An email exchange in which Tim Kail and Tom Dean discuss how wrestling can reclaim kayfabe
Tom Dean (TD): Dear Tim, I don’t know about you, but when I first found kayfabe being used in political discourse or wider cultural commentary, I was pretty excited. I thought: a-ha, wrestling’s finally getting the recognition it deserves as a complex form of storytelling. Only, I’m not sure it is. I often see kayfabe used as a kind of shorthand for fakeness or post-truth, or Trump’s past appearances on WWE TV might lead to easy analysis of his public speeches as wrestling promos. In folk falling all over each other to point kayfabe towards politics or whatever else, I believe kayfabe is often simplified or misunderstood. And in misunderstanding kayfabe, wrestling as an art form is being devalued.
So I propose over this conversation we reclaim kayfabe as a unique, powerful narrative tool within that beautiful chaos we all love – wrestling. And – I’m really excited about this part – that we try to sketch out its future. To get started, I’ve got a two-part question for you: 1) I’d love to know where you see kayfabe’s place in modern wrestling; and 2) If you had to pick a 21st century wrestling event/happening/segment that’s taken us to this place, what would you go for?
Tim Kail (TK): I really appreciate your desire to reclaim kayfabe for professional wrestling. I think we’ve seen it used in politics for a couple reasons – first, it has the appearance of effectively describing the post-truth world in which we live. It gives shape to a specific circumstance wherein reality and fiction are collapsing into each other. Second, I think it’s just a fun word and using it makes people feel good and smart regardless of whether or not it actually fits the context of a particular discussion.
To answer your first question, I see kayfabe as an ever-reliable narrative tool professional wrestling can always access whenever it wants to. As for its place in modern wrestling I have a few thoughts.
For kayfabe to function well in modern wrestling a promotion would have to actively want to use it in a consistent way. There’d need to be a conceit. That conceit could be anything, as outlandish as “Wrestlers in outer space!” or as grounded as, “We are a legitimate sports league.” But all the narratives would have to emanate from that perspective and maintain that unique application of kayfabe.
For your second question related to a specific event, I feel a little self-conscious pointing to CM Punk’s “Pipe Bomb” in 2011 just because it’s such a seemingly easy answer and it has received the most coverage. I also think it’s worth mentioning what I regard as the indie equivalent of that event, Drew Galloway’s promo when he returned to ICW in 2014. I don’t know if this promo has a name, but I like to call it “Galloway’s Stand”.
It must be said though, that Punk’s pipebomb remains a great pro-wrestling promo. The discussion around it often fails to acknowledge the simple craft of it – Punk isn’t merely airing his grievances and dismantling the architecture of a creatively bankrupt company…he’s selling a pay-per-view.
When you expand your view into its larger impact on the fandom and the culture of wrestling, I think its effectiveness simply as a promo selling a pay-per-view match gets a little lost (again, because people really like being smart and having smart discussions – something I’m even guilty of and demonstrating in this very discussion we’re having!). I view the cultural impact of Punk’s Pipe Bomb on a personal level – I ask “What did it do for me?” For me, it exposed me to the language of professional wrestling, specifically the terms “Shoot” and “Work”, which are just a hop, skip, and a leap from comprehending the depth of kayfabe. People may not remember that in the wake of Punk’s promo fans really didn’t know where the fiction ended and the truth began. The world was very different in 2011 – there was still a strain of naiveté in the wrestling culture – things weren’t dissected and robbed of their magic instantaneously on social media quite the way they are today. Fans picked the speech apart line by line in an effort to figure out the reality of the speech. I remember one of my friends saying, “He didn’t mention TNA, so I think it’s a work”.
And this finally brings me to what I regard as the most beneficial narrative function of kayfabe in the medium that originated it: the creation of a scenario wherein the audience’s ability to distinguish between reality and fiction fails. This is the purest theatrical benefit of kayfabe.
I’d love to hear your thoughts in response to anything I’ve said, especially if you think there are features of kayfabe I’ve missed. I’d also like to know how you imagine professional wrestling reclaiming this word/narrative device and why that’s even important? Does kayfabe have unforeseen beneficial, or even negative, implications for the art of wrestling?
