Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage by Eero Laine (review)

Crack any serious text on professional wrestling and comparisons to theater will appear, usually within the first few paragraphs. Researchers since the immortal Roland Barthes deployed such comparisons—wrestling is acting after all. Often, professional wrestling scholarship uses some type of theater-performative framework, whether interpreting wrestler actions, personas, or storylines. Some scholars, without a hint of shame, deploy the common metaphor that pro-wrestling is a "soap opera for men." Others see through the glitz and glam of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) performances to analyze symbolism, representation, or politics. A study of the artform at hand, theater, has taken a back seat largely because of who is doing the writing. My personal knowledge of theater generally started and ended with a costume-design major as a college roommate, so the idea of theater studies is far outside my repertoire. The good news is that scholars now have work by Eero Laine to elucidate the theater-ignorant public.

Eero Laine, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, departs from the all-toocommon analytical frameworks in professional-wrestling studies and to its core artform of theater with a deep dive into the meaning of labor. The very concept of the book is essentially proven in the first few pages. The WWE, a publicly traded corporation headed by Vince McMahon, is, in Laine's interpretation, the world's largest touring theater company, a point difficult to dispute in any meaningful way. The argument continues with a natural flow into the effect this has on the wrestlers themselves. Professional wrestling is an example of productive theater, meaning live performances financially benefiting a corporation, to an assertion that it is the only major global corporation making live theater performance central to its business model. Theater, of course, encompasses far more than onstage actions but includes "bodies, representation, character, plot, spectacle, labor, [and] performance," not to mention the artform's place within global capitalism (123). At the core of Laine's analysis are the wrestlers themselves. Wrestlers work, sometimes in highly dangerous ways, for the benefit of others in an ephemeral trade, a point previously made clear by others. Laine's largest contribution comes when placing wrestlers within the theater industry, showing how their work is signed away, commodified, and made replicable on a global scale. Theater is unlike anything else in this way.

Laine's chapter on hardcore wrestling—when wrestlers intentionally wound each other with chairs, ladders, thumbtacks, and light tubes—is particularly strong. Most viewers see this subgenre as a vicious spectacle little more than sadomasochism incarnate. Fans of this subgenre can be further characterized as bloodthirsty idiots, and plenty of governing bodies have sought to ban such events. Nevertheless, Laine places hardcore wrestling through the lens of labor. "While the theatrical frame of professional wrestling contains [hardcore wrestling] to a point," she writes, "the labor of the wrestlers bleeds through and reminds us what unregulated capital looks like" (76). It is impossible not to note that the use of "bleeds" here serves multiple purposes, but either way hardcore wrestling's growth came directly from international markets and deregulation. Hardcore wrestlers quite literally bleed for their audience, the ultimate toll of the artform's physicality, and are compensated very little, thus highlighting the reality that professional wrestlers have long been exploited by a wealthy industry.

At times, Laine's arguments fade when theory gets dense and some secondary ideas are lost in the shuffle. Chapter 1 jumps right into Adam Smith and Karl Marx, but the analysis is clear with enough popular culture references to pull the reader into the narrative. At a few points, the reader may be left hoping Laine lets theory slide away for a few pages to show more wrestling, although these are few in number. The book also begins as most dissertations do, with an extensive literature review, but, in this case, it is highly welcome. Few such surveys of wrestling writing have been undertaken and none from...