Movement That Makes a Difference - An Introduction to Six Essays on the Aesthetics of Dance

Over the past several years I have done a great deal of reading in aesthetics—music, theater, poetry, painting, film, visual arts and architecture. Like many lovers of the arts, I have come to feel reasonably confident in my bearings when listening to a Mahler symphony or a Beatles song, reading a play by Mamet, or watching a film by Kurosawa. I know, more or less, what kinds of questions to ask. What is being represented? What is being expressed? What formal problem is being solved? What tension is being resolved? What techniques are being used, and why?

But dance has always been different.

I have watched a great deal of it—ballet, modern, contemporary, Broadway choreography, vernacular forms, experimental work. Some of it has struck me as beautiful. Some of it as dramatically compelling. Some of it as merely athletic. Some of it as baffling. But without diminishing my enjoyment, I have found myself uncertain how to speak about it in the same philosophically serious way that one might speak about music or drama. Was I watching expression? Structure? Narrative? Social ritual? Therapy? Athleticism? Something else?

Part of the difficulty is that dance does not present us with an obvious object of interpretation. A play gives us characters and dialogue. A painting gives us forms and colors arranged within a frame. Music gives us structured sound unfolding in time; a movement in a symphony and a song has a beginning, middle, and end.

But dance presents us with something more immediate and, in a way, more primitive:

A body moving.

Now…not every movement of the body is dance, of course. A stumble is not dance (except when it is). An itch is not dance. A reflexive flinch is not dance. Yet there are moments—on a stage, on a dance floor, in a rehearsal studio, or elsewhere—in which movement alters the situation in a way that becomes perceptible to those present. This is the moment when someone steps forward, and the balance of the scene changes. When an ensemble begins to circle, and tension intensifies. When bodies move in synchrony (or intentionally out of synchrony), and a new order becomes visible. When one figure advances and another retreats, and the range of possible outcomes narrows.

When movement makes a difference.

We sense this when watching John Travolta take the floor in Saturday Night Fever, or when Ray Bolger seems unable to stop being the Scarecrow even when he is not playing the Scarecrow. We sense it when Fred Astaire resolves a romantic impasse through coordinated movement, or when Gene Kelly turns a lamppost and a rainstorm into partners. We sense it when an ensemble in Hamilton slows the passage of time around a decision that cannot be undone, or when a line of zombies in Thriller suddenly reveals what it is to move as one of the walking dead. We sense it when Bunny Briggs begins to tap during Duke Ellington’s First Concert of Sacred Music, and we begin to suspect—having now seen what such dancing looks like—that when David danced before the Lord with all his might, something very like this may have been happening.

These essays begin from the simple observation that dance emerges when difference-making movement becomes perceptible, shareable, and repeatable within a field of attention. We are no longer witnessing mere displacement, but something that can be attended to again—something that alters how the present moment unfolds.

From this starting point, different traditions of choreography and performance appear not merely as stylistic variations, but as distinct answers to a more basic question:

What is the movement doing here?

Sometimes movement serves structure—articulating musical time, clarifying spatial relations, or resolving formal tensions. Sometimes it becomes identity, stylizing the native tendencies of an individual body until movement itself reveals character. Sometimes it narrates, making memory, inevitability, or decision visible through tempo and proximity. Sometimes it confronts, concentrating conflict into the reciprocal adjustment of two bodies occupying the same contested space.

And sometimes—though we will come to this only later—it exceeds the dancer’s apparent intention altogether, dissolving individual agency within repetition, rhythm, or collective synchrony.

These possibilities are not confined – not even remotely - to the concert stage. In what follows, we will consider canonical ballet alongside Broadway choreography; the stylized physicality of musical theater alongside more vernacular or improvisatory forms. We will also, at certain points, take seriously staged confrontations—two figures circling one another in a ring, surrounded by allies and antagonists—as instances of what might be called concentrated agon: movement that does not illustrate the event but constitutes it.

As always, I am grateful to Roger Scruton and his Aesthetics of Music, which has served as a kind of philosophical mentoring text for me. The approach taken here will stretch into areas that Scruton himself would almost certainly not have followed. Nonetheless, I remain indebted to him for showing how one might begin aesthetic inquiry from irreducible features of experience, and build outward from there.

Each essay that follows will examine a different way in which movement becomes aesthetically intelligible—how it may serve form, embody presence, stylize persona, narrate events, negotiate conflict, or, at times, surrender control. Together, they attempt to sketch the outlines of an aesthetics of dance that begins not from symbolism or representation, but from the perceptible differences introduced by movement itself.

For dance, whatever else it may be, begins where movement makes a difference.

Dance begins when movement makes a difference!

The Sublime, the Taboo, the Mythic, and the Dionysian: Wrestling’s Archetypes and the Transcendent Babyface

In the previous essay, we noted that John Cena represents the real-life, human superhero—the performer who transformed a dramatic role into a source of personal rescue. To see the magnitude of that achievement, we must first understand the landscape from which he emerged. For professional wrestling, like opera, sustains a remarkable ecology of archetypes: forms that repeat across decades and territories, each with its own internal logic and mode of fulfillment. To understand John Cena’s transcendence, we must set him among those rare figures whose very being aligned with a dramatic form larger than themselves.

André the Giant perfected the sublime. His presence was not merely large but overwhelming—an encounter with physical impossibility. Audiences did not cheer André so much as witness him. He existed at the boundary between myth and biology, a living contradiction whose every movement disclosed the ancient terror and wonder of the giant. He was wrestling’s cathedral: towering, impossible, unforgettable. Truly, he will never be forgotten.

The Sheik perfected the taboo. Fire, blood, foreignness, fear—he embodied the shudder that ancient ritual evokes, the thrill and dread of transgression. The Sheik was not a villain in the moral sense; he was a villain in the anthropological sense, a figure from the underside of myth whose presence revealed the fragility of order. His wrestling was not sport but sacrament in the negative mode: chaos made flesh.

The Undertaker perfected the mythic. His matches were not contests so much as rites. His slow walk, his gesture of resurrection, his tolling bell—these were not theatrical gimmicks but dramatic invocations. If André was awe and Sheik was taboo, the Undertaker was cosmic order: death’s majesty rendered with operatic dignity. No one else has ever approached his ritual coherence.

And then there is Ric Flair, wrestling’s Dionysian genius. Flair perfected excess—not only material excess (robes, limousines, jewelry) but existential excess: the ecstatic edge where pleasure becomes madness and triumph curls toward tragedy. He was the celebrant-priest of wrestling’s intoxicating side, pouring his own life into the art until the boundaries dissolved. He lived the drama and burned through himself in the process. Nietzsche did not know Ric Flair when he described the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy—and yet, somehow, he did.

These four, André, Sheik, Taker, and Flair, show what it means to fulfill a dramatic archetype completely. Each reached a kind of completion—an alignment of body, persona, gesture, and myth that allowed the audience to encounter something elemental.

But none of them—and here is the key—achieved what John Cena achieved.

For André, Sheik, Taker, and Flair reveal truths about humanity through distance: the awe that dwarfs us, the chaos that threatens us, the myth that encompasses us, the ecstasy that shatters us. They embody forms that tower above or crash down upon the human scale.

But Cena reveals truth through proximity. Through recognition. Through the unsettling and consoling possibility that his struggle could be our own—that we, too, might rise up, endure, and do a little better. If André embodies the sublime and Flair the Dionysian, Cena embodies something rarer and more demanding: the human that can be heroic.

