Following Gregory Hollin's article, our interview further explores the wrestler’s world and its synecdochical, if not allegorical, connections to the contemporary post-truth era. Hollin discusses how he entered this field, his thoughts on crafting the ethnography, the wrestlers’ everyday lives, and their ambivalent futures. He argues that the wrestlers’ stories of struggle, if anything, are best described as a form of “tragi-comedy.”

Yichi Zhang [YZ]: I'd like to start by asking about your research process. How did you first gain access to the world of wrestlers? What was your fieldwork experience like?

Gregory Hollin [GH]: Getting access was a classic case of being friends with the right person. You wouldn't know it from this article, but I normally work in the social studies of science and medicine, and at the moment that research is largely concerned with concussion and neurodegenerative disease. In 2018, I was studying brain injury in relation to sports, and I wanted to find three teams impacted by concussion and whom I could follow, for one season each, for a book project called Hard Knock Life (a book which is hopefully forthcoming soon!). I was talking to a friend about all this and must have mentioned that I thought pro' wrestling would be an interesting case study—for reasons that I think are present in the article: the fact that the practice is completely unregulated; the thin line between fiction and reality—and, out of nowhere, that friend said, “Oh I used to be a wrestler and one of my best mates runs a training school. I'll WhatsApp him and see what he says.” So absolutely no skill on my part whatsoever, just good luck.

The research experience overall was a very positive one. A lot of the scholarship on pro' wrestling comes out of Fan Studies and is produced by researchers who already watch, understand, and enjoy wrestling. That definitely wasn’t true of me—I knew very little about it other than the absolute basics and that there were some high-profile cases of brain injury—but the wrestling community was incredibly welcoming and, I think, they really appreciated that this random person from a university was interested in them and taking them seriously. It must be said as well that I think that my views and experiences have changed somewhat in the wake of subsequent events. In retrospect, 2019 was a high-water mark for British wrestling: it was pre-COVID (which was unsurprisingly disastrous for those doing wrestling gig work) and also pre-#SpeakingOut (or “wrestling's #MeToo”), which is discussed in Coda 2 of the piece. I don't think one can think about the British wrestling scene the same way post-#SpeakingOut, but at the time I probably had this quite naïve, fuzzy view of this community that self-sold as “weirdly inclusive” and that was just very different to every other sport I was thinking about.

YZ: The wrestling community you describe in the article strikes me as a group striving to grow and thrive within an environment defined by precarity and doubt. Their stories feel allegorical—please correct me if this interpretation is off—as a reflection of contemporary society and politics. You briefly mentioned Trump in the article, for instance, to make a broader connection. Could you expand on the relationships between your understanding of wrestlers and the political dynamics of a post-truth world?

GH: This is a great question and your choice of “allegorical” is really generative—it's not one I’d really thought of before, but I think it’s a nice word to sit with here. To give a bit of the background: when I decided that I was going to write this piece, I started searching back issues of Cultural Anthropology for any mention of professional wrestling and there is basically nothing—the only piece that I could find with any sustained engagement at all was published over twenty years ago (Metcalf 2001). There is some really useful ethnographic work out there—I learnt a lot from books by Heather Levi (2008), Sharon Mazer (1998), and R. Tyson Smith (2014), just to name three—but that work isn’t being engaged with here to any great extent, from what I can tell. At the same time, when I read the Fieldsights series from 2017 on “The rise of Trumpism,” it is completely saturated with pro' wrestling. Susan Harding (2017) describes Reverend Jerry Falwell by saying that Falwell “plunged into what would later be called the culture wars with the skill of a boxer and the showmanship of a television wrestler.” Michael Taussig (2017) refers to Trump’s “fornicatory obscenity, no holds barred,” making use of a term with its origins in wrestling and made famous by a film starring Hulk Hogan. When Judith Butler (2017) says Trump “goes where we wish, he says what he wants, and he takes what he wants... he allows for identification with someone who breaks the rules, does what he wants, makes money, gets sex when and where he wants,” Butler could easily be describing a pro' wrestler, particularly from the late 1990s when the “product became a bonanza of puerile and juvenile behavior... [that] reveled in profanity, misogyny, coarse racial stereotypes, and sexuality” (Beekman 2006, 134) and “commodified adolescent nihilism...: it aestheticizes and packages unruliness, a refusal to behave and to internalize discipline” (Sammond 2005, 135).

While I am quite charmed by the idea of Susan Harding, Michael Taussig, and Judith Butler gathering on the sofa to watch Friday Night SmackDown, I do acknowledge that’s unlikely.

