Politics and the death of the territories

[Loss]

I don't know if there's anything to this, but I'm starting this thread so the topic can be explored more. The death of the territories and rise of the WWF happened in a similar time frame to companies like Wal-Mart putting so many local businesses out to pasture. I'd like to look at FCC regulations regarding cable television and labor laws passed in the 80s that were more favorable to big players, and the impact that may have had on the territories. In other words, I'd like to explore the politics of cable television's rise.

 

It also seems like there's stuff here worth exploring as it relates to the death of manufacturing and the impact that had on the culture, and as such the types of babyfaces and heels presented within pro wrestling. Folk heroes like Dusty Rhodes and guys next door like Tommy Rich were replaced with people we were in awe of rather than being able to relate to, like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.

 

I'd also like to tie the end of the sexual revolution to the rise of the WWF. When I say that, I mean that the AIDS epidemic largely sent people from obsessing over sex to obsessing over fitness. It also shifted attitudes to the right, which played into Hogan's popularity in the Reagan era, which we've touched on before. There was a body craze not just limited to wrestling in the 1980s, so in so many ways, the culture was at just the right temperature to ensure the success of the WWF and Hulk Hogan.

 

I realize this is a lot of thoughts swarming and may be better served as multiple threads. But that can be sorted out later. In the meantime, I'd like to use this thread to try to work all this stuff out.

[Vinnie B]

I'm about to start a PhD on Grassroots activism in the US in the 1980s, quite often in attempts to combat this kind of big business, so I'd be interested in getting involved in this debate.

[Ship Canal]

It also seems like there's stuff here worth exploring as it relates to the death of manufacturing and the impact that had on the culture, and as such the types of babyfaces and heels presented within pro wrestling. Folk heroes like Dusty Rhodes and guys next door like Tommy Rich were replaced with people we were in awe of rather than being able to relate to, like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.

 

 

 

The obvious and probably insufficient explanation would be Mcmahon as one of the foremost zealots for the new monetarism. My impression was always that there was a similarity between the post 1984 British mining communities of the UK after the defeat by Thatcherism and the industrial heartlands of the US, Detroit being the most discussed but there were many more besides. It was bullshit of course, but people were beginning to be spun a more pronounced individualism in a world of crumbling class solidarity.

[SteveMPunk]

In my paper on Springsteen's Born in the USA I wrote for my course I looked into the image of masculinity in America at this time in relation to Reagan. I remember making a point about how the characters in those songs (similar to the folk heroes Loss described like Dusty) were losing their jobs, the things that made them men. At the same time, we had Rambo, Arnie and Hogan on screen as dominant images of masculinity. Bruce himself even bulked up as he prepared for superstardom. I wish I had managed to throw a pro wrestling reference in there now!

[Ship Canal]

In my paper on Springsteen's Born in the USA I wrote for my course I looked into the image of masculinity in America at this time in relation to Reagan. I remember making a point about how the characters in those songs (similar to the folk heroes Loss described like Dusty) were losing their jobs, the things that made them men. At the same time, we had Rambo, Arnie and Hogan on screen as dominant images of masculinity. Bruce himself even bulked up as he prepared for superstardom. I wish I had managed to throw a pro wrestling reference in there now!

 

YES! I'm a massive Springsteen fan and I think that's a really good shout.

 

There's a definite air of Darkness on the Edge of Town about a lot of the saddest stories of post territories decline, albeit often mixed in with a load of self preserving sleaziness.

[ButchReedMark]

Springsteen is God. Seeing him in the Etihad later this month. But yeah, he certainly henched up for the mid 80s.

[SteveMPunk]

Springsteen is God. Seeing him in the Etihad later this month. But yeah, he certainly henched up for the mid 80s.

 

I've went a little crazy and got tickets for Glasgow, London and Milan haha.

 

Now I need to see a Memphis retrospective set to My Best Was Never Good Enough

[El-P]

I'd also like to tie the end of the sexual revolution to the rise of the WWF. When I say that, I mean that the AIDS epidemic largely sent people from obsessing over sex to obsessing over fitness.

 

Interesting, I never heard about that before. This whole hygienism mentality, which very much anglo-saxon. Ah, those people who take the time to brush their teeth before having sex...

 

About Springsteen, the use of "Born in the USA" was totally ill-advised in pro-wrestling, as in pretty much anywhere else. It's like people just didn't pay attention to the story and thought it was a patriotic song.

[Loss]

I watched a documentary on the Sexual Revolution (which they loosely considered started by The Kinsey Report and lasting from the legalization of the birth control pill through AIDS) a few years ago. In the late 70s, American culture was getting more permissive. You saw it in the pop culture with disco gaining popularity. Places like Studio 54 and Plato's Retreat are iconic. Gay liberation was a hallmark of the time, and a few years earlier, abortion was legalized. In the early 80s, we saw the rise of the Moral Majority and there was a lot of fear around sex post-AIDS, so you'd get a lot of news coverage that said stuff like, "Nowadays, more people prefer exercise classes and gyms" and movies like Fatal Attraction and Cruisin' were made, which had a far more cynical take on sexual freedom. Newt Gingrich was pushing legislation to quarantine gay people, which is one of the great forgotten stories of American politics. There was a cultural shift.