He began, of course, within wrestling’s most familiar role—the babyface, the good guy. The babyface archetype is old and honorable, but also limited. It has been inhabited by many, often briefly, as wrestlers turn from heel to face and back again. Historically, babyfaceness has been more emblem than enactment: a broad moral alignment, a gesture toward virtue rather than its full embodiment. Ricky Steamboat expressed it beautifully, Bruno Sammartino fiercely, Dusty Rhodes poetically, and Hogan mythically. These were complete expressions of the classical form.

But then came John Cena.

His heroism is not a style but a mode of being. The audience does not admire him from afar; they are drawn toward identification. They carry his slogans—“Never Give Up,” “Rise Above Hate”—not as catchphrases but as equipment for their own lives. Cena’s babyface is not performed; it is lived. And because it is lived, the audience can live it with him.

This is the ontological transformation Cena introduced into wrestling’s dramatic ecology. With him, the babyface ceased to be a symbol or a temporary alignment with virtue.
It became something new—something previously unimaginable.

It became a participatory practice.

The audience, in recognizing him, became co-bearers of his role. Cena ceased to be merely a character or an ideal; he became a shared existential resource. And for twenty-five years, the audience sustained him as he sustained them. This is beyond archetype. It is beyond wrestling’s classical taxonomy. It is a new mode of dramatic truth in which performer and audience create meaning together—a Gadamerian fusion of horizons within the squared circle.

For some wrestlers embody myth. But once in a rare while, a wrestler embodies hope.

And that is a role only John Cena could play.

The Superhero Who Bleeds: John Cena and the Dramatic Multiplication of Truth

When history looks back at the long, kaleidoscopic age of professional wrestling live and televised, it will find few figures as improbable, extraordinary, and indispensable as John Cena.

His in-ring career will end on December 13, 2025. The record he leaves behind is impressive—championships, main events, longevity, discipline—but none of those statistics explains what has happened around him, or perhaps because of him, over the past two and a half decades.

For in the quiet corners of the internet lie thousands of testimonies—raw, earnest, unprompted—describing a phenomenon that should not be possible. These are not reviews, nor fan letters in the conventional sense. They are confessions. “Thank you, John Cena,” they begin. “When I was young, my circumstances were not good. I did not believe in myself. But you made me believe I could still amount to something. And now, years later, I share that belief with my children.” The stories are legion. Their tone is unmistakable: gratitude, sometimes trembling, sometimes defiant, but always sincere.

We should pause over this. How can a flesh-and-blood human being—albeit unusually motivated, disciplined, intelligent, talented—become, for so many, an agent of personal rescue? What strange alchemy is this, by which a man in denim shorts, fluorescent t-shirts and a baseball cap, performing choreographed matches before roaring crowds, can accomplish what counselors, teachers and coaches could not? What category of human achievement does this belong to? Not sport. Not entertainment. Something older, something more mysterious: the realm of drama.

In the world of comic books and cinematic universes, Captain America is genuinely inspiring. The Marvel films—especially Avengers: Endgame, which is in many respects a masterpiece of cinematic drama—demonstrate the extraordinary power of fictional narrative to move, console, and galvanize audiences. Steve Rogers is noble, self-sacrificing, steady; he embodies virtues we admire and wish to see reflected in ourselves. When he lifts Mjölnir or stands alone against the armies of Thanos, the moment rings with mythic force. It is real in the way great drama is real: compelling, stirring, emotionally exact.

But even so, Captain America remains a fictional character. His heroism is enacted within a sealed imaginative world that we inhabit only temporarily. When the lights come up, the world we return to remains unchanged. Rogers inspires us, but at a distance; his triumphs live in the realm of the ideal. In the realm of fiction.

But John Cena does not dwell in that realm. He performs in ours.

The difference is not one of artistic quality—Marvel has proven that cinema can achieve genuine dramatic depth—but one of ontological status. Fictional superheroes engage and entertain by embodying hyperbolic ideals. Cena, by contrast, embodies an ideal through his own finite, vulnerable, historically situated body. His courage, stamina, and persistence occur in real time, under real conditions, before a real audience that shares the risk and reward of his dramatic world.

He does not show us what a character might do. He shows us what a person can do.

And in doing so, he accomplishes what even the best cinematic or fictional heroes cannot: he creates a truth that survives the performance, a meaning that continues to work in the lives of those who witnessed it. His drama does not end with the closing bell. It multiplies outward, changing the emotional economy of the people he touched.

If this seems like exaggeration, one need only read the testimonies. They do not resemble celebrity fandom. They resemble something closer to gratitude for survival. Cena helped children endure isolation, helped teenagers survive bullying, helped adults find meaning in broken circumstances. He probably did not intend to play this role, as such; but once the role became real to him, and to us, he played it. The audience, recognizing the human form beneath the performance, completed the work by becoming more human, and occasionally, within the context of their own lives, incrementally more heroic.

One might ask: is this not sentimentality? No. Sentimentality cheapens or simplifies emotion; Cena’s dramatic truth intensifies it. His iconic gesture—“Never give up”—would be empty if not backed by twenty-five years of visible bodily cost: surgeries, scars, losses, humiliations, comebacks. What the audience recognizes in Cena is not a slogan but a life lived as if the slogan were true.

This is why the comparison to superheroes ultimately fails. Superheroes are fantasies of unlimited power. Cena represents the opposite: the possibility that a limited human being, with the ordinary constraints of pain, fatigue, fear, and doubt, can nonetheless become a source of strength for others. His heroism is not abstract; it is participatory. It is born in the space between performer and audience, in the shared enactment of a world where resilience is not a plot device but a lived necessity.

This is why he is the world record holder for Make a Wish Foundation events. No one will ever match his record.

And here we return to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, Truth and Method. As he explains many times in this book, in order for a play (a “Spiel”) to be true, it must absorb its participants. Cena’s drama—his stories, his feuds, his improbable triumphs and crushing setbacks—works not because it imitates sport, but because it reveals something essential about the human condition. The audience recognizes itself in the struggle. They see the shape of their own lives in the form that appears before them. And in that recognition, a deeper truth emerges: the truth that one can endure, and that endurance can be shared.

When Cena steps away from the ring on December 13, 2025, it will not be the retirement of an athlete. It will be the concluding act of one of the most consequential dramatic performances of our time. For two and a half decades, he has demonstrated that drama, when embodied with conviction, does not merely entertain. It multiplies. It reveals. It rescues.

And in this sense, John Cena has done what fictional heroes cannot. He has shown that in the fragile space between performer and audience, a human being can become—through the power of mimesis—something more than himself. A truth-bearer. A force of hope. A man whose drama became, for many, the difference between despair and endurance.

That is not entertainment. That is art. And through art, he became a superhero.

The Smashing Machine - Movie Review

I went into The Smashing Machine wanting to love it. I love Dwayne Johnson. I love that he’s on the board of TKO. I love what he brought to WrestleMania 40. And I love that he’s one of the top five performers on the mic in the history of professional wrestling.

I love the UFC. I love the early days when they would pit fighters of one discipline against those of another just to see who was best. And I love the story of Mark Kerr — a real, tragic figure who helped shape the early years of mixed martial arts. And I love A24. When I saw their logo, I assumed we were about to get a hard-hitting tragedy, something with the emotional depth and quiet power of The Iron Claw — a film that found raw humanity, beauty, and heartbreak in another world of bruised masculinity.

Instead, I got a movie that smothers itself in confusion, misguided musical choices, and an almost pathological focus on addiction at the expense of the real story.

