The right question was never whether professional wrestling was real. We do not debate the unreality of stage performance unless it’s in a ring. What was always interesting about wrestling was that these costumed warriors were mere reflections of the real people who played them. When a character really worked, it’s because they channeled something so interior and so true about themselves, that there was this exhilarating cohesion of identity and performance. Something for an audience to hold on to. The best feuds in wrestling were based on real bad blood between the actors. The line begins to blur so much, in some cases, that it becomes hard to tell whether someone is acting out a character or just being themselves.
When Vince Kennedy McMahon would perform as Mr. McMahon, he would act out his truths about what it means to relentlessly run this cutthroat business of wrestling, what it means to abuse your power and control for women or family status, and what it means when you can no longer separate reality from fiction. McMahon’s truths are that business is everything and any charged reaction from an audience is a good reaction.
So, he played the bad guy. The baddest guy in his wrestling federation. Bad because he was a bad person. A bad person because he was money-hungry, would grow his business at any cost, and because he says he regrets nothing he’s ever done and there are dozens of things to regret in just this documentary. You can call it a hit piece, McMahon has already disavowed the documentary, but if you capture the reality of a subject and they believe it to be a hit piece, who put the hit out on them anyway?
Documentarian Chris Smith has an excellent handle on how to tell stories that blend fiction and non-fiction. The subject matter is a treasure trove here, as the footage is talking heads interspersed with pro wrestling clips. The documentary is also a history of World Wrestling Entertainment, as it was run by McMahon. The footage runs the gambit of eras and defining events — the 6-episode arc goes like this: profile of Vince McMahon; the Hulk Hogan era; the rise of World Championship Wrestling; the Attitude era; the Ruthless Aggression era; and the denouement, a sobering profile of McMahon’s history of sexual assault accusations, as he prepares to sell the company.
At the end of the show, there’s a question of bias. This is both always relevant in every documentary and so implicitly part of the process that it’s too obvious to say it. When a filmmaker films a subject, they have a reason for it. Maybe they are looking for the reason while looking through the camera but what they see will shape what they continue to look for. Through all these arcs of entertainment divided by television-friendly eras, the thing the documentary keeps circling back to are the legal cases. It’s like the filmmaker is saying: here is who this person is, here’s what everyone, including himself, has to say about him, and then each episode ends with a recap of the legal battles McMahon was embroiled with, and we get to think as the audience how it’s becoming pretty clear this guy only cares about money and business to the extent that any ethical issues raised seem obvious to us. He could’ve done anything. Could’ve assaulted anyone. Could’ve abused his power all the time.
The editing pulls the story together. The rise and fall (a cycle repeated) of Mr. McMahon is organized coherently as a working life story. We get to see all of McMahon’s project for what it is. If we’re interested in his development of that, there’s a lot of depth granted to the key characters like Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, Stone Cold Steve Austin, John Cena, and the McMahons themselves.
Wrestling fans are in deep. If you’ve seen the way some of them are into wrestling, they’re walking encyclopedias of the entertainment-sport, they know everything this documentary is going to tell them, and so much more. This is a useful history, for most people outside the story, but for the diehard fan, who this is most for, they already know about it, because it’s part of the product they’ve watched for years. What’s more interesting here, since not much new info that doesn’t exist outside of here gets uncovered, is the interpersonal battle between who this figure is in the ring and in his personal life. What you find out is that nobody, even Mr. McMahon himself, can tell the difference. What happens inside the ring is taken from McMahon’s personal life and his only personal life is the business of wrestling. What is real?