WWF's Attitude Era as Deconstructionist Wrestling

[!!!]

In a move I'm sure you all will deny to no end, I declare that the Attitude Era (1998-2001) of the WWF deconstructs the traditional conventions of wrestling.

What does this mean? Well, if we consider wrestling in terms of its traditional conventions, we see that the whole shows is based around two people fighting. Everything builds to a match. In the Attitude Era, wrestlers could feud in ways unrelated to any match, for example, by vehicular humiliation.



I don't think it's a coincidence that the construction vehicle Austin commandeers is labeled "Austin Deconstruction." Austin is a deconstructionist anti-hero. McMahon is a deconstructionist supervillain. McMahon will use police officers to hurt Austin, Austin hits McMahon with the bedpan in the hospital. The two use angles that take precedent over any match.

The result is a more cinematic product where the conflict between the wrestlers resembles a conflict on a TV show.

 

[IdleRich]

I don't think it's a coincidence that the construction vehicle Austin commandeers is labeled "Austin Deconstruction."

I think you're right, it's definitely not a coincidence, Austin Deconstruction comes from his name Steve Austin - good spot.

 

[IdleRich]

But I'll bite, what's the "attitude era"?

Please tell me it's about gay pandas

 

[luka]

wtf

 

[Mr. Tea]

wtf

No no, it's "WWF". Easy mistake to make though.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Predictably...

 

[shakahislop]

i've said on here before that i think the WWE so called attitude era was a moderately influential cultural thread. a step change in the form for sure, and one that WWE even now still harks back to. listening to longform interviews with the people involved is revealing, there's one that just came out which is rick rubin interviewing paul heyman (one of the senior people involved in this era I think, though i'm not expert) for a couple of hours. he comes across as a blowhard, total nightmare of a conversationalist, constant self-promotion, everything overstated, sounds like he's constantly lying, has that Trump thing (which isn't a coincidence i think, there's a lot of Attitude WWE in Trump) where he's creating a subjectivity and worldview through the confidence with which he expresses his view of the truth even if it doesn't stand up to a minute of scrutiny.

form-wise attitude was a total break. deconstructed as you say, or in my words they broke a lot of conventions and rules. or alternatively and probably more accurately ECW did this and then WWE took those ideas into its behemoth. i don't know if that's exactly the same thing as something being deconstructed.

there's always presumably been a lot going on maculinity-wise in wrestling. part of what was going on in attitude-era WWE is a combination of masculinity, violence and dominance. it's one of the key ingredients at least. there's something which is basically impossible to unravel but is going on i think with how this drive is expressed in various US media forms over the years, how they bleed into one another, how they could be placed into a continuum, how they're forms that come out of the US working class, how they're exported to and influence other countries

that era of WWE was an assemblage of concentrated money, the US media and music environment of the time, wrestlers from marginal backgrounds with few other options, the pre-internet screens trend towards escalating depictions of violence

 

[shakahislop]

watching that clip you posted the most obvious thing is how different the aesthetic sensibility is, it's the polar opposite of the tastes of the US coastal arty rich people thing

it's a stretch for a foreigner to say something like this coz i don't really know but the US rich people thing has absolutely zero influence from the south. whereas something like WWE incorporates it.

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

i've said on here before that i think the WWE so called attitude era was a moderately influential cultural thread. a step change in the form for sure, and one that WWE even now still harks back to.

It overlapped with stuff like Eminem, GTA, Jackass and South Park. You can toss in Bloodhound Gang, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson and a bunch of other stuff too. This very white, very male, very juvenile strand of culture that was all about wrecking things and being rude and outrageous. All of it had this tone of acting out to wind up your parents. Lots of "Oops, did I just say that?!" winking at the audience.

 

[Murphy]

Search results for query: Wrestling

 

[luka]

It arrived at the same time as and overlapped with stuff like Eminem, GTA and South Park. You can toss in Bloodhound Gang, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson and a bunch of other stuff too. This very white, very male, very juvenile strand of culture that was all about wrecking things and being rude and outrageous. All of it had this tone of acting out to wind up your parents. Lots of "Oops, did I just say that?!" winking at the audience.

versions dissertation topic

 

[!!!]

i've said on here before that i think the WWE so called attitude era was a moderately influential cultural thread. a step change in the form for sure, and one that WWE even now still harks back to. listening to longform interviews with the people involved is revealing, there's one that just came out which is rick rubin interviewing paul heyman (one of the senior people involved in this era I think, though i'm not expert) for a couple of hours. he comes across as a blowhard, total nightmare of a conversationalist, constant self-promotion, everything overstated, sounds like he's constantly lying, has that Trump thing (which isn't a coincidence i think, there's a lot of Attitude WWE in Trump) where he's creating a subjectivity and worldview through the confidence with which he expresses his view of the truth even if it doesn't stand up to a minute of scrutiny.

