170. ON HEELS - Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?
My wife asked me over breakfast the other morning - “are there any actual heels in wrestling anymore?”
It was a good question. Heels (bad guys) seemed to have a certain trajectory these days. The more dastardly and hateful they are, the more we end up liking them. Current (as of the time of writing, a week before the Full Gear PPV that will have taken place last weekend) AEW champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman is an excellent case-in-point. Utterly obnoxious, insulting the audience every time he got on the microphone, he somehow became “our scumbag”. We embraced his arrogance at being “better than you, and you know it” and started to cheer instead of be offended when he called us his “poors”. Nowadays, we egg on his antics, chanting “sportsmanship! Sportsmanship!” as he holds out his hand to his opponent, only to roar with laughter as he inevitably pokes them in the eye or kicks them between the legs when they go in for the handshake.
Another good example is Christian Cage. The first time he started invoking the name of an opponent’s dead father to get a rise out of them (Jack Perry’s late dad, the actor Luke Perry), we were shocked. Outraged even. Even for a pre-written and agreed upon fiction it felt like it somehow crossed a line. But then we started to relish it. What terrible thing would he say next? He couldn’t possibly spit on the cherished memory of…oh? He did! So now any touching moment of sentimental remembrance is in danger of being roasted by this moral monster we lovingly call the “father of the year” and we sit eagerly on the edge of our seats waiting to see what terrible thing he’ll say next. When Cage’s music hits, we know he is about to say the worst thing possible, and we can’t wait to hear him say it. His lifelong best friend jumps ship from WWE to AEW and asks him to form a tag-team with him one last time to end out their careers with a storybook finish and we cheer when his response is three brutal words not frequently heard together on television: go f**k yourself.
While things are a little tamer over at the more family-friendly WWE, over there we are willingly acknowledging the reigning, defending, undisputed WWE champion, Roman Reigns, despite this tedious gimmick starting in a flood of boos and jeers. We couldn’t wait to see who would finally dethrone him after years of clinging onto the belt - now we clap when he wins yet again. Undefeated. Arrogant. Awful. But our tribal chief.
Likewise, when The Judgment Day did the unthinkable and wooed Rey Mysterio’s son, Dominik, away from his dad, made him a sullen, father-attacking, criminal and paired him with the villainous and corrupting Rhea Ripley, we couldn’t get enough of it. She’s his Mami now.
These are just four examples. And at this point you might rightly be wondering why I’m writing this stuff about wrestling on my Philosophy blog? What has this got to do with anything important in the world, let alone anything particularly philosophical?
Well, the reason is that when my wife asked me that, and we thought about all the heels we can’t help but love (the boos we give to Don Callis and his ever-expanding family that are nothing more than thinly disguised cheers; the frustration we feel at Jay White’s theft of the world championship belt, but recognition that we now, too, are calling it the “Bang Bang Belt” and throwing our “guns up” fingers into the air with Bullet Club Gold whenever he comes out), I also thought about how this phenomena from wrestling seems to have seeped beyond the ring and into the real world.
Because are there any heels anymore in the actual world?
Wrestling, of course, is make-believe. A predetermined fiction, as scripted as any weekly soap opera or movie. It is a space where immoral actions can be safely cheered because we all know deep inside that nothing bad has actually happened in the real world. When Swerve Strickland breaks into Hangman Adam Page’s house and leaves a Swerve t-shirt on the crib of Hangman’s baby son, we can relish the mind games without actually having to worry about the safety of the baby, or the anxiety and terror of Adam Page. It’s the same reason we can return to the movie theatres Halloween after Halloween to watch another brutal murder from Scream’s ghost-face, Michael Myers, or Jigsaw. We cringe, we cry out, but we also laugh because none of it is real. It’s a way of playing with fear, playing with taboo, rather than actually experiencing it.
But this is the week that David Cameron returned to UK politics after the turmoil caused by Suella Braverman. A week where the sacked former Home Secretary, Braverman (who gave political speeches as if she were a pantomime villain, dismissing being without a home as a ‘lifestyle choice’, calling calls for a cease-fire in Palestine ‘hate marches’, and turning asylum seekers away with a smile on her face) is still framing herself as a possible future leader of the Conservative Party, and is still supported by many outraged that she was asked to leave.
Cameron himself was mired in scandal after he left office, and when in charge of the country made the political choice to impose damaging and unnecessary austerity measures that we continue to feel the ripple effects of today. As well as presiding over the hurricane of lies we saw in the Brexit referendum and being responsible for possibly the most divisive rift in modern English politics.
Across the ocean we see Donald Trump continue to face multiple trials, just a few years after the whole world witnessed his cruel, racist, sexist, homophobic Presidency, and his popularity continues to grow. There remains a serious possibility of his reelection in 2024.
The growth in recent years of the alt-right, for whom Trump, and his UK equivalent in the populist Boris Johnson, as the modern face of extreme right fascism might be down to the movement’s move away from angry Nazi imagery and its turn towards cynical dark humour. Mocking memes. Trolling and eye-rolling. A technique which even people who balk at their ideology might fall for. They don’t think about the movement behind it, they just laugh and pass the sick humour along, slowly eroding our norms and attitudes with each share.
As a UK voter, the return of Cameron feels symbolic of this whole phenomenon. Since 2010 we have had a Conservative run government doing more and more damage each election-cycle, yet election after election, they somehow continue to get elected. Self-evidently mean-spirited policies and public rhetoric are rewarded by the voting public while attempts to care about others and make the world a better place are dismissed as being ‘woke’ (as if being conscious and alert to the world is a negative rather than a positive) and rejected by the majority. Every election-morning a kick in the teeth. But not just a kick in the teeth - a kick with someone standing over you, pointing and laughing the whole time. You can’t have heels anymore in a topsy-turvy world where the bad guys are cheered and the only people booed are the babyfaces.
We actually saw this at the start of the century in wrestling. Kurt Angle, a former Olympian, debuted in the WWE as a stars and stripes clad, milk-drinking, earnest good guy, with his ‘three Is’ of ‘intensity, integrity, and intelligence’, and was immediately booed by fans for what, just a decade or so before, would have made him a good guy in the business. But by this point in wrestling the last good guy to do it - Hulk Hogan - had already betrayed Macho Man Randy Savage and spray-painted ‘NWO’ all over his back. Being good was no longer ‘over’. It was the bad guys who sold all the best merchandise.
When things are so awful everywhere all the time, they lose their impact as being awful. Exploiting children to bring us cheap consumer goods is no longer an outrage, it’s just good business. Taking a home away from someone is just what happens. Another bomb is dropped on Gaza, we hit another year in the Russian invasion of Ukraine - this is just life for those people. We glaze over. We don’t think too much about it. We share some more funny memes and watch videos of people injuring themselves online.
The guy who multiple people have accused of sexual assault and who we all saw literally cage children and separate them from their families while undergoing and all-out attack on a shared epistemic reality - maybe we’ll make him President again? The guy who his colleagues referred to as ‘The Trolley Problem’ as he blustered his way through badly managing a pandemic that nearly every other country in the world got through better - let’s give him his own TV show. The guy who spent a whole career stoking hatred for immigrants and division across Europe - stick him on I’m A Celebrity…
I guess in writing this I have an answer for my wife. Whether in wrestling or in the real world, there are still actual heels. They are us.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. It makes a lovely Christmas present for the anarchist, atheist, punk rocker, or teacher in your life!
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