 

Sadly, this article is behind a paywall, but the cover photo, dated 04/09/84, says it all:

 

http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19840409,00.html

 

I think wrestling can thrive in a more permissive culture too, but for what the WWF was aiming to present at the time, it really was the perfect cocktail.

[JerryvonKramer]

I don't know if there's anything to this, but I'm starting this thread so the topic can be explored more. The death of the territories and rise of the WWF happened in a similar time frame to companies like Wal-Mart putting so many local businesses out to pasture. I'd like to look at FCC regulations regarding cable television and labor laws passed in the 80s that were more favorable to big players, and the impact that may have had on the territories. In other words, I'd like to explore the politics of cable television's rise.

 

It also seems like there's stuff here worth exploring as it relates to the death of manufacturing and the impact that had on the culture, and as such the types of babyfaces and heels presented within pro wrestling. Folk heroes like Dusty Rhodes and guys next door like Tommy Rich were replaced with people we were in awe of rather than being able to relate to, like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.

A 10,000-ft Marxist analysis might say something about capitalism moving into its final, consumerist phase: a phase we are still in.

 

As the economies of the West shifted from traditional industry and manufacturing to being more service-based, the emphasis changed from the "means of production" (i.e. actual factories, coal mines, the labour force, etc.) to the product itself. Some have called this the fetishization of the product. People came to think of themselves less in terms of where they worked and what they did, and more in terms of what they own and the sort of things they were into. Not what you do, more what you spend your money and time on. Your choice of lampshade comes to define you as a person. It's pretty well summed by that opening spiel in Fight Club:

 

 

You can see this process mirrored in wrestling, the rise and subsequent monopoly of the WWE etc. So much of the Hulkamania era is marked by its existance as a product, a merchandising enterprise, as opposed to what wrestling was about before that.

 

I want to say that the more recent rise of entitled- and whiny- smark-crowds is the same phenomena at play at an even later stage of its development: ribald consumer culture manifest as a living crowd.

 

That wrestling should struggle to find authenticity in this phase of capitalism is also far from unique to it. I mentioned Fight Club, think also of American Psycho or many of the other big texts of the past twenty years. So many of them are marked by the struggle to find something "true and real" in a plastic and increasingly inauthentic post-modern world.

 

Which is not to say that my struggles with mid-00s ROH mirror Patrick Bateman or Ed Norton's character in Fight Club -- the analogy is too grandiose -- but in a way it is exactly the same thing.

[JerryvonKramer]

Some further reading, this is Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism":

 

https://newleftreview.org/I/146/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism

 

My post above is a massively dumbed-down version of this. Note the date: 1984. Kind of interesting it was at that moment, the moment Loss points to, that he wrote this.

[overbooked]

Cable TV changes seem at the heart of this from a practical, rather than political, perspective, but more broadly a move away from the local to the national/international culturally.

 

It also seems wrestling was shifting from the spectacle as a means of making money from/pacifying the masses to consumerism/product fetishism doing the same thing. This was a broader cultural shift seen in say, the closure of cinemas and the rise of various home entertainments.

 

The whole business model of the territories was built around the spectacle - the live show. WWF still made money from that, but the focus shifted to consumerism. Money was to be made from souvenirs, ice cream bars, action figures. Others tried that, but nowhere near as well. WWF became primarily a producer of product. They could make money purely through their products. The spectacle almost got in the way.

[El-P]

In the early 80s, we saw the rise of the Moral Majority and there was a lot of fear around sex post-AIDS, so you'd get a lot of news coverage that said stuff like, "Nowadays, more people prefer exercise classes and gyms" and movies like Fatal Attraction and Cruisin' were made, which had a far more cynical take on sexual freedom.

 

And yet, all this "gym culture" and cult of the body went along with a sexualization of the body too, body that is always fitter and younger-looking, and therefore, more sexually desirable. So as always, there was a good bit of hypocrisy.

 

When I was in movie school, I put a few words about pro-wrestling on one of my papers, about how the body shape evolved from the 80's and the steroid muscle über-males to the smooth, sliding ones in the 90's (Micheals, of course) and made a comparison with the Hollywood action cinema of the Schwarzys and Slys to the new figure of the 90's which was Keanu Reeves, with his much flexible body and movies like Speed (doh) and of course the Matrix. I thought it was a bit ridiculous but got a really good grade because of it.

