FWIW, I tried “The Geography of the Imagination “ nearly 20 years ago. I don’t really remember it, except that it was pretentious bilge and I didn’t get through it.
The only shocking thing about McMahon is this stuff was going around 2021-22. I was convinced an absolute metric ton of stuff dating back decades would come out about him and other big names of wrestling when #MeToo was at its height in 2017 (although this may just be because it turns out he seemingly spent half his budget on NDAs).
Think about it and the business has all the same pitfalls and dangerous incentives as the Hollywood acting world. In that your booking and success is ultimately almost entirely at the whim of the big guys with big male egos at the top.
Yet unlike the Hollywood world, where there is a conformity to signing up to a certain feminist girlpower worldview which got exposed as fake and full of hypocrisy in some cases. 90s and 00s attitude era WWE especially was an unashamedly ultra-red blooded male product (of the type that has basically become extinct now in mainstream culture) and had a locker room of hyper masculine men probably injected with goodness know how many gallons of extra testosterone and human growth hormone, playing hyper masculine characters, combined with at the time some women hired out of beauty contests and model catalogues. You could hardly design an environment more conducive to some quite bad sexual harassment stories.
Indeed McMahon in hey day as on screen character basically acted as a Harvey Weinstein type boss degrading women. It was hardly a stretch to think given the power over his female employees he had he might be like that in real life. Probably loads of other big powerful names at the top of the industry were all probably in on it too and lucky the stink seems to be going solely to him right now.
Him having a scandal about treatment of women is as surprising as if you told me same about other characters like Trump, Mayweather, Andrew Tate etc (all who just like McMahon virtually indistinguishable in real life from what you would imagine their WWE heel villain personas might be).
However as you noted in your "Vince is America" article, what made McMahon perhaps unique and work as a perhaps all time entertaining TV character, was just like those named above, everybody basically has always known he was a real life major league bully, & misogynist, and all round ego driven asshole, is that despite that he allowed what was basically his real life character to be the get whacked about with steel chairs, on screen humiliated, his perversions to be butt of jokes and storylines, and get shoved up a giant's butt. And because the fact everyone basically knew he was such a behind the scenes asshole, so he barely needed to act to really convince anybody, it probably made it work to make it more enjoyable for audiences to suspend belief get caught up in the moment. By contrast it is inconceivable that other real life heel characters like Trump or Tate would ever willingly allow their characters to get even gently laughed at. As you can also see in most dictatorial regimes too, most evil power mad people have absolutely zero capacity for taking mockery.
So that is why think McMahon (at least up until now) maintained more widespread peculiar kind of grudging comic fondness for him shared in memes and GIFS by people despite obviously being a maniacally evil dislikeable character. He was perhaps also the one in a billion evil character who would consent to allowing an audience to get pleasure seeing such a virtually real life character get the comeuppance of the visceral kind some really probably deep down wish would happen to Trump, Tate etc too.
That said it could be asked what came first, the evil Mr McMahon real life character, or the evil Mr McMahon on screen character? That is harder to say. In any case he is indeed a fascinating cultural figure. PBS American Experience have done great long life story profile documentaries on likes of PT Barnum and William Randolph Hearst and McMahon would be another who'd make a good study.
FWIW, I tried “The Geography of the Imagination “ nearly 20 years ago. I don’t really remember it, except that it was pretentious bilge and I didn’t get through it.
Hah! Thanks for the non-recommendation
The only shocking thing about McMahon is this stuff was going around 2021-22. I was convinced an absolute metric ton of stuff dating back decades would come out about him and other big names of wrestling when #MeToo was at its height in 2017 (although this may just be because it turns out he seemingly spent half his budget on NDAs).
Think about it and the business has all the same pitfalls and dangerous incentives as the Hollywood acting world. In that your booking and success is ultimately almost entirely at the whim of the big guys with big male egos at the top.
Yet unlike the Hollywood world, where there is a conformity to signing up to a certain feminist girlpower worldview which got exposed as fake and full of hypocrisy in some cases. 90s and 00s attitude era WWE especially was an unashamedly ultra-red blooded male product (of the type that has basically become extinct now in mainstream culture) and had a locker room of hyper masculine men probably injected with goodness know how many gallons of extra testosterone and human growth hormone, playing hyper masculine characters, combined with at the time some women hired out of beauty contests and model catalogues. You could hardly design an environment more conducive to some quite bad sexual harassment stories.
Indeed McMahon in hey day as on screen character basically acted as a Harvey Weinstein type boss degrading women. It was hardly a stretch to think given the power over his female employees he had he might be like that in real life. Probably loads of other big powerful names at the top of the industry were all probably in on it too and lucky the stink seems to be going solely to him right now.
Him having a scandal about treatment of women is as surprising as if you told me same about other characters like Trump, Mayweather, Andrew Tate etc (all who just like McMahon virtually indistinguishable in real life from what you would imagine their WWE heel villain personas might be).
However as you noted in your "Vince is America" article, what made McMahon perhaps unique and work as a perhaps all time entertaining TV character, was just like those named above, everybody basically has always known he was a real life major league bully, & misogynist, and all round ego driven asshole, is that despite that he allowed what was basically his real life character to be the get whacked about with steel chairs, on screen humiliated, his perversions to be butt of jokes and storylines, and get shoved up a giant's butt. And because the fact everyone basically knew he was such a behind the scenes asshole, so he barely needed to act to really convince anybody, it probably made it work to make it more enjoyable for audiences to suspend belief get caught up in the moment. By contrast it is inconceivable that other real life heel characters like Trump or Tate would ever willingly allow their characters to get even gently laughed at. As you can also see in most dictatorial regimes too, most evil power mad people have absolutely zero capacity for taking mockery.
So that is why think McMahon (at least up until now) maintained more widespread peculiar kind of grudging comic fondness for him shared in memes and GIFS by people despite obviously being a maniacally evil dislikeable character. He was perhaps also the one in a billion evil character who would consent to allowing an audience to get pleasure seeing such a virtually real life character get the comeuppance of the visceral kind some really probably deep down wish would happen to Trump, Tate etc too.
That said it could be asked what came first, the evil Mr McMahon real life character, or the evil Mr McMahon on screen character? That is harder to say. In any case he is indeed a fascinating cultural figure. PBS American Experience have done great long life story profile documentaries on likes of PT Barnum and William Randolph Hearst and McMahon would be another who'd make a good study.
All valid points. I guess I hoped McMahon was less like his character than he seemed, though there wasn't except a vast probability of that.