ABSTRACT
Professional wrestling is a curiosity that lingers on the margins of American culture, sustained by our insatiable need for entertainment and waxing and waning in cycles that defy explanation. The first essay in Roland Barthes' classic study of French culture, Mythologies, is devoted to wrestling. Wrestlers show great inventiveness in developing the submission holds and derive a certain amount of identity from having a distinctive or unusual one. Many of the wrestlers have nicknames, especially the heroes and the villains. One of the more interesting aspects of televised wrestling is the interviews between announcers and wrestlers. In some wrestling programs, as a matter of fact, wrestlers spend almost as much time at the microphone as they do wrestling. To the extent that viewers of wrestling have given up on political participation and adopted a fatalistic (or stoic) stance towards the world, the political education wrestling provides is most unfortunate.
