Sharon Mazer is the Mr. McMahon doc's unsung hero
The author manages to cram a lot of insightful cultural commentary into her tiny soundbites in the new Netflix documentary series.
I wrote about Netflix’s new documentary series, Mr. McMahon, for TIME last week.
Shameless self promotion isn’t the only reason I mention this, although it’s certainly part of my motivation. The middle of the Venn diagram between freelance writers and wrestlers isn’t huge, but a constant need to promote yourself while also trying to do your work and tell you stories is nestled somewhere in there.
This is the second time I’ve written about wrestling for TIME (I covered The Iron Claw for them last year) and I’ve come to appreciate this experience quite a bit. For one thing, it involves getting paid to do something that I enjoy and am good at, which is an increasingly rare experience in my line of work. For another, I love the challenge of explaining a relatively niche and closed off subculture to a mainstream audience. I think it keeps me on my toes as a writer and ever so slightly more grounded as a wrestling fan.
Covering pro wrestling outside of the pro wrestling bubble requires an alchemical mix of championing art and arguing for accountability. The audience for these pieces is generally as ignorant about what makes pro wrestling good as it is about what makes it monstrous. When doing this kind of work, I often find myself advocating for wrestlers to be taken seriously as talented performers who make genuine physical and mental sacrifices for their work in the same breath that I’m advocating for the business to be called on its bullshit and made to pay for its abuses.
While I was watching the screeners for Mr. McMahon and gearing myself up for another round of this balancing act, I was treated to a near perfect example of it an action.
Sharon Mazer, author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, appears sparingly throughout the series. But every time she pops up, she delivers an incredible cultural commentary soundbite. She’s never condescending about wrestling. It’s quite clear that she takes it seriously as an art form in her work. But part of taking it seriously is soberly assessing its place and influence in the greater culture—both good and bad—and she does not shy away from the latter.
And she manages to do this in a way that is accessible enough for audiences who don’t follow wrestling to grasp and short enough to be digestible for streaming service documentary talking heads clips.
Take, for example, her Episode 5 commentary on the infamous segment in which Mr. McMahon made his onscreen lover, Trish Stratus, strip and bark like a dog. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, no, there is absolutely no context that exists that can make it look better than it sounds.) While Vince and company—including Trish—have always insisted that it was a perfectly fine piece of television because Vince was clearly the bad guy and Trish got her revenge, Mazer cuts to the heart of the matter in less than 60 words:
“That is an amazing ‘have your cake and eat it, too’ kind of heel performance, because at the same time that he’s getting everybody to know that we’re supposed to hate him, he’s giving them a titty show. Knowing that he’s bad for doing so it doesn’t get in the way of the pleasure of watching her be humiliated.”
Discussion of the Attitude Era’s most notorious moments usually veers from overly permissive shrugging to out of touch, Tipper Gore-esque scolding. Mazer effortlessly eschews both approaches and simply and smartly breaks down what was actually going on there.
In the previous episode, she cuts even deeper in fewer words with “Vince McMahon is part of his time. The difference is that he's in a distinctive position where he reinforces those tendencies, rather than challenging or changing or transforming them into something else.”
Which is an absolutely scathing indictment of Vince McMahon the creative in both moral and aesthetic terms. There’s nothing subversive or groundbreaking about having that amount of power and creative freedom and just going along with what everyone else is doing, is there?
Anyway, I briefly shout out Mazer’s work in my TIME article. But I wanted to take a bit more time to highlight her work here, because this is exactly the kind of undersung stuff that I set out to highlight.