A Soundtrack That Drowns Its Story

The film’s most unforgivable flaw is its music. It’s everywhere, all the time, yet never seems to know why. Sometimes it’s muffled, as though playing from a stereo across the room — and then, without warning, it swells into the full score. There’s no pattern or logic to these transitions, only confusion. At best, it’s distracting; at worst, it undercuts the emotion on screen.

Even the source tracks — often brilliant songs in their own right — are used with baffling tone-deafness. The worst offender is Springsteen’s Jungleland, which plays during the film’s emotional breakup scene. I adore that song; I adore Born to Run. The album is a masterpiece — Thunder Road, Backstreets, Jungleland, the whole thing. But in The Smashing Machine, the use of Jungleland made no sense. Was it supposed to be playing in the room? Was it part of the score? Why this song, in this moment, in the mid-1990s when Springsteen himself was deep into his pop phase (Born in the U.S.A.)? The scene collapses under the weight of its own irony — a masterpiece of romantic yearning misapplied to a moment of domestic chaos.

And forgive me for extending the rant, but Jungleland is the emotional and musical climax of Born to Run — a nearly ten-minute epic that begins with Roy Bittan’s haunting piano, builds through Clarence Clemons’ legendary sax solo, and ends with Springsteen’s wordless cry fading into silence. It’s where all the album’s themes — escape, failure, romantic defiance, the death of youthful dreams — finally collide. It’s a masterpiece of dramatic musical storytelling. To use it as mere breakup wallpaper is criminal.

Then, as if tone-deafness were the guiding aesthetic, the filmmakers chose My Way for the final training montage. A song about self-determination applied to a character who never demonstrates agency or control. Thankfully, they spared us the Sinatra version. There’s no irony in it, no subversion — just confusion.

A Film About Addiction, Not a Fighter

For a movie named The Smashing Machine, it has shockingly little interest in fighting. Yes, there are fight scenes (a bunch of them), and they’re shot well enough — they don’t look like actors fighting (though almost all are close-ups). But the fights feel perfunctory, as if the filmmakers are saying, “We’re showing this because this is a fighting movie.”

In truth, roughly three-quarters of the film’s runtime is consumed by addiction and the decay of a toxic relationship. There’s a potentially great story to tell about a once-great athlete undone by his demons — but this isn’t that story. We never get the sense that Kerr was a prodigy or that he truly loved fighting. He says he feels alive in the ring, but we never really see it.

The tragedy of The Smashing Machine should have been the waste of greatness — the Marcus Dupree arc, the mythic fall of a man who could have been legendary. Instead, we’re left with a story about a guy who fights, takes opioids, fights again, and repeats the cycle, eventually landing in rehab — with a vaguely annoying personality in between. There’s no rise, no fall, no catharsis — just stasis.

Addiction can absolutely be part of a great artist’s story — think Walk the Line or Elvis. Think Ed Wood. Those films show brilliant, singular talents wrestling with their humanity and the consequences of their pain. But Mark Kerr, as portrayed here, is not Bela Lugosi, he’s not Johnny Cash.  And he’s definitely not Elvis. He’s just a guy who fought a bit and got hooked on painkillers. Sad, yes. But not really a story.

Shot Like a Documentary — But Without the Purpose of One

The film is shot in a handheld, vérité style, as though we’re watching a documentary. That might sound intriguing, but it’s mostly just annoying — because it’s not a documentary. The cinematographers seem to want us to feel like we’re on opioids too: everything drifts, lingers, and wobbles without intention. There’s a difference between realism and aimlessness, and this film doesn’t know it. The effect is narcotic, not in an immersive sense, but in a numbing one.

Lost Opportunities

The film flirts with fascinating ideas and then abandons them. The early MMA world — the wild, unsanctioned, pre-corporate days of the sport — could have been a goldmine of myth and cultural texture. The Japan sequences hint at corruption, cultural clashes, cheating, and exploitation, but those threads are dropped almost immediately. What could have been a cross-cultural drama about power and dignity becomes a blur of half-formed notions.

Even the relationship between Kerr and his training partner — the one human dynamic with any spark — is left underdeveloped. It could have grounded the film, shown us a brotherhood at the edge of chaos. Just like Warrior. Or The Fighter. Instead, it’s a whisper amid the noise.

The Performance and the Paradox

Dwayne Johnson gives a remarkable imitation of Kerr — the speech patterns, the hesitant awkwardness, the offbeat rhythm of his personality. He nails it. But what he nails is a man who isn’t very interesting. It’s a technically perfect performance in service of a dramatically hollow script. Portraying dullness accurately does not make a movie compelling.

The Ending That Wasn’t Earned

The film closes with a postscript that reads like it belongs to a different movie. It honors the early pioneers of MMA — the underpaid, overworked fighters who built something lasting — and ends with, “His name is Mark Kerr.” A fine tribute in principle, but the movie itself never supports that idea. We never see Kerr as a builder of anything, never see him contributing to a legacy. There’s nothing poignant about his journey as presented here. The sentiment rings false because the film never earned it. It comes across as the filmmakers wagging a finger at us: “Respect this man.” To which I must respond: help us understand why.

Final Thoughts

By the time the credits rolled, I felt trapped — a prisoner of a film that mistakes mood for meaning, noise for emotion, addiction for depth. I wanted to love it. I wanted it to be the great fighting tragedy of our time. But The Smashing Machine isn’t about greatness lost. It’s about confusion maintained.

And for a full two hours and ten minutes.

And confusion, no matter how beautifully photographed, does not make a film.

“Except One”: Barthes, Paul, and the Myth That Does Not Deceive

Roland Barthes was right about myth. He saw through the modern world’s favorite sleight of hand—the transformation of meaning into form, of history into nature, of ideology into the obvious. In his collection of essays, Mythologies, his razor-sharp prose cuts through postwar French culture, showing how a magazine cover, a wrestling match, or a bottle of detergent can become a sign stripped of context, bloated with a new, invisible message. “Myth,” he tells us at the outset of his final essay in the volume, “is a type of speech”—a second-order semiological system that turns signs into new signifiers, all the while pretending nothing has changed. Meaning, once rich and historical, is hollowed out and worn like a mask. In this way, myths become engines of alienation—seductive, empty forms that make the artificial appear inevitable.

And Barthes was right. About nearly every myth.

Except one.

To put it in Pauline terms—if the Apostle Paul were to read Mythologies, he might nod in recognition. The instinct to unmask what is falsely eternal was one he shared. Paul, too, was a hunter of idols, a man who understood how power cloaked itself in piety, how “the elemental spiritual forces of the world”[1] could enslave both Jew and Gentile alike. But Paul’s protest against the world’s empty forms did not leave him in irony. It led him to a singular scandal: the Incarnation.

Where Barthes sees myth as the process of draining meaning into form, Paul sees a mystery—the only case in which form did not destroy meaning but fulfilled it. “Who being in very nature God,” Paul writes, Christ “did not count equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made Himself nothing….”[2]. And yet, unlike Barthes’ myth, this kenosis—the self-emptying of Christ—is not an erasure. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, not as reduction, but as revelation.

Christ, for Paul, is not a myth in Barthes’ pejorative sense. He is what myth always claimed to be but never was: the Universal made Particular without deceit. This is a descent that does not diminish. The Logos enters history, but does not lose eternity. The form of a servant, the death on a cross—these are not masks concealing power, but windows through which power is redefined. Whereas myth conceals ideology behind a veil of nature, the Incarnation unveils divinity through humility. It is, to borrow from C.S. Lewis, myth become fact—and more than fact, truth offered as communion.