TD: So ICW and Drew Galloway is linked to a good example of why I think we need to reclaim kayfabe. There’s a BBC podcast called Sideways, featuring an episode that explores the theme of ‘grudges’ through the Drew Galloway/Jack Jester (Lee Greig) feud you referenced. This podcast also includes interviews with psychology professors and self-help writers, and does at one point theorise that holding grudges might not be 100% unhealthy, but this is its conclusion:
“That’s what Lee and Drew’s story teaches us – when the lines are blurred, it’s easy to lose ourselves in the darkness of our emotions, especially when we’ve been carrying resentment for a long time. The key lies in finding a balance between acknowledging our legitimate grievances while allowing the space for true forgiveness.”
Now, I’m not really sure what the Average Joe is supposed to learn from the highly unique situation Drew and Lee find themselves in, or how that links to a balance of acknowledgement/forgiveness. Tim, you quite rightly point out how well Drew’s promo (and Punk’s Pipe Bomb) serves the fiction, so with this in mind, the podcast had an opportunity to explore how fictional grudges help us to process and understand real grudges. Instead, as with many of these podcasts, it obsesses over the blurred lines without making any deep effort to untangle the threads of fiction and reality, and why that serves an ultimately fictional narrative. The host doesn’t acknowledge that the wrestlers may be working him (and they do seem to be, at least some of the time), and they may even be working each other. He leaves us no wiser on how we decide what constitutes a ‘legitimate grudge’. And we’re denied the possibility that kayfabe might help us make this decision, in the way that autofiction writing might help us better understand our inner selves. The result for pro-wrestling is that kayfabe has been misunderstood, and it’s been reduced to a cheap trick. I think this is what it comes down to: kayfabe is unique and so has a lot of untapped potential as a narrative form. As you say, it’s an ‘ever-reliable narrative tool’, and I think that’s due to it being so agile, so versatile. I worry about what denying kayfabe’s uniqueness might mean for pro-wrestling’s future. Take these definitions of kayfabe from Urban Dictionary:
- to gaslight
kayfabe can be used as gaslight is used - Referring to a person as an adjective. Flakey person, Uncaring, Inconsiderate, Full of bullshit, But you still hold them high in standards.
- To not be genuine, to lie or be fake around people.
Call me a doom-monger if you want, but I always find it a fun theoretical exercise to take a line of thought for a walk down a path and see where it leads. And in this case, I think there’s a chance that the use of ‘kayfabe’ in everyday life could, given the way language evolves, change its meaning. And so the WWE – a conservative storyteller, always eager to tap into the mainstream – could embrace these new meanings, continue to deny us anything resembling nuanced narrative, and lose track of the storytelling joys pro-wrestling can offer. And notice, all those definitions were negative – there’s no acknowledgement of kayfabe as something that can offer hope or inspiration.
Let me try to illustrate kayfabe’s uniqueness and possibilities with the 2005 Lita/Hardy/Edge love triangle (for anyone not familiar, here’s my timeline of events). By the way, Tim, I will get to your question about the negative side of kayfabe, because it definitely applies here, but let’s put that to the side for one second. In the narrative arc of the Lita love-triangle, we see Kane initially stand in for an absent Hardy, to permit (and monetise) the fans’ negative reaction against Lita. Then Hardy is brought back to retell the story with an extra layer of reality, meaning he (real-life partner of Lita/Amy Dumas) and Kane (fictional partner of Lita) are co-existing in the same space. And at the end of it, the fans still believe Hardy is going to legitimately kill Edge. In what other narrative form could this occur? What other narrative form could be flexible and agile enough to respond to the fans’ wishes, re-integrate Hardy, and bind two re-tellings of the real story together in a way that doesn’t completely alienate the audience? And this shows the potential and problems of kayfabe as a narrative form. What should be the end goal of any narrative? To elicit our emotions, to make us feel connection, through character and ideas, right? Well, maybe on that level the story fails, unless the connection the WWE was hoping to provoke was men hating on women. But this could’ve been a unique and interesting way to explore infidelity. Imagine if Lita had been a heel against Kane, but then once Hardy came back he went too far (though I dread to imagine what this would mean in 2005), and there was a double-turn after which we sympathised with Lita and saw her perspective? I’m not saying this would make good TV, but I’m just trying to show that kayfabe can hold many possibilities.
