For the final day of the three-day on-campus writing retreat I attended (shout-out to Gertrude and Kilmeny for an ace job organising!), I looked to put my critical and creative projects together. So far, I have resisted anything too ‘meta’ in my creative work, but I was curious to see what it would look like on the page, so here we are:
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“This, Jackie, what we’re going to make right here, is confessional art,” Leo, the promotor of UK Supreme Wrestling, said, ushering Jackie Parnaby, the performer Victoria Atlanta, into his office. In his excitement he almost shut the door on Jackie’s companion, who’d been trailing a couple of yards back, engrossed in his coffee. “And who in the blue hell might you be?”
Jackie stepped in, “This is Tom. He’s an academic researcher on our beautiful Business. Today, he’s my advisor.”
“Advising you on what exactly? You’re here to do business, no?”
“Nothing’s decided yet, Leo. I want to know how you see this all playing out.”
Jackie was referring to her now-public affair with Big Money Mitch, fellow UKSW performer, and Leo’s wish to turn this real-life drama into an on-screen angle, casting Jackie’s real-life partner The Greek Alpha as a huge babyface.
Leo sat behind his antique Victorian desk – a gift from his father – logged into Netflix then spun his thirty-four-inch monitor to face Jackie and Tom, who were waiting on the office’s two lime-green cocktail chairs. Jackie knew she’d struggle getting back up from this chair, and from what she’d seen of Tom insistently massaging his lower back, suspected he’d have similar trouble.
In 2005, while WWE performer Matt Hardy was recovering at home from a knee injury, his real-life girlfriend, fellow WWE performer Lita (Amy Dumas) began an affair with Hardy’s friend and also WWE performer Edge (Adam Copeland). Hardy was first fired by the company for revealing this online, before eventually mobilising enough support among the Internet Wrestling Community to persuade the WWE to re-hire him and turn the affair into an on-screen angle. Jackie, Leo and Tom were watching this angle, as a narrative model for Jackie’s own potential infidelity angle.
They started by viewing a scene where Lita and Edge were in-ring, Lita confessing her reasons for cheating on Kane, her on-screen husband, with Edge. The crowd was rabid. Chanting ‘You screwed Matt!’ and ‘We want Matt’. Performing their knowledge of backstage gossip, gesturing towards the now-fired Matt Hardy. The commentators carefully omitted the name of the wronged, allowing the television audience to apply Kane or Hardy, as they saw fit.
“Listen to that heat. White hot,” Leo said. “Pure money.”
The crowd now began chanting ‘Slut’ at Lita.
“Why would I want that?” Jackie said.
“It’s just heat. Heels provoke heat. That’s their job. You’re not thin-skinned.”
“Look, man,” Jackie said, “I wish I’d acted differently, I do. I look at my behaviour and I know it’s wrong. But, let’s be honest, worse things have happened in the world. I didn’t kill anyone. Why would I want that kind of heat?”
Lita and Edge were smirking at the crowd’s hostile reaction as Lita sarcastically delivered her first line: “Throw your stones, go ahead, I’m here … I seem to have forgotten, I’m in a room full of saints, so go ahead and pass judgement”.
“Great line, biblical,” Leo said, “lovely heel stuff.”
Tom glanced at Jackie, and she nodded. He said, “But note how Lita does not ask the confessors to ‘forgive, console and reconcile’. Therefore, she is mocking the confessional mode, and associated Christian morals. This codes the rejection of the idea that the couple are seeking to be absolved from guilt and shame. In fact, they are further inviting the confessor’s moral rejection and refusing to round out the confessional ritual.”
Leo glared at Tom, “So what, you pencil-necked geek!”
Jackie permitted Tom to go on.
“Look at her performance signs. Her, let’s say, over-the-top-ness. Given the complication between reality and fiction – the fans are being presented with a fictional story, which they also read as a proxy for the real story – these performance signs problematise Dumas’ potential ownership of her private narrative; which is to say, Lita is addressing an authentic scandal inauthentically. As Tambling writes on postmodern confession, ‘confession as acting means also, of course, self-fashioning and implies the presence of metonymic displacement and a glossing of the (textual) self’. On this basis, Lita’s rejection of confessional motifs such as guilt and shame acts as another mask for Dumas, opening up another layer of interpretation to the audience. The audience may identify some of Dumas’ truth in Lita’s performance given the previous collapse of star and character boundaries. However, at the same time they may judge Dumas for masking her authentic feelings behind said performance.”