Barthes, to his credit, knew what was at stake. He was not merely denouncing commercials or dissecting sports. He was pointing to the spiritual poverty of a culture that no longer believed in transcendence but continued to borrow its forms. The world of signs had become a museum of empty reliquaries: crosses without crucifixions, freedoms without sacrifice, virtues without God. In such a world, every form becomes suspect, every myth a trap.

But the Apostle Paul would interrupt this funeral procession with a single protest: not this one.

The Incarnation is the only myth that gives back more than it takes, the only form in which meaning overflows rather than evaporates. It does not explain away suffering with a slogan, or transmute sacrifice into sentiment. It endures. It redeems. It is not the ideology of the strong masquerading as nature, but the love of the strong becoming weak—for us.

So yes—Barthes was right about every myth.

Except one.

[1] Galatians 4:3

[2] Philippians 2:6-7

This is part 7 of 7 essays

Cage, Scruton, and the Border of Music

John Cage is one of the most admired—and most misunderstood—figures in 20th-century artistic thought. His most famous work, 4′33″, continues to provoke debate, inspire imitation, and invite reverence. As I argued in the previous article, 4′33″ is sincere, bold, and spiritually loaded. But it is not music. And on this point, philosopher and author, Roger Scruton is both uncompromising and correct.

In his treatise, The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton insists that music is not merely organized sound. Music is not physics. It is not the raw phenomenon of vibrating air molecules. Music, rather, is a tonal and intentional structure, apprehended through imaginative listening informed by culture. Notes become music when they enter into relations—melodic, harmonic, rhythmic—and when those relations mean something to a conscious, culturally shaped mind.

Cage’s 4′33″, while intellectually rich and existentially provocative, offers no such tonal structure, enters into no such relations, and makes no appeal whatsoever to a mind shaped by the Western musical culture. Rather, it asks the listener to hear ambient noise as sound-in-time. There is no pitch to imagine, no tension to follow, no phrase to interpret. What it offers is silence-as-stage, framed by a kind of theatrical gesture in place of music. And that is the crux.

So if Cage’s work is not musical sense, then what is it? It is performative.

Indeed, 4′33″ may belong more properly in the lineage of modern drama than of music. Like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, it stages emptiness as a condition of life. Like Brecht, it draws attention to the performance itself, rather than the illusion of content. And like Artaud, it demands presence, discomfort, and attention from the audience.

In this light, Peter Szondi, author of Theory of the Modern Drama, would not be out of place studying Cage. Szondi’s theory, after all, centers on how modern drama dissolves traditional plot and character in favor of exposing the crisis of subjectivity. What is 4′33″ but a dramatization of that very crisis?

Cage’s earlier percussion works, while rhythmic and sometimes used in modern dance, occupy a similarly ambiguous position. They are fascinating, sometimes even delightful. But they rarely engage the musical imagination as Scruton defines it. They are choreographic scores more than musical ones.

None of this is to deny Cage’s importance. He expanded our understanding of sound, silence, and listening. He forced us to confront the border between art and non-art. But if we are to preserve any meaningful category called “music,” Cage must remain on its edge, or just outside it.

We may call him a conceptual artist, a philosopher of sound, or even a dramatist of silence. But not a composer of music.

This is part 6 of 7 essays

John Cage and the Costly Silence

When John Cage premiered 4′33″ in 1952—a composition in which not a single note is played—many in the audience thought it was a prank. Some laughed, some walked out. But Cage wasn’t joking. He had just performed what may be the most demanding artistic gesture of the 20th century. And when it was over, he reportedly collapsed in exhaustion.

This is not surprising, if one understands what 4′33″ really is: not an absence of music, but a framing of silence, a radical reorientation of attention. The piece demands the listener hear the coughs, shuffles, and ambient sounds of the concert hall not as intrusions, but as the music itself. It forces composer, performer, and audience alike into a shared vulnerability. There is no melody to hold onto, no harmony to comfort. Only presence, bare and unmediated.  And each “performance” is, obviously, different.

In that sense, 4′33″ is minimalism at its most austere—and most honest. It demonstrates the poetic point made by T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding:

"A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)."

What Cage offered was not less effort, but more—more courage, more sincerity, more trust in the world to carry meaning without adornment. The exhaustion he felt was the exhaustion of one who had let go of control, who had dared to believe that music could exist without sound, that meaning could emerge from stillness.

Cage was many things—mystic, innovator, trickster—but he was never insincere. 4′33″ is the opposite of a joke. It is a prayer.

And like all true acts of minimalism, it cost him maybe not everything, but much.

This is part 5 of 7 essays

Minimalism and the Condition of Complete Simplicity

In eight words, Eliot offers a phrase that ought to be engraved above the entrance to every gallery of minimalism, every kitchen serving elemental dishes, every manuscript composed of restraint rather than flourish. For what he names is not austerity for its own sake, nor a fetish for sparseness, but a discipline of essence—the rare achievement of clarity without loss, of purity that still carries weight.

This essay is an about-face (or perhaps a complement), and rightly so. For while we have stood with skepticism before the musical altar of Pierre Boulez, whose Bruckner left the listener cold, now we turn toward something subtler, something harder to dismiss. For there are times when what is absent is not a sign of emptiness but of focus. Not every table demands a stew of game meats and root vegetables—a meal fit for a victorious war party of Vikings. Sometimes, what is called for is a consommé—clear, exacting, reduced to its essence. The key is not to confuse the two. Serve one when the other is expected, and disappointment will follow. But when the dish and the occasion align, even minimalism becomes a feast.

The modern eye has learned to spot this ethic in the visual arts, where Gerhard Richter’s “Grey Paintings”—particularly his Six Grey Mirrors at Dia Beacon—line the walls like quiet sentinels. Each surface, nearly uniform at first glance, reveals gradients, textures, and spectral reflections that reward prolonged attention, especially as light changes throughout the day. Gray, Richter once said, “makes no statement”—and yet in that non-statement, we discover the conditions of meaning itself.

Henri Matisse

Blue Nudes

Or consider Henri Matisse, whose Blue Nudes reduce the human form to bold, curved shapes that carry with them not just visual elegance but emotional immediacy. There is no fuss, no rendering of detail, but the gesture is complete. Though neat, these images are powerful. Matisse once described his desire to create art “devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter... like a good armchair.” What he achieved, at his best, was not comfort but concentration—the beauty of presence without intrusion.

The culinary arts demonstrate this principle well. A perfectly ripe avocado, halved and sliced, served on a non-intrusive white plate, perhaps with just a dusting of sea salt, can be as satisfying—perhaps more so—than a twelve-course extravaganza. The presentation offers no garnish, because no garnish is needed. The color, the oily softness, the faint vegetal perfume—all speak in silence, and what is left out heightens what remains.

This is the minimalist ideal: not silence, but distilled speech. Not an absence of expression, but the refinement of expression into essence.

And so with that, we return to Boulez, this time with a different score in hand. His Anthèmes I, composed for solo violin, is a world apart from his Bruckner. Here, stripped of orchestral density and canonical weight, Boulez operates in a field where minimalism is not sabotage but strategy.

The piece begins with fractured tones, harmonics, isolated gestures that feel almost surgical. The violinist becomes less a performer and more a cartographer of sonic terrain. There are silences—but they are tense, poised, not blank. The listener is asked not to float along but to listen actively, to inhabit each creak of the bow, each whisper of a note. It is, in a sense, music as x-ray—a view into the bone structure of sound.