But we can’t ignore the negative side. Amy Dumas had to perform and then re-perform a real-life traumatic event, copping more fan abuse every week. The boundaries between her public and private life were broken down. Out of guilt, she felt she had to ‘do business’. So her work became suppressing this real-life guilt – which she can’t show on-screen because it isn’t part of the storyline – in order to perform glee at inflicting pain. In the end, Dumas, who let’s not forget was a super popular female performer at this time, retired at the age of 31. My point is when kayfabe strays into this confessional realm, there can be real bad consequences for the wrestlers.
Anyway, I could talk about the 2005 love triangle all day… Tim, I’d love to know if you think my concerns above are founded or if I’m doom-mongering a little? Where do you find the hope and potential in kayfabe?
TK: I don’t think you’re doom-mongering. There are tangible downsides to actively collapsing the barrier between reality and fiction and you’ve pointed to a perfect casualty of that process in Lita’s career. This points to some of the limits of kayfabe. I don’t think we can trust a massive capitalist organization that deals primarily in spectacle and broad stroke storytelling like the WWE to handle a narrative device as complex as kayfabe very well. Put another way, I don’t have faith in big organizations to approach such a device responsibly. And I think storytellers at the professional level have to think responsibly and carefully. Otherwise organizations will simply harvest the real-life trauma of a performer for financial gain. I consider Paige disparaging Charlotte’s brother as a perfect example of this. You could tell it legitimately hurt Charlotte and it all just felt icky. The results will almost always be destructive, sapping a performer of their narrative and creative power. If an artist or showrunner is going to actively blur the lines between reality and fiction (in the interest of creating a new, more emotionally resonant fiction) they need to do so with a level of thoughtfulness I don’t think most people are willing to give. For the average creative person, kayfabe (or devices like it) is kind of like a shiny new toy. I remember being an adolescent and loving movies where the main character broke the fourth wall and talked directly to the camera. They seemed so powerful, like they had control of the movie. But I think that’s who such narrative devices initially appeal to – an adolescent-level mind. I remember being a young artist thinking I would “break the rules” and that I’d be cool and subversive. Look at what a genius I am! Damn the man!
I’m certain this makes me sound pretentious, but I mean it in earnest: if you’re going to experiment with the form of a particular medium you can’t merely do it because it’s cool or fun or experimental. It has to be thought through carefully and the act of using any narrative device should be germane to the story you’re telling. I actually think it’s much harder to tell a straightforward, structured story with a beginning, middle, and an end than it is to tell a story that manipulates a form. The reason I think this is very simple: it’s incredibly difficult to convince an audience to suspend their disbelief and to sustain that state of suspension for the duration of any work of art. Breaking the fourth wall is kind of like a cheap pop – a quick and easy way to elicit an “Oh!” reaction from the audience.
All of that said, I see limitless positive potential with kayfabe specifically in professional wrestling. It’s entirely up to any particular promotion to establish a consistent narrative universe and then harness the power of its conceit to inspire stronger emotional responses from the crowd. There could be “rules” like “don’t use social media out of character” or “if you’re supposed to be injured don’t use that limb in public”. If I was in charge I’d even order heels and babyfaces to travel separately – I actually like some of the traditional kayfabe rules and mindsets. I like them because professional wrestling is an art where there’s so much potential for the theatre of a particular event to bleed over into the theatre of real life. A recent example of this was a video of Sami Zayn on the highway supposedly caught by a fan (I write “supposedly” because there’s no way for me to confirm the veracity of this event). Sami raised the WWE Title up and shouted and then sped off. It watched like a video of sasquatch being caught in the wild. It gave him a sense of being ever-present and powerful. It also was the exclamation point put on a week of funny little photos and videos of Sami with the title. So you were able to follow it like a little sub story that enhanced what you’d seen on-screen. More of that please!
Kayfabe represents a commitment to narrative that I think a lot of performers just don’t have the mind or stomach for.
So I find hope in kayfabe’s ability to create a massive narrative universe wherein it’s harder to distinguish between reality and fiction and the result is a more significant emotional investment from the crowd and bigger pops. I think there are other examples I’m likely missing, though. What are some kayfabe ideas you have for wrestling to use? How can wrestling lean into the positive benefits of kayfabe and not dip into pure exploitation? Also, is kayfabe just too big an idea for a massive organization to handle well and can it really only work on an individual basis?
p.s. I’d like to add, despite some of the misgivings I have about big entertainment corporations, that storytellers should feel free to use as many narrative devices as they want so long as they enhance drama. That, for me, is the basic function of pro-wrestling’s kayfabe. It enhances drama. It has limitless potential in the way it can deepen our understanding of and appreciation for the inner lives of these wrestling characters. To not use kayfabe is almost like a writer thinking, “I’m not going to use words in this novel”. That writer would then produce a book with blank pages. Kayfabe can provide color and depth in professional wrestling, in a way that’s very much unique to it.