[JerryvonKramer]

It also seems wrestling was shifting from the spectacle as a means of making money from/pacifying the masses to consumerism/product fetishism doing the same thing. This was a broader cultural shift seen in say, the closure of cinemas and the rise of various home entertainments.

Yes, all of this. I guess where I've always struggled massively as an individual is that ... well, that's me, that's my life. I was born in 1982. I define myself by the things I spend my money on. I get excited for the new see-through blue light-up kettle I bought, as anyone who is a Facebook friend of mine will tell you. My childhood was all He-Man, WWF, Disney Home Videos, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Nintendo. I am a post-modern man. Perhaps it is self-loathing or the old cliche of yearning for a past that never was, but I've never been able fully to embrace it.

 

As a little tid-bit, did you know that the He-Man cartoon was developed after the action figures with the express purpose of shifting more units? When they introduced new characters it was because Mattell told Filmation there was going to be X and Y character in the new line. Remember this dude:

 

 

Only exists because of the toy. That's my childhood. That's me. It takes some time to come to terms with.

[El-P]

That's why I have no nostalgy for my childhood, as happy as it was (and yes, I remember this guy).

[Strummer]

funny I was just watching a Martin Scorcese interview from about 20 years ago and he revealed that after the gritty and realistic films of the 70s he had trouble getting work in the early 80s. Studio heads wanted to shift away from harsh reality and towards a less cynical, more "ideal" reality. Francis Coppola and Michael Cimmino and other directors went through the same thing. I was born in 79 so I was pretty much raised on this 80s and early 90s culture which is kind of humorous to me in retrospect. It felt like simpler times but I guess that was just a false reality being propagated.

[Jingus]

 

As the economies of the West shifted from traditional industry and manufacturing to being more service-based, the emphasis changed from the "means of production" (i.e. actual factories, coal mines, the labour force, etc.) to the product itself. Some have called this the fetishization of the product. People came to think of themselves less in terms of where they worked and what they did, and more in terms of what they own and the sort of things they were into. Not what you do, more what you spend your money and time on. Your choice of lampshade comes to define you as a person. It's pretty well summed by that opening spiel in Fight Club:

 

I mentioned Fight Club, think also of American Psycho or many of the other big texts of the past twenty years. So many of them are marked by the struggle to find something "true and real" in a plastic and increasingly inauthentic post-modern world.

The problem with that area of analysis is that it only focuses on a minority fraction of the population. Basically, the "we have too much stuff and it controls is all" argument is something that only applies to rich people. Poor people (who do comprise the overwhelming numerical majority, even in America) don't have fancy custom furnishings in the first place to be defined by. They just have whatever was on sale at Walmart.

[Loss]

Well, even then, Wal-Mart is a cultural institution for some people. When my family visits me in Chicago and we go to the suburbs for something, they get excited when they see a Wal-Mart because it more closely resembles home. I think fetishizing is a strong word to describe that sort of thing, but I do think people value the familiar and assign cultural value to it.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

As the economies of the West shifted from traditional industry and manufacturing to being more service-based, the emphasis changed from the "means of production" (i.e. actual factories, coal mines, the labour force, etc.) to the product itself. Some have called this the fetishization of the product. People came to think of themselves less in terms of where they worked and what they did, and more in terms of what they own and the sort of things they were into. Not what you do, more what you spend your money and time on. Your choice of lampshade comes to define you as a person. It's pretty well summed by that opening spiel in Fight Club:

 

I mentioned Fight Club, think also of American Psycho or many of the other big texts of the past twenty years. So many of them are marked by the struggle to find something "true and real" in a plastic and increasingly inauthentic post-modern world.

The problem with that area of analysis is that it only focuses on a minority fraction of the population. Basically, the "we have too much stuff and it controls is all" argument is something that only applies to rich people. Poor people (who do comprise the overwhelming numerical majority, even in America) don't have fancy custom furnishings in the first place to be defined by. They just have whatever was on sale at Walmart.

 

When I think of bling hip-hop culture and so on, I'm not sure if I agree with that. For the rich it's a reality, for the poor it becomes aspirational. Either way, it's hollow.

 

In many ways materialism is most marked when you look at the culture of the poor.

 

In this country, the truly rich folk don't want to show anything off, it's seen as being in poor taste. It's all about the organic orange juice and charity trips to Africa, darling.

[Death From Above]

I do remember that action figure. I liked him because you could put him together like 10 different ways.

 

The cartoon wasn't worth shit but Masters of the Universe toys were awesome.

 

Sorry, don't mean to take this topic into a toy discussion. This is actually a really fascinating thread, I'm just not sure where to start with it. I do think that there is something to the shift away from manufacturing/factory work in the US, the diminishing numbers in the lower-middle class and a lack of relate-able heroes. There's still plenty of people struggling but there tends to be a bigger gap to jump to get to your suburbia now where those people look more towards white collar careers, and people don't find anything heroic about white collar.