Leo looked to Jackie, “The fuck is he on about? I’m not hearing a good reason not to do business.”
However, Tom was emboldened. He joined Leo on the other side of the desk, took control of the mouse, and found another TV show several months on, by which time Hardy had been re-employed. This was a weekly online magazine show, filmed in a studio, where action from the company’s main shows, Raw and Smackdown, was informally and benignly discussed. Lita was the guest, taking questions from callers. She was sitting with her feet resting on a coffee table, the shot invoking the privacy of domesticity. Soon, Hardy ‘gatecrashed’ the show as a caller, and his disembodied voice demanded that Amy Dumas, not Lita, confessed her sins again. Referring to his previous appearance on Monday Night Raw, Hardy said, “I came out Monday and called him Adam because that’s the only name I know him by, but I didn’t even call you Amy, because the Amy Dumas I know is dead. She is gone. Lita is all I know.”
“See,” Tom said, “by asserting the presence of the character Lita over the person Amy Dumas within the real-life events, Hardy offers the audience hope of a reality intrusion in which the ‘real’ Amy Dumas will re-emerge, as endorsed by Hardy. Overall, these strategies suggest a traditional confessional ritual – rather than the indirect confession Lita first offered to Kane – in which Hardy is the confessor and Dumas the confessant.”
Leo slammed his fist on the table, “Confessors, confessants. What the shit, Jackie? You want to do business or not?”
On the screen, Lita said, “I’m a very private person … private issues are private issues … Enjoy me from 9pm to 11pm, and then don’t worry about who I’m in bed with. I have no obligation to the fans to be Matt Hardy’s girlfriend.”
“Pay attention,” Tom said. “For Dumas, her indirect confession with Kane featured the labour of performing a guiltless confession under the character Lita, in order to assuage her real-life guilt as Amy Dumas. Yet, her second confession requires her to perform a direct confession to Hardy, as Amy Dumas, her ‘authentic’ self. She ends the show, having been re-provoked and re-exhausted not, on this occasion, by the fans, but by Hardy himself. Although she appears to have satisfied her role in the confessional ritual, Hardy’s insistence on more self-interrogation from Dumas, within the authority of his role as fan-favourite confessor, renders this process incomplete. Though her ‘work, shoot confessional’, as I call it, has comprised a character indirect confession and a direct confession from her ‘authentic’ self, her punishment will continue.”
Jackie now said, “Yeah, I think I’ve made my decision, Leo.”
“But wait,” Tom said. “let me explain how this all ends. In the January before her 2006 retirement, Lita and Edge took part in a ‘live sex celebration’ after his WWE Championship win, to main-event Raw. According to journalists, this TV segment gained a viewership rating, ‘bigger than any quarter hour on Raw since 2004’. Did you know, she objected to it, as did Edge, John Cena and several others but Vince [McMahon, then WWE owner] insisted on it, to the point she claimed he told her she would be fired if she didn’t do it. Such corporate coercion suggests the importance of the WWE’s monopoly status in forming the work, shoot confessional, and collapse of Dumas’ private/public boundaries. Her labour, in this case, was primarily the revealing of her private body as part of a performance of the private, sexual act. Behind that, her secondary labour was to hide her reluctance to perform this character work.”
Leo ignored Tom and took Jackie’s hand, “So you’re really not going to do this? You want to be a star don’t you? Get the rocket strapped on you, straight to the top of the Business? Your face on billboards and collector cups, selling out arenas, top merch sellers, your own action figures, collaborations with brands, movie deals?”
Jackie thought on this; her childhood, her dreams, a lifetime’s work.
On seeing this, Tom shouted: “Lita retired in November 2006, a mere eighteen months after the infidelity angle, at the young age of thirty-one, unable to take the fans’ abuse at shows, and on the streets.”
Leo turned off the monitor. “So, no turning lemons into lemonade, Jackie? No doing business? No ‘you’ve made the bed so you might as well lay in it’?”
“Well,” said Jackie, “I didn’t say that.”
Credit: WWE
Work Shoot Confessional 
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