TD: I think there are two things you’ve mentioned there that really chime with my own research – big corporations and freedom of performers. I’ve framed my academic research, and much of my novel, from 2001-2019 because in that period the WWE had no real competition. It was effectively a monopoly (sorry TNA fans!), which means that Lita might not have liked using her real life in storyline but if she wanted to keep the same star status and pay packet, then she was really left with little choice. Her freedom around how that reality/fiction line is blurred is very limited unlike, say, a writer of autofiction, or writer/performer of a confessional stage show or stand-up set. And that’s why it’s so great that AEW exists (or any true competition with weekly TV and financial stability). A wrestler can then choose which organisation fits their own ideas about storytelling and kayfabe. That way, there’s more chance of the storytelling balance between wrestler/booker/crowd shifting back towards wrestler and crowd. This, after all, is central to the art of professional wrestling and its uniqueness – the wrestler’s ability to improvise by reading the crowd. This is the level of reality that’s important. In its unpredictability, new situations and ideas can emerge. Whereas if we’re heavily reliant on a booker… well, any WWE viewer of the past twenty-five years can tell you how that goes – for the most part, conservative, predictable storytelling.
Having said that, I think the Bloodline angle – from Roman Reigns’ heel turn in 2020 to Cody Rhodes ‘finishing the story’ in 2024 at WrestleMania – is a good example of how the WWE is capable of telling a superb long-term, nuanced and emotional story, and therefore is an example of kayfabe offering hope. From this whole run, the only reality intrusions that stick out in my mind are Sami Zayn making the Usos and Roman laugh and break character, then the crowd’s reaction in the WM40 build when The Rock took Cody’s spot. The storytellers didn’t need to rely on breaking the fourth wall. And I should say at this point, not only do I agree with your point about fourth-wall breaking being cheap and feeling adolescent, it’s also very much of a time, i.e. late 90s to early 2000s, when postmodernism and metafiction were still relatively new and shiny. Now it’s 2026 and we’ve seen all that, it’s no longer impressive or subversive or shocking (I do still pop for Deadpool though!). So, in the Bloodline angle, when those two reality intrusions occured, they were used specifically to garner babyface sympathy, and so didn’t feel cheap. The reality intrusion didn’t become ‘the spectacle’. The spectacle remained an excellent fictional story that was based around family and wrestling belts. I was gutted when first Sami Zayn then Jey Uso couldn’t dethrone the Tribal Chief. I was jumping around when Cody finally ‘finished the story’. Emotional responses from a story of fiction. That is what we’re told by Triple H again and again is the WWE’s raison d’être. And, by the way, we’re told this across various levels of reality – within kayfabe in the ring, out of kayfabe in more corporate-style interviews, on WWE Unreal. Yet we can clearly see across all these levels of reality that this claim is rarely true.
So what needs to happen? As far as some kind of return to kayfabe, I’m onboard with the consistency you say we need. Some kind of baseline to work from. I’m not completely sure about a return to old-style kayfabe but I’m open to it, and I do think kayfabe’s flexibility makes this a real possibility – it wouldn’t require some hard, publicised reset. And this is where MJF pops into my head for a couple of reasons. Firstly, his media interviews in character. Although we know fine well he’s maintaining kayfabe, I’d urge anyone to consider if the character MJF feels less authentic than CM Punk? For me, this is about consistency. We hear interviews with Phil Brooks, we see footage of CM Punk backstage via Unreal and YouTube, we hear him espouse his values in-ring on the mic, but are we presented with a consistent and coherent character? I’d say not. Is he ‘the voice of the voiceless’, or is he just there to make money? Who knows. The two things are not compatible. Whereas MJF is MJF at all times. I could hazard a clear guess at what he’d do in most situations, not because he’s predictable, but because he’s such a well-wrought character that has been drawn over different layers of reality, while maintaining a fictional stance. Then there’s the thing you said about ‘theatre bleeding over into reality’. The subtlety of this really appeals to me. It reminds me how MJF’s Jewishness has been portrayed on-screen. In modern fiction writing there’s an insistence that, for example, a Black character shouldn’t be solely defined by their race, or a gay character shouldn’t be solely defined by their sexuality. That’s to say, these things can be true, and deepen character, while also not being the focus of the story. And I think that’s similar to MJF. Over the years, we’ve learned about MJF’s Jewishness; it sometimes plays a part on-screen, but often doesn’t. We understand him more. It adds something to his motivations. But he isn’t MJF the Jewish Man, he’s just MJF. I feel like this is what we keep coming back to – kayfabe deepening character, which serves the fictional story. This kind of subtlety, these small brush strokes, linked with creative freedom for wrestlers, I think, is the key to avoiding exploitation, and means that big corporations could handle kayfabe.
