By combining aspects of narrative theory and game studies research, this paper will analyze the narrative of professional wrestling utilizing the tools commonly used or specifically developed for videogames. Professional wrestling and videogames deal in different contexts with the same elements: rules and fiction (Juul 2005). Those same rules serve as a setting for a particular kind of narration: the kayfabe, the fictional framework for all professional wrestling’s narrative, a fictional world with the characteristic of having a 1:1 ratio between real time and fictional time. We explore how masculinity and the male figure evolves in Lucha Libre Cinema, and the processes that wrestlers have to undergo in order to be able to portray themselves as superheroes of an evolving and fast growing Mexico.""Įmerging from a legitimate contest regulated by a set of rules, professional wrestling is today a fictional product, where no actual competition takes place. Through an anthropological and historical analysis of Mexican Cinema and Lucha Libre, this paper investigates the main social interaction of male wrestlers who perform as heroes inside the celluloid world and outside of it. These emergent paladins of the Mexican metropolis set the cultural and moral standards of that time and how Mexicans wanted to be perceived. Later, Lucha Libre Cinema mixed with Monster Cinema resulting in the birth of new heroes and myths. The success of Monster Cinema in Mexican culture was based on the integration of national legends and beliefs, placing them in local and identifiable concepts in the Mexican popular imagination. After the introduction of the Monsters Cinema in the 1930s, Mexican audiences welcomed and adopted characters like Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Werewolf. The sport became famous mainly due to its masked wrestlers, who incorporated their own family traditions, beliefs and fears into the design of their masks, transforming an ordinary person into a fearless character. Lucha Libre has played an important role in Mexican culture since the late 1950s. This chapter will instead explore how market and technological developments led to the emergence, development, and diffusion of this sport, as well as how forms of bodily knowledge entered the athletic information economy through the UFC. For critics, the UFC might represent a limit case of the media industry's willingness to transgress social taboos in pursuit of market share. Critics decried the events as the most violent of spectacle, a return to barbarous blood sports on par with the Roman coliseum or "human cockfighting." Some of the most dedicated fans of the sport, however, approached these competitions as information, reconverting athletic spectacle broadcast through satellites and fiber optic cable into embodied knowledge. Driven by the content-craving technologies of the New Economy and the competitive impulses of media providers, a group of entrepreneurs founded the Ultimate Fighting Championship or UFC, a "no-holds-barred" fighting sport, for cable broadcast. Published on ATTN: Listen to our new episodes at sesh.The proliferation of media channels, including cable television and limited access, pay-per-view narrowcasts, transformed professional sports.* "Extreme" sports, events more spectacular, violent, or dramatic than those traditionally broadcast on television, arose, in part, from the insatiable demand of these new outlets for programming. Struggle Session’s tracks The Matrix Resurrections We talk video games, movies, TV, wrestling, comic books, music, anime, and all of your problematic faves. Leslie Lee III, Jack Allison wade into the reactionary hellhole of modern America. Struggle Session is the world's finest politics and pop culture podcast.
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