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On the Secret Podcast today Sarah and I talked about the coming rehabilitation of Ghislaine Maxwell and about Derek Huffman, the MAGA guy who signed up for the Russian army.
The show is here.
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1. Hulkamaniacs
Hulk Hogan, né Terry Bollea, passed away Thursday at the age of 71. He was a quintessentially American figure who appeared and reappeared in popular culture (and the news) continually over forty years.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Hogan is responsible for what America is today. But not much of one. Hogan, like his friends Vince McMahon and Donald Trump, was both a symptom and a cause of what we have become.
We’re going long today on a guy who is famous for getting oiled up and rolling around half-naked in front of a crowd. This guy:
I understand how ridiculous this conversation may seem.
But also: You cannot understand the world we live in, right now, unless you understand Hulk Hogan.
So let’s hang and bang. Let’s head to the mountains. Let’s take this ride together, brother.
We start with Hogan’s long and varied presence in American culture.
In 1980, he was known to only a small number of aficionados in the pro-wrestling subculture. A few years later action figures and lunch boxes with his face on them were in every toy store in the country. By 1985 he was a character in a children’s cartoon that ran Saturday mornings on CBS.
In 1990, Hogan became embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit after he applied a sleeper hold to comedian Richard Belzer during a taping of Belzer’s talk show. It was something of a scandal.
He was a star in forgettable action movies during the 1990s, and then a reality-TV pioneer in the early 2000s with the VH1 series about him and his family, Hogan Knows Best.
In 2012, Hogan was caught up in the era of the celebrity sex tape, which drew him into contact with Peter Thiel. Hogan teamed up with Thiel (in secret) to launch a lawsuit designed to bankrupt the media company Gawker. He was successful.
Last year, Hogan was on stage at the Republican National Convention, endorsing his longtime friend, Trump.
The point here is that Hogan’s longevity and ubiquity combined to make him a piece of our national furniture.
Consider the difference between Hogan and, say, Tom Cruise.
Cruise has also been famous for forty years—but almost always in the same context. He’s a movie star. He makes movies. He sits within a specific slot in society’s consciousness.
But Hogan? He’s always just . . . been there. Sometimes as a wrestler. Sometimes as an actor. Or a person talked about on newscasts. Or involved in lawsuits. Or at political rallies. His name is, in itself, a kind of shorthand: “The guy was the size of Hulk Hogan.” Or: “That dude was Hulking up.”¹
When fame tips over into long-running ubiquity, an alchemical transformation occurs. The star goes from being a remote, aspirational figure to an avatar. Which is what happened to Hogan. He became a totem for Real America.
2. Kayfabe
Hogan and his partner, Vince McMahon, brought the structures and mores of professional wrestling to American society. Their innovations changed our culture and politics to a degree that’s rarely appreciated.
This will take some explaining.
In wrestling, every match, promo, and story line is designed to put someone “over”—meaning, to help them get a reaction from the audience. Getting over is the goal of every wrestler. Because once the audience reacts, you can draw money from them.
Here it is important to understand that being over is value-neutral. The crowd can love you or hate you. What matters isn’t the polarity but the valence. Wrestling wants intense reactions. No one does anything in wrestling without first gaming out how the crowd will react. What would be the point?
In that way, wrestling is the purest form of populist entertainment and the rest of American culture has followed its lead.
Edgelords on Twitter. Aspiring influencers. Cable news heads. Republican primary candidates. Their every action is guided by the desire to get over with the audience because America is now an attention economy.²
Professional wrestling taught people how to thrive in this new world.