Okay, it seems like CM Punk is constantly on the edges of this conversation, so why don’t we use him as a case study. Tim, how would you handle the CM Punk character kayfabe-wise to get him back somewhere near his 2011 level? I’m not necessarily talking fantasy booking here, just principles that might return a deeper, well-rounded character.
TK: CM Punk’s current characterization is really disheartening for me. His matches have been excellent, some even great, but his promos, with one exception (his very simple promo about winning The Royal Rumble one or two years ago), have been severely lacking and conceptually dubious. He operates in a few incongruent spaces within the fiction. On the one hand he’s still “the voice of the voiceless” by way of nostalgia, on the other he’s simply a “good veteran wrestler”, and on the other third mutant hand he’s wrestling to “make money, not friends.” I love your concept of reality intrusions. In Punk’s case, when he said after his promo, directly into the camera, “I’m here to make money, not friends” I view that as an entirely unnecessary reality intrusion. I had a viscerally negative reaction when he said that – it felt like being punched in the stomach. All I thought was, “You didn’t have to say that.” It’s not an especially babyface sentiment. That could easily be his real-world motivation. I just don’t want to know that because it reduces the depth and integrity of his performance to financial gain.
I’d be less frustrated by this if he didn’t talk about “doing business” in that pseudo-macho way you often hear Triple H model. It’s as if these wrestlers are insecure about being artists and talking about money is a way of asserting a very male idea of “competition” and “success”. I’ve often heard John Cena in interviews talk about being a storyteller. That’s what I want to hear from my wrestlers. Keep the finances to yourself! In sharing that side of their motivation they lessen the power of their character. It’s like watching your favorite wrestler do laundry. I want my wrestling characters to be motivated by ideals. “Making money” could be a character’s ideal – even their primary ideal – but it would have to be consistent with their character (I’m thinking of someone like MJF). It’s not consistent with the Punk I knew in 2011, which signifies a need to evolve.
I apologize for being bleak in this regard. Punk is no.2 on my top 5 favorite wrestlers list and I’ve found it difficult to maintain my fandom of him. He doesn’t make it easy.
I don’t want to see him mimic his past self (we saw his WrestleMania “pipebomb” where he asked to lower the ticket prices and it was awful) but I also don’t want him to become a “corporate heel” even if that would align with his real-life values. It’s just strange to see him become “the company man”. It’s an affront to the person I was convinced to believe in all those years ago. What are your thoughts on Punk? Any better ideas than me on how to salvage his character through the use of kayfabe?
I’d also be curious to know if you’ve had a similar experience to mine with an artist in any medium? Has there ever been a moment in your life, in terms of art, where seeing how the sausage gets made took away from your enjoyment of that art?