I fully understand that, if people read this article at all, that connection with Trump will likely be one of the reasons why they choose to do so, especially given that the article is more relevant today than it was when I actually wrote it a year or two back.

In terms of what exactly the connection is between wrestling/post-truth politics/Trump, it’s obviously an interesting question and folks have settled on many different answers. The safest answer is just to say that wrestling offers a vocabulary—the distinction between work and shoot; between marks and smarts; the concept of kayfabe—that, for some people at least, permits some additional insight into what many find to be a completely incomprehensible political environment. Others make the much more arresting claim that wrestling is a key part of Donald Trump’s supervillain origin story—making much of his World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) appearances, the fact that he was threatening to “make WWE great again” many years ago, and so forth. Those connections are certainly there (Linda McMahon, who was “co—chief executive” at WWE is apparently going to run the U.S. Department of Education, and I encourage everyone who has not done so already to watch Hulk Hogan’s speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, because it is wild), but as with so much in wrestling, it’s very hard to pin down exactly what is going on and how deep the connection is.

In the article, I ultimately opted for the word “synecdochical” to describe the relationship between pro' wrestling and what you call here “the post-truth world” because, for me at least, it seems to recognize the links in the dynamics without having any connotations of causality. Quite differently, and added to all that, a line that I quote from Michel Feher guides how I think about this: when trying to understand contemporary work environments, studying “relatively marginal and disempowered groups is not necessarily wrongheaded—especially when these groups seem to indicate where capitalism is heading” (Feher 2018, 207). Given that we’re seeing an increased focus on the precariat, and given that there is an intense concern about “post-truth politics,” I think one can make the argument—obviously, because I’m doing it!—that it is “not necessarily wrongheaded” to have a good look at what is going on within wrestling given that it is a practice that is undeniably shot through-and-through with both precarity and post-truth politics.

YZ: Wrestlers play their distinct roles or characters on stage and often in real life as well, evidenced in the discussion between “work” and “shoot.” I’m curious about two aspects:

• Have you ever observed wrestlers breaking character when they weren’t supposed to?
• Conversely, do you think some wrestlers become so absorbed in the ‘shoot’ that the boundaries between their wrestling persona and their personal life dissolve? Coda 1 seems to hint at such instances.
  

Additionally, do wrestlers engage in other forms of entertainment or creative work outside wrestling? I’m asking to gain insight into their lives beyond the ring.

GH: I'll take your last question first here, just because it’s the easiest to answer: yes, a good number of the wrestlers worked in other forms of entertainment and creative work. To generalize, individuals tended to arrive at the training school through one of three paths. The first group are just those who love wrestling and watching it on tele' and are now giving it a go themselves. The second group are those who arrive at wrestling from other sports—there was a decent splattering of American footballers, gymnasts, mixed martial artists, and rugby players amongst this cohort, for example. The third group are those with broader interests in performance and amongst this number were a fair few actors and a surprising number of stand-up comedians.

Thinking about wrestlers breaking character, or mixing up what is real and what is not, Sharon Mazer said that the “...phantom of the real is at the heart of professional wrestling's appeal” (1998, 167), and I think that continues to be right: folks are always trying to work out when the act has been replaced by something more “real.” Sometimes that “real” is glimpsed through a simple and pretty obvious mistake (or ”botch,” as it was known): a wrestler might start laughing at insults being directed toward them, even though they’re meant to be deeply offended. Or a wrestler might perform a move on their opponent in an unsafe manner, and it might be very clear that they're concerned about the health of that opponent, even though they meant to be hurting them.

More interesting, in many ways, are those times when the boundaries between work and shoot “dissolve,” as you put it, and it really isn’t clear if someone is breaking character, or what have you. There is an exceptionally famous promo—a promo being a segment where a wrestler is just talking, rather than actually wrestling—called the “Pipebomb promo,” performed by a wrestler called CM Punk whilst he was working at the WWE. If you talk to any wrestler for approximately thirty seconds, it is a nigh of certainty that they’ll mention this promo and a large part of its success arises from the fact that everyone was incredibly unsure if this guy had gone off script (spoiler: he had not) because he was talking about all manner of backstage events that you’re just not meant to talk about whilst in character. In that promo, Punk literally says, ”Oops, I’m breaking the fourth wall,” so this was the phantom of the real being invited up onto center stage. Wrestling fans ate it up and now that type of ‘worked shoot’ where real life is directly incorporated into the script is quite common: the story at the center of this article is someone taking that idea of the worked-shoot and applying it to unionization, to give an obvious example.