Does it move the heart as Mahler does? Perhaps not. But that is not its aim. Its success lies in its intensification through limitation, in doing much with little, in letting a single line bear the burden of form.

What minimalism demands—what Eliot understood—is not less effort, but more. Simplicity, if it is to carry meaning, must be intentional, exacting, and often ruthless in what it excludes. It must not simplify complexity into banality, but refine it until only the necessary remains. To do so costs not less than everything: it costs ornament, comfort, and sometimes popularity. But when it succeeds, it allows a clarity of encounter, a distillation of spirit.

It is something “like the stillness between two waves of the sea” as Eliot might say (and did, in fact, say).[1]

Minimalism is not the only path. It is not superior to density, to tradition, to musical or artistic abundance. But it is a path—and at its best, it is a clearing in the forest, a single voice in a cathedral, a plate with one perfect thing upon it.

In the end, it is not a matter of choosing between stew and consomme, between Mahler and Boulez, between abundance and restraint. The greater wisdom lies in knowing when each is called for, and why. For there are days when we need music that remembers the world, and there are days when we need music that forgets it—if only for a moment—to help us see it again, with new eyes so that we can “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”[2]

This is Part 4 of 7 Essays

[1] T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

[2] T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

From Gutter to Glory: The Misfit Logic of Cultural Renewal

By now the pattern should be visible.

It begins not with greatness, but with loss. Not with clarity, but with fatigue. The forms are still standing—the museum, the school, the stage—but their animating spirit has flickered. The rituals grow longer, but not deeper. Audiences applaud, but without conviction. Art still exists, but the artists are tired.

Barzun called it “exhaustion,” and it is the unmistakable signal that a culture, once fertile, is entering its late phase. But if exhaustion is real, so too is the stubborn vitality that rises to challenge it. It never comes from the center. It never wears the proper clothes. It almost always arrives uninvited.

In this series, we’ve traced that renewal through two improbable emissaries of cultural energy: The Ramones, who could not become a proper pop band and in failing to do so gave us a permanent new language; and Paul Heyman, who ran a wrestling promotion out of a bingo hall and in doing so rewrote the grammar of modern dramatic performance.

What unites them—and what justifies our attention—is not merely their outsider status, but their uncanny ability to remake the world from beneath it. They were not destroyers. They were purifiers. Not vandals of the temple, but renovators from the street.

The Inversion of Prestige

To understand how we arrived at this moment—where two cultural misfits can shape the sensibility of a generation—we must revisit the concept of the mainstream. As noted earlier, it is both myth and machinery. The myth says that talent rises. The machinery ensures that only certain kinds of talent do. It rewards polish, pedigree, and promise of return within the confines of the status quo. Accordingly, it has always struggled to recognize conviction without context, or greatness that arrives in the wrong clothes.

What punk and ECW share is their open rejection of this machinery—and their unintended triumph. They did not scale the castle walls. They broke ground behind it and built something louder.

Their success is not ironic. It is axiomatic. As in earlier eras—when Van Gogh painted outside the salons, when jazz emerged from brothels, when American democracy was conceived in taverns—the real work of renewal was taking place outside the institutions that claimed to preserve.

Legacy as Echo and Distortion

Of course, the edge does not remain the edge forever.

The Ramones are now museum pieces. Paul Heyman works the main event at WrestleMania. Their names appear in textbooks, on merchandise, in the mouths of performers and promoters whose polish would have once disqualified them. The machinery, having ignored them, now needs them—for authenticity, for language, for myth.

This is the price of success. But it is also the proof of influence. When the fringe becomes canon, it confirms the movement of renewal.

That legacy is not pure. It is, like all legacy, a blend of echo, distortion, softening. Pop-punk without anger, “extreme” wrestling without danger, slogans without struggle. But the original force remains traceable, like the root of a mighty tree still visible beneath the bark.

The Edge captured this moment perfectly in his speech inducting The Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He wasn’t speaking of the Ramones, but the story was the same: a first-wave punk band that wasn’t polished enough for the machinery of the time—too political, too raw, too real—but who changed everything that came after. What Edge understood, and what he articulated with clarity and gratitude, was that the sound of the margins becomes the rhythm of the center. The Clash didn't adapt to the system. The system adapted to what the Clash had already made possible.

The Edge Inducts the Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Audience Is In On It Now

Perhaps the most radical transformation, however, is not in the sound or the spectacle. It is in the role of the audience.

In both cases, the misfits did not just offer a new product. They offered a new relationship. Punk fans were not just buyers—they were scene-makers, zine-writers, co-conspirators. ECW fans were not just spectators—they were agents of the narrative, participants in the logic of the show.

This shift matters. It is not a gimmick. It is a redefinition of dramatic form. The fourth wall is not broken—it is perforated, and everyone knows it. Reality and fiction blur. The knowing wink becomes part of the ritual. The crowd now co-authors belief.

This is not postmodern detachment. It is post-postmodern participation. The audience has been disillusioned—but chooses, nonetheless, to believe again. Not naïvely. Not passively. But knowingly, and together.

It may be the most honest mode of storytelling we have left.

Closing the Circle

In the end, what this series has tried to trace is not just the history of two cultural episodes, but the logic of how renewal happens.

It does not happen by committee. It does not happen by institutional decree. It happens at the edge—when a misfit plugs in an amplifier or rolls out a wrestling mat, and dares to act as if what they feel matters.

Sometimes the world listens. Sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does—when it truly hears—it is changed.

Barzun saw it. You have seen it. And we will see it again.

Because culture, like belief, does not die. It smolders. And when the citadel grows cold, it is always the noise from the margins that tells us: the fire is still burning.

And that somewhere, in a garage or a bingo hall, it is about to roar again.

(Part 4/4 in this essay series)

Paul Heyman: Theater of the Margins

Every art form, when it endures, develops not only technique but ritual. Rules harden, boundaries are set, and the audience learns to expect structure as much as surprise. But eventually, the form forgets why it began. The gestures remain, but the spirit dulls. The cathedral still stands—but no one hears the choir. When this happens, revitalization does not come from renovation within. It comes from the fringe, from the fool, the outlaw, or the heretic who refuses to play by the accepted rules.

In professional wrestling—a form long misunderstood, long dismissed—this moment of rupture came through a wiry, hyper-verbal New Yorker named Paul Heyman, whose small promotion, Extreme Championship Wrestling, became a revival tent of unholy liturgy in the mid-1990s.

Heyman did not invent wrestling, any more than the Ramones invented music. What he did was purify it. He stripped it down to violence, voice, and vengeance. He removed the pretense of legitimacy but left in the raw emotion. He let the audience see the strings—and then used the strings to strangle the illusion. In doing so, he invited the fans to believe again, not in kayfabe, but in wrestling as drama, rebellion, and renewal.

The Old World Order

For most of the 20th century, wrestling operated as a closed system, governed by kayfabe and cartel. The National Wrestling Alliance divided the country into territories, each with its own regional stars, promoters, and loyalties. Champions were chosen not merely for athleticism or charisma but for their ability to “carry the belt” in real life—to protect the illusion, travel constantly, and negotiate backstage politics with care.

The fans were participants in a shared fiction. They knew, perhaps vaguely, that the matches were predetermined, but they accepted the performance as meaningful. Betrayals hurt. Victories mattered. The blood, though often theatrical, felt real. Wrestling was less a sport than a ritualized morality play, with good and evil fighting in tights and boots instead of robes and incense.

