86

4.2.3 (MAIN QUOTE): THE IMAGE OF PASSION ... EMPTYING OUT OF THE INTERIORITY
“We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy ... What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself

[...] This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime.”^87

4.2.4: THE EXTERNALIZED IMAGE OF TORTURE, THE PERFECTION OF AN ICONOGRAPHY
“What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks ... which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.”^88

4.2.5: THE ORGY OF EVIL ≠ DEATH OF BOREDOM AND INDIFFERENCE
“ ... but he [the spectator] would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.”^89

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85. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press, 1975. Print. p. 13.
86. Ibid., p. 13.
87. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
88. Ibid., pp. 17-18.