Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [7]
Female wrestlers often try to sabotage matches or seduce male wrestlers who oppose allies or members of their clan. In one episode broadcast on the big screens in the arena, a female wrestler named Melina enters the locker room of a wrestler named Batista. The scene has the brevity and stilted dialogue of a porn film. Melina, in a sequined red tank top and micro-miniskirt, stands awkwardly behind the brawny and tattooed Batista, who is seated on the bench, dressed in a tiny bikini brief. Melina self-consciously rubs her palms up and down his expansive pecs. “My boys, Mercury and Nitro, have a match against the Mexicools, and they could really use this time to prepare. So if you could . . . withdraw yourself from the match tonight?”
“Naw, I don’t think so,” rumbles Batista.
“I could really make it worth your while,” whines Melina, straddling one of Batista’s massive thighs.
“How you gonna do that?” Batista mutters.
“Let me show you,” Melina pouts. She kisses him, wriggling her shoulders in a caricature of passion. Batista finally figures it out and yanks her down as they kiss, spreading her legs open over his lap. The crowd is heard whooping.
The video cuts to a close-up of Melina’s black bra strap. She turns around, pulling her tank top down over her bra.
“So we have a deal, right?” she simpers, blowing her hair out of her face.
“A deal? No, no deal,” Batista chuckles. “Thanks for the warm-up, though. I feel great.” He flexes his chest muscles, making them jump. “I’m going to kill those guys.” He cuffs her on the shoulder. “See you out there.”
“Oh, my God,” sniggers the announcer. “Did he say, ‘Thanks for the warm-up’? What a backfire!”
The camera zooms in on Melina’s humiliation. “No, no, nooooo!” she shrieks, clapping her hands to her face, squinting malevolently after Batista.
Fans chant, “Slut! Slut! Slut!” when Melina appears in the arena. Melina, although the temptress in the story, later announces she has filed a lawsuit for sexual harassment against Batista.
In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality. If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he will suffer great pain. Blinded by the glare, he is unable to see anything and longs for the familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated. He confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality. The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they be blinded as well.
Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. No admirer of popular democracy, Plato said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”
We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel Boorstin writes that in contemporary culture the fabricated,