Dude, Paul Heyman is a genius and that Rubin interview was brilliant. He's a total liar yes, but that's part of his genius. Every quality you described him as having is a part of promoting wrestling, especially "that Trump thing". Wrestling personalities have to create elaborate fictions to sell wrestling. Hulk Hogan is often criticized for constantly telling outlandish tall tales about his career but that kind of mythmaking is part and parcel of the wrestling business. Think of it as free bonus fictional content.

there's always presumably been a lot going on maculinity-wise in wrestling. part of what was going on in attitude-era WWE is a combination of masculinity, violence and dominance. it's one of the key ingredients at least. there's something which is basically impossible to unravel but is going on i think with how this drive is expressed in various US media forms over the years, how they bleed into one another, how they could be placed into a continuum, how they're forms that come out of the US working class, how they're exported to and influence other countries

Really interesting ideas here but you're saying so many different things I find it difficult to respond. Could you elaborate on the point you're trying to make here?

that era of WWE was an assemblage of concentrated money, the US media and music environment of the time, wrestlers from marginal backgrounds with few other options, the pre-internet screens trend towards escalating depictions of violence

True. I just wanted to outline the way in which it breaks wrestling's rules.

"it's a stretch for a foreigner to say something like this coz i don't really know but the US rich people thing has absolutely zero influence from the south. whereas something like WWE incorporates it."

This is actually spot on. American avant-garde types look down on wrestling, I think in large part, because they look down on the South. Southern wrestling is in my opinion the most sophisticated and artistic version of the wrestling morality play. It's like redneck superheroes. But no one in America wants to be a redneck, so wrestling has never quite been accepted as "high art", if such a thing even exists anymore.

I like to say that every "innovation" of the Attitude Era was already used in the territories. I bet no one can give any counter-examples.

 

[shakahislop]

It arrived at the same time as and overlapped with stuff like Eminem, GTA and South Park. You can toss in Bloodhound Gang, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson and a bunch of other stuff too. This very white, very male, very juvenile strand of culture that was all about wrecking things and being rude and outrageous. All of it had this tone of acting out to wind up your parents. Lots of "Oops, did I just say that?!" winking at the audience.

the woke thing tends to be thought of as a corrective to a hundred years of culture of whatever. sometimes i wonder if its actually a corrective to how cruel culture became in the 00s. a period of sensitivity and strongly held norms, as opposed to one of insensitivity and transgression

 

[!!!]

the woke thing tends to be thought of as a corrective to a hundred years of culture of whatever. sometimes i wonder if its actually a corrective to how cruel culture became in the 00s. a period of sensitivity and strongly held norms, as opposed to one of insensitivity and transgression

This is why I believe the proper way to revive the Attitude Era is to double down on wokeness and present a more aggressive, confrontational versions of wokeness. Because woke people feel wokeness is righteous and the right feel it's offensive. Offensive and righteous, two key qualities of the Attitude era. Picture a queer manager in the vein of Jim Cornette or Paul Heyman.

 

[shakahislop]

Dude, Paul Heyman is a genius and that Rubin interview was brilliant. He's a total liar yes, but that's part of his genius. Every quality you described him as having is a part of promoting wrestling, especially "that Trump thing". Wrestling personalities have to create elaborate fictions to sell wrestling. Hulk Hogan is often criticized for constantly telling outlandish tall tales about his career but that kind of mythmaking is part and parcel of the wrestling business. Think of it as free bonus fictional content.

Really interesting ideas here but you're saying so many different things I find it difficult to respond. Could you elaborate on the point you're trying to make here?


True. I just wanted to outline the way in which it breaks wrestling's rules.

"it's a stretch for a foreigner to say something like this coz i don't really know but the US rich people thing has absolutely zero influence from the south. whereas something like WWE incorporates it."

This is actually spot on. American avant-garde types look down on wrestling, I think in large part, because they look down on the South. Southern wrestling is in my opinion the most sophisticated and artistic version of the wrestling morality play. It's like redneck superheroes. But no one in America wants to be a redneck, so wrestling has never quite been accepted as "high art", if such a thing even exists anymore.