Now, the general assumption with this sort of thing, and I think this is true more generally, is that if we dig a bit deeper, or if speak to the right people, then it will be possible to find out exactly what the deal this. Fans watching CM Punk's pipebomb promo may have thought it was shoot, but both Punk and the scriptwriters knew it was a work and thus, with access to the right people, we could have found out the truth of the matter. Or, you know, Donald Trump either genuinely believes he won the 2020 U.S. election, or his claims of election interference are nothing more than a self-serving performance. We tend to assume, reasonably enough I think, that it is just option one or the other. When writing this piece, I tried to structure it as a thwarted detective story wherein I am trying to work out what is actually going on—is this unionization effort real or is it just a performance?—and I just fall flat on my face and fail miserably: first I speak to these wrestlers, and they don't know what’s going on. So I go and access these better-informed coaches and scriptwriters, but they don't know either. Finally, I just decide to speak to the man himself, seem to get an answer, but then he signs my goddamn university consent forms under his stage name! I'm literally none the wiser as to whether this is ultimately a work or a shoot, except that now I’m more cynical and wondering if it’s “wrestling all the way down” as I called an earlier draft of the manuscript. The article is probably a failure when it comes to playing up that detective-genre angle, but hopefully the general idea comes across and, as I mentioned in response to your previous question, we can at least find both some comedy and some tragedy.

YZ: Barrett’s “downfall” appears to have significantly impacted unionization efforts to improve working conditions. This brings up two important questions:

• From an intersectional perspective, could you elaborate on the experiences of women wrestlers, both within Three Count and beyond, particularly in terms of their work, shoots, and lives?
• After accounting for these challenges, what potential paths for hope or accountability do you see? How might these efforts address the precarity of the wrestling community and, more broadly, the precarity of our contemporary world?

GH: Gender in wrestling is obviously something that I’ve thought about continuously, and writing this article was no exception. The title is a fairly obvious riff on Rabelais and his world, but I really agonized about it, given the male pronoun. Likewise, while the natural end point of the “detective story” was Coda 1 (the material for which derives from December 2019), it felt really important to acknowledge 2020’s #SpeakingOut movement which occurred after I’d finished my time at the training school. I wrote a blog about my feelings during the movement (Hollin 2020), but long story short: at least two women I interviewed have said publicly that they are victims of abuse and a further attendee at the training school accused another of abusing them (not, I should add, at the school). The female wrestlers, in general, had the same hopes for a career in wrestling, as did the men, and I was often told of the comfort and community they found in pro' wrestling, but these disclosures in 2020 made it exceptionally clear that gender-based violence and discrimination is endemic within pro' wrestling.

In terms of “paths for hope”—either for gender-based violence or economic precarity—I’ll be blunt and say that I really don’t see any, and I can offer a pretty clear example of why I think that way. In 2020, in the midst of #SpeakingOut, Members of Parliament in the U.K.’s House of Commons actually took an interest in pro’ wrestling. An All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Professional Wrestling was formed and set about inquiring into the state of professional wrestling in Britain. Members of the APPG called a number of witnesses from across the wrestling community; received written statements from many interested parties (including me); they paid for my train fare to London to talk about these things at the Houses of Parliament; and they ultimately set about producing this really comprehensive, one-hundred-page report into the state of play and making recommendations for improvements. I cited this APPG Report at the end of this article not as an endorsement, necessarily, but because this level of interest from the state seemed like a possible deus ex machina, a rupture to the internal dynamics that I tried to articulate in the rest of the piece. Now, at the proofing stage of writing this article Kate Herman, the managing editor at Cultural Anthropology, sent me an email saying, basically, “Greg, I can’t find this report anywhere, I've had to go to the Wayback Machine to pull up a copy.” Firstly, that is some amazing editorial attention to detail! Secondly, what hope do we have that these (or any other) policy recommendations will be enacted if they can’t host a report on their website for longer than three years? What a total waste of time. Maybe, probably, that speaks to the argument that precarious workforces need to continue to look beyond the state and traditional trade unions when it comes to activism and sources of solidarity. We obviously can, and should, have hope that particular communities—and individuals within those communities—will seek to improve labor conditions but, and this is obviously what we've been talking about at length, solidarity has proven hard to come by in pro' wrestling given that everyone is continually asking if that solidarity is for “real.”