Barthes claims that, in the United States, the formulaic violence of such spectacles offers audiences an Armageddon in miniature - the ultimate battle between good and evil neatly confined to a ring and fought by muscular, costumed proxies. In his 1957 book Mythologies, the French critic Roland Barthes speaks of wrestling (“ le catch”) in precisely these terms. Yet unlike other sporting events, whose pleasures and pains can linger, the existential impact of wrestling is both more short-lived and also somehow more transcendental. Again and again, a caricaturized combatant, after much choreographed struggle, eventually pins another to the ground. The dramaturgy of professional wrestling, by contrast, offers the catharsis-like effects that life lacks. Most lives look (from the outside) and feel (from the inside) like a bundle of frayed nerves, loose ends that never tie. WE DON’T OFTEN GET a true catharsis - that release of feeling born of a decisive resolution, whether euphoric or tragic.
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