TD: Ironically, in 2011 Punk was one of the first wrestlers I heard call wrestling an art. And the thing with that line, ‘make money, not friends’, is I can easily imagine Punk defending it as typical of his own authenticity. Put it in conversation with this line from his pre-WrestleMania promo this year, ‘I won’t trade my authenticity for approval’, and there’s an argument for character continuity. But what Punk – or his bosses – would be failing to appreciate is that there are many layers of authenticity at play in pro-wrestling, and as you allude to, we don’t need to see them all. This makes me think, one issue here might be pro-wrestling constantly trying to tap into other cultural forms, which goes back as far as post-Screwjob when McMahon referenced Seinfeld, King of the Hill and Jerry Springer amongst others. Perhaps pro-wrestling should just be comfortable with what it is, in all its over-the-top-ness and clear code of good and evil. This wouldn’t mean a lack of nuance, just a shift away from this emphasis on reality intrusions. I’ve just watched the Grayson Waller promo from NXT and what I’m about to say is absolutely not a slight on Waller, but I found it embarrassing to watch. Some of the beats were almost identical to the Pipe Bomb – it felt like a parody. And yet online, a lot of people are eating it up. What’s this about? Is it that we’re starved of good promos as wrestling fans? Or does it go deeper; are we that starved of authenticity as a society that we’re willing to accept this fairly unconvincing representation of it? I’d love to know your thoughts, Tim.
But anyway, back to Punk. I think there’s a clear case for us hearing less from Phil Brooks. This doesn’t have to be for ever. But I do think it would stabilise the character CM Punk. I completely agree that corporate heel Punk wouldn’t solve anything, in fact it’d be tiresome as hell. Wily veteran might be the way to go. Most importantly, keep it in the realm of fiction. We need to anchor the Pipe Bomb firmly to the CM Punk of 2011, see it as part of that character’s life at that specific time, rather than a moment Punk can keep revisiting or any underused superstar can plug in and play. To move on from the Pipe Bomb as a ‘moment’, which I think would help re-orient Punk the character in the world of fiction, Punk needs to remind us of his fictional competitive achievements post-Pipe Bomb – beating John Cena at MitB, the long title run, the success of his alliance with Paul Heyman etc. Keep directing everything back to this fictional competition, where the most important things are titles.
As for your question about art more generally, it brings to mind a pet peeve in fiction writing, both on-screen and on the page. This isn’t quite seeing the sausage get made, but when characterisation is thin and the dialogue is poor, I start to hear the writer’s voice and their world view. In other words, the veneer of fiction falls away. Now, obviously all the time we’re being fed writers’ world views through fiction, but we want this to happen covertly through good storytelling, right? Take the show, Hacks, which I’ve been watching a while now. For those who don’t know, the conceit is an ageing female comedy star takes on a young female writer and so her career is revitalised. There’s this interesting examination of friction and education between generations. Generally speaking, this is a good show, but occasionally the two main characters get into an ethical debate where it feels too staged, and I can hear the writer preaching as clear as day. To take this back to wrestling, the WWE thinks they get around this by laying these structures bare. As you said, we’re constantly fed this idea of ‘best for business’ where ticket sales and merch sales and drawing money and who’s in charge are part of the story. But this seems to draw us away from a convincing fictional realm. Though the story of ‘the business’ seems a deep-rooted North American (and English) wrestling trope at this point, I do think AEW is slightly better than the WWE in this regard. Let’s for a second assume an open-mindedness within the WWE that likely doesn’t exist. Which other wrestling promotions do you think the WWE could take inspiration from in their use of kayfabe?
TK: I think we are absolutely starved for authenticity. The problem is we live in a world where the barriers between reality and fiction have broken down so thoroughly that it’s very easy to fake being authentic or a “truth teller”. For example, one of the reasons Trump is beloved by his supporters is that they perceive him as being authentic. In reality, he’s a veracious liar and a con man who dog whistles a large portion of the American populace who want the nation to remain primarily male, white, and straight. But the way in which he “states his mind” or “tells it like it is” comes off as honest and appealing to certain groups. We live in an age where it’s very easy for people to masquerade as “truth tellers” by being antagonistic or transgressive with the political opposition, whatever side of the ideological spectrum they’re on. No one has to be held responsible for their views in such a world or contend with the consequences of their words – opinions are hurled like hand grenades into the public sphere. Combine that situation with people’s hunger for “truth” and you’ve got an ideological powderkeg. And the frustrating thing about it is that those purporting to be authentic by pushing a particularly raw emotional button in society are little more than “debate me guys”. They’re still lying. Perhaps not in the exact way we’re accustomed to politicians and commentators lying – we’d grown comfortable with a subdued form of lying. They’re angrier and more bombastic than they used to be, but they’re still liars.