I like to say that every "innovation" of the Attitude Era was already used in the territories. I bet no one can give any counter-examples.

the US rich arty people thing has been on my mind recently. i don't think there's exactly a uk equivalent. what we would call pretentiousness is a bit more accepted in the US. i remember k punk writing about anti-intellectualism in the UK posh boy elite and that always felt on the money to me. the UK has / well it used to anyway more of a working class autodidact tradition in the arts writ broadly. i think there's a bit of lamentation around now that that's been lost

the other guy that paul heyman reminded me of was joe rogan. it's that blowhard thing. i get what you mean about it being necessary to be like that to work in an environment like the very weridly structured world of wrestling. these guys have had very odd lives, being in a position to shape a whole artform / entertainment form so comprehensively. i've been around people like him and they are really annoying to work with and annoying to chat to, they take over the whole conversation, fill all the space

its hard to delineate all the affective components of wwf at that time but masculinity, violence and dominance are three connected strands of it. you could do a annoying internet manosphere dweeb reductionist thing and say that these are features of human society everywhere. but that doesn't ring true to me, i think there's something particular going on in america with all that, it seems to burst out of the culture all over the place. i don't particularly want to get into talking about porn on dissensus but i basically think that the particular violent and dominant form that so much of it takes is because so much of it is made by americans and so much of the money that can be extracted from it comes from american pockets. the similarities between the current porn formation and wwe attitude era are obvious. then you also see resonances of all of that in trash talk, in things like g funk / the aftermath thing (which is another part of the version early 00s continuum), the torture porn films of the 00s, the current mainstream hiphop thing of megan thee stallion / dababy / cardi b, the particular forms that us military torture took in the bush era. this is a list off the top of my head, it's not thought through, but what i'm saying is it blossoms everywhere.

in terms of it being exported, we're particularly sensitive or exposed to it in the UK for obvious reasons, but coz of how media production works these cultural threads end up being absorbed not everywhere on the planet but in quite a lot of places

 

[shakahislop]

attitude era wrestling had a sexual component. the half naked girls who occasionally whipped each other, trish stratus and so on. but also the big oiled up men. this isn't exactly something that no-one has noticed before. wrestling reminds me of contemporary dance more than anything else (certainly more than sport). which i don't see a lot of but the stuff i've seen is partly about intimacy, and also involves a lot of touching, highly trained and sculpted bodies, choreography and so on, as well as narrative expressed through movement. its more like dance than theatre or storytelling from my perspective.

 

[shakahislop]

if we're going to judge cultural production by what it does to people, the messages it sends out into a culture and the behaviour it provokes, wwe should be utterly condemned. i don't see why you'd want to revive it

 

[!!!]

if we're going to judge cultural production by what it does to people, the messages it sends out into a culture and the behaviour it provokes, wwe should be utterly condemned. i don't see why you'd want to revive it

That same judgement would then apply to all WWE, thus it would be pointless to revive any part of WWE's history.

The attitude era has plenty of morally questionable or downright wrong stuff in it. But when it comes to messages, Austin vs. McMahon expressed basically the best political message WWE has ever sent. It is the best WWE feud ever after all. The only thing in wrestling that makes a comparable political statement is Dusty vs. Flair, which is in my opinion the all time best feud in all of wrestling. If anything, we should condemn people for not behaving like Austin. Destroy your boss!

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

attitude era wrestling had a sexual component. the half naked girls who occasionally whipped each other, trish stratus and so on. but also the big oiled up men. this isn't exactly something that no-one has noticed before. wrestling reminds me of contemporary dance more than anything else (certainly more than sport). which i don't see a lot of but the stuff i've seen is partly about intimacy, and also involves a lot of touching, highly trained and sculpted bodies, choreography and so on, as well as narrative expressed through movement. its more like dance than theatre or storytelling from my perspective.

There were some really bizarre sexual storylines too, like Perry Saturn falling in love with a mop and Mae Young giving birth to a human hand.

 

[shakahislop]

That same judgement would then apply to all WWE, thus it would be pointless to revive any part of WWE's history.

The attitude era has plenty of morally questionable or downright wrong stuff in it. But when it comes to messages, Austin vs. McMahon expressed basically the best political message WWE has ever sent. It is the best WWE feud ever after all. The only thing in wrestling that makes a comparable political statement is Dusty vs. Flair, which is in my opinion the all time best feud in all of wrestling. If anything, we should condemn people for not behaving like Austin. Destroy your boss!

what was the austin vs mcmahon story? a solid no nonsense working class lad against the cruel boss in a suit? i didn't have sky so i could only watch wrestling when it was on channel 4 or when my mate over the road would agree to tape it for me