But by the mid-1990s, that world had crumbled. National television deals, the decline of the territory system, and the rise of Vince McMahon and corporate wrestling turned once-regional art into overproduced spectacle. The matches became formulaic. The danger evaporated. The audience became restless.

Then came Heyman.

Heyman's Rebellion

Heyman’s genius was not just in what he booked, but who and how. He didn’t seek the chiseled stars and comic book heroes of WWF or the aging icons of WCW. He collected misfits, has-beens, wild men, and cult heroes: men with scars, with records, with chips on their shoulders and something to prove. In ECW, broken men were not rehabilitated—they were unleashed.

He shot promos in locker rooms, alleys, and parking lots. He encouraged profanity, blood, and real-life grudges. He handed out microphones like weapons and told his wrestlers to speak their truth, whether it fit the storyline or not.

And most importantly—he turned the audience into co-conspirators.  This was the heart and soul of his revolution.

ECW fans were not passive. They were initiates. They chanted, cursed, threw chairs, and cheered things that other wrestling audiences weren’t even allowed to see. They knew the business, knew the dirt sheets, knew what was a shoot and what was a work—and Heyman rewarded them by turning that knowledge into the show itself.

It was not polished. It was feral theater. But it was alive.

The Business as the Story

In the closed-world kayfabe era, the business of wrestling—the contracts, the booking, the politics—was never part of the narrative. But in ECW, and later in the broader revolution it helped spark, the business itself became the story.

A wrestler didn’t just turn heel—he walked out on a handshake deal. A title wasn’t just won or lost—it was dropped because someone no-showed, or got fired, or was leaving for a better offer. When Shane Douglas threw down the NWA World Title (literally trashing the famous “ten pounds of gold” belt!) and declared ECW independent, it was not merely a plot point. It was a declaration of rebellion, staged as a moment of theater, but vibrating with real-world consequence.

Fact and fiction were now intermingled in a way never before in the history of the dramatic arts.

And this meta-awareness spread. Scott Hall’s 1996 Nitro debut, the rise of the nWo, the Mr. McMahon character, the Montreal Screwjob, the entire Attitude Era—all of it grows out of the seed Heyman planted: that the audience can be trusted with reality, so long as reality is made mythic.

Heyman showed that the greatest heat didn’t come from fantasy—it came from truth, weaponized.

A Sacred Spectacle

Violence in ECW was not a gimmick. It was a form of confession. Tables, barbed wire, fire—these weren’t just props; they were sacraments. The violence wasn’t staged for shock value alone, but for authenticity. Wrestlers bled because life was hard, because they had nothing else to offer, because the audience deserved it.

This was not the wrestling of Madison Square Garden. This was the bingo hall gospel: loud, ugly, participatory, and raw. There was no illusion of safety, and therefore no barrier to belief. ECW wasn’t fake. It was true.

Heyman, like any good showman-priest, knew how to manage chaos without appearing to. He let the crowd feel like it was running the show, while quietly shaping every beat. He played to the smart fans, the angry fans, the disillusioned believers who didn’t want kayfabe back, but wanted something to believe in. What he offered them was not certainty—but conviction.

Failure, Again, as Victory

ECW didn’t last. It was too violent, too unstable, too indebted. The company folded in 2001. The wrestlers moved on. WWE bought the library and absorbed it.  The brand became a corporate asset within the WWE empire.

But like the Ramones, ECW’s failure was its fulfillment.

Heyman didn’t change wrestling by winning. He changed it by altering the conditions under which victory could be defined. After ECW, the industry could never again pretend the audience didn’t know the game. It could never again hide behind kayfabe alone. Every promotion that came after—whether they copied ECW or tried to erase it—was responding to the new logic Heyman had introduced: that wrestling is not pretending to be real, it is real pretending.

His influence lives in AEW, in the “pipebomb” promo, in every moment where the camera lingers too long on an unscripted reaction, in every storyline that whispers, “What if this one isn’t fake?”

Conclusion: The Heretic and the High Priest

Paul Heyman did not look like a revolutionary. He looked like a manager at a downtown copy shop. But in a strip mall in Philadelphia, he rebuilt wrestling from the floor up, using only noise, belief, and a locker room full of men with nothing to lose.

He did not save the art form by preserving its traditions. He saved it by reminding us what it was for: to let people scream, and bleed, and matter, even if only for ten minutes under the lights.

Barzun teaches us that cultural renewal often begins in places that look like collapse. That the true guardians of civilization are sometimes mistaken for vandals. And that when the stage goes dark, it is the back alley or the bingo hall that lights the next fire.

Heyman lit that fire. And it burned beautifully.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, My Name is Paul Heyman!”

And now, a generation later, he is at the center of the most celebrated storyline in modern wrestling. The wise man. The consigliere. The anchor of The Bloodline saga. What do we make of that?

We accept the irony. We accept that the revolutionary becomes the establishment, that the heretic is invited back into the temple—sometimes even as high priest. The cycle continues. And in this case, we say simply: Congratulations, Wise Man. Well done. You earned it.

And then, we enjoy his performance—because it is, unmistakably, in continuity with what he began long ago in South Philly. Still unpredictable, layered, dangerous, and alive.

The bingo hall never really closed. It just moved to prime time.

(Part 3/4 in this essay series)

The Ramones: Cultural Renewal from the Margins

In any age, the mainstream is both myth and machinery. It claims to be the destination of talent, the proof of value, the reward of refinement—but it is also a filtering device, designed to admit only what conforms to its aesthetics, marketing logics, and institutional tastes. The machinery includes the labels, the critics, the award shows, the charts. The myth is the illusion that these institutions recognize greatness, rather than merely manage visibility.

By the 1970s, rock music had become particularly vulnerable to this machinery. What had begun in the two decades prior as a kinetic outburst of rhythm and soul had, by mid-decade, ossified into pageantry. Stadium shows required budgets. Songs grew longer, lusher, less urgent. The rock star was no longer a threat to the establishment—he was the establishment.

Into this world came The Ramones, four oddballs from Forest Hills who didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a headliner, couldn’t play like the virtuosos on the radio, and had no evident place in the system at all.

And yet—they wanted in. That’s the paradox.

The Ramones didn’t set out to burn down the house. They wanted to play inside it. They loved the girl groups, the British Invasion, and bubblegum pop. They longed to be pop stars, adored by teenagers and welcomed onto American Bandstand. But what emerged from their collaboration was something entirely different: a new ethic of performance, rooted in velocity, minimalism, and refusal. They didn’t become what they dreamed—they became something greater, and ultimately timeless.

Three Chords and the Truth

There was nothing accidental about their sound. It was stripped-down on purpose. A Ramones song did not build or swell—it attacked. The songs were short because they had nothing to prove. No solos. No bridges. Barely any endings. Joey’s vocals were somewhere between a chant and a whine, unpolished and deadpan, yet unmistakably human—a voice that could be mocked but never imitated. (You could say the same of Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, or Bob Dylan—voices dismissed by critics, imitated by comics, and yet impossible to replace.)

Everything was deliberate: the matching leather jackets, the blank stares, the economy of motion. Where other bands courted transcendence, the Ramones delivered precision simplicity—which, in their hands, became electrifying. They brought energy without decoration, which is to say: ethics.

