Pro Wrestling as Theatre, Part 2: Why Antiheroes Like CM Punk Intrigue Fans

Last week, this series started with a focus on John Cena and the "Superman Phenomena" that envelops his character with a look at why kids love it and adults hate it.  You can read it by clicking here.

Fans are split on Cena, and it showed in the comments for the article.  Some hated him and others loved him.  Some found him annoying but admitted that he had an important role in the WWE, and some wished he was gone.

Many said the same thing though: his character is stale and boring.  There isn't enough progress or evolution in it to make them interested.

Then there are characters like CM Punk.  Punk is nothing like Cena, though both are faces in the WWE.  So why is Punk loved more by the fans then Cena?

Because older fans seem to enjoy antiheroes a bit more than the same Hulk Hogan-esque heroes that kids seem to enjoy.  The reasons will vary a little but most of it can be summed up in one sentence.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  

This sentence is actually a title of a book written by Joseph Campbell.  In the book, Campbell laid out the myth of the archetypal hero.  Many characters have been drawn from the book even if just from parts of it, and Cena is no exception.

The truth is no hero is.  They have only one path that they can walk.  They have to follow certain rules and live by a direct set of values.  There is no room for error and there is no margin for mistakes.  The hero must remain perfect.

This lack of ability to fail on a moral level makes heroes like Cena captivate children who still believe in absolutes such as "the good guys always win" and "the nation I live in is the good guys."  Adults who have a more three-dimensional view of the world find this hokey and quickly grow tired of it.

Antiheroes on the other hand have plenty of different possibilities and motivations that are open to them.  There could be any number of reasons why they do what they do.

Stone Cold Steve Austin wasn't above doing less then heroic things because he wanted to take someone down a peg.  He didn't cheat, not because he followed some moral code, but because he felt he was so strong he didn't need to.  He wasn't a stickler for rules, he was just vain.

Fans were able to tune in every week and see a character who might have been fighting against Vince McMahon not because it was the right thing to do, but because McMahon had angered him.  It didn't really matter if McMahon was corrupt.  It just happened to work out in the character's favor.

CM Punk is the same way.  He is a hero in the sense that he wants to change the company for the better, but part of this is him being the top guy in the company.  Is he a wrestling saviour or is he a narcissist who came around at the right time?

The best example of an antihero?

Frankenstein's monster.

In Mary Shelley's novel, he is seen as a monster who kills countless people while seeking revenge against his creator.  Yet at the same time he is also made to be a sympathetic creature who merely wants to have company after being rejected from a world that is repulsed by his appearance.

Though he does horrible things, he is also somewhat relatable because he just wants to stop feeling alone.  The contrast of his horrible actions that would normally not be condoned in society are somewhat removed by his emotional nature.

Or he could have been a monster who just tried to justify his actions by blaming others for his own mentality.

It is not just the fact that antiheroes have a larger set of actions available to them, but the fact that they are able to have different reasons and justifications for them that make them so interesting.

It makes them layered and able to do the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason.

And that makes for good TV.

This section was originally meant to include villains but that will have to be continued next week and the tie in will be Shakespeare as promised.  Feel free to comment in the section below.