 

We've also seen this in film over the decades where America has slowly over time moved away from your John Wayne type (who in a sense was both an everyman, yet a giant of a figure), towards a comic book fueled world of Captain Americas and Batmans. Wayne goes way far back obviously but over time I think you see this shift towards less relate-able more imaginary fantasy to appeal to a crowd with more free time to use their imagination. The 70's was a decade of conflict there where you still had a very popular character like Dirty Harry but then Star Wars comes out near the end and we see a shift towards escapist fantasy like ET, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Terminator etc in the 1980's. Now in the 2010's escapist fantasy has become one of the most corporate, tightly controlled money making industries there is. I'm skipping over a ton of stuff in there but I think it's follow-able.

 

In many ways I feel the 90's was the last decade wrestling was actually decent at capitalizing on cultural trends. 90's was a very "fight the power (but not too hard)" kind of decade. ECW was about that (on the outside). Steve Austin was about that. The Rock was about that. Wrestling hasn't really come close to producing a star like Austin or The Rock since because I think they've really struggled to connect to just what is it people want out of a hero and it's been easier to just lean on nostalgia acts. That might make you some money but nostalgia acts usually aren't cool unless you luck into something like Ozzy Osbourne's family having a random hit TV show. The fact there are people in their late 30's/early 40's that pop on Twitter, when The Rock and Shane McMahon show up sure it's great you have their attention, but you're also damning yourself to looking uncool to their kids.

[Death From Above]

Forgot to throw in at the end there, even if you look at guys that would be "rebels" and fight against Vince McMahon's power, when you look at guys like The Rock or Shane McMahon, even their end goals have changed. It's no longer about rebellion by tearing down the system. It's about wanting to be able to goof off at work but still get promoted to the point you get a company car and the 100th floor office with a private staff. The Rock's image of coolness is him being a jerk that says jerk things yet somehow he became a movie star wearing suits that cost thousands of dollars. Shane McMahon is the prodigal son that rebels by wearing tennis shoes to the office and goofs off in front of his father, but someday wants to inherit a billion dollars. He's a real modern rebel.

 

This really bears no resemblance to the apparent end goals of a hero like Dusty Rhodes. Does it reflect well on people as a whole? Probably not. Even wrestling heroes now are corporate cynics that want to hold all the cards for themselves.

[flyonthewall2983]

Kind of funny that Fight Club is being brought up. David Fincher was upset with Fox because TV ads for the movie were shown on WWF programming, and that the ads themselves marketed it more as an action movie. I watched it again recently, and it really feels like something of it's time now. In it's sort of hyper-driven pace it could resemble what the studio may have seen it as but it obviously went much deeper than that. The ideas expressed were clearly meant more for the 30-somethings like those who wrote, directed and starred in it, not the younger and maybe more ignorant lowest-common-denominator crowd Fox appealed to. Even I found much more in it in these recent viewings than I did when I was 17 and was blown away by it.

 

Anyway, it's interesting that the idea of a working class hero in WWE would be nonexistent now. It makes me wonder how much of that was a hidden reason why Vince hated what he referred to as "rasslin'". On the surface it's admirable that he wanted to use his company to take the artform to a more universal level than just appealing to lower/middle-class Americans. How it coincided with the importance laid towards the kind of superhuman male identity being promoted in the 80's couldn't have been timed better. But inherent in that was that any identification with the audience was lost. For all of Hulk Hogan's charisma in his interviews (not to mention the way he could sell when he was in danger), all people took away from him was that he was just this big dude with a little bit of a cool attitude but made the image as important, if not more than the message.

[JerryvonKramer]

Just want to underline the point:

 

 

[JRH]

Getting back to the topic someone brought up about escapist entertainment, it should also be noted that a lot of it is now made with an audience of adults in mind. Just look at Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, even cartoons like Archer, Rick and Morty, and Venture Brothers. Even stuff aimed at a more "general" audience like the Marvel films have appeal to all kinds of fanbases. Keeping this related to wrestling, thats what caused WCW to overtake WWF in 96-97. By appealing to the college/high school crowd (while still keeping it appealing to younger fans, long time fans, and casuals), they were able to get a wider audience. Vince, on the other hand, was still marketing almost exclusively to the younger crowd (i picked up an issue of WWF Magazine in 1995, and there were only a handful of articles actually about wrestling, everything else was about video games or trading cards or wrestlers extra-curricular activities, which had almost no appeal to older fans, even the apter mags knew they had an older audience in mind). Getting away form this tangent, who was the last wrestler in the WWF (or for that matter, wrestling in general) who had that "blue-collar" appeal? Austin? Bikertaker?

[Ricky Jackson]

I think you could say that Punk and Bryan are the modern equivalent to the blue collar hero, "regular" looking guys who came up through the indies and appealed to fans as "one of us"