You might say they brought:

A New Kind of Virtue

What punk introduced was not merely a sound but a set of moral priorities. It refused excess, performance for its own sake, and virtuosity as a credential. What mattered was sincerity, velocity, and presence. To be in the moment, not to narrate it.
And—to a certain extent—to take the moment with you. Hence the importance of melody in punk. That’s why people still hum “Blitzkrieg Bop” decades later—it wasn’t just energy. It was catchy.

In this way, punk was not the enemy of artistry—it was its conscience. And the Ramones were not lazy musicians. They rehearsed relentlessly, tracked obsessively, and held themselves to standards no critic could see. They may not have looked like professionals, but they were never casual. They simply redefined what professional meant.

This, too, is part of the larger pattern Barzun names: when an art form becomes over-theorized, exhausted by its own vocabulary, a new one appears—not just to vandalize, but to purify.

Failure as Fulfillment — The Paradox

Of course, they did not succeed on their own terms. The Ramones never had a number-one hit. They were never the pop stars they aspired to be. They did not break into the machinery of the mainstream—except as a curiosity, a warning, or later, a mascot. But in failing to become popular, they became permanent.

What the Ramones did was harder than sell records. They retooled the culture’s ear. They created a vocabulary that more marketable bands would later adopt. Without the Ramones, there is no Nirvana, no Green Day, no American Idiot on Broadway. Even U2, with their stadium reverence and moral uplift, owes a direct debt. Bono has said the Ramones taught him to believe in raw expression—and that Joey Ramone's voice never left his head. The first track on Songs of Innocence is appropriately The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone).

They may have been too strange, too fast, too unpolished to win the favor of their time—but they became the measure of what would last beyond it.

A Canon of the Margins

Today, the Ramones are canonical. Their logo is worn by people who’ve never heard “Beat on the Brat.” They are rightly taught in courses, lionized in documentaries, referenced in museum exhibits. But this canonization risks obscuring the depth of their gift. They were not merely “early” or “raw.” They were correct. Their instincts were not precursors—they were judgments. They heard what was false in the age, and they answered it not with theory, but with rhythm, noise, and uniform haircuts. What they proved—like jazz before them, like the mystery plays, like the founders of empires—is that refinement is not always evolution, and technical mastery is not the same as artistic power.

The Ramones wanted what the mainstream could not give them—and what it didn’t understand they were giving in return. They didn’t make it inside the machine, but they changed what the machine would later run on. And in doing so, they revealed the deeper pattern: that cultural renewal comes not from the center of power, but from the margins of refusal.

In their three-chord thunder, they taught us something Barzun himself might have recognized: that when forms grow hollow and belief dries up, truth returns in strange garments.
And sometimes, it wears a leather jacket and counts off:
“1-2-3-4!”

(Part 2/4 in this essay series)

Wrestling & Punk: Cultural Renewal from the Margins

In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun surveys the last 500 years of Western cultural history and charts the movement from creative vitality to what he calls “exhaustion”—an era in which forms remain but meanings falter. He observes how, by the twentieth century, the West had grown "introspective to the point of paralysis," turning its genius for criticism inward, often to destructive effect. Religion, art, education, and politics—those great institutions that once shaped Western man—were no longer immune to scrutiny. Worse, they no longer inspired. The artist mocked the museum, the professor dismantled the curriculum, the statesman became a politician—or worse, a bureaucrat—and the preacher often doubted his own sermon.

Institutions that once offered a framework for creation and legitimacy, if not transcendence, now seemed preoccupied with undermining their own foundations. It was an age not of disbelief, but of exhaustion—an era in which culture still had the machinery of greatness but no longer the conviction to turn the key.

In such a moment, vitality—the essential, almost biological force that gives rise to art and belief—could no longer be expected to issue from within the cathedral. The established forms, still standing, echoed with past glory but no longer generated it. The truly generative energies, as they had in other periods of stagnation, began to bubble up from the peripheries: from the garage band with two working amplifiers, from the rusted factory turned dance hall, from the bingo hall lit by neon and cigarette smoke. What was dismissed as low or illegitimate—vulgar, in the old sense—now became the crucible of renewal.

This is the paradox, which is also no paradox but a perceptible, perpetual pattern.

Western history, long before its modern self-awareness, has always flirted with this dynamic. The medieval mystery plays were birthed outside the church even as they dramatized its doctrines, reminding us that sacred expression often begins in unsanctioned space. Jazz rose from the red-light district of New Orleans, improvised by the socially marginal and racially excluded, only to be later anointed as America’s classical music. Van Gogh, uncelebrated in his own lifetime, painted in isolation and poverty, outside the salons and institutions of his day—yet today, he is for many serious critics the greatest painter of all time, a genius who can never be matched.

Even America’s Founding Fathers, whose Enlightenment prose would later line the walls of officialdom, were—at their moment of creation—rebels and provincial agitators, condemned as traitors to the empire they would ultimately transcend. Their political and philosophical innovations were forged not in European capitals but in colonial assembly halls, taverns, and battlefields—peripheral places that gave birth to a central ideal.

Each time the citadel falters, a new vernacular is born in the alleyways, first condemned as chaos, then crowned as genius.

So it was in the late 20th century, when culture’s official avenues grew stilted, managed, and bloodless. The life of the spirit moved once again to the margins. And if you were listening closely, you could hear it—not in the concert hall or the network studio, but in the feedback of a battered guitar in Queens, or the chants of a sweat-drenched crowd in South Philadelphia, demanding tables, blood, and truth.

One was The Ramones, a ragged band of New York misfits who played three-chord songs faster and louder than anyone had before, founding not just punk rock but a new ethic of performance. The other was Paul Heyman, an irreverent wrestling promoter who turned a threadbare independent wrestling promotion, ECW, into a laboratory for theatrical chaos, emotional realism, and a new grammar of storytelling.

In the essays to follow, we will explore what these two misfits did, how they relate to each other, and how—despite existing far outside the boundaries of respectability—they shaped the language, logic, and aesthetic possibilities of popular culture today. Their stories are not merely footnotes in the histories of punk and professional wrestling. They are chapters—urgent, improbable, and unforgettable—in the larger chronicle of Western cultural decline, subversion, and renewal.

We are not speaking here of high culture—at least not directly. But we are speaking of cultural renewal within a subculture, of forces that arise from below but eventually ripple upward. This, too, is part of the pattern Barzun saw so clearly. In moments of exhaustion, when the great instruments of civilization grow quiet, it is often the noise from the margins that signals the return of life.

(Part 1 of 4 essays on this topic)

From Sophocles to SmackDown: The Deep Philosophy of Pro Wrestling

So.

I’ve begun what I expect to be a long, serious project: the first philosophical study of professional wrestling. Not a book of commentary or pop culture reflection, but something closer in ambition to Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music. I want to treat wrestling not as a lowbrow curiosity, but as an art form—a subgenre of drama—deserving of philosophical and aesthetic reflection.

To do that, I need to start with drama itself. What is it? What is its structure, its history, its form? Why does it ever matter, and why does it still matter?

To that end, I’ve just started Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama, and it is, frankly, not an easy read. Szondi, writing in the 1950s, set out to understand how the structure of drama had changed in the modern period. He was convinced that the classical conception of drama—one which assumed a stable moral universe, coherent characters, and the possibility of resolution—could no

longer, and does in fact not, hold. The modern world had changed, and the forms of drama had to change with it. Szondi does not weep for that loss, but he does treat it with a kind of tragic seriousness. The classical form is not rejected so much as it is outlived.