I think it’s much harder, whether in wrestling or reality, to give an authentic performance in-kayfabe, which is what I think Punk did in his 2011 Pipebomb. What I mean by this is that if a wrestler wants to be authentic they need to not “break the fourth wall”, but instead speak from the heart, the heart of their character, and perform the emotions of their character in a consistent way. That requires a degree of skill most performers or artists just don’t have. This also reflects the basic complexity of art – we use fiction to tell the truth. That dynamic is complex and I don’t think artists (and particularly the public) are encouraged enough to unpack that duality. My concern is that the average person’s ability to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic has been corrupted. I think wrestling fans have literally gotten worse at sussing this out. They’re more easily duped, and being duped is not the same thing as being worked. I want to be worked, because that means I’ve been moved emotionally by an artist with skill.
To answer your final question, I think all pro-wrestling organizations would do well to study New Japan Pro-Wrestling if they want to reestablish kayfabe. New Japan presents professional wrestling with the utmost sincerity and doesn’t deviate from their perspective. From their style of presentation to their commentary, everything is consistent with the presentation that professional wrestling is a sport. I’ll always remember the first time I saw Wrestle Kingdom. I felt like I’d arrived fifty years into the future where professional wrestling was on the level of any Olympic sport. I appreciate that consistency in perspective and consistency is at the heart of kayfabe. WWE might be consistent in their presentation (and I’m being very literal about their camerawork and structural efficiency – how they block segments and matches, etc), but they’re decidedly inconsistent when it comes to their perspective. I can’t say what Raw and SmackDown are actually about. There is no narrative foundation for WWE’s wrestling universe and there hasn’t been since The Attitude Era. What might a narrative foundation be? Simple: we are where the best athletes in the world come to compete. Instead of that we get a variety show that fluctuates in quality and perspective wildly from one moment to the next.
In an age where pop-culture is defined by massive, interconnected fictional universes with rules and consistent aesthetic principles, it’s pretty surprising WWE hasn’t caught on to what modern viewers like. They take shortcuts – it sounds like that Grayson Waller promo is a short cut. It’s much harder to take the time to construct fiction that deals in real human emotions. I haven’t given up hope though. WWE has demonstrated an ability to still tell good stories whenever it wants to. A perfect example of this, for me, was when Jacob Fatu challenged Roman Reigns for the World Championship following WrestleMania. It was a simple story about family and the desire to strike out on one’s own. It was relatable and I cared about the characters. No one needed to break the fourth wall. In fact, doing so would have completely derailed the authenticity of the story. I’d like to see more of that in all of my pro-wrestling.
This has been a productive conversation for me. I feel like I’ve come away with a clearer idea of what I like about kayfabe and how professional wrestling can reclaim it. My main takeaway is that kayfabe is about commitment and consistency. An artist has to be willing to commit to the inner-life of their character and then be almost rigidly consistent in the way they present that inner-life to the audience. It’s my hope that some young wrestler reads what we’ve discussed and feels inspired to think deeply about their art and carve out their own perspective in it.
How about you? Have you found this conversation useful, and what is it about kayfabe, ultimately, that appeals to you?
TD: Extremely useful. I think what we keep coming back to are simple pillars of storytelling – using fiction to reveal truth about the world, consistency, heart, emotions, inner self. If these things were in place, it’d likely be easier to forge connections with characters. Kayfabe is not a gimmick; it’s a way to tell a story. I’m reminded of a quote from the academic Benjamin Litherland about how kayfabe means different things at different times and in different places. It shifts. No one can put the genie back in the bottle and convince us that pro-wrestling is genuine competition or that Duke ‘the Dumpster’ Droese is a real-life garbage man. But that doesn’t mean pro-wrestling can’t prioritise a sealed, powerful fiction over a fiction/reality blend. Max Landis’ video essay Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling says, “Wrestling isn’t a sport. It’s a TV show about a wrestling show.”. Triple H himself has even publicly said words to this effect. All of which tallies perfectly with what you’re saying about New Japan.
As for what appeals to me about kayfabe, despite asking for a return to sincerity, I’m still impressed by kayfabe’s flexibility. It offers so many narrative possibilities, and I believe this does make it a unique storytelling tool. All I’m saying is let’s be strategic, move with the times, and think about what we lose when obsessing over reality intrusions. I don’t know if we’ve set out kayfabe’s future in detail here, but this conversation has left me with hope that pro-wrestling can recover a more consistent artistry, which could prevent the misunderstanding of kayfabe in wider culture. Thanks Tim!
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