The Perpetual Emotion Machine

Everyone knows professional wrestling is scripted. What most people don’t know is that there's really only one script. Found in virtually every form of literature for centuries, it draws upon the most basic story structure in existence and is told in three acts.

Act 1:The good guy (or face) squares off against the bad guy (or heel) until the heel gets bored with the rules and uses dirty tactics to gain the upper hand.

Act 2: The heel then shows off his nefarious abilities, beating our hero within inches of defeat.

Act 3: The face shoots his shoulder out of a pin just as the ref’s hand is coming down for the final count, shows off all of his really fancy moves and finally vanquishes the heel.

OK, so maybe the part about launching a shoulder out of a pin before the three-count hasn't been around for centuries, but you get the idea. There are many variations of the above, but the same basic structure has been playing out in big arenas, bingo halls, and barns for more than a century, since pro wrestling’s birth as a carnival sideshow, where onlookers were bilked out of their money by a hero’s improbable victory.

And no one does this like Hulk Hogan.

Hogan has been wrestling since 1977, and has been the world’s most famous wrestler for most of the time since. His ascendency within the World Wrestling Federation (now the WWE) made him the personification of the industry, an '80s icon, and an avatar for a nation unnerved by the Soviet Union's arms buildup, Iran's hostage taking habit, and Japanese economic encroachment. As an American flag-waving face, there was no mystery that Hogan would ultimately win, especially against the explicit stand-ins for those nationalistic fears, like Nikolai Volkoff or the Iron Sheik. His appeal then was not in winning, but in appearing to almost lose.

A decade earlier, the French semiotician Roland Barthes opened his Mythologies with one of the first academic appraisals of this phenomenon: “The function of the wrestler is not to win, it is to go exactly through the kabuki of what is expected of him.” In Hogan’s case, this was epitomized by “hulking up,” his ritualistic dance that signified the beginning of a match's third act.

It goes like this: Having recently escaped from a pin or been knocked down by an attack, Hogan gets up from the ground shaking both fists, his face almost purple with rage. His opponent punches him, though Hogan completely ignores this. He reacts to a second punch, but not out of pain. He is clearly beyond all sensation now. Instead, Hogan straightens up, points to his opponent, and slowly wags his finger in admonishment. The crowd is livid with a combination of excitement and nostalgia, having waited all night to see this exact sequence of events for the hundredth time.

Fully hulked up, Hogan is now invincible, impossibly strong, and destined to win within the next few seconds. He blocks his opponent’s next punch, punches back three times, whips him into the ropes and knocks him down with a high kick on the rebound. Atomic leg drop. 1-2-3! The crowd cheers. Hogan’s iconic “Real American” theme song plays.

After a decade of reaping the rewards of this dance, Hogan was put at the forefront of the early '90s steroids scandal that required the WWF to admit its scripted nature and soon defected to its main rival. He would spend the 20 years bouncing back and forth between the WWF and its competitors, turning heel as necessary so crowds would cheer even louder when the pendulum inevitably swung back to face.

Each time he returned, he was a little slower. A little balder. The penultimate kick drifted from the face to the chest to the gut, the half-life of the atomic leg drop waned. Now pushing 60, his wrestling repertoire has become extremely limited compared to the high-flying 20-somethings he trades headlocks with. Jaded fans consider him a joke, desperately clinging on to his past glory. But even they are not immune to the charms of the one move Hogan will do far past the day his body is too shattered to climb to the top of a turnbuckle: the hulk up. They cheer along with the rest of the crowd, and yell You! when he points his finger.

Barthes’ critics say his conception of wrestling as a series of barely-connected scenes, with each move or hold its own passion play, no longer applies to the modern soap opera that tells story arcs over the course of years. But just as all matches have the same basic script, all of these stories are of the same ur-story, cyclically playing themselves out. The cumulative effect is to trap certain tropes, characters, motions, and emotions in a timeless tableau, like a spinning propeller whose blades appear to be standing still.

The wrestling industry survives through these self-contained mythologies, distilling all of the unpredictable conflicts from real sports—or the real world—into their most pure and perfect forms. Hogan survives on it, too. Hulking up may well be the platonic ideal of the comeback. Impossibly, it resonates with the audience not because it is unlikely but because it is inevitable. He has created a kind of perpetual emotion machine: the rising hero forever suspended in the moment before his triumph.