His predecessors and sources include Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, Walter Benjamin’s Origins of the German Tragic Drama, and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music. So my reading list has continued to grow, but I believe a serious look at professional wrestling as a subgenre of drama is worth the effort to come.

Roger Scruton, somewhat in contrast to Szondi, wrote out of a deep and often explicitly conservative aesthetic sensibility. He was not stodgy, nor did he fail to appreciate innovation, but ultimately he is an exegete and champion of the Western musical tradition. In his magisterial The Aesthetics of Music, he defends the classical tradition of Western tonality—not just as a technical system, but as a meaningful order, one that allows for beauty, intelligibility, and the disclosure of human feeling. Scruton mourns the collapse of musical form, particularly in the face of kitsch and irony. Where Szondi diagnoses and defines a historical shift, Scruton laments a civilizational rupture.

But the two are not at odds. They both believe that form matters, and that when form collapses, so too does the possibility of meaningful expression. They both understand that content without form is chaos, and that form without content is dead ritual. They are each, in their own way, grappling with how art can still carry meaning in an age that no longer trusts meaning itself.

(Let me note that this is how I am reading Szondi so far. If I progress through his work and need to come back and correct my reading, then I will do so.)

And then there is my T. S. Eliot.

T. S. Eliot stands, as he so often does, at a strange intersection—classical and modern, theological and fractured, ritualistic and ironic, precise but not pedantic. He mourns like Scruton. He diagnoses like Szondi. But unlike either, he tries to rebuild. The Waste Land does not simply describe and inhabit a ruined landscape—it assembles fragments, half-remembered rituals, ghosted voices, and shorelines of memory. In Four Quartets, Eliot embraces liturgical rhythm, theological time, and poetic musicality to build a poetic form adequate to the modern soul.

And it is Eliot, I think, who best helps us understand why professional wrestling is worth thinking about seriously. And for saying that, let me apologize in advance both to Eliot and to Scruton. (I would like to think that Szondi would like this project, but I don’t know that for sure.)

Let me clarify early on that wrestling is not born of drama. Its roots are in combat and sport, as far back as the gladiatorial games. Then in America, its roots are in carnival and in showmanship. It was never a theater of ideals. Once professional wrestling was separated from combat sport by its organizers, it was a work—a con, a trick, a show. The organizers knew it was scripted, but the audience didn’t. What has grown from those roots is a dramatic form unlike any other: a genre built of conflict, moral gesture, bodily risk, myth, and audience participation. Its matches are ritualized struggles. Its characters are masks that sometimes fall away. Its stories are often absurd, sometimes profound, and occasionally tragic. At its best, the stories are surprising and unpredictable, but eventually, at least for a moment, satisfying. And always, somewhere just beneath the surface, is the crowd, shaping the story as it unfolds.

In no meaningful sense is wrestling fake. Rather, it is profoundly real. It’s just not a competitive sport. It’s, well… it’s drama.

But it’s an interesting form of drama. Pro wrestling is American folk opera. It’s not elegant, but it is rich. It remembers its history even when it mocks it. It stages betrayal, redemption, revenge, sacrifice, failure, pride, and laughter in ways that resonate with something ancient. The best storylines can span ten or fifteen years, and even generations. The very best storytellers are very meticulous.

The WWE—whatever one thinks of it as a company—has understood this, at least in flashes. It acknowledges and returns to its roots in the carnivals. It honors its lineage and presents its own history as myth, complete with saints, villains, martyrs, and miracles. And like Eliot, it constructs meaning from fragments.

Wrestling is fragments shored against ruin.

It is one of the last great popular spaces where the physical body still carries symbolic meaning, where the crowd still gathers for a shared experience of moral drama, and where the fourth wall isn’t just broken—it’s moved, toyed with, transgressed, and restored again. At its best, wrestling allows us to participate in the form itself. It gives us a place to see good and evil (and everything in between) played out, not as philosophical abstractions, but as human struggles carried in the body.

I don’t expect everyone to see wrestling this way. But I think it’s worth arguing. And if I’m going to make the case seriously, I need to understand the full history of drama, from Aristotle to Szondi, from Sophocles to Beckett. I need to reckon with Scruton’s sense of form, and Eliot’s instinct to rebuild it. Wrestling didn’t start as drama. But I believe it has become a dramatic form. And I believe it might be, in its own strange and broken way, one of the last places where we still act out the human story. And that is exceptionally important.

In this I will also be drawing on another source that has long shaped my view of the human person and public meaning: the philosophical anthropology of Karol Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II. In his view, it is through action—particularly embodied action—that the person is disclosed. The body is not a mask or instrument, but the visible expression of the invisible self. In At the Center of the Human Drama, Kenneth L. Schmitz explores this idea with clarity and depth, showing how Wojtyła’s vision affirms the dignity of performance, sacrifice, and witness. Wrestling, in its best moments, is a secular liturgy of the same truth: persons and personhood revealed through bodily struggle, conflict, and moral decision, witnessed and affirmed by a crowd.

So this is where I begin. With Szondi, Scruton, Eliot and Wojtyla—not because they ever wrote about wrestling, but because they understood that form matters, and that when we lose it, we lose something human.  Our dramatis personae will grow, but let’s begin.

And maybe—just maybe—wrestling, in all its madness and myth, helps us get a little of that back.

When Profit Shapes the Plot

Every delivery method of entertainment implies a path to monetization, and that path shapes the creative act. When revenue comes from ticket sales, you invest in the stage. When it comes from ad dollars, you write to the break. When it comes from algorithms, you write for clicks.

Monetization models are not neutral—they drive budgets, which in turn determine production value, which in turn create audience expectations. Eventually, the product’s very aesthetic logic comes to reflect its revenue logic. Sometimes this leads to aesthetic success. Sometimes it leads to aesthetic stagnation. Hollywood’s current output—largely IP-driven mega-films backed by private equity or corporate media conglomerates—reflects this perfectly. Each film is less a standalone work than it is a financial instrument: a known quantity engineered for maximum global box office, merchandise potential, and theme park synergy. They are expensive commercials for themselves. But they are not really films.

But technology is not inherently the enemy of art. Tomorrow we will look at one of the great artistic achievements of our day which has always been pushed forward by technology and mode of delivery.

When Medium Molds the Message

Every entertainment product is shaped not only by its content but by how it is delivered. This is not incidental—it is constitutive. This has been true forever.

When Anglo-Saxon scops performed their poems, they were also composing in a meter and rhyme scheme which made their product memorizable. That’s how we have Beowulf still today.

Elizabethan drama was inseparable from the open-air amphitheaters, daylight performances, and all-male casts of its time—conditions that demanded vivid language, heightened emotion, and theatrical ingenuity, giving rise to the genius of Shakespeare, whose plays were shaped by and written for that very form. And he did it so well, his plays became works of literature to be read.

A Depression-era radio drama in the American Heartland was not simply a stage play without visuals; it was a form that lived and breathed and thrived within the affordances and constraints of radio. Change the mode of delivery—to television, to podcast, to livestream—and the product changes too. Not just in packaging, but in pacing, structure, budget, and ultimately meaning.

So we see the mode of delivery becomes embedded in the product itself. Silent films had exaggerated facial expressions because that was the communicative mode. Network TV dramas were built around ad breaks, which shaped story arcs. VHS led to the rise of the direct-to-video market; streaming birthed the binge model, which in turn warped storytelling to serve the "next episode" button. The medium doesn’t just carry the message—it molds it.

Ponder that and tomorrow we will discuss monetization.

This article was